1001 Dark Nights: Bundle Fourteen

by Kristen Ashley

  “Fuck,” I said, the words hitting me like a blow. I swayed, stunned. “You’re right. We have to get the hell away from this town. Now.”

  “I know,” she said. “Call Sara. Call her right now and see if we can get a ride or borrow her car or something. I can throw some things into a backpack and—”

  Abruptly, the phone was taken out of my hand. Shade caught my arm, spinning me to face him as he raised it to his ear.

  “She’ll call you later,” he said, then hung it up. Fucking bastard! I slapped at him, lunging for the phone. He grabbed me by the waist from the side, then lifted me, my back to his stomach. I kicked back, trying to get him, but nothing worked. “Settle the fuck down. No phone until you tell me what’s really going on.”

  Fury filled me. I wanted to kill him.

  No, Wonder Woman said. You have to calm down. Manage this. Work the situation and protect the girls. They’re all that matters.

  Taking a deep breath, I forced myself to settle. Shade held me, leaning forward to speak directly into my ear.

  “You ready to talk to me or what?”

  No, I was ready to kill him.

  “Yes,” I managed to say, gritting my teeth. “Let me go.”

  He lowered me but kept one wrist held tight. Then he twisted it around behind me, forcing me into his body. He’d caught me this way the first time we kissed, but this time his eyes weren’t full of heat. They were cold. Angry. I stared up at him, chest heaving, hating him and Randy and Trevor and every other man who’d ever fucked up my life.

  “Tell me what happened,” he said, his voice icy. It was an order, not a request. The phone buzzed and I knew Hannah had to be frantic. Shade’s face was grim—he wasn’t going to give up until he got what he wanted.

  “Hannah’s ex is causing trouble,” I said quickly. “We have to leave town. Today. I’m going to pick up my money so we can buy bus tickets. You need to let me go right now, okay? It’s none of your business.”

  His fingers tightened on me. “And were you planning to give me a heads-up about this?”

  “No,” I said. “I was too busy worrying about my sister and her kids. You’re just a fucking one-night stand, okay?”

  “Yeah, well, we never had breakfast,” he said. “That means the night isn’t over and you’re trying to sneak out before I wake up. That’s bullshit and you know it.”

  “It’s not about you,” I hissed. “It just isn’t. You don’t get a vote in this. I have to go and I have to go now.”

  Shade let the one hand go, keeping my other wrist captive. I jerked hard, trying to get away. Might as well have been cuffed to him. He gave me the phone.

  “Call your sister,” Shade said, his voice softening. “Tell her I’m bringing you back to the trailer. The two of you are going to tell me everything. Everything. Think it through, babe. If you really need to bug out, you’re not gonna get far without a car. We’ll talk it over and find a solution. You can bullshit all you want about sex and one-night stands, but I’m not done with you yet and you know it. I get what I want, and I want you. If I have to deal with some drama to make it happen, then I guess I’ll deal with some drama.”

  “This isn’t drama, Shade. This is serious shit.”

  He caught and held my gaze. “Serious shit is what I do, Mandy. We can handle it.”

  There was something in his face, something strong and dangerous that almost had me believing he meant it. God, if only… I dialed Hannah’s number and she picked up almost instantly.

  “What happened?” she asked. “Did they find you?”

  “No,” I told her. “But Shade’s here. He’s bringing me home and then we’re going to talk.”

  “You didn’t tell him, did you?”

  “Not all of it, but enough… He says we need to talk about it. Maybe he can help.”

  She fell silent for a moment. “He can’t help, can he?”

  “Honestly? I don’t know,” I whispered. “We’ll be there in a few minutes. Try not to freak out too much. Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  Hanging up, I turned to Shade. The sun was behind him, turning him into a dark, looming profile of a man. Threatening. Intimidating. Implacable. I should’ve stayed away from him. I thought I’d met fun, sexy Shade, but that’d only been a front. He’d been scary Shade all along. I’d just been in denial.

  “Leave the bicycle over there,” he said, nodding toward a fence. “We’ll come pick it up later. Then get your ass on the back of my bike.”

  Shade

  I listened as Mandy and Hannah told me the whole story, wishing I could feel surprised. I’d seen a lot of ugly in the world, though. Far too much ugly to doubt for a second that they were in real danger. The situation didn’t set right. Wasn’t a big fan of pedophiles. Also wasn’t a big fan of men who’d sell out their own kids for drugs.

  I’d have been willing to step in on this one even if I wasn’t fuckin’ Mandy, and that was the truth.

  As for her and her sister, they were like two kicked puppies. Mandy looked defeated. Hannah, too. All the while, her little girls were running around, playing some sort of elaborate game with sticks and leaves in the dust. I supposed they were cute enough. You know, if you liked children. I never had. Even so, the thought of some asshole touching them… Nope.

