by Naomi West
Chapter 2
Cora
I go about my work like a zombie, performing all my tasks adequately but hardly aware of what I’m doing. I don’t make any mistakes, but I don’t fully engage, either. My attention is focused on trying to stop myself from being sick, thinking about Logan and the baby, and wondering how this horrible business with the mafia is going to end. I bite my lip to fight away the sickness. I take as many deep breaths as I can. At lunchtime I sit on the toilet with my head in my hands, breathing steadily like the clopping of a cantering horse. That seems to fix it; just breathe, just breathe. I’m able to exert some control over my body, and for the rest of the day I beat the sickness back.
I wonder more and more what it’d be like to keep the baby and be with Logan, really be with him. At first I wonder as a sort of joke, letting my mind drift that way the same way I used to let my mind drift to fantasies of being a Viking shield-maiden when I was a teenager, strutting around my bedroom with a mirror as a shield and a hairbrush as a sword. I would alternate singing for a while and then playing the Viking afterward. I entertain it as a fantasy, seeing myself as though I’m an observer, sitting on a rocking chair with the baby in my arms, my handsome man leaning over me, his hair falling down to tickle my ear. Then I wonder what it’d be like if that actually happened. I’d have a family and a man I care about and enough money to be comfortable for the rest of my life ...
In any case, I want to spend more time with Logan. I know that for sure.
At around four o’clock, Cecilia swaggers over to me and taps me on the shoulder. Her perfume smells like the sea today. “There’s some guy downstairs. Says he’s with something called the Demon Riders. I told him—I’m sorry, but I had to say it—that that sounds like some kind of gang. He smiled in a very rude way, looking me up and down like I’m a piece of meat! Anyway, he’s in the lobby. He said to tell you that Logan is in trouble and you need to come right away. Hey—Cora!”
I sprint down the hallway, heart pounding at the back of my throat, feeling like it could leap up onto my tongue. I swallow over and over, but it makes no difference. I kick through into the lobby and approach the man. He’s tall and skinny and calmer than he should be. The jacket doesn’t look quite right on him, with his suit pants and shiny shoes, but these are fleeting thoughts. The main thought is that he’s going to take me to Logan.
“Are you Cora?” he asks.
I nod.
“Follow me. Logan was shot. He’s asking for you. We don’t know if he’s going to make it.”
“Is he at the hospital?”
I follow him into the afternoon sunlight, down the street toward a black sedan. “We’re not sure,” he says. He opens the backdoor and nods in. “We need to hurry the fuck up.”
I climb into the car and the door locks. There’s a man sitting next to me, his hair jet-black and plastered to his hair with gel, his jacket a little too tight for him, squeezing at the shoulders and the arms. I run my finger along the door lock, almost flush to the door, wondering ... And then the car starts, the tall man driving quickly away from the dentist’s office. His fingers are long, spindly, weird-looking. He taps them on the steering wheel as he drives.
“Are you guys Demon Riders, then?” I ask.
“You could say that,” the man next to me replies. “My name is Crusher. Yeah, that’s my name. I’ve been a Demon Rider ever since I was a kid. I used to go to the junkyard and play in the trash there, finding pieces of bikes and sticking them together and all that shit. I love bikes. Bikes are what I live for. Nothing like riding around on a hog and feeling big and strong and cool, getting oil all over your shoes and letting the wind fuck up your new suit.”
The driver sniggers.
“Yeah,” the man called Crusher goes on, although I’m starting to think his name is not Crusher, that I might have made a fatal mistake. “There’s nothing quite like rolling around in oil, is there, nothing quite like it at all. I love it, in fact. It’s the best thing there is. Why would you go down to the strip club and fuck a couple of whores when you can spend your time in a junkyard full of other guys, lathering each other up in oil? What a fun fuckin’ time that is. Nothing gay about that.”
The driver sniggers again, making a left turn. He’s going so fast that the force of the turn shoves me up against the glass.
“Could you slow down?” I ask, trying to keep my voice steady.
