by Julia Marie
I don’t see her car here. Fuck.
It had been a long shot, coming to her apartment building. A Hail Mary, but I didn’t have any other options until I was able to get in contact with Marshall. He had the resources and the tools to be able to track down anyone anywhere, the special kind of person that it was wise to make friends with because they could come in handy at the most important times.
Where do I go from here?
I waited as a car backed out of a parking spot right in front of me, stopping just shy of my bumper. What the hell is this moron doing?
A slight bump shook the car, jostling me in my seat. “What the fuck?”
The bump came from behind; while I had been distracted with the car in front, another had come from nowhere to nudge right up behind me. I could see the driver in the rear view mirror – suit and tie, and dark sunglasses even though we were in a dimly lit parking garage. Both vehicles were a shiny, spotless black, and they completely blocked off any ability to maneuver the BMW.
Uh oh. I knew I should have taken the bike. There was no way I could have been taken off guard on a motorcycle like this. Now I was in trouble.
All of a sudden all hell broke loose. Men in helmets and bulletproof vests streamed from all around where they must have been lying in wait for the trap to spring closed.
I didn’t stand a chance. Before I could even lock the doors they had pulled the doors open and cut my seatbelt, pulling me out to the ground. There were shouts and commands, but it all ran together in one big blur, impossible to differentiate.
Handcuffs tightened on my wrists, holding my hands behind my back, and I was pulled up and shoved into the back of the car in front of my own. There was a divider preventing any view of the driver or communication.
~
By the time the car pulled to a stop outside a monolithic glass building uptown, my wrists were getting very sore. Someone was going to have to answer for this.
An escort of armed men formed around me as I was led from the vehicle and into the building. We didn’t walk far before getting to our destination; an interrogation room that was straight out of a bad TV cop drama, complete with an observation mirror.
There I was left, but thankfully they removed the handcuffs from my wrists first. There were red welts that stood up from the smooth white flesh of my forearm, the skin hot.
I had more than enough time to think things through on the way. While there were a few different players with stakes in the game being played, there was only one with the resources and sheer balls to pull off a stunt like this.
When the door opened to admit a short, stocky man going bald at the temples, my suspicions were confirmed.
“McCrown, you son of a bitch,” I said. “You had better have a damn good explanation for this. Manhandling me like that and bringing me in here like a war criminal! What happened to civilized conversations between gentlemen?”
“Fuck off, Shane,” said the other man. He sat heavily across the table and leaned back. “We both know that neither of us are gentlemen. Or civilized, for that matter. Don’t get all high and mighty on me.”
I crossed my arms. “I’ve always cooperated with you in the past. What makes you think I would do any differently if you had just asked me instead of sending your goons out to capture me?”
We stared at each other across the table. McCrown looked away first.
“We know, Shane. We saw the papers that Jackie took from the warehouse. Those were good men, Shane, and you had them all killed. ”
I struggled to keep the shock off my face.
They think I ordered the men killed?
I had expected them to have the copied documents. There was no other reason for the sudden seizure unless Jackie had been working for the FBI all along and had gone straight to them. It was surprising that they jumped immediately to the obvious – and wrong – conclusion. It would be better if I talked as little about the contents of those documents as possible. There was still a chance that I could salvage the situation if I could divert the conversation and keep them mired in their assumptions.
“She was a fantastic actress,” I said. “You must have trained her for months. It’s tough to admit, but I had no idea that she was an FBI plant; normally I would have caught that in the interview.”
McCrown chucked. “Well, there’s a good reason for that. She was no plant, Shane. We didn’t even talk to her until after you had already hired her, and even then we didn’t tell her who we were. Just some broad, empty threats were all it took to produce results.”
“What? You blackmailed her?”
As suddenly as my world had tilted when I had found out that Jackie had stolen the files from my office, it changed back. She wasn’t the problem. The problem was the meddlesome asshole sitting right across the table from me.
“Now, now,” McCrown said. “Blackmail is a strong word. We are a government agency and we simply ask citizens to stand up for what is right on occasion.”
“You idiot!” I said as I exploded from my seat. “You dragged an innocent woman into the middle of this fucking mess and exposed her to all kinds of danger, and for what? Access to a couple documents? Don’t pretend as if you couldn’t have just sent someone straight into the clubhouse and gotten that information yourself if you really wanted to. You did this just to mess with me, and now a woman’s life hangs in the balance!”
The short man rocked back in his chair. He shot a glance to the door – where no doubt there were armed men ready to flood into the room if deemed necessary.
