by Malcom, Anne
And I guessed that would mean forfeiting my life, because no doubt they had a way of monitoring my calls, I’d be dead before anyone even picked up at the other end.
I sighed. “Show me to my chambers then.”
Hansen moved to jerk his head at the prospect at the end of the room, standing. Prospects didn’t get seats, interesting.
“You’ll be in my room,” a rough voice growled.
I looked to Liam, to his hard eyes, scarred face. He had stood too, his hands fisted at his sides, his entire body taut. “Like fuck I will.”
His eyes were solid. “I say you got a choice in the matter?”
“Hansen did,” I shot back, jerking my head toward the president violently. “That choice being I stay here, or I accept my punishment for being a rat, that being an unmarked grave and a violent death. I’d prefer that than sharing a room with you.”
I turned on my heel and walked out. I swear I heard Claw’s chuckle as I slammed the door.
* * *
To my utter dismay and panic, I was not showed to an empty room. I was shown to the same room that had been my cell and my solace for the past week.
Liam’s room.
And when I tried to get my things and move them, John appeared from nowhere, blocking my way, obviously under instruction from Liam.
“Move,” I said through gritted teeth.
He didn’t.
I was tempted to run at him, fight him, tear my way out of this room. But it would do little good. He was so big and muscled he took up the whole door. I wouldn’t win a physical fight with this man.
I knew I wasn’t going to win the metaphorical one I was currently engaged in with Liam.
So I surrendered.
On the outside, at least.
Though I knew the battle I was engaged in with Liam was one I’d eventually lose, it didn’t mean I was going to stop fighting. No, I had to keep fighting, battling. There was no other choice.
John sensed that he had won the standoff, turning on his motorcycle boot and walking away, and the door was left open. So I was no longer confined to Liam’s room. I was obviously free to walk around the clubhouse. But no matter how desperate I had been for the past week, how intent I was to get out of the room that housed too many memories and one single white feather, I couldn’t bring myself to cross the threshold and explore.
Never in my career as a journalist had I let fear stop me from going to cover my story. Not when covering prison conditions in Lagos with a shitty security team, nor when I snuck into Syria to cover the refugee crisis, or in any other deadly situation that was necessary to navigate in order to get my story.
But that door frame was harder to cross than a border to a war-torn and dangerous country.
It was impossible to go, but it was unbearable to stay.
But I stayed. Like a coward, the minutes in Liam’s room cutting through me like blades.
John returned with my phone.
I raised my brow when he handed it to me. “Not worried I’m going to call the police?” I had obviously already had this conversation with Hansen, but I was interested in how much the prospects knew. How much they were entitled to know.
He regarded me with an empty gaze. “You can try. We own the police here. And I think Hansen educated you on what happens here if he finds you can’t keep your word.”
Ah, so John couldn’t carry on a normal conversation, but he seemed very capable to regurgitate his president’s death threats.
After they gave me back my phone, it took an hour to get through all my voice messages, texts, and emails. A few were from my family, checking in, though they were obviously worried about the lack of response since they were used to such things when I was on a story. They were used to months of silence and the only way they could find out whether I was alive or not was to watch me reporting the news.
So they were lulled into a false sense of safety thinking I was covering some benign story in Arizona. When in reality, I was likely in more danger, or at least comparable danger, here as I was in a war zone.
I texted them all back, choosing not to inform them that I was being held hostage by a biker club and the man they’d welcomed into their family and expected to marry their daughter. A man they’d mourned like he was their own. I know they mourned for a daughter that was their own too. Because I’d died. Not all of me. But a big part. An important part.
I lingered on a photo my sister sent me, she was smiling with her hand over her large rounded stomach. She’d be due in two months.
Where would I be in two months?
Would I be alive?
Would I be able to face my family, my home, with the knowledge I had now?
Would I be able to face myself?
The appearance of a new message shook me from that morbid contemplation. It was Emily. She was my contact for the story, and I’d been calling her nightly to update her on what I had. She was beyond interested in the story and already had big plans for it.
Unlike my family, she knew how much danger I was putting myself in. Hence why most of the calls and messages were from her.
The latest read:
If I don’t hear from you today, I’m calling the police. I don’t care if it blows your story. No matter what you think to the contrary, you are more important than your story.
I sighed and dialed her number.
“Holy fuck!” she screamed through the phone after barely one ring. “I thought you were dead. That the bikers found you out as a rat and that you were swimming with the fishes.”
I smiled. The familiarity of the voice was welcome. It was a comfort in a place where nothing was comfortable. Familiar. “We’re in New Mexico, Emily,” I said, trying to keep the tears out of my voice. “Not many places for me to swim with any fishes, and that’s more of a mafia thing. This isn’t the mafia.”
“It’s almost the same thing,” she scoffed.
I rolled my eyes.
It wasn’t almost the same thing. If I had been found out to be trying to infiltrate the mafia, there would be no conversation, I’d have had a bullet in the back of my skull without so much as a conversation.
The Sons of Templar at least gave their enemies somewhat of a conversation before putting a bullet in their brains.