“Don’t you want to get to Logan?”
They could be Demon Riders, I tell myself. I’m sure lots of weird guys join biker gangs. You’d have to be less than normal to spend your life riding and shooting and possibly dying for a leather jacket. I try to convince myself of this, but the more I look at them, the more I doubt it. I grip my knees and try not to panic, but the tide is rising inside of me, a tide which grips me just as firmly as Logan’s lust grips me, but now in the other direction. Fear penetrates every part of me.
“What did Logan say?”
“What?” the driver grunts.
“Logan, what did he say? When he said he wanted to see me.”
“He said he wanted to see you.” He sounds annoyed. “What else do you want to know? You’ll be with him soon enough. You don’t have to worry.”
“So he just said he wanted to see me.” I nod. “He didn’t say anything about bringing the money, then.”
“What?” The driver pulls to a stop at the side of the road and then turns and faces me. There’s something unsettling about his eyes, the way he squints as though looking through me. “What are you talking about?”
“I thought he wanted me to guard the money. Wasn’t that the whole point of going to work, so we could hide it there?”
“What money?” Crusher barks. “What’re you talking about?”
“I thought you guys knew. All the Demon Riders know, don’t they?”
Tension fills the car until it is almost physical, something that shrouds me, fills me, suffocates me. The driver stares at me as though he’d like nothing more than to reach down my throat and tug out my child. There’s death in his stare, and hunger, too. He wants to hurt me. It’s now, staring into this lethal face, that I know these men are not Demon Riders. I have to get away. I have to stay calm, play the silly ignorant girl. Men will always see the silly ignorant girl if we play it well enough.
“I just thought ... I’m so, so sorry if I’ve gotten it wrong. I just thought everyone in the MC knew about it. I just ... so I wasn’t supposed to leave the money in the dentist’s office. Silly me!”
“How much money are we talking?” Crusher says.
The driver just watches.
“Well, are you sure it’s okay to tell you? Shouldn’t we be driving? What about Logan?”
“He’s fine,” Crusher says. “He’s in the hospital.”
Their story is falling apart now. How does he know that Logan is fine when before we were rushing to him because he might be in mortal danger?
“How much money?” the driver mutters.
“Two million,” I say in my most innocent voice. “I thought it was common knowledge. I’m so, so sorry. I didn’t know! What shall we do?”
“Go back,” Crusher says. “Come on, boss. We’ve gotta turn this around. You heard the bitch! Two million!”
Boss, bitch ... a Demon Rider wouldn’t call the driver boss, and he wouldn’t call Logan’s woman a bitch. If I needed further proof that these men aren’t Demon Riders, I have it. But I don’t say anything. I pretend to ignore it. Right now my only desire is to bait the driver into returning to the dentist’s office so that I can get the hell out of here. I keep my face composed, calm, and innocent, a real idiot’s face.
“Go back,” the driver says, squinting at me. “Is that what you want to do, Melissa?”
Melissa. My throat seizes. I fight vomit back down into my belly. “I think we should go back,” I whisper. “Logan needs that money.”
“Go back ... with your man bleeding to death. That doesn’t seem like something you
’d want to do.” He sighs, and then leans all the way across the car so that he’s half hanging out of his seat, his face sneering inches away from me. “That was a clever trick. I’ll give you that. That was a really clever trick. If it’d been this dumb fuck in the driver’s seat, you would’ve had him, and had him cold. But I’m just a tad smarter than these gorillas.” The driver turns to Crusher. “Make sure she doesn’t try anything funny. She knows the score. She might get feisty.”
I press my face against the glass and take a deep breath, defeated. “I’m not going to fight,” I mutter, and it’s the truth. At least, I’m not going to fight right this second, where it’d be the easiest thing in the world for Crusher to grab me, crush me, kill me and kill my baby as well.
The driver starts the car. “My name is Moretti, by the way,” he says. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you, Melissa Collins.”
“A pleasure,” I repeat, praying for Thor, Odin, Frey, but most of all praying for Logan.