“Shane, what the hell are you talking about? Her life is hanging in the balance? If she’s in danger from anyone, it’s you. We are going to do everything we can to protect her from you and your gang.”
Incredulous, I stared at the man. He actually believes the words coming out of his mouth. It was astonishing. I couldn’t say anything further without compromising the secret that I was holding. I would just have to take care of Jackie myself.
“Let me the fuck out of here, McCrown. You had no right to bring me here like you did and absolutely zero cause to keep me. What do you have? A piece of paper that says absolutely nothing about murder.”
The short man got to his own feet, an attempt to get back on equal ground that failed miserably due to the height difference between us. “Cause? We’re the FBI, Shane; we have enough cause to detain a grandmother if she sneezed suspiciously. I’m not going to let the man who ordered the deaths of all of those men go.”
I stared at him, and let a little of the fierce anger and loathing that swirled within me show on my face. “What are you scared of, McCrown? That I’m going to write a letter to some mysterious person and all of a sudden you are going to have your own little ‘accident’? I know if I leave here I am going to have more government agents following my every move than the president, do you really think that I’m going to be able to do so much as hiccup without their knowing?”
It was a standstill. I could see the battle raging behind his eyes.
“Fine. You can go. But if you do absolutely anything that makes me think you are up to something, you are getting hauled back here, and I’ll be damned if we ever let you go again.”
“How long am I supposed to just sit here?”
My question fell on deaf ears. It’s not like I really expected an answer this time after a few hours of futility, but at least it gave me something to do. There was precious little else in the small house that I could use to entertain myself.
After I had given Agent Thompson the documents, he assured me that the government would take care of me in thanks for my service to the country. Apparently in the short term that meant boring me to tears so that I would just kill myself out of boredom and save them the effort. A couple of men had taken me to this small house on the outskirts of the city and said I was to wait here for further instructions, that I would be safe here and there is no way that Shane or the motorcycle club would be able to find me.
Ugh. This is the wors
t.
I drifted off into thoughts of Shane. It had seemed like longer than two days, the time that we had spent together. The long, tense, sexually charged days and the sweet, blissful unions that followed would be burned into my brain for an eternity, even though I would likely never see him again.
Even knowing what I now did, the thought of not seeing Shane again was devastating. He had been both charming and commanding, not to mention achingly handsome. The way he had owned my body, the things he had made me feel had filled a need that I hadn’t even known I’d had until now.
He was also a criminal, and dead to me, and I needed to get that fact rammed into my thick skull.
The agent’s phone went off, and he took one look at me before leaving the room to answer it. His voice was a soft murmur in the hallway.
Now he’s willing to talk, just so long as it isn’t in front of me.
He was only out in the hallway for a moment before I sensed his shadow in the doorway again.
“So,” I said, “are you going to tell me what that was about or are we just going to sit in silence for a few days and say absolutely nothing?”
“Get on the ground.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked as I swung to face the man.
The aggressive barrel of a gun stared right into my eyes from only a few feet away.
My hands raised in the air in an automatic response to the weapon brandished towards me. “Whoa! What the hell are you doing?”
“Slowly get off the couch and lie on your stomach on the ground.” If his eyes had been humorless before, they were downright empty now.
My breathing was harsh to my own ears as my heart began to pound in my chest. My body launched itself fully into fight or flight mode, and my hands began to shake from the fear and adrenaline that coursed through me, combined in my veins.
I had never felt so capable and yet so powerless at the same time. Against a highly trained agent with a firearm, my pumped up lady muscles were useless.
Slowly, unwillingly, I slipped forward off the couch onto my knees. Unable to see a way out of my predicament, I started to drop my hands to the floor and lower my body down.
“Why are you doing this? You are here to protect me! The government can’t just decide to kill me off because it’s more convenient!”
“Quiet,” the man said.
He didn’t offer up any more explanation, and I wondered why I thought he would. Must be a lifetime of bad movies. The main characters always get to hear the reason they are about to get shot.
The problem was that as much as I wished it otherwise, I was in no movie, and it didn’t look like there was going to be a last-minute rescue.
I put my forehead on the ground and closed my eyes, deciding I didn’t want to stare at the bullet that was going to end my life.
“Where are we going, Marshall?”
I waited impatiently, fingers tapping the wheel of the black Lexus, ready to be off.
“Easy, Shane. I just got you out of the clubhouse from underneath a dozen FBI agents without them being the wiser. One step at a time.”