I thought about the gray matter on the concrete.
Well, half a conversation.
“Okay, since you’re not swimming with the fishes, care to tell me where the fuck you’ve been the past week?” Emily asked pleasantly.
Sirens and horns echoed through the phone and I imagined her shouting at her phone while pounding the streets in six-inch heels. She was one of the busiest agents in New York, she was always rushing somewhere, swearing into her phone. “Because I’m on my way to my doctor to get some fresh Botox for the wrinkles you caused me worrying about you being buried in a shallow grave.”
“I thought it was swimming with the fishes? You’ve got to stick to your metaphor, Em,” I teased.
I only got a growl at the end of the phone.
I smiled again. “You were not worried about me, it’s not in your schedule.”
Emily was religious about schedules, to the point of OCD. She had bathroom breaks in there. No joke.
“When my best friend makes her living by almost dying daily, I put worrying about you in my schedule, written in blood. Don’t worry about that. Right before my morning celery juice and after my morning orgasm.”
It wasn’t a surprise she even had her orgasms scheduled.
I wondered if this one was from a new girlfriend or a battery-operated device. One thing she didn’t have a schedule for was women. She was all about flipping stereotypes and feminism, but she was also acting like the classic toxic male when it came to womanizing. She was afraid of commitment, except when it came to her job. And me.
“Well stop worrying. I’m fine,” I lied.
“No, you’re not,” she shot, calling my bluff immediately and bluntly, as was her way. “For a journa
list, you suck at lying.”
“Journalists aren’t meant to lie, it’s kind of the point.”
She scoffed again. “And I’m not meant to eat carbs, but I had a bagel for breakfast.”
I picked at the comforter of the bed I was sitting on. “Not the same thing,” I told Emily.
“Whatever, I’m on a crunch, so fill me in on what the fuck’s going on,” she demanded.
I didn’t have the time, the energy or the creativity to come up with a lie that would satisfy Emily. So I went for the journalistic truth.
Leaving out the part about Liam/Jagger, of course. I wasn’t going to bury that lead. I’d obliterate it. She knew all about him. After a night of lemon drops, confessions, and broken hearts. It was the only time I’d ever seen her cry. No, the other being when one of her biggest clients had a meltdown on live TV days before his book launch.
“Shut the fuck up,” she said when I finished telling her I was a prisoner here until I was found to be trustworthy enough to be able to leave. Most normal people would express outrage, panic and be calling the police.
Emily was not most normal people.
So I waited.
“You got the president of one of the most notorious organized crime collectives in the fucking country to agree to give you the inside scoop?”
There it was.
I couldn’t help but smile. “Yeah, with the small detail that I’m a prisoner until I do so.”
“Details,” she dismissed. “This is big. Like really big. I already had publishers on the line when I pitched the idea of a novel when you were undercover, but now...shit we’ll have our pick out of all the fuckers.”
I froze. “A novel?”
Traffic honked in the distance. “To begin, but depending on the way this goes, we could get a movie deal. A mini-series. Netflix would love the screenplay for this shit—”
“Emily,” I snapped, knowing that she would just keep going. And I needed her to stop. “I didn’t ask you to pitch a fucking novel. I asked you to put out feelers to the Times and the Tribune about an expose.”
I could hear her roll her eyes. “With this story plus your talent as a writer, I couldn’t physically do something like that. With this exclusive, they’re going to triple their advances.”
I clenched my fist. “I don’t care how much they offer, Emily, I’m not going to do it,” I gritted out through my teeth.
“Are you kidding?” she demanded. “This is the chance of a lifetime. Let’s forget about the money, though that’ll be hard to do since there’s a lot of it on the table right now. But we’ll try. This is every writer’s dream. A fucking book deal. And not to mention in this climate. No one is getting book deals anymore. Especially on nonfiction. Especially with an advance like this.” She spoke quickly, apart from the times she drew out words, long to put focus on them. It was her signature trick, and it worked surprisingly well with everyone but me.
I ran my hand through my hair. “Yeah, I’m sure this book deal is every writer’s dream, Emily, but I’m a journalist, not a writer. I don’t want buckets of money so I can sit in my cozy apartment and tell my story. I want to be somewhere that’s not cozy, so I can tell the stories of people who aren’t offered book deals for their lives. I’m not profiting off the horror I’ve seen. That’s not what I’m here for.”
She laughed. “A noble journalist, you may be the last of your kind.”
“I’m not noble,” I said, the word scraping at my throat. “I’ve done a lot of morally questionable things to get stories. I’ve hurt people. Betrayed them.” I thought about the man who I’d been in love with once. The one whose eyes had gone dark and who was currently keeping me prisoner here. “I’m not putting all that into a book. I’m going to keep doing my job until I can’t, unless I die first.”
I hated that it sounded like a premonition.
Chapter Nine
They came for me late that same night.
I had expected as much.
My door wasn’t locked anymore, but I didn’t venture out into the clubhouse because of the tone in the room earlier today. I knew that a lot of the men weren’t happy with their president’s decision.
