His to Protect: Midnight Riders MC

by April Lust

  This, I felt, was a little ridiculous. What did it matter if I was who I said I was or not? Realistically, if they had nothing to hide, then there was no reason to prevent me from speaking to the guys who were working on the VCI building before it collapsed. In fact, I was doing my best not to even mention VCI because I was fairly certain that no one would give me the time of day if I did, but even without doing so I was left hanging out to dry.

  “That would be great,” I finally told him, forcing a smile. “Can I get an application?”

  Mr. Caraway looked at me skeptically, but after a moment he nodded his assent and asked me to wait just a moment while he rummaged around for an application. It took him several minutes to search through his filing cabinets and his drawers before he finally stopped and sighed. “I can’t seem to find one here. Would I be able to e-mail it to you?”

  Sensing my opportunity, I shook my head. “Sorry to say that my computer is down right now and I don’t know that it’ll be fixed sometime soon. I’d much prefer to have a paper copy that way I can get it back to you as quickly as possible.”

  Mr. Caraway let out another long winded sigh, as though finding a paper copy of the application was just the hardest damn job in the world. It made me grin just a little bit, pleased with myself over the whole thing.

  “Fine, fine,” he told me after a moment. Heaving his jiggly, round body up from the desk, he waggled a mini sausage-like finger in my direction. “I’ll go look in the main office for one. Maybe I can get one to print off for you. You wait here until I get back.”

  I nodded. “Thank you, Mr. Caraway. I really appreciate it.”

  He waved off my thanks with an engorged hand, then waddled off to the main office. When he was out the door, I tracked him with my eyes. It wasn’t until he reached the elevator and stepped in, the metal doors closing behind him, that I got up out of my chair.

  I gave it half a second, then darted out the door and into the overheated working area. I started snooping around, seeing if I couldn’t catch someone off their guard long enough to get some answers, and some proof.

  As I walked along, I tried to get the attention of several of the men, but they all waved me off or worse, when I asked them about the collapse and VCI, they told me to fuck off. I was about to give up hope, when a big burly man with a shaved head and a neatly trimmed beard laced with ginger strands of red came over to me.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” He didn’t quite seem enraged, but he wasn’t pleased either. In fact, he mostly looked annoyed, like I was one in a long string of idiots who had been causing him problems lately.

  I shook my head. “I don’t mean any harm. I’m just trying to—”

  “Get your head smashed in? Yeah, I can see that,” he said smartly, interrupting me without so much as a care.

  I frowned at him. “What?”

  He gestured towards my head. “Where the hell’s your hat, you moron?”

  Surprise probably showed on my face because he actually rolled his eyes at me and let out an impatient sigh. His muscles glistened with sweat and I saw that they were huge as he moved to put his hands on his hips. There was no question that the man was big and I wasn’t one hundred percent positive that, if push came to shove, I would be able to take him in a fight. Deciding quickly that it was for the best to just not test that, I put up my hands in what I hoped was universal for placating apology.

  “Sorry, man, no one gave me one.”

  At this he cursed under his breath. “Damn idiots. C’mon. You can’t be walking around here without one. I’ll get you a quick fit and if you last more than a day or two, we’ll get you one that actually fits. I’m just not losing my ass just ’cause you’re going to catch a falling piece of metal with your head.”

  I glanced behind me at the other workers. None were paying me any attention, and the ones I’d spoken to already were deliberately ignoring me. I decided quickly that going with this man was my best bet—partly because I didn’t want to get my head crushed in. I followed him as he headed down a stretch before hooking a sharp left. He was the most talkative man I’d met that day and maybe if I played my cards right, he’d talk to me.

  I followed him down a hallway until we reached a room that actually didn’t seem to have a door. Or if it did have a door, it had been taken off. We went inside to find a row of lockers and at the very back, a stack of hardhats.

  “Here, try some of these on.”

  I did as I was told. As I was trying them on, their fit awkward and a little uncomfortable, I glanced over at the burly man standing by to make sure I got a damn hat.

  “Get a lot of accidents around here?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

  The man shrugged. “Sometimes. It’s dangerous conditions, you know? Which is why you gotta be safe.”

  I nodded my head and tried on another hat. “Do these things really make a difference though?”

  He barked out a deep, quick laugh. “Not necessarily. They help with some of the things, probably save you from a hammer going through your skull, but if you get something big dropping on you, you’re dead either way. Still. Rules are rules and if we’re caught not following them, it’s a hefty fine and someone’s gonna lost a job.”

  I considered him for a moment. He clearly knew what was going on, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. There was every possibility that he was just some average Joe worker and didn’t know anything about VCI. Or if he did, there was a high probability that he wouldn’t say shit about it. It seemed like that was the MO of the company thus far.

