Exposed: A Bad Boy Motorcycle Club Romance (Fury Riders MC)

by Sophia Gray

  “Stupid, fucking bitch,” Jacob grunted as he threw her down on a wooden chair in the back of his house, a dark room without windows. “You weren’t even supposed to get involved in this. Just had to stick your pretty little nose in where it didn’t belong, huh? Huh?!”

  Abby gasped in response, an involuntary reaction that she wished she could take back as soon as it left her body. Jacob started walking slowly toward her, and every cell in Abby’s body began to tremble.

  “Listen, listen, I don’t know anything. I don’t know anything about the fires,” Abby said, and she assumed she was technically telling the truth even if the next part was a bold-faced lie. “I will leave here and never tell anyone anything about you, okay? As long as you let me go without hurting me.”

  “And? What if I hurt you?” Jacob said, stepping ever closer to her even as his steps slowed down.

  Abby set her jaw, clenching her teeth together as she stared up at him. What could she do, instead of falling victim to him? Instead of proving how weak she truly was? What could she do? “If you hurt me,” she began, and her voice came out small and squeaky, like a tiny mouse. “If you hurt me,” she said again, clearing her throat to speak louder. “I will make it my business to hunt you down and hurt you tenfold, for the rest of my life,” Abby finished, practically hissing through her teeth by the end of her threat. Her heart pounded painfully hard in her throat, but she didn’t regret saying what she said. If she was going to die here, if she was going to suffer, she was going to scare him even if she had to turn into a goddamned ghost to do it.

  “You’re a very foolish girl, aren’t you?” Jacob said, backing up and going over to the darkest wall in the room, the one to the right of the door. Abby briefly considered bolting for it, since he hadn’t tied her hands and legs up, but she knew she didn’t have time. He’d catch her and probably punish her worse. She had to wait for the right moment.

  Maybe… Maybe someone will help. Maybe Jagger…

  No, that wasn’t going to happen. She hadn’t told anyone where she was going. She was stuck here unless she found a way to get out of the situation herself.

  Jacob returned to her a moment later holding rope and duct tape. He had evidently planned for a situation like this. Abby wondered if she was always destined to end up here, stuck in a psychopath’s house, with no legitimate hope for an escape.

  Jacob had her restrained in less than a minute before he walked back over to the shadowy corner of the room where there must have been a cabinet or set of drawers where he kept his supplies. When he bent over, she noticed a withered tattoo on his upper arm, some military insignia.

  Abby barely had a second to breathe and tell herself to calm down before Jacob came back again, this time brandishing a knife. All she could do was swallow and raise her head to meet his eyes, trying not to let him know how terrified she felt. “Let’s get to know each other a little bit, shall we?”

  # # #

  Jagger

  Jagger had just gotten back from a long, fast bike ride when he checked his beeper. Several notifications were waiting for him, all from Tony. Shit. Abby.

  Without bothering to read the individual messages, he opened his phone and called Tony directly to get the full story as quickly as possible. “What’s up?” he said into the phone as soon as Tony picked up the call.

  “It’s bad, boss. It’s really bad,” Tony said in a rush, sounding like he was panicking.

  “Slow down, it’s okay, just tell me what’s going on,” Jagger said, slowly lifting his body off his bike and walking toward his car. He had a feeling he was going to need to get to where he was going very quickly, but hopefully, if all went well, he’d come back with a passenger.

  “Abby. It’s Abby. I saw her… I saw her walking into Jacob’s house. It’s bad. I think… I think he has her.”

  “How do you know that?” Jagger asked, feeling his stomach acid gurgle painfully in his gut as he pictured Abby and Jacob in the same room. “Did you… Can you hear anything? Is he hurting her?”

  “No. No, I mean, I don’t know,” Tony said. “All I know is her normal schedule would have had her heading to the hospital by now, but there’s no sign of her from the house, and he’s just sitting in the front room watching TV. That can’t be good. I wanted to storm in and see if I could find her, but…”

  “But it’s safer if you’ve got more than one guy,” Jagger finished for him. It was a standard rule of the club: never go in without back-up. There weren’t many rules for the club. The only other one that Jagger could think of was the one that Jacob had violated all those years ago: don’t hit women and children. Robert had been one of the leaders of the club who’d pushed for him to get kicked out. Jagger should have picked up on it sooner. Jagger’s heart rate picked up, his blood rushing almost painfully through his veins as he thought of what that motherfucker could do to Abby, all because she was a strong woman who got in his way.

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Just a few minutes, Tony, hold on,” he said before hanging up the phone, leaping into his car and backing out of the compound’s parking lot so fast his wheels kicked up clouds of brown smoke.

  As Jagger sped on down the busy streets, weaving in and out of traffic, his head began to pound as if someone were using it as a giant drum. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. On a loop in his head, the rhythm pounded, his blood rushing to his extremities, which had somehow turned painfully numb over the course of just a few minutes.

  I should never have let her go, Jagger thought to himself. I should have kept watch on her the whole time, no matter what she said.

  You almost got her killed the last time you thought that way, he argued back to himself.

  No matter how hard the various voices in his brain pushed and pulled each other back and forth, there was one truth that he couldn’t deny: he couldn’t control Abby. It wasn’t just her feistiness, or her ability to fight for what she believed in. It was how much she cared. That was the biggest thing, the real reason why she kept getting in so much danger. It was because she cared too much, far too much for one person. It was like she’d taken all the loneliness she felt as a sick teenager and reflected her frustration back out into the world as compassion. She’d turned herself into her own superhero, the person who would have saved her as a kid. Jagger couldn’t blame her for that, but goddammit, it was tempting to do so when he thought of how much danger she’d managed to get into this time.

  He rolled to a stop on Jacob’s street, not pulling up to his house because he wanted to preserve the element of surprise. When he and Tony and the other boys busted in there, Jacob would have no idea what hit him. That’s the way this was going to work.

  “Hey,” Jagger panted as he walked up to Tony, still hiding behind a row of neatly trimmed bushes. “Anything new?”

  “No noise. He’s just been hanging out in the house, doing nothing. Maybe she left out the back or something,” Tony said with a sigh, at the end of his rope.

  Jagger shook his head. “No, she would have left this way, out the front, to head toward the hospital. Or at least she would have passed you if she had left through the back. She would’ve had to walk around the house from the back to get on the street. She’s in there, Tony. We gotta break in.”

  “But how?” Tony asked, desperation now tainting his voice. He must have learned to care about Abby, too. Jagger put a hand on his shoulder to reassure him.

  Jagger opened his mouth to answer Tony’s question, but before he could get any words out one of the other men on the lookout team, Cash, cleared his throat to interrupt him. “Guys, we’ve got an issue here. He’s on the move.”

  “What do you mean, what’s he doing?” Jagger asked, straining his eyes to peek through the holes in the bush into Jacob’s living room window.

  “He suddenly sprang up from his chair like he’d been stung or something, and ran out of the room. Maybe he noticed one of us.”

  “Maybe,” Jagger said, looking behind his shoulder to see if his truck wa
s visible from that distance. He wasn’t sure if the old man would be able to make it out, but it was possible.

  They inched along the bushes, trying to find an alternate view into the house that showed them what was going on. They had to have some strategy before going in, even if Jagger was coming out of his skin thinking of Abby trapped inside.

  Before they could find another window, a long groaning and creaking sound caught all of their attention, causing them to stand up and stare over the bushes as Jacob’s bright red truck backed out of his driveway, out onto the street.

  “Shit, shit, Abby’s in there, she’s gotta be in there, she’s gotta be,” Jagger said, turning around and breaking into a run back toward his car, Tony and Cash swiftly following him a second later.

  The truck whizzed by them just as Jagger leapt into the front seat and switched the engine on. “You guys ready to fucking rumble?” Jagger said, as his car lurched violently into motion onto the rocky road, chasing after Jacob’s truck.

  “For you?” Tony said, pulling a gun out of his back jeans pocket. “Anytime.”

  Jagger exhaled heavily, trying to keep himself calm. Tony was right. Despite everything, despite how fucked he felt right now, he had his MC. He had his family. Together, they’d save Abby. He knew they could. He just had to fight for her, with everything he had. Jagger pressed his foot down harder on the accelerator, following Jacob down a curvy, narrow road where trees scratched along the sides of their cars.

  “I’m coming for you, Abby,” he murmured out loud, not even feeling the slightest bit embarrassed about his brothers listening in. “I’m coming.”

  # # #

  Abby

  Abby blinked several times, struggling each time to pry her eyes back open after they shut. Her brain was fuzzy as if it had been filled with static. She didn’t know what had happened. One second, she was restrained in that pokey, uncomfortable chair in Jacob’s creepy dark room, and then the next second he returned, pulling some of the rope off her wrist and sticking her with something sharp and thin and hard.

  Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck, he must have injected me with something. Something to slow me down, make me sleep. Abby pinched the flesh of her palms, as hard as she could, desperately fighting to stay awake. I will not fall asleep. I will not fall asleep. I won’t fucking succumb to the darkness. Not again. Not ever again as long as I live.

  Abby kept repeating the words, holding onto them in her head as if they were a literal lifeline, repeating them to remind herself. I will not be a victim. I will not be weak. I am not weak. I am not weak. I am powerful. He will not kill me. He will not get the best of me.

  She kept pinching and scratching at her skin, biting the inside of her cheek, using the pain to anchor herself to the moment, despite the rocking motions around her that threatened to lull her into the abyss of sleep. The rocking… She was in a car! The trunk of a car. There wasn’t a ton of air in there. It felt cramped like she was back in the fire that claimed Jagger’s home. She started holding her breath longer, breathing more and more infrequently to maximize the use of whatever oxygen she had at her disposal.

  How do I get out of this? How do I stay alive? Abby’s inner voice demanded to know. Even though she had never felt this sluggish before in her entire life, she resisted sinking into the warm nothingness that threatened to overtake her mind. She smacked her head lightly with her hand, hoping the stinging pain would keep her brain stabilized.

  I wish Jagger were here with me, she thought out of nowhere. She didn’t mean it literally, of course. She didn’t want him to be in life-threatening danger like she was, not really, but she would have liked to have seen him one last time. He was the only man in her life that had ever stood up for her, that had ever fought for her, that had ever admitted he was wrong to her. He was the strongest man she’d ever known. She wished she had the opportunity to say that to him.

  Instead, she’d accused him of the arsons, which weren’t his responsibility. Despite everything, even though she was most probably riding to her death, she felt guilty. Maybe she should have been proud of that, proud of the ability to still think of another person even when she was at death’s door. Little good it would do her now. She was never going to see him again.

  No, come on, fuck that. Fuck that. You’ll see him again. You have to. You have to, Abby, she said to herself, stretching out her body to try to shake free from the remaining restraints. They loosened a little around her muscles, but they were still too tightly wound to fall off her body entirely. Fuck it. She’d just have to make do with what little power she had over her limbs.

  Abby exhaled deeply, trying to keep herself steady and calm as she pushed her legs against the back of the trunk. Maybe someone would hear her, someone on the street. No, Jacob was driving way too fast for that. No one would notice anything unless she kicked the taillights out entirely.

  She breathed in deep, blinking several times to focus her eyesight on the corner of the car. She’d have to push down, at an angle, to put any kind of pressure on the back lights at all, let alone force them out of their sockets. Luckily, the car looked like it was an older model, at the very least. The lights had probably already seen some action, and it might not take too much power to knock them loose if she got lucky. She still had no idea where Jacob was going. Maybe they were an hour away from their destination, maybe only five minutes. She couldn’t afford to waste any more time.

  Abby braced her body against the back of the trunk, nearest to the back seat, before lunging forward and smacking her foot as hard as she could against the left corner of the other side. She heard a dull “thud” sound, but nothing to indicate that her attempt had been successful. Abby inhaled deeply again, summoning all of her willpower as she sprang her legs back out. This time she heard a distinct shattering noise. The glass of the headlight broke, even if it hadn’t been removed entirely from its place on the back of the vehicle.

  She kicked at the same spot again, a little weaker this time, hearing some glass hit the road behind the truck with a crashing sound. Abby would have smiled in triumph if the world hadn’t started spinning around her, the trunk vibrating as if the very air had caught fire. Abby swallowed heavily to clear her clogged-up throat and dry mouth and cradled her head in her hands, willing the pounding and swirling sensations to stop. She couldn’t afford to rest for long. She could tell that the vehicle had sped up, the movements of the trunk around her getting rougher and more violent as the truck ran over bumps in the road, almost causing Abby to hit her head on the ceiling of the trunk.

  Wherever the truck was going, it was going to get there faster than initially intended. Jacob was on a mission. Abby only had a slim chance of getting somebody’s attention on the road before they went to whatever place he’d decided on as the optimal murder location. Abby inhaled as hard as she could, hoping the extra air would empower her to kick harder or at least more precisely, as she aimed at the other side of the trunk. She kicked weakly a few times, failing to break any glass on that side of the car.

  Come on, come on, come on, I can do this. I can fucking do this. I’m strong. I’m not that little girl anymore, Abby silently said to herself as she prepared to kick again.

  As the familiar pull of nausea attacked her stomach, Abby realized something for the first time: she was that little girl. She was that little girl dying in a hospital bed. She always would be. That was how she knew she could do this. She’d beaten cancer. She’d beaten a family that hadn’t loved her. She’d beaten death. She could do it again. She could do this, right? She had no other choice.

  Just as she was about to launch her foot forward again to kick out the other taillight, there was a loud banging noise. Maybe Jacob hit something with his car? Then a second realization hit her: gunshots. Someone had a gun and was pointing it at Jacob’s truck. That meant someone was following him, someone who knew who he was the arsonist. She still had a chance. There was hope. Abby swallowed hard, summoning up all the strength she had even thoug
h her head refused to stop spinning in circles. She pulled her leg back as far as it would go in the cramped space of the trunk and kicked as hard as her weakened muscles would allow, causing a crunching sound as her foot collided with the tail light.

  She heard some indistinct noises after that: another banging noise that was probably another gunshot, but also some male voices yelling, although she couldn’t make out the words. She had to pant hard for air now, the trunk appearing to close in on itself as the seconds ticked by. Her entire body tingled with something, probably the side effects of whatever Jacob had injected into her. It was so tempting just to fall asleep, close her eyes, relax into the darkness that had wanted to claim her ever since she was a child.

  As her eyes began to slide shut, some noise pierced through the fog: “Abby! Abby! Abby!” Her name was being screamed by a familiar voice, deep and throaty and desperate. Jagger! It was Jagger. He’d come after her. He’d come to save her.

  First, she’d have to save herself. She’d have to be strong. He needed her. She could hear it in his voice. That was what woke Abby up, shaking her alert like she’d just had a ton of ice-water poured all over her body. He needs me, she thought. I can’t die yet. He needs me to save him.