I understood that.
Which was why I wasn’t surprised when the man I knew as ‘Swiss’ came into the room. The nicknames were a mystery to me since this man didn’t look Scandinavian, with beautiful midnight chocolate skin, sharp bone structure, and a bald head. But for all I knew, he’d killed a lot of Swiss men.
He’d hit on me on the first night I came to the club. Well, all of the men had. I was a new face, fair game. Likely competition for them as soon as it became apparent I was handing out rejections. He’d almost tempted me, with his smooth voice, his jarring beauty. He had engaging conversation that hadn’t started with, “hey baby, wanna fuck?” which had been many of his brother’s opening lines, or variations of the same.
But this was not the man from the clubhouse party hitting on a woman. No, I wasn’t a woman to him now, I was a traitor.
I wondered if that man was an act, or if this one was. I had a strong feeling it was the former.
I closed my book, standing. “I’m assuming you’re not here to ask me to dinner?” I asked dryly.
His jaw clenched. His eye twitched. The hatred for me was painfully obvious. “You wanna see what we do. What we are? For your story?”
He didn’t wait for me to speak, he just snatched my arm and dragged me. His grip was tight. Violent. Painful.
I didn’t struggle. It wouldn’t make a difference.
There was something in his eyes that told me he might like it if I struggled.
So I didn’t.
And I did want to see who they were. But not for the story.
For my sorry, broken and tortured soul. Because I hadn’t put it through enough already, obviously.
We moved through the back end of the clubhouse, past the doors that housed a lot of the members—since most of them were new transplants and didn’t have a home in the town yet—we went further than I’d gone. Further than I thought the building had within its walls, it didn’t betray this size when looked at from the outside, which I guessed was the point. We stopped at a door at the end of a hallway, separated from anything else.
It had four locks on it.
Something moved in my stomach at the sight of the seemingly innocuous door. Something that slithered up my spine, to the base of my throat.
Swiss stared at me, daring me to say something, anything. His grip tightened on my arm.
“Are you going to show me what you seem intent on showing me, or we just gonna stare longingly into each other’s eyes?” I asked, my voice betraying none of the dread or fear that that door awakened inside me.
Something moved around, mingling with the empty cruelty in his eyes. Something more human. But something I was coming to discover with the Sons of Templar was that every man here was a monster, but they were also a human. Not wholly one or the other. Swiss was closer to monster than most but still human.
His grip loosened slightly as if it were a sign of respect.
But it was only to unlock the door, it tightened once again as he opened it and dragged me down.
Down into the bowels of the clubhouse.
The underbelly of the Sons of Templar.
Where the story lay.
Where the humans disappeared, and the monsters came out.
* * *
The basement stank.
Of sweet. Blood. Tobacco. Metal. Mold.
It didn’t smell of death. I didn’t agree with some of the greatest writers and poets of our time. Death didn’t have a smell. A sound. Death was silent. It had no odor. No signifier. Only a feeling. A bone-deep knowing that every human has. That only comes seconds before you see it, too late for you to run, avert your eyes.
That was the point.
I didn’t avert my eyes at the dead body hanging from a hook on the ceiling.
I merely ran them over the man curio
usly. He was shirtless, wearing only tattered and stained jeans. Though he wore mostly blood.
It pooled underneath him.
Another man sat bound in a chair.
He was alive.
Claw jerked up from where he had been sitting smoking on a small stool to the left of the room. In his other hand, he still held a bloody knife.
“Dude, what in the fuck are you doing?” he hissed at Swiss, advancing on us. “You can’t bring her in here. This is club business.”
Swiss’ grip on me tightened as if he were expecting Claw to snatch me away from him. I was nothing but an object right now, to be tugged and bruised. I’d been treated worse for lesser stories, so I didn’t protest.
Not just because I wanted the story. Because I needed it. I needed to be sickened by these men, by the life Liam had chosen, in order to be sickened by him, in order to stop wanting him so much.
“Yeah, and she’s here to learn about the club business,” Swiss said to Claw when it became apparent he wasn’t going to tug at my other arm. “She’s here to write her story. Hansen gave her permission.”
Claw glared. “Yeah, permission to tend the fuckin’ bar, watch some idiots get roughed up, watch Blake get too drunk and fall off his bike, see a fuckin’ orgy. Not a felony!”
Swiss shrugged, unnerved by the fact a man with a bloodstained knife was glaring at him and yelling at him. “She’s already witnessed a felony.”
Claw’s eyes bulged. “So why don’t we add more to the mix? It’s not fuckin’ Pokémon, you don’t catch ‘em all.”
I couldn’t help it, a hysterical giggle erupted from my lips.
Both men looked to me.
I had never lost my composure in the midst of a story. I hadn’t cried. Vomited. Screamed. Expressed sympathy. Anger. Disagreement. I certainly hadn’t laughed in front of two men, one captive—two if you counted me—and a dead body.
But something about Claw’s visceral anger, about the reference to Pokémon, of all things made me lose it.