I gritted my teeth. It was best not to get on Marshall’s bad side – he had way too many methods of killing a man to ever want to help him test out another. “I just know that Jackie’s out there, and the government has put her in danger without even realizing it, the fucking idiots.”
Whatever Marshall was doing over there with the screen lighting his face up with pale blue light, he was doing it too slow. I started the engine and started to drive out of the garage just to put some distance between us and the plain industrial building wedged between a factory and a warehouse.
“Hold up,” Marshall said, and I stopped as he pulled out another device and waved it around us. It beeped a couple times and a red LED came on, but he stared at it intently before waving me forward. “Okay, we’re good to go. I’m glad you took my advice about the tunnel when you picked out the clubhouse. It made this downright simple.”
“Well it just seemed like a good idea. Maybe it was a little tough to pull off without alerting anyone who might have been snooping around – like the FBI. But worth it.”
The Restless Motorcycle Club’s warehouse and base of operations was located in the middle of a bustling industrial district, and it wasn’t an accident. The warehouse had been leased legally under the club name, but at the same time a small building had gone for sale a block over that I purchased secretly, under a false name, through several layers of protections meant to conceal the identity of the true owner. Marshall had uncovered a few contractors who were trustworthy and stealthy – not to mention skilled – enough to tunnel underneath the two properties and build a hidden passageway.
The logistics had been headache-inducing – worming through the sewer system, the buried utilities, and hidden outcroppings of bedrock, all without striking anything and alerting anybody. It had been more expensive than I’d wanted to admit to the others in the club, and something that looked like it would never pay off.
Until tonight. Tonight had made it all worthwhile.
“Okay, she’s up north, a ways out of downtown,” Marshall said. “Take the highway.”
We drove in a terse silence aside from the odd direction given from the man in the passenger seat. Marshall was an incredibly useful acquaintance to have, but he was not comfortable to be around. He had seen and done far too many things for that to ever be the case. I knew enough not to bother asking him how he got the information he did.
At his direction, I pulled the car to the side of a street in a shabby neighborhood, next to a house displaying a couple of graffiti tags. The houses would have been nice when they were first built back when this was prime commuter real estate. As the city limits expanded and the buildings grew older, the wealthier middle class kept moving further outside of the city bounds, and this became a forgotten community, kind of like the occupants.
Another one of Marshall’s devices was out in his steady hands, scanning slowly around a house a few doors down.
“There are only two people in there,” he said. “One man and one woman. I can’t believe they’ve made things this easy on us. They really thought that we wouldn’t be able to find her.”
“We can take one man,” I replied. “I’m going in there. Where should I enter?”
Marshall squinted out the car and shrugged. “Looks like they’re just through the front door, so we should loop around back. You want the lead?”
I nodded. “Like Kuwait?”
He smiled; the vicious grin of a fellow predator.
The lawn was lumpy and there were patches of dirt under my feet as we crouched and ran towards the side of our target building as quietly as possible, a distinct contrast to the green carpet that perfectly filled my own yard.
With a concentrated effort and the benefit of countless mornings spent running through a posh neighborhood, I kept my breathing slow and quiet, drawing each breath carefully through my nose and expelling it the same way to make sure it didn’t tip off our opponent.
Marshall used hand signals to point towards the back of the house. I nodded.
There was a door just around the corner, a swinging one with just a small window. It looked like it might make some noise when opened.
I looked back at Marshall and grimaced; he pointed over my shoulder at a window that was cracked open to the warm night.
“I don’t know why you’re doing this, but isn’t there anything I can do so that you won’t?” I asked, my voice growing desperate even to my own ears. “I don’t know what I’ve done wrong. Please!”
There was no response. This guy did not want to give me anything. There was no hope.
I was going to die here. On the floor of this crappy house, far from anyone I knew, having betrayed the man I had barely had the time to start to fall in love with.
This is bullshit. I can’t fucking believe—
A man’s yell interrupted my thought, drowning it out with its volume and
intensity.
A thud beside me made me flinch and instinctively roll away.
Two men were rolling on the floor, struggling and grappling to gain an advantage over the other. One was my guard-turned-executioner, and the other was—
Oh my god.
“Shane!”
It was him. It was really him. His muscles bulged as he secured his position on top of the FBI agent, and started to punch him in the face.
My shout made him look over, and the agent took advantage. With a quick flip of his lower body and a shove low on Shane’ side, the biker was rolled off and onto the floor, and all of a sudden he was the victim of an onslaught of blows.