Chapter 3
Logan
“They ain’t here, boss,” Spider says. “I don’t know where the fuck they are. I’ve checked and ... goddamn, boss. I just don’t know. Cora’s gone, too.”
“Goddamn it!” I snarl. “God fucking damn it! Get the fucking men, all the fucking men, gather them at the club and get them ready. It’s time to go to war.”
I hang up the phone and kick my bike. I’m about to ride off, fire in my veins, when my cell buzzes again. I answer, thinking it’s going to be Spider, but the voice which sings across the phone doesn’t belong to my MC. It’s Moretti, sounding smug, victorious.
“Hello there, Logan,” he says. “How are you doing this fine afternoon?”
“Fucking animal!” I snap. “Fucking prick!”
“I’m the animal? I’m not the one growling. Calm down, please. Listen to this.” There’s silence for a second, and then a noise which seems to leap from the phone and burrow into my brain. She screams loudly, in pain, screams which make me feel weak and useless and impotent, screams which make me feel like I’m the one causing them for letting her out of my sight.
“I’ll kill you. I’ll fuckin’ kill you.”
“Sure, sure. Okay, Logan. You’re a real tough guy. You asked what I wanted. Now let me tell you. I want to torture this tight little whore until she gives me her money, and if she doesn’t feel like giving up the money, I’m sure I’ll have a good time anyway. Look at her. How can women think they can cover themselves in tattoos and not attract men like me, Logan? Can you tell me that? My father once told me that tattoos are for men what the weak antelope is for the lion. It’s a signpost, telling us that she’s a freak, she’ll do anything we want. Why else would she get them?”
“Because she wanted to get them, you fucking lunatic.”
“Wanted. They never want anything. They just do things. See you later, Logan. Have a good day.”
“Wait.” I listen closely, past Cora’s crying and past Moretti’s smug breathing—only he could make breathing smug—to the sound of construction workers beneath it all. They’re down the street, it sounds like, a drill and a truck backing up, the familiar beep-beep-beep.
“What?” he asks. “Are you going to sing me a song?”
“Just let her go. Do you want money? I can get you money.”
“I want money. I want her money.”
I scan my mind, thinking back over the past week of riding about town. Where are they doing construction? I flounder for a moment and then my mind settles. I remember. There’s a place a few streets over from the club, a block of apartments which is being demolished to make room for another block of apartments.
“We can work this out,” I say.
“Work it out? I’m winning. Why would I want to work it out when I’m the one in the lead? I’ll see you around, Logan. Don’t lose too much sleep thinking about what’s happening to your tattooed little whore.”
He hangs up the phone. The urge to toss my cell at the wall comes over me, to kick my bike, to punch the brickwork of the nearby bakery until my hand swells to twice its size. The urge to shout and shoot and kill. But I fight it all. I have to be calm now. I have to be deadly.
I call up Spider. “It’s time to go to work.”
Chapter 4
Cora
I remember standing behind the science labs sharing a cigarette with one of my high school friends-who-was-not-really-a-friend. It’s strange, because I don’t remember her name now, only her face, which was beautiful and always drawn tightly in an expression of anger. I remember sucking heavily on the cigarette so that it felt like my head might float away from my body. We were talking about the future, as teenagers often do, but we had no conception of what the future actually meant. For us it was a scary land of fog full of grownups and dating and driving and jobs and all the other aspects of life which terrified outcasts like us.
I remember saying, “I’m never going to be like those women you see waiting outside the gate for their kids. You know the ones I’m talking about, the ones who are always dressed like they’re about to walk down a catwalk, always standing with their backs straight to push their fake tits out, just in case their husband happens to join them. Or maybe it’s to make the other women jealous. I don’t want that.”
“What do you want?” my friend asked.
“I want to feel something, really feel something. I don’t want to have to put on a performance. If I’m going to find a man, I want a man who’s going to, I dunno, like make me feel real, you know? I want a man who’s going to make me feel alive, like if he reaches out to touch me I’m really there and he knows me so well and ...” I stopped, smiling like a giddy teenager, because that’s what I was. “Is there anything in this?”