  Still, he was the most forthcoming. What did I have to lose?

  “Yeah? What about that collapse though? The one a few months back?” I tried to keep my tone causal, like I was just having a conversation, not interrogating him for valuable information that would change things dramatically for me.

  He hesitated. “You mean that charity place? The one over on Central?”

  I did my best to stay calm and not seem too eager. I tried on another hat. “Yeah, I think it was on Central. It was a huge deal. People died.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the man tense. His lips pursed together into a thin line and it was clear he wasn’t overly happy about the topic of discussion. I expected him to snap at me, to tell me to shut up, or at the very least to simply shut up himself. But I was surprised when he shook his head. “That was a damn shame,” he told me, and he was sincere enough that I was convinced he honestly believed that.

  I looked over at him in surprise. “Accidents happen, right?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, accidents.”

  “Why do you say it like that?”

  “Because you’re right. Accidents do happen. All the damn time. Which is why we do things the way we do things, you know? Accident happens, we change the way we do things so that they don’t happen again, right?”

  I nodded my head. “Yeah, sure. Makes sense.”

  “Right. Makes sense. So then why would you go back to the old way you do things if you know accidents are more likely to happen like that?”

  I stared at him long and hard. This was it. This was the bit of information I was looking for all along. “Are you saying that they didn’t follow protocol or something? Skipped safety stuff?”

  He shook his head. “Nah, not technically. They did it all by the books, but that don’t mean shit if you skimp out on the materials.”

  And there it was. That one statement gave me what I needed. If they went cheap for the materials, they could skim a lot of money off the top, especially if they said they were using the right kind of materials. Everyone makes out, but like the big guy in front of me was saying, it meant that accidents were more likely to happen. And it meant that Santos fucking knew about it.

  “You mean they didn’t use the right materials?” I clarified, just to make sure that this guy knew what he was talking about.

  He gave me a grim smile. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s not a surprise the
damn building went down. Cut on quality of materials. Cut on the time we were given to complete it. Cut on everything.” He shook his head again. “It’s a fucking shame and it ought to be criminal.”

  I considered him and my next move very carefully before deciding. Finally, I decided to take a risk. “What if it was criminal?”

  He paused. For a second it felt like all the air in the room had been sucked out as I waited for his next response. I could see it in his eyes that he was starting to get suspicious of me. That he was starting to question whether or not I was just some new idiot needing a hard hat or whether I was something with ulterior motives.

  Finally, he said, “Then they ought to pay for it.”

  I let out a breath. “How willing would you be to help make that happen?”

  “Very.”

  ***

  I learned that the man’s name was Calvin Serrano and he’d worked there at the steel factory for a while. He was actually a foreman and kept the other guys in line. The way they worked was that they would get called in to make steel beams and the like for buildings before or as they were constructed. They worked with a variety of different companies, most of them not giving them any problems.

  But Calvin admitted that this last company had been a bit of a pain in his opinion. They sent over blueprints of what their plans were for the building, then they’d include a list of needed materials. Calvin told me that he oversaw some of that—not in any capacity that gave him real power, just put him in a position to have enough information to give direction to his guys—and noticed that what they were requesting was a little odd for a building of that caliber.

  It was massive, and yet they were using the more brittle of materials.

  “That’s dangerous,” Calvin explained. We weren’t in that room full of lockers anymore, because he said that the guys took their breaks there a lot of the time and if they didn’t, they’d stop by to get into their lockers at the very least. He sensed that what we were talking about wasn’t the kind of thing to be sharing with everyone. “If you start making something tall, you got to expect it to encounter way more wind, right? So you need something strong and durable, something that won’t bend too much, but won’t crumble under the sudden pressure. If you get something too brittle, it’ll start to weaken and then break.”

  He explained that he’d even addressed the issue with Mr. Caraway, who was more or less the boss. Not of the entire company, but definitely of their little slice of it. He was the one who worked directly with VCI.

  “I brought it to his attention that we should recommend a stronger material,” Calvin told me, his face a little flushed, and not just from the heat. He obviously was getting worked up about this. “I thought, hey, this is great for us, right? It means these assholes need to get the more expensive materials. But no, Caraway told me to shut up about it and follow instructions.”

  “Why would he do that?” I asked him, though I had a hunch of my own. One that involved a little money lining a lot of pockets.

  Calvin shook his head. “I wasn’t really sure. I thought maybe they just knew something I didn’t about the building, you know? I’m just a materials guy in the end, so maybe it was a design thing.”

  “You don’t think that anymore?”

