Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Brimstone Lords MC 3)

by Sarah Zolton Arthur

  Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

  Brimstone Lords MC

  Book Three

  Sarah Zolton Arthur

  I can’t be with you

  Or live without you

  Because he’s trapped me

  Between the devil and the deep blue sea

  Can you forgive me,

  For not forgetting you?

  But see, he’s trapped me

  Between the devil and the deep blue sea

  When he finds me, and he’s got me scared

  You come running, no questions you ask

  Chasing away the demons ’til our souls are bared

  In the bosom of your love, I’ll finally bask

  You’re always mine

  And I’m always yours

  Because now he can’t touch me

  Between the devil and the deep blue sea.

  -Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

  Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

  Copyright © 2018 by Sarah Zolton Arthur

  All rights reserved.

  First Print Edition: April, 2018

  Irving House Press

  P.O. Box 5738

  Saginaw, MI. 48603

  Formatting: Heather Young-Nichols

  ISBN-13: 978-1986851794

  ISBN-10: 1986851796

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  1.

  Livvy

  three months ago…

  God, he’s so loud. Every breath, through his nose and mouth simultaneously. The room. I’m in the room, not the box. I’m in the room. Next to him. The black, just black.

  The black, just black.

  I grab my head, holding my face with my hands, squeezing, tears streaming down my face again. Heart palpitations. Pounding. Pounding.

  And he sleeps.

  I keep gripping my face to keep from gripping his neck to shut up that damn loud breathing or from grabbing those scissors just a pullout drawer away.

  I could stop him.

  But I couldn’t stop him.

  Because I can’t move.

  I can’t breathe.

  Houdini is still out there, plotting. Waiting. He got me before. He could do it again.

  I feel the box filling up.

  Sloshing.

  Wet.

  Wearing nothing but my man’s T-shirt, forcing the panic down, I will my legs to move. Quietly, so quietly, keys in my hand and purse snatched from the dresser and slung around my shoulders, I creep out of our room. I leave my phone. Phones can be traced. Especially by people like my brother.

  So late, it’s early. A few hours before dawn. No one remains awake in the compound. Not with the way bikers like to party. Even with the VP’s old lady, my friend Elise, and their new baby, Gunner, taking up residence until that piece of shit Houdini is captured. They got to go home. Shit happened. Doesn’t shit always happen in the club? Now they’re back—as a precaution. That’s what they tell us. Not to worry. They’ll handle it. Trust your man.

  Trust your man.

  But Elise is back, isn’t she? Elise and Gun, they’re back. Because shit never ends.

  Gun, the sweetest baby in the world, keeps her up but keeps her sane. Despite the badass biker name, Gun got his name from our friend Crass. Biker name Crass. Given name Gunner.

  He lives back in Chicago, part of the Illinois chapter, no matter how many times I’ve, well, we’ve begged him to transfer down to Kentucky.

  Maybe Crass would take me in.

  No.

  Gage, Chaos to the club—he’d find me. Biker name Chaos. Given name Gage, also known as my man. That would be the first place he’d look.

  Damn him for coming back into my life. I couldn’t say for making me care again, because to say that would be to insinuate I ever stopped. Which he and I both know I didn’t.

  He totally screwed up my world coming back for me—turned the whole place upside down.

  My older brother, Raif, hasn’t talked to me since I got out of the hospital after Boss and Chaos rescued me from the box. The blackness. The wet. The place Houdini meant for me to die. I miss him. My brother, not Houdini.

  Half the time he’d been a shit brother, all entitled from being not just a man in a motorcycle club, but the son of a founding chapter member and his old lady.

  We may have grown up together, but our lives couldn’t have been further apart since I’m the worthless daughter of a founding chapter member and his club whore.

  That’s how I grew up. The worthless daughter of a club whore. Women, old ladies included, are nothing more than second-class citizens with the Lords. The Brimstone Lords. My brother’s club. Our father’s club. Chaos’s club.

  He didn’t grow up in the life, just hung at the fringes. Knew my brother from school. Best friends from, like, kindergarten on.

  Once upon a time I thought he could give me a life away from all this. If it weren’t for that stupid bro code, the one that says you don’t fuck your best friend’s younger sister, which kept us apart for so long.

  Until he couldn’t stay away any longer, which happened to be the night my father was murdered and my brother, the stupid idiot, avenged his death—along with his best friend, my love. The love he pulled from my bed and didn’t even know it, not until a few months ago, which would be why he stopped talking to me. And Chaos.

  Two guards, newly patched, guard the front gate. But that’s okay because I have no intension of waltzing out the front gate.

  It took some time, but eventually I started to venture outside again, after my kidnapping and subsequent rescue, after Elise’s kidnapping and subsequent rescue the day of her wedding—well, the rescue happened a day later. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is how Houdini accessed the Lord property from an old access road at the back of the property, a road where they keep an old pickup truck parked to block the unguarded back gate. A pickup for which I have a key, a gate for which I also have a key hanging on the keyring next to my car keys.

  Keys that neither Chaos nor my brother, nor Boss or even Duke know I grifted.

  So as Blaze and Blue stare out at the road in front of the compound, I run silently through the short, mowed grass running along the singlewide trailers off to the side of the main clubhouse and into the tall never-been mowed grass leading back to the access road and my freedom.

  The truck is loud but far enough away from the compound that it shouldn’t wake up a bunch of drunken bikers. And if it does, I’ll already be far enough away before they mobilize and figure out it was me who’d run off.

  I’ve tried to stay.

  But I just can’t do it. Can’t be here anymore, slowly drowning on the phantom water filling up the blackness of the room where Chaos, Gage, sleeps.

  The truck turns over after a strangled start but rumbles to life. End of the access road joins a back state highway.

  By the time the distant rumble of bikes disturbs the night, I’ve already turned off the old highway to cross the bridge into Ohio. Bridges connect Ohio and Kentucky at various spots all the way up the Ohio River. We stay near one such bridge.

  My stomach hu
rts being off the compound, making me vulnerable to Houdini once again. But he couldn’t know my escape would come tonight.

  By the time dawn breaks, I’m firmly inside the border of West Virginia. To fool them, to fool Gage, I crossed from Kentucky into Ohio. But they’d expect me to head north again, wouldn’t they? Back to Chicago.

  I’m smarter than that.

  I drive east. A destination in mind.

  Several hours into my getaway, my mouth parched, eyelids drooping and gas tank sputtering, I coast into a truck stop.

  Truckers openly gawk at my dress, or lack of dress. A Lords T-shirt, no pants, no shoes. But they could never understand I had to get out. Gage, he’d have known, heard me moving around the room. Can’t live the life and sleep deep. Everything had to be the same. Same. He’d have seen through a change in routine, even down to what I wear to bed. Besides, I have money. I have money to fill the gas tank.

  I have money for coffee. Coffee to fill the Livvy tank.

  I even find a cheap pair of pink jersey shorts with a West Virginia logo in white on the right leg corner, and a pair of plastic flip-flops.

  The shorts, a size too small, hardly cover my ass cheeks, but cover enough to not get me arrested for indecent exposure when I tie up the T-shirt, so reports of a crazy woman in nothing but a T-shirt don’t find their way back to The Lords.

  The very last thing I do is walk over to the meager electronics department where they sell replacement phone cords and car chargers, and thankfully exactly what I’m looking for. I pick up the package for one of those cheap, disposable flip phones, one of those untraceable flip phones, and a card with triple the minutes. This card has a thousand minutes, which means three-thousand when I load it onto my account.

  Twenty minutes after sitting in the parking lot of the truck stop setting up my phone account with those minutes and new number, the open road calls to me again, eastward bound. Disturbingly toward the sea.

  If I allow myself to think about it, finding myself anywhere near a large body of water in my state of mind is probably not the smartest choice.

  But this is an escape from bikers and murderers, so I hardly allow myself to think about it.

  ***

  Several hours of highway behind me, mountains turn coastal, heat turns light breeze and the briny scent of freedom wafts through the truck cab along with the call of the gulls flying overhead.

  I’ll be safe here.

  I have to be.

  ***

  The little town of Smithfield, Virginia, yes the very same town known for ham, smells of bacon and sits near the Chesapeake Bay.

  Small town Americana in every way a girl from the Windy City would think of Americana.

  Sweet.

  Charming.

  Quaint.

  Storefronts for artisan galleries, shoppes and cafés. A tourist’s dream. From stories of my mother’s childhood, I know this place swarms with them in the summer months.

  I’ll get to look around more after settling in. Right now, with no sleep, crashing is imminent.

  Following the handwritten directions my mother had given me years ago. I’d handwritten them from memory. My mother, when halfway lucid, told me about her home. When the mood hit, she’d tell me bedtime stories as she tucked me in at night. Right before she’d go off to get high and let men she didn’t care about use her body however they felt fit because it was the only way she could sometimes get the attention of the man, the only man, she ever loved. Leaving me alone in our crappy, cramped apartment for hours.

  Once I figured out she left, I couldn’t sleep until she came home. Sometimes she got there on her own, but most times dumped in our living room by some man who’d gotten what he wanted and had no more use for her.

  How a young, beautiful virgin from Smithfield, Virginia could end up a cracked-out biker whore in Chicago?

  My dear old dad.

  The man only meant to roll through town. He met her at her grandfather’s gas station.

  He stayed a few days more.

  He took her virginity.

  He convinced her to run away with him. To the big life in the big city.

  What he’d neglected to tell my beautiful, innocent mother was that he had an old lady back home. Not just an old lady, a wife. A wife and a one-year-old son. My brother. Raif.

  My brother doesn’t know about this place. Gage doesn’t know about this place. Anyone, aside from me, connecting the Lords to this place died years ago.

  Freedom.

  From Raif.

  From Gage.

  From Houdini.

  Maybe here, the nightmares will stop and I can finally get some sleep.

  Out the other side of town, closer to the Chesapeake, I turn the truck down a dirt lane off the main road. Barbed wire fencing lines the trees leading up to the dirt lane, all with NO TRESSPASSING signs in bright orange lettering tacked to each tree.

  I’m not trespassing. This land belongs to me. Inherited after my mother’s grandfather passed away. I’d paid the hefty inheritance tax and keep up property taxes every year. The gas station had been sold to afford assisted living for the old man before he passed. Too bad. I could use a readymade place to work. Since the kidnapping, I haven’t been able to get myself back into the phone sex, my main source of income while I worked on my finance degree from DePaul. It paid well, and I could set my own hours. A great job until the moment he took me. Now I’m a skittish woman always convinced the douche calling is Houdini threatening to finish what he started. I know I’ll have to find a job. Just one more thing to check off my list.

  The long lane ends at the mouth of an inlet off the bay. So maybe the house has seen better days—it’s mine. Everything else can be fixed.

  Without a second thought, I park the truck, jumping out to the brackish smell of ocean mixed with vegetation and walk to the overgrown flowerbed under the front window. Flowers have long since been choked out by grass and weeds. Mostly weeds. I head to the fake cement rock, which looks surprisingly like a real rock, the one my mother used to wax on nostalgically about before she’d get too high for coherent speech.

  Not because of it being a fake cement rock, the nostalgic waxing, but because it sat directly under a tiny hula dancer in the window sill. So despite the overgrown vegetation, I know exactly where to find the rock.

  The hula girl still sits in the window. One of those meant for a car dashboard. Mom’s grandpops brought it back from Hawaii after WWII. He’d been a navy man. Saw combat. He’d been career. It was how he’d ended up in Virginia. The plastic, that old 1950s hard plastic, the kind that breaks just as easily as glass, has been sun bleached and hair-line cracked over the years from a lifetime stuck in her sentry spot.

  Her deep Hawaiian skin now looks as pale as mine. What was once, I’m sure, a vibrant red on her lei and headdress now appears a shade lighter than pastel pink. Her green-grass skirt, a pastel green. Though, despite her age, she looks poised to hula with the best of them.

  Mom.

  She loved that hula girl.

  Using the outside sill for balance, I squat down, ripping large handfuls of weeds from the flowerbed, tossing them to a pile I might actually get to clearing later, until my knuckles scrape the rough cement surface of the rock.

  I toss over that last pile of flora, prying up the rock, and immediately drop it back to the ground. So many bugs, from long roly-polies to earwigs, wriggle their bodies over the edge, scurrying across the damp mud-bottomed stone to get back to the safety of the soil. The problem being, I have to touch that muddy bottom to unscrew it from the top of the rock to reach the treasure, also known as the spare house key, inside.

  But I’m so tired. Not just from the drive but from days, weeks, months of not sleeping. I need to see if this will finally be the day. The day I can close my eyes and not fear the darkness.

  I have to bash the fake rock against a real one to loosen the two sides enough to separate the top from bottom.

  Upending the top, a brass-c
olored key spills into my hand.

  Door successfully unlocked, I push it open. The space appears shadowed but not dark. All the curtains pulled closed years ago, but being so bright outside, the rays try desperately to infiltrate. Hence, shadowed.

  All the furniture sits covered by white sheets, which is good, seeing as after almost twenty years of no occupancy, a blizzard of dust swirls up from just walking in.

  Cleaning could wait.

  Exploring could wait.

  Well, except for finding a bedroom. I walk down the one hallway in the house because it seems the most plausible spot to find a bed.

  At the very end of the hall, I open the door to a kind of deconstructed bedroom. Deconstructed because only the skeletal bones of the bed, headboard and footboard and springs, were left for whatever reason.

  So I go looking. Nothing bed-worthy in the bathroom or second bedroom.

  The third bedroom, pay dirt.

  All bedroom furniture, as in tables and dressers and thankfully, mattresses, fill the room. The mattresses up on their sides, leaning against the wall.

  It isn’t hard to find the one for the back bedroom. The only queen.

  Why does sleep have to be so difficult?

  Moving the other two twin mattresses to an adjacent wall, I then take up the arduous task of switching between pulling and pushing the queen out the narrow doorway, back down the hallway to finally flop the mattress down onto the springs of the big bed.

  Now I’m not just tired, but too fatigued to go any longer without some shuteye. I give up and belly flop onto the naked mattress. Because although I have a naked mattress beneath me, I have a naked mattress beneath me. Sweet surrender.

  The moment my face plants against the soft, fluffy surface, my eyes close and sleep finally, finally, finally finds me in a shadowed room outside Smithfield, Virginia.

  2.