“Just a bit of weed ...”
“Weed!”
And then time passed and we were walking home, and I was ranting again: “I want a man who makes me feel like I can do anything, but he doesn’t pander to me. He makes me feel like, like, oh, just like. I just want to feel. I don’t want to be one of those couples who go and hang out with their separate friendship groups and bitch about what the other person did because they can’t just talk to each other about it, or one of those couples you see on The Real Housewives who stand together like they’re posing for a photo, like they never learned how to be natural with each other. I want to be one person. Wouldn’t that be neat?”
But my friend had left and I was ranting to myself.
As I rise out of the abyss of unconscious, I grasp at those memories, trying to sink through into the haze of the past and tell her, my naïve past-self, that I’ve done it, I’ve found the man. I’ve found the one who we can build a life with, who we can grow close to, grow into. But now that we’ve found him we might just lose him, just when things are getting good, just when screwing is turning into lovemaking, and a connection is forming between us. Just when things are starting to smell like roses, the scent of rotting flesh has come between us.
And then I shake my head and grit my teeth.
My head aches from where Moretti slapped me across the temple with his pistol. I blink away tears and look around. I’m tied to a chair, my wrists behind my back, the zip-ties cutting into my flesh. Pale shafts of light shine through the floorboards above. Rickety steps lead up to the basement door. Above me, men speak. Down the street a plane takes off, no—a drill hammers into the concrete. When I close my eyes I can feel the drill, an almost-nonexistent hum up the chair leg and into my body. I work my jaw, spitting onto the floor, and then roll my neck in my shoulders.
I’m in big trouble here. There’s no doubt about that. Fear twists inside of me. I try to fight it, try to be brave. Whenever I’m scared I try and think about what Viking women had to go through, constant death and misery and pain; maybe that’ll put things into perspective for me. But fear doesn’t work that way. For some people, saying hello to the postman is the scariest thing they’ve ever done. For others, it’s jumping out of an airplane. If I’ve learned a
nything in my life, it’s that everything is subjective. I try not to think about what they’re going to do to me, the men stomping around upstairs, laughing and drinking. I try not to think about chains, or naked men, or blood or tears. I try not to think about Logan standing over my corpse not even knowing there was a baby in me. Or maybe that’s how he’ll find out: when the doctor tells him that I was pregnant. Tears slide down my cheeks and I can’t even wipe them away. They slide into my mouth and spread over my tongue, salty and warm.
I sniff them away when the basement door opens and Moretti enters, walking snake-like down the stairs. Logan said I moved like a snake onstage, but I’ve got nothing on the way Moretti is moving right now, arms at his sides ready to strike, fingers twisting like spiders poking out of a snake’s mouth. He doesn’t seem like a man. He seems like something otherworldly. I wonder if he’s a god, here to punish me for ... for what? For not being the woman my father wanted me to be, for not playing the Good Girl. The irony of this whole mess is that I want to do that now, want to be with Logan and have this baby.
I gasp at the thought, and fresh tears spring from my eyes. I want the baby, and I want Logan. It only took being kidnapped to make me see that!
“Don’t cry, please,” Moretti says. I expect someone else to join him, his backup, but the basement door stays closed. That’s more unsettling somehow, just me and this man who has complete power over me. There’s no pity in his eyes as he kneels down so that we’re eye level. He places his hand on my knee. I move it away, but he grips it hard, so hard it feels like fangs are digging into my skin. “Now, now. Let’s be nice, okay? Let’s not cause any unnecessary drama.”
“I need you to listen to me,” I say, desperate for him to stop sliding his hand up my leg. He stops mid-thigh, staring up at me expectantly. “Listen,” I go on. “I haven’t got any money. I swear to you, I’m broke. If I had money do you think I’d be staying in a one-bedroom apartment, where I can barely pay my rent? Do you think I’d be working in a dentist’s office? Just think about it! I’m broke.”