by Raven Dark
I throw a look over my shoulder. Deacon Jacob stands up and heads toward the bar. I’m out of time.
Taking a deep breath, I rush behind the bar. I snatch the tip jar, grab the key card for the back door, and make a run for it.
Someone shouts—one of the customers, I think—but I ignore him, pushing myself to keep going until I reach the security door. I swipe the card and bolt down the hall. I slam into the door to the alley and push it open.
Two steps into the alley, I collide with a hard male frame.
A pair of tattooed hands grab my shoulders as if to steady me, and a devilish smile fills my vision.
“Whoa, where do you think you’re going, beautiful?”
I jerk back, horrified.
His eyes go straight to the tip jar and key card clutched to my chest. That smile grows bigger. His eyes alight with triumph.
“Well, well, well. What have we here?” he says. “It looks like we have ourselves a little thief.”
2
Stealing From the Devil
When he first grabbed my shoulders, a million things occurred to me all at once.
The man is beautiful. Strong features that look like they were carved by angels. Eyes that gleam like chips of ice. Slicked back, blond hair.
He’s a hulk of a man, towering over me by more than a foot. The neatly cropped beard should kill the look, but he pulls it off.
I’ve never liked beards; they give a man too much to hide behind, but he makes it look rough and dangerous.
He’s so gorgeous it feels like it’s a sin just to look at him. His hands send a bolt of electricity from my shoulders all the way to my toes. I can’t take my eyes off him.
A year in the isolation chamber wouldn’t be enough to absolve me.
“Where do you think you’re going, beautiful?”
With his deep sensual voice, his smooth words wrapped around me like a blanket, tempting me to lose myself in his forbidden heated touch. I staggered back, ripping my gaze from his face. His hands tightened on my shoulders, and then the rest of what I saw filtered through my brain.
He’s dressed in the strangest clothes I’ve ever seen. All leather and tight-fitting, and he’s wearing some kind of unusual leather vest with grey rectangular patches sewn onto each breast. The vest is open at the front, leaving bare a muscled, powerful chest. One of the patches has SGT. At Arms sewn on it. Whatever that means, it sounds dangerous.
His massive arms, layered in ropes of muscle, are covered in tattoos, like Dee’s, but more of them. I also smell smoke, a deliciously woodsy scent.
All of this hits me in the space of a single second after he says his first words to me. Then I tear my eyes away from him at last, throwing my gaze to his huge boots.
He speaks again, and one word he says now registers, dwarfing all else.
Thief.
Oh no…
The tip jar is still clutched to my chest, the money in it, and the label, “Tips,” plain as day. I’m also holding the key card to the door. I’ve stolen from the people I work for, only to run right smack into a customer.
No, by the sounds of it, he’s a member of the staff.
It looks like we have ourselves a thief. That’s what he’d said.
The predatory triumph in his voice makes my stomach knot with fear, and I sneak a look at him through my lashes.
He eyes the jar, and then me, with contempt, his words rife with accusation that suggests he’s taken what I’ve done as a personal attack.
Panic races up my spine. Deacon Jacob is probably still in there looking for me. With the cruel way this guy’s mouth twists, I’m not sure if Jacob finding me would be better or worse.
Years of ingrained subordination are trying to kick in full force. I can feel my body trying to make itself small, part of me screaming to keep my eyes down and think of him only as “sir.”
No. I will not be that girl again. I will not be weak. Not now. Not here. Not again, and definitely not with him.
I force myself to look right into his eyes and twist violently in his grasp. “Let me go!” I snap.
I should be screaming, getting someone’s attention, but I can’t afford to attract questions from the authorities.
A wolfish smile twists his beautiful mouth, as if my resistance amuses him. He fists the front of my shirt with a mocking slowness. The aggression causes my panic to morph into real fear.
“Get your hands off me,” I snarl, still trying to get away.
“Ohh. Quite the little wildcat, aren’t you?” That smile gets bigger. “This is going to be fun.”
My heart sinks. I’m in so much trouble here.
He jerks his chin at someone near him. “Pip, get over here.”
We aren’t alone. A slightly shorter, skinny guy with a close-cropped, dark beard and a shaved head appears at his side. He can’t be more than a year or two older than me. He’s wearing the same sort of sleeveless vest, but his has no patches on the front. The beast of a man holding me rips the tip jar and the key card from my hands and pushes both into the other guy’s chest.
“Take these inside while I deal with this one.”
Deal with me? An icy shiver races through me. The lust burning in his eyes makes my stomach tighten, even while heat unfurls in it.
Pip disappears inside.
“I’ll scream,” I tell the hulk in front of me. It’s a bluff, and I hope he doesn’t see right through it. I force my eyes to remain on his.
His hand wraps around my throat tight enough to make me worry. “No you won’t,” he growls.
Okay, questions from the authorities are preferable to whatever he has planned for me.
When I open my mouth to cry out for help, his fingers tighten. He shakes his head. The brute is way too strong for me to escape. I whimper.
His lips curve in a cruel imitation of a smile. “Settle down and be quiet, or what I do to you will be a lot worse. You understand me, thief?”
Lord, I feel like I’ve walked into the middle of a nightmare. His words are filled with a dark promise that scares the starch out of me.
The pastors have told us what to do when faced with this kind of thing. It’s easy for them to say turn the other cheek when they aren’t in it.
Months ago I would have said a silent prayer, begging God to save me, but there is no God in this alley with me now.
I force myself to relax. The only option is to wait until I see a chance to escape, or until I can find some way to appeal to him before he decides to “deal with” me.
He pulls his vest aside.
The butt end of a gun sticks up from a holster at his hip. The Colony has men who patrol the grounds with guns. I know what they do.
“I have no problem using this,” he says. “Nod if you understand.”
His throaty voice does strange things to my insides. The heat of his hand brands my throat. It makes no sense, but the feel of his fingers constricting my throat causes a clenching between my legs. A clenching that should be entirely wrong, and not just because he just threatened to shoot me.
I nod.
“Good girl. You and I are going to have a little talk.” He removes his hand, then hoists me over his shoulder like a sack of grain. Then he strides toward the door with ease as if he’s not carrying a hundred and twenty pounds on his shoulder.
My thoughts race as I desperately try to square this guy’s actions with what I’ve seen of a world that, until six months ago, was as alien to me as another planet.
It’s a strange thing. In the Colony, the pastors made it sound as if the rest of the world is overrun with gangs, men who run around shooting each other as if it’s the Wild West. They made it sound as if stepping beyond the Colony would get us shot or worse. It had been disorienting when I arrived in Santa Fe, the first stop outside the Colony, and saw hardly any guns and almost no violence.
Talk about a wake-up call. At first, when I’d realized what the elders of His Holy Peace were doing to us, I’d been nervous, wondering what in the world w
as going on. The only weapons I saw were carried by the police. There were no bodies in the streets, no women being ravaged in alleys at every turn.
Slowly, over the course of the first few days, I’d realized the truth. We were being lied to, scared into staying with the promise that if we left, we’d step into a frightening world none of us were equipped to deal with.
Seeing this brute of a man who obviously isn’t law enforcement show me his gun with such ease makes me realize that the stories about the dangers of the world weren’t a total lie. The world isn’t a den of evil, but there are monsters out there.
There are monsters, and this man is one of them.
My captor opens the door to the club and strides inside, letting it bang shut behind him. With the security door cutting off this area from the rest of the club, none of the customers would see him carrying a woman over his shoulder like a stolen bride at a Viking wedding.
He marches down the hall toward the security door, but I have a feeling that’s not where he’s going.
Fear and outrage strip me of all reason and make that ingrained instinct to be silent impossible. I’d rather die standing than on my knees.
“Where in God’s name are you taking me, you—”
His hand smacks my backside.
Mortification makes my cheeks hot. The sting nearly shuts me down, but I won’t let it.
“Seriously?” I growl.
He grunts a laugh and rubs his palm over my butt cheek in what feels like a parody of affection. “As a heart attack. You stole from us, Wildcat. Now you’re gonna pay for it.”
“Pay for it how?” I’m starting to panic again.
Without answering, he stops in the hall, and I raise my head up, trying to twist around to see over my shoulder, but I can’t.
“Monica’s been told we don’t need the girls in here now,” an unfamiliar young man’s voice says. “You guys won’t be interrupted.”
Wait, Monica? Dear God, what is going on here? She’s going to just let this happen?
If no one is allowed into this area, then no one will know what happens here…
I consider screaming for help, but all I have to do is remind myself of that firearm my captor is carrying, and any urge to cry out dies a quick death.
Horror stabs through me. I pray that if the stories the church told us about the world outside were lies, the part about God watching over us isn’t.
“Thanks, Pip,” my kidnapper says, and I hear a slapping noise, as if he’s clapped Pip on the back.
A door snicks open and the guy carries me into a well-lighted room that smells strongly of booze, cigars and leather.
“Will you please put me down? I’m not going to try to run.” It’s a lie. If I can get out of here without getting my head blown off, I’m gone.
“We’ll see if you still think that when you see what I have planned for you.”
I’m grappling for a response to this when I notice my surroundings.
There are mirrors on the walls, reflecting the room back at me. Everything in the room is deep scarlet and black. Leather couches sit in the middle of the room around a raised platform, a brass pole connecting it to the ceiling.
A brass pole, like the ones the strippers use on the stage.
Oh, no, no, no.
This is one of those private rooms used for parties. Parties where the girls are the entertainment.
This is so not going to happen.
“Put. Me. Down,” I grind out.
He ignores me.
“Ohh. What have you got there, Spider?” An older voice drifts from somewhere nearby.
Spider. Is that this guy’s name? It fits with the other names Dee has mentioned before, like Snake and Diesel. I’m missing something. Something big I’m supposed to understand.
“It seems we have a thief working for us, Arson,” Spider says, carrying me further into the room.
Pip shuts the door to the room, and when he turns his back to me, I catch a glimpse of the back of his leather vest. There are patches there, but the one in the middle catches my attention. It’s a large image of a skull with horns, coupled with a gun on either side. Devil’s Outlaws MC is stenciled across the middle in flaming cursive.
Devil’s Outlaws. That’s the name Monica used for the bikers who were in their meeting. Everything about that patch is dangerous and wicked and sends a weird mix of fear and curiosity through me.
Glancing down at Spider’s back, I see the same patch on his vest, only at my angle, it’s upside down.
What have I gotten myself into?
Pip locks the door and stands there, as if waiting for something.
“I figure we’ll deal with her infraction here before I decide what to do with her,” Spider says.
There it is again, that threat to deal with me.
The man Spider called Arson laughs as if Spider told a joke.
“Put me down!” I snap, kicking my legs.
Spider drops me from his shoulder and plops me down onto the platform. My backside stings.
“Ow!” I glare at him and he smirks, touching me under the chin. I tear my face away, and he chuckles. I’d kick him, but he still has that gun. “Is that really necessary?”
“Why are you talking, thief?”
Ugh. I hate the way he uses that word, as if that’s all I am. I feel guilty enough as it is.
“You got yourself a mouthy one,” Spidy,” Arson says, sounding delighted.
I glance at a chair to my left and barely have a second to take in Arson’s wild waves of blond hair and his square jaw before I realize he, Pip and Spider are not the only ones in the room.
I whip my head around, looking over each of my shoulders.
There are two other men sitting on the other side of the platform. They both look as fierce and intimidating as Spider. One has dark black hair dusted with grey. The other has short, brown curls and an earring in the shape of a dagger hanging from one ear. Both look within a few years of Spider’s age, late thirties to early forties.
They’re all wearing the same sleeveless leather vests as Spider, but with different patches sewn on the breasts. All have tattoos everywhere I look.
Monica was right, they are all hot. Even Pip is nice looking, but in a much younger way.
“All right, beat it, kid,” Spider says with a look back at Pip. “Go fuck your girl. Time for the men to take care of business.”
I do a double take, thrown by the astounding ease with which he discusses sex.
“No complaints here, sir.” Pip leaves, shutting the door behind him.
“Striker,” Spider says.
“Got it.” A chair creaks and the guy with the dagger in his ear—Striker, I guess—comes over and locks the door before returning to his seat.
For real? That “kid” just left me in here to these animals?
“Now,” Spider says, crossing his powerful arms and pinning me with a cool stare. “Care to tell me why you decided it was a good idea to steal from us?”
No. If I tell him that, for all I know, he might send me back to the Colony. Or it could put people there in danger. I have friends there. My parents. I can’t tell him.
“What are you going to do to me?” I can’t keep my voice from shaking.
Spider’s eyes rake over my curves, the swell of my breasts, the flare of my hips. He uncrosses his arms and closes the space between us with a predatory slowness before running one hand up my leg.
The feel of his rough, calloused palm on my skin causes instant heat to flare over every inch of me.
In the Colony, it’s forbidden for a woman to allow any man other than her husband to touch her. If she allows it, she’s seen as a whore. Outrage and shame scald my cheeks.
It’s the bolt of excitement shocking through me that makes me flinch as if his hand is on fire.
Amusement flashes in his eyes. His hand tightens on my thigh, his fingers pinching it until it almost hurts. The intimacy, the roughness in his touch makes me feel violate
d, as if he’s touched somewhere private, somewhere secret in me.
“Get off!” I snarl, trying to pry his hand away.
Again, the urge to avoid looking him the face tries to kick in, and I force it down. He’d only see it as a weakness.
“I don’t think she likes you very much, Spider,” Striker says with an alarming casualness.
“That’s all right. It’s more exciting for me. I like a challenge.” Spider’s big hand wraps around my dark curls slowly before he yanks my head back hard enough that the sting makes me cry out. He puts his face in mine.
“Are you forgetting who has the gun, thief?” he growls in a low, dangerous voice.
He’s right, in my fear, I had forgotten. I go limp in his grip, shutting out the pain in my scalp. I can’t understand why, but the pain is going right between my legs, producing an ache I’ve only felt when I was alone in my room, thinking thoughts I’d end up in isolation for if I acted on them.
Heaven help me, he’s a criminal and a monster. I shouldn’t be attracted to this guy, but everything he does makes my skin hum with awareness of him. Shame eats at me, heating my cheeks and I tear my eyes away, focusing on his chest.
Until the feel of his warm breath on my forehead brings my head up.
Spider’s beautiful lips hover an inch from mine, close enough to cause mine to tingle with the heat of them.
“You stole from us,” he growls darkly. “No one steals from the Devil’s Outlaws. People get killed for less. You’ll pay, but you should consider yourself lucky if it isn’t with your life.”
It shouldn’t shock me that these men kill people. He already told me he has no issue with using his gun on me, but his words ratchet up my fear nonetheless.
“You can’t be serious.”
“I am.”
“You’d kill me for what was in that jar?”
“I haven’t decided yet. Why did you take the money?”
I look away. “I…I needed to get out of town.”
He jerks my chin up so that I have to look right into his cold, pitiless eyes. “I promise you we are a lot more dangerous than whoever you were running from. Who’d you piss off?”
I say nothing.