  Wasn’t gonna happen.

  Dopey stood at the far end of the yard, smoking and giving us privacy. I’d fill him in later.

  “Did he lay hands on you?” I asked Hannah, considering the situation. She looked away, one hand coming up to rub her arm self-consciously.

  “He grabbed me,” she admitted. “Twisted my arm. I’m more worried about Callie. The way he looked at her… This is bad. Really bad. We need to leave town right now.”

  “What about your boyfriend—the deputy?”

  “If I call him and they find the drugs, Mandy could go to jail,” she said. “It’s better to leave.”

  “I’d rather go to jail than let them get the girls,” Mandy chimed in.

  “If there are drugs in the house, you’re both in possession,” I said flatly. “Doesn’t matter who put them there. You both get arrested, those kids will go into foster care, and that sicko might come for them.”

  Hannah nodded, her face determined. “So we’ll leave.”

  “Do you want to leave Violetta?” I asked her, considering the situation. She shrugged.

  “Doesn’t matter. We can’t stay.”

  “And you?” I asked Mandy. “What about probation? You’re only four weeks out from total freedom. This could destroy that.”

  “Hannah and the girls are all I care about,” she told me, her voice resolute. “That’s what counts here. If they leave, I can go crash on Sara’s couch.”

  I nodded, already making my plans. We could handle this, of course. Randy and his little friends were like gnats to a guy in my position. I could run them off without hardly noticing. That would be too easy, though. If one of those bastards was into kids, he’d had other victims. Men like that needed to be put down. That part was straightforward enough.

  More complicated was doing it in a way that let Hannah stay in Violetta. That deputy of hers was the kind of man who married a woman, took care of her. For reasons I didn’t care to examine too closely, I liked the idea of Mandy’s sister being happy.

  That meant we had to solve the problem of the trailer—God only knew what other kinds of shit Randy had lying around.

  We’d need to interrogate him, I decided. Find out exactly what he’d left there, figure out if it could be cleaned up. If he got seriously hurt during the questioning, all the better. It’d still end the same, but I wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep if he bled a bit first.

  “You got a place the kids can go for the afternoon?” I asked.

  Mandy narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “Why?”

  “Because later today we’re going to have Hannah call Randy and tell him to come over. Then we’re going to talk to him and you probably don’t want
the kids around while we do it. Might be a little traumatic.”

  The sisters shared a look.

  “Are you serious?” Hannah asked. “Even if you dealt with Randy, his friends will still be after us. We can’t pay them off. We barely have enough money to buy bus tickets north.”

  “I’m the president of the Reapers Motorcycle Club,” I told her, my voice gentle. “Not the local chapter of the club—the whole damned thing. We got more than a hundred brothers in four states, plus all the support clubs under us. Altogether that’s maybe a thousand guys, and I’ll set every single one of them to hunting those fuckers down if I need to. Then I’ll make sure they never bother you again.”

  “But—”

  “They’ll never bother you again,” I repeated.

  Hannah’s eyes widened. “What will you do?”

  “What needs to be done.”

  Both women stared at me, understanding dawning.

  “Why?” Mandy finally asked, genuinely confused. I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose.

  “Because we haven’t had breakfast yet,” I told her.

  “What?” Hannah asked.

  Mandy just looked at me like she couldn’t quite believe I was real.

  “It means we’re not done yet,” I said to Mandy, catching her gaze and holding it. “And that means you’re mine, at least for now. Nobody fucks with what’s mine.”

  “We’re not in a relationship,” she whispered, and I couldn’t decide whether she was trying to convince me or herself.

  “Call it what you want. Just don’t fuck anyone else while you’re fuckin’ me. As long as whatever the hell this is that we don’t have lasts, you’re under my protection. Your sister doesn’t want to leave town. She’s in love with that bastard, Andrews. Suck it up, Mandy, and accept some help. These are not good guys. Let me handle them and worry about definitions later.”

  “Okay,” she whispered. “I’ll call Sara—maybe she can take the kids.”

  “You do that,” I told her. “I need to make some phone calls, too. Dopey is gonna make sure you get over there nice and safe. Then he’s gonna cruise by periodically to make sure everything stays safe. You can call him if you need to, but don’t unless you have to. The less of a trail we leave the better.”

  “We can do that,” Hannah said fervently.

  “Yup,” Mandy agreed.

  “Great. I’ll be back in a couple hours with some of the brothers. We won’t be riding bikes and we won’t be parking in front of your place. Give me your keys now, so we can let ourselves in quietly. You got any nosy neighbors?”

  “Mrs. Collins, across the street,” Mandy said. “She’s half blind. You won’t have to worry about her. The folks on the other side are new—I don’t know them very well.”

  “Then we have a plan. Mandy, