Riding Dirty: Nine Devils MC

by Kara Parker

  I felt the slap Dave delivered all the way to my toes. It rattled my teeth and stressed my eyes out. My fingers spasmed, and I tasted blood. I heard more than I saw, as Dave’s hand whipped back for another slap; but, Hardell stopped him.

  “Che. You’re going to kill her if you keep doing that.”

  I couldn’t talk as everything on my face tried to right itself and fit into swollen places. I swallowed blood and spit. Then, I coughed and said, “Don’t want me dead? Thought that was the plan.”

  “Not yet.”

  No two words had ever sent a shiver down my spine like those. I squirmed, my bravado or stupidity—I wasn’t sure which—fleeing as the blood-curdling fear set in. “Garrison’s going to find you. He put a—a tracker on me. In my shoe.”

  “Hmm…” Hardell stroked his chin and sucked his teeth in contemplation. He slowly reached behind his back. “Well, if that’s the case, we’ll just shoot your foot off. I’m sure we’ll get the tracker then.”

  I started kicking wildly, moving my feet every way I could as he pulled out a gun that was almost as long as my arm. He cocked the gun, and I started screaming bloody murder.

  A wide smile curved Hardell’s face, as he squinted and took aim. “Tit for tat, Chels, honey.”

  A cough in the corner stopped Hardell’s finger. I swallowed my scream and whipped my head to Ryan, hair getting tangled in my wet lashes and plastering itself to my tear-drenched face.

  “She’s...lying…” Ryan coughed out, spitting blood.

  Dave went to Ryan, fist balled and arm pulled back.

  “Wait.” That single word stopped Dave in his tracks.

  Hardell made a show of putting his gun away. He got up and limped over to Ryan. “Surprised you can still talk.” He looked the man up and down. “Must not be the first time you’ve been beaten.”

  Ryan forced a smile, and I was surprised to see all his teeth intact, if a little bloody. “I’ve had worse.”

  Hardell walked a small circle around Ryan before he paused at the man’s back. A hiss whispered past his lips, and he whirled on Dave and struck him on the shoulder with his cane. Dave fell to his knees, hard.

  “Fucking, idiot!” Hardell yelled, beating his dog until he broke a sweat and wheezed out a tired breath. “Do you even know who this is?”

  Ryan started to laugh softly, the sound painful and labored.

  I couldn’t get it. Couldn’t understand what was going on.

  Hardell turned back to Ryan, fear flashing through his eyes before resolve replaced it. “Chelsie your woman?”

  Ryan leveled the man with a look that was cold and hard. “Even if she was, you think we would let you off?”

  Hardell swung back around and whacked a whimpering Dave once more. He cursed long and hard, hobbling around the room. “I could kill them quick,” he mumbled to himself, all but biting his nails. “Bury them in the desert. No one would be the wiser.”

  Ryan barked out a harsh laugh that made me shudder. “Caza. Matar. Comer.”

  My Spanish was rusty, and it took me a second to translate the words. Hunt. Kill. Eat.

  What did that mean?

  Hardell stopped his pacing and looked at Ryan for a long second. The men had a wordless conversation that I wasn’t party to. Another second rolled by before Hardell looked away and kicked Dave in the side. “Get up. We have stuff to do.”

  While Dave struggled to get up, Hardell came over to me, bent down, and twisted a handful of my hair around his fist. “Bitch, you cause me too much trouble. I should kill you now—”

  Something in the room growled, and a shiver wracked Hardell. The biker gave me one more look before slapping me hard across the face and heading up the stairs.

  The room began to swim as my jarred brain tried to process everything that had happened. I moaned, wanting to look at Ryan but finding it hard to even focus on the floor.

  “It’s okay, Chels. I got you.”

  Darkness encroached on my vision, and for the first time since I’d been kidnapped, I didn’t feel like I would die.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I woke to the sound of dripping and a migraine the size of my home state.

  “Fuck me,” I moaned as I gingerly moved my head and neck and took a look around. Ryan was no longer hanging like dead meat, but curled on his side on the blood-soaked carpet.

  My eyes widened as I looked at the wicked tattoo curving around his back. I knew the man had tattoos and had glimpsed a few here and there, but nothing like this. It looked like something a Yakuza might have in a movie. Detailed and colorful, it looked like a murder scene out of a horror movie. Five shadow-like things stood around a dead animal that looked like another animal was devouring it, and flames and fire exploded around the scene like fireworks.

  A shiver wracked me as Ryan flexed and rolled over. I swore those shadowy figures moved.

  “Hey,” he grumbled, “you’re up.”

  “And alive.”

  He smiled and nodded. I watched Ryan maneuver into a sitting position and noticed the lack of chains or ropes around him. “You’re free!”

  He grimaced and flexed a swollen wrist that was turning purple. “Not by half.”

  I frowned and tugged at my own wrists, finding them bound. Ryan was free and I was chained. My first thought was that he was working with Hardell, but that didn’t make sense. They wouldn’t have beaten him then. My next was that he somehow got out of it, but he’d been hanging at least an inch off the ground when I’d last saw him, and he was nowhere near capable of freeing himself.

  Ryan answered my silent questioning, “They think it’ll help them.”

  “With what?”

  “Their deaths.”

  The way he delivered the two words made me nearly shit my pants. What happened to the Ryan who had a crush of Tiff? The one who came to my house and had tea and cookies, flirted lightly, and coaxed information about women out of me?

  I stared into eyes that looked blacker than night and took in his skin, bloodied like a newborn’s. I got the sinking feeling I was about to cross that line from reality to fiction. From, “It’s just a shadow,” to “I saw that shadow breathe.” I’d grown up in a small town with its own little urban legend, ghosts of slaves forever doomed to walk the Earth looking for lost family. The sighting of animals that couldn’t possibly exist.

  I’d seen the Devil and married him, and Yanik had been one hundred percent human. I wasn’t so sure about Ryan. There was something...different about him. Like, I would return to this moment years later and say I felt a different energy from him. “I’m a man, Chelsie.”

  I flinched hard at the way he said it. He knew what I was thinking.

  Ryan cracked that signature grin he rarely lost. “I can’t read your mind, chica. Your face says it all.”

  “What are you then?”

  “A more ruthless biker than Hardell. And he knows it.”

  I felt prompted to ask more questions, but the squeak of stairs had me biting my tongue. Hardell’s head popped around the banister as he descended. “You two are up. Good. It’ll be easier to move without having to carry you.”

  I began to squirm. “Where are we going?”

  Three more men followed Hardell, all guys I’d seen before. They moved quickly, grabbing me roughly. They stood me up, a hand at the back of my neck, tilting my head up.

  Hardell limped toward me and sneered, “Our times up, Chels.”

  They dragged me to a white van that I couldn’t remember and threw me in the back. Dave appeared, bandaged and looking worse than I felt, and handcuffed me to the metal grate separating the seats from the back.

  Ryan followed after me and was shown the same treatment. That made me feel a little better. Maybe my fear was playing tricks with my mind and Ryan wasn’t some kind of supernatural creature.

  I heard the driver’s door close and the rumble of the engine. The van didn’t have any windows, and the grate was blocked by a piece of cardboard or something, so the only
light came from the crack between the doors.

  I huddled close to myself, trying to think of a plan. There was no way I could get anywhere. I was handcuffed in the dark of a van, and the tricks about people punching our tail lights didn’t look like it would help me here.

  I couldn’t think of a way out of the van, so I turned back to my conversation with Ryan. “Why do they think it’ll help with their deaths? You going to kill them?”

  I couldn’t see his face in the darkness, but as the car started to move I craved his voice. “Not me. My brothers.”

  “Your biker friends, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you know they’ll even find Hardell?”

  Ryan must have moved because I heard metal scrape against metal. “Man like him can’t stay hidden long. And when push comes to shove, there’s only one place he can always go back to.”

  “Want to cut the eerie crap and say what you mean?” I growled.

  “Old habits die hard,” Ryan said and laughed, so I saw a flash of white. “What I meant was that Hardell thinks he’s a badass biker, and that the only place he belongs is with badass bikers. My men have been riding since birth. It’s in our blood. We were born on the bike. And we have a code that runs deeper and stretches farther than all his connections combined.”

  “So you sell drugs, too?” I’d been around bikers, and no matter how noble Ryan made it sound, I knew there was a darker side. He might kiss babies and give to orphanages and good Samaritan crap like that. However, he could also turn right around and sell drugs to those kids and make those orphans his mules.

  I wondered why I ever hung out with Ryan. He had a motorcycle, but I didn’t see him use it much. And the gang—or brothers as he liked to call them—hadn’t struck me as the same guys Hardell had working for him. But it was the way Ryan said things, like he’d seen death and liked what he saw.

  “No drugs. That shit’s for pussy gangs who think violence unites them. Violence and fear and pain unite the weak. My brothers and I are together because this world has enough bad in it without us adding to it. We might not be perfect, but fallen angels are still angels.”

  I blanched at his speech. A biker with a sense of morality, now there was a sight. I wondered how warped my sense of justice was—because all I could think was that angels don’t fall for no reasons. They do bad stuff to land on God’s shit list. Real bad stuff.

  “Is that what you are, Ryan? Some kind of avenging angel?”

  He didn’t respond for a long moment, and when he did, he sounded tired. “No. I’m just a guy trying to do the right thing and survive.”

  The rest of the car ride was silent as I contemplated that.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I met Death once. It was at a party. Yanik punched me in the bathroom and my head banged against the ceramic counter top. My husband had left me there to go do God only know what and a lithe figure dressed in a lime green taffeta wedding dress had popped up in his place. She had oval fingernails painted chocolate brown, and her auburn hair was scooped up in a chignon. At least, I think that’s what it was called.

  She’d smiled at me and inclined a hand, but I’d been too out of it to shake it. “Lucy McBeile. Death Collector Number Forty-five.”

  “Am I going to die?”

  She pulled a clipboard out of thin air and scanned it. “Says that’s still up for debate. So, maybe, maybe not.”

  “I want to die.”

  The clipboard vanished, and she gripped the edge of the counter. “Anything you want to live for?”

  I tried to think hard but came up with a big fat nothing.

  “What if I told you you’re pregnant?” she murmured.

  I thought about that, really thought about it. “I’ve always wanted a kid.”

  Lucy clapped her hands and hopped off the counter. “It’s settled then. Have a nice life.”

  I’d woken up six days later in a hospital bed and the doctors had told me I’d been in a medically induced coma to bring down the swelling in my brain. I’d convinced myself that I never saw death, and maybe I hadn’t.

  Wouldn’t Lucy, Death Collector Number Forty-five, be right in front of me now? Seemed like the appropriate time and place, as I stared down the barrel of a gun.

  Hardell had driven us to the desert, and just like he promised, he would kill us and then bury our bodies. Ryan was right beside me, a cocky grin on his face.

  Or maybe Death wasn’t who I was supposed to see. Why didn’t I see a clock? Hear the tick...tick...tick...that had been my Hell for the last few years. Everything that should have happened—life flashing, Death coming, ticking sounds, time slowing down—just didn’t happen.

  Here I was, in the middle of nowhere, kneeling in the dirt while seven bikers stood around me with a gun trained at my head. I wasn’t shaking or shouting or crying. I wasn’t begging for my life or cursing them. All those movies and TV shows I’d watched should have prepared me for this showdown. I was in a CSI or Blue Bloods-type show-down, and I just felt...peaceful.

  I’d had an interesting life. Good sometimes, bad others. But I lived.

  I married Yanik.

  Fell in love with Garrison.

  Lost my daughter, Janie.

  Gained a friend for life, Lisa.

  I was set. I was happy. There was nothing in the world I desperately needed to do. No mountain I needed to climb, or landmark I needed to visit. I’d had the human experience, as painful and joyous a one as any.

  “Chelsie,” Hardell said.

  I lifted my head, stuck out my chin, and looked him square on the eye. I was ready.

  He flipped off the safety and moved his finger to the trigger. I stared at him the entire time. I watched him squeeze down, heard the bullet break the sound barrier, but I never took my eyes off Hardell.

  I was still staring down Hardell when the bullet planted itself in the dirt a few feet behind me. My ear felt hot and something wet dripped onto my shoulder. I reached up my bound hands and felt my ear. My fingers came away bright red and stained with blood.

  “I’m alive.” My voice was faint, and I wasn’t sure if I said it out loud.

  I looked up at Hardell and found his entire body shaking. I knew he had no problem killing me, so I wasn’t sure what was going on.

  “Boss, what’s the—”

  Hardell whipped his head and roared at Dave, “SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

  I winced at the sound, and Dave hid his head.

  Hardell turned back to me and cocked the gun again. “I’m going to kill her. I’m going to kill her,” he muttered furiously under his breath.

  A sound like rolling thunder moved toward us, and everyone turned their heads to see a myriad of bikers speed down the dirt road. Hardell issued orders, and all his men grabbed guns. I knelt there, still in shock over living, as motorcycles circled and closed in around us.

  Hardell was wild, looking completely different from the calm man who had faced off with the FBI. Was that because he knew the FBI would just incarcerate him if they got him while these men...wouldn’t?

  “Ryan,” a biker with a streak of blue hair greeted as he climbed of a silver crotch rocket and leaned against the bike, “you look like shit.”

  Ryan laughed, but the sound was pained. “Feel like it, too.”

  I was a little slow, a little dumbstruck during the whole bikers-suddenly-showing-up thing. My brain was still trying to wrap itself around the fact that it was still functioning, while my body did the same thing, with teeth chattering shivers and twitchy muscle spasms.

  I was alive.

  Hardell was scared chicken shit.

  And there was a circle of bikers around us.

  My mind kind of broke off then. I was suddenly split into two separate but conscious beings. One who was on the ground still amazed at life, and the other who was out of body and thinking about the one thing she’d never thought of while chained.

  The future.

  A future that held Garrison in it,
living in a ranch house with one or two or three kids. I saw German Shepherds running around the house, with horses, cows, and chickens milling around the ranch. I saw Garrison and I on a bed, limbs entwined, sharing the same breath. I saw the life I’d always thought I’d have and realized it was just within my reach.

  Hardell twined his hand in my hair and yanked every part of me back to real time. Real time and my life was still in danger. I felt adrenaline run through me, hotter and quicker than all my other near death experiences. And since meeting the FBI agent, Garrison, there had been a lot.