  Again, Calvin shook his head. “No. I forgot something here one night after I left. When I came back to pick it up, I saw Caraway talking with someone. I wasn’t sure who he was, but I had a feeling it was about Vanguard Construction. The next day, Caraway pushed the materials through and told me I needed to keep my mouth shut if I wanted to keep my job."

  He looked almost guilty about the whole thing, scratching at his bald head beneath his hard hat. Maybe that guilt would be enough to make my next suggestion more reasonable. Maybe it would be enough to get him to help me.

  “You think there’s a paper trail linking this guy? Maybe showing that some skimming might have gone on?”

  Calvin studied me a moment, then said, “I don’t know who you really are, but if you’re asking if I’ll help you out with Vanguard, then I’m telling you now, I will. But you’d better make sure Caraway goes down with them, because my job’s on the line.”

  I nodded. Realistically, it wasn’t something I could honestly promise. Caraway wasn’t on my list and so long as Santos got what was coming to him, I didn’t really care about the rest. Still, if I could avoid screwing the only guy who had been interested in helping me out, it would be all the better. I didn’t want Calvin to lose everything, but I also knew that there was some part of me that wouldn’t care if he did so long as Santos paid for his crimes.

  And I wasn’t talking about the construction shit. The crimes he committed against me were at the forefront of my mind and they were, in the very end, all I truly cared about.

  Still, if I could keep Calvin from losing his job, I would.

  Chapter Ten

  Zelda

  I kept glancing in the rearview mirror, half expecting a maniacally crazed Santos to be driving drunk and careless along the road behind me, his face flushed with rage and alcohol as he swerved across the entire road, gunning for me. Determined and blood thirsty.

  But the road remained empty behind me as I drove farther away from Santos and closer to where I knew Nester was staying.

  He’d lost his place when he went to prison. We hadn’t lived together, despite being together for as long as we had. I’d insisted that I needed the personal space, a place to go to where I could immerse myself in the tough studying that came with being a student in nursing school. But in retrospect, I had to admit that it was foolish. Nester was over all of the time anyway and we spent the night at each other’s places more nights than we spent alone. The only practical thing about it was that if Nester got into trouble with the law, they at least wouldn’t come sniffing at my door. Maybe to ask questions, but not in the hopes of truly finding anything.

  I almost laughed at the memories. How I’d stubbornly clung to my little house, even though I was madly, hopelessly in love with Nester. How I’d spent more time studying at the library in the end anyway and was only at the house when Nester was there to keep me company.

  And the most ironic part of all: how I was going to lose that house in such a short amount of time when Santos and I married.

  I shuddered at the thought. Marriage. We’d be married soon, and while I’d always known deep down inside that Santos was a ticking time bomb, I had seen firsthand tonight what it would be like to live with him.

  A nightmare. An ongoing, never ending, rage fueled nightmare. One that would leave me bruised and broken and flinching at my own shadow. It wasn’t something I had ever wanted—Santos wasn’t ever what I’d wanted—but I didn’t know how to get out of it now.

  Nester was staying at a house that belonged to one of the guys who was part of the Berserkers. One of his more loyal friends. Jackson was a decent guy, always the sort of person who was really good to me, but never in a way that made me feel uncomfortable, like he was hitting on me. Part of that was that Jackson was a family man. Maybe he didn’t walk the straight and narrow path—that seemed pretty hard to do given that he was a part of a motorcycle club—but he was good to his little girl and had made a huge effort to be the kind of husband you wanted to come home to.

  Not that it had worked out in the end. His wife had left him and I didn’t know what was going on with their kid. I had to assume there was some sort of arrangement, but if there was a custody battle, I was sorry to say I had a feeling Jackson would lose.

  I felt bad going to Jackson’s house knowing that Santos could follow me and Jackson’s little girl could be there, but I truly didn’t have anywhere else to go. No family. No real friends. Santos had made sure of that. And if I went home, surely Santos would go there first to find me.

  No, I couldn’t risk it.

  It was what kept me driving. I promised myself that I would leave if Jackson’s daughter was there. And I convinced myself that Santos wasn’t following anyway.<
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  I pulled up along the road beside Jackson’s house. There were still a few lights on, for which I was grateful. It meant someone at least was still up. A trickle of fear ran through me. What if Nester told me to get lost? That I’d made my choice and deserved what I got? I forced those thoughts aside. I couldn’t think like that. I had to believe that, however mad Nester might be with me, he wouldn’t throw me back to the wolves after something like this.

  Getting out of the car, I headed up the sidewalk, wrapping my arms around my middle defensively. My face hurt, the quickly forming bruises throbbing on my cheeks and the taste of copper lingering from my split lip. I felt paranoid, glancing behind me to make sure that Santos wasn’t creeping up just a few steps after me.