by Brook Wilder
He laughed at his own humor. Moose stayed quiet. She scowled from over her coffee cup as she took a sip and relished in the feeling. There was nothing like the first cup of morning coffee, especially after a long night like the one she had. She’d slept fine, but her dreams had been too real and too plentiful. It made her feel like her sleep was for nothing when she woke up already made anxious about her day.
“What about you?” she asked, putting her cup down. “Didn’t get stabbed in the neck by a hooker’s stiletto?”
That, Moose did laugh at. He stopped quickly when Chance shot him a look. He couldn’t keep the smile completely off his face, however. The tension was broken when the food arrived and it gave everyone something else to focus in on, though Hannah was readying any insult she needed the second Chance decided to open his mouth again with more smart things to say at her.
Breakfast was going by fine. It was going by silent, but it was going fine. The food was exactly what you’d expect from diner fare, food that all seemed to be bathed in grease, no matter what it was. Coffee that tasted a little too much like the filter used to make it, but too good to pass up because it was still coffee after all. Moose managed some small talk here and there, talking about the weather or sports or anything that had nothing to do with gambling or gangs or hostage girls. He asked Hannah some questions directly, once or twice.
She decided, whether or not it was some act to gain her trust, she liked this guy. There was some real honesty there, no matter what the goal was, he couldn’t help being nice to her and she couldn’t help but smile back at him. Besides, it seemed to bother Chance to no end that they were getting along so well, if his scowl from the corner was anything to go off of.
It all was going fine until a man in a Fallen Angels biker badge came up to the table with a dangerous smirk. Hannah felt herself shiver for reasons she didn’t quite understand. All she knew was danger. And those feelings increased tenfold when she saw Chance begin to fidget in his seat, felt his hand come over her thigh in a method of warning, not comfort. She watched Moose reach down, trying to casually move his hand down to his hip but she knew he was reaching for his gun. She swallowed.
“Well, well, Williams you’ve been holding out on me,” he said. He was a large man and he leaned down over the table, putting his hands across the surface and invading their space with a sense of ownership that Hannah couldn’t really deny. “Who’s this pretty little thing?”
“None of your business,” Hannah answered for him and felt the hand on her thigh squeeze harder. She gave him a sidelong glare.
“We’re trying to make a deal here, Chance,” he said, moving his face in close to Hannah’s and she could smell his breath, sour with cigarettes and a morning shot of whiskey. “She’d certainly sweeten the pot right up. Might make me very interested in your proposition—”
“I’m not for sale,” she bit at him, ignoring the ay Chance seemed to be trying to just rip her leg right off with his grip.
“My bitch stays with me,” he said and despite knowing it was an act, she still wanted to punch him for that. She imagined he must have said it before about other women.
“You better watch yourself, Williams,” the man said, dangerous and close. Hannah could tell from the way moose moved that his hand was wrapped firmly around the butt of his gun. She moved her hands underneath the table to hide how much they’d been shaking.
“It’s all well here,” he said. “You know the rules. I never share.”
For good measure he took the hand that had been squeezing her thigh and wrapped it around her shoulders, pulling her into him just as tightly. She tried not to look so appalled by the turn of events, which turned out to be fairly easy when her eyes widened slightly at the feel of his body underneath his clothes. She could tell from the way he walked that he must have muscles wrapping around his body, clinging to his frame in beautiful dips and curves—not that she imagined it. She could feel it here. His body hard beneath her own as she was pulled into him. His racing heart was a drum trying to reach her from the other side of his chest.
For a minute, several things could have happened. Moose could have pulled out his gun, the Fallen Angels rider could have launched at the pair of them and they would have had no time to react. The world could have opened up and swallowed them all before any fight could break out. But then, the man was smiling with his yellow, chipped teeth.
“All’s fair in love and war, Williams,” he said. “And we’ve always had both.”
They exchanged a few more pleasantries before the man said he had to be on his way to meet with his riders and walked out of the diner in a cloud of jingling metal and leather. As soon as he was gone, Chance shoved Hannah out of her seat, his hand now gripping the fabric of her shirt and dragging her along.
“Get your fucking hands off me—”
He dragged her on, some of the other diner patrons watching them but he didn’t seem to care as they moved through the diner and out the side door where he finally released her against the wall and moved in close to avoid any chance at an escape.
“Is this all a fucking game to you?” he asked. “Honestly, is there some suicide note waiting at home and you figured this would be the more interesting way to go?”
“I don’t need to be lectured by a kidnapper,” she says. “What the fuck was that? Do you honestly just pass girls around to try and make bff’s with other gangs?”
“That’s Ben, not me,” he said, dangerously. “I saved you from that bullshit because that’s exactly what he wanted to do with you. I don’t tolerate that antiquated, cave man crap.”
He was so angry that she had no choice but to believe him. His eyes were wild, he clearly hadn’t slept much last night and now he was completely wired. He was pacing back and forth and running his hands through his already wild hair. She wondered if it was permanently windswept from all the days of riding in the wind on his bike.
“Look, we have to go to the clubhouse later and it’s clearly too dangerous,” he said. “These guys are like animals.”
“It’s interesting how you make yourself feel like the better man by distancing yourself from them,” she said, narrowing her eyes and crossing her arms. “But you seem pretty content to let me stay your hostage.”
“Would you just shut up about that?” he said. “I get it, you’re not a fan of being held like this but it’s not exactly against your will and we’ve given you food and shelter and goddamn coffee. Stop looking at things so black and white.”
He sighed and stopped his pacing. He massaged his forehead and eyes into his hand for a moment.
“I’m putting you on a bus and sending you home. It’s too dangerous for you here and way too dangerous for business,” he said. “I can’t risk fucking up several years of work for some bullshit like this.”
She didn’t know what to say to that, afraid anything she said would force him to change his mind in some way. He was sending her home. She was getting her freedom back after the past twenty-four hours of total torture and stress. She quietly thanked herself for losing her head so quickly in the diner. If she knew that was all it took to get him to let her go she would have done it in the first few seconds on his bike.
He got her a bus ticket from the motel front desk and told her to lie low because Ben wouldn’t be happy to find her back and walking around when he’d been denied keeping her for himself. She nodded, not saying a word. She wouldn’t grace him with a thank you for setting her free, something he should have done in the first place. Moose told her to have a safe trip back and he’d see her soon.
She really hoped not.
Chapter 4
When Hannah got home the first thing she did was scream at her brother until their neighbors were banging on the door, asking if everything was alright. He took it with honor, sitting there on the couch with his head bowed and his hands clasped in his lap. The first thing he asked when she walked through the door from the three hour bus was if she was hurt, if they did anything to
her. It was a roundabout way of asking if she’d been raped. She asked him, with a sneer, if he had been worried, if it would have bothered him to know his sister was in danger of that sort of thing because of him? He got quiet and red in the face and simply took her verbal beating.
It was the Hannahe things she always told him. He was irresponsible, he was obsessed with making money fast and not putting in the work for it. He relied on his looks, thinking he could charm anyone into anything or thinking a pretty face suddenly made playing at a poker table a breeze.
When she ran out of things to yell at him over she went to her room and slammed the door shut behind her, not saying a word to him after that for two days. He tried to be helpful, to find a way back into her good graces. He took out the garbage without being asked two weeks in a row and did the dishes and paid for the groceries himself for once.
She spent as much time out of the house as she could in lecture. She apologized to her Criminal Law 101 professor for missing class, telling him it was a family emergency and he seemed to buy it with the haunted look her eyes got while talking about it. She sat in class and took notes like nothing had happened.
But she could not pretend that nothing had happened.
Chance’s bright eyes stuck in her mind. Blue eyes weren’t exactly some rare piece of genetic code. But his seemed to much brighter than anyone else’s that she’d seen. They seemed to outright sparkle. She imagined gang members with hard, dark eyes full of years of work and anger but his were calm. Except when he looked at her with all that rage. Then they were fire. She didn’t know how she felt about those eyes. She never felt scared, she knew that much. But she got a swirling feeling in her stomach that she couldn’t place.
She found herself often wondering what he was up to. It had been nearly two weeks since she parted from him with barely a goodbye and hadn’t heard from him since. She hadn’t seen him around town and no one had come banging to their front door demanding to see her. As far as she could tell, that Ben Andrews guy still had no idea she’d been set free but she still slept each night with a baseball bat within arm’s reach of her bed just in case. Chance might have been willing to let her go or even quietly forget her brother’s debt but she knew that man would not.
All these ruminations had started to spill into virtually every part of her life. She couldn’t keep her pen moving in class, taking notes like the diligent student she’d always been. She couldn’t concentrate while she was doing her nightly reading, getting through an entire page only to find that she’d completely missed whole paragraphs and their contents. During their weekly comprehension quizzes, her answers got shorter and shorter, some questions left completely blank until she was being graded zeros out of fives.
Rather than allow her GPA to dip any lower, she decided to take a leave of the semester. This meant more time around the house and more time to watch her brother continue to act strangely.
“Everything alright?” she asked one night when she walked into the kitchen and he practically jumped out of his skin to find her behind him, cursing her and telling him to warn her next time.
“Everything’s fine,” he spat. “Just talking to some friends.”
She watched him type feverishly into his phone, sending text after text. When he noticed her watching, he walked away without a word and went into his room with the phone, shutting the door behind him.
She was more than willing to give him space, considering her anger over his lack of responsibility still had not faded. She hoped he was trying to make something out of his current situation but somehow she doubted it was anything good. She tried to ignore it. He went off into his room whenever she was home and it was easier to ignore that the whole thing was happening. But she couldn’t fight the gnawing feeling that it had something to do with her.
No more Satan’s Knights had shown up at the door. She assumed it meant that she managed to get off the hook. That didn’t mean her brother was, of course. But she seemed to be safely out of their grasp and she wondered if she had Chance to thank for that. Not that she would thank him for something like that. Gee, thanks for not sending your goons to kidnap me again.
The days only got stranger the more her brother avoided her. Gabe seemed to find every excuse to move to every part of the apartment that she was not in. If he was watching TV in the living room and she came in, he’d say he was going to the bathroom and then never return. He made his own dinner in the microwave before she got home from work and ate it in silence in his room. He was up earlier than her these days, and out of the house most of the day.
She wanted to believe that he was working to get the money back, that he was putting all his energy toward it and that maybe he was still feeling guilty about what he almost did to her and was trying to find ways to avoid that guilt.
But somehow, she doubted it.
With school at the back of her mind, she picked up more shifts at the diner but it didn’t result in too much more money. She got four dollars an hour and barely made tips enough to cover the three dollar gap to the minimum wage.
“No one likes to tip in this economy,” Jorge said from the small window into the kitchen where he was flipping patties for a burger order at table fifteen. “We should do away with the whole system. Just get a flat rate and call it a day on all this tipping crap. I’ve gotten jumped twice on my way home because some thugs thought I was a waiter carrying tips home and wanted to take it right out of my pocket.
Hannah’s tips came to just over five dollars for the night and she tried not to scream in frustration or throw a salt shaker. Saying it wasn’t fair was childish and something her mother taught her never to rely on. The world was not going to be a fair place to anyone, her least of all. She had to make her own fairness. In that maybe she could appreciate the attempts that Gabe was making. He was trying to make his own luck, his own slice of fairness. But gambling has never been a smart way to do that for anyone. His problem was that he could only ever see dollar signs in everything he did.
The diner was open 24/7 but she put a hard cut at her hours just before midnight despite how much Terry was trying to force her to stay later and later. Just fifteen minutes before she was due to leave, the jingle of the bell at the door sounded and she wanted to groan, hoping the newcomer didn’t sit in her section,. But of course he did and she tried not to glare too much as she walked over with a menu and met the eyes of the stranger who was ruining her night.
It was Chance Williams. It had only been two weeks since she’d seen him last but he already seemed like a ghost from her distant past. She’d put those twenty-four hours as his prisoner so far behind her that it felt like a different lifetime and now here he was, only feet from her, looking grim.
“Can I help you?” she asked with barely disguised venom. She started handing him the napkin-wrapped utensils when his calloused hand gripped her wrist and stopped her. She felt a jolt of electricity from the point where their skin met without a barrier.
“I need to talk to you,” he said. “Now.”
It was not a request and not the type of tone that she could ignore. He had that way about him. Perhaps it made him a good natural leader, he had the ability to command even the most reluctant and unwelcoming person. She dropped into the booth across from him before she could stop herself, trying to remember all the reasons he’d made her so irritated in the past, unable to recall it exactly under the heat of those bright eyes.
“Your brother’s been hitting the beat trying to pay off his debt to me,” he said. “And not in a good way.”
“Great,” she groaned. “Now what?”
“He’s trying to sell you,” he said, bluntly, matter-of-factly. “He’s been shopping around and finally found a buyer.”
“Sell me?”
“Prostitution.”
She felt like she was going to be sick. She thought of all the nights her brother had spent alone, all the time he spent avoiding her. He was trying to sell her body? He was promising her to strangers in e
xchange for money? Was he fucking insane?
“I took a drive by of your apartment building. There’s a couple guys waiting there for you. They’ve already paid your brother, they’re just waiting for the delivery of goods,” he said.
He said this all so plainly but she could see the irritation building there. She wondered if he actually cared so much for her or was just frustrated at so many people getting involved in his money deal with her brother.
“This isn’t why I got in this business, you know,” he said.
“This business? You mean riding around on motorcycles and terrorizing people?”
He glared. “We used to be in drugs and guns and all the usual merchandise for our lifestyle. I didn’t like it. I got into loan sharking. But not because I wanted it to get bloody. Ben would gladly shoot your brother and take whatever possessions he had to get the money back. Your brother is trying to sell you into some archaic fucking sex slavery. This is exactly what I wanted to avoid. This was meant to be a new era for the Satan’s Knights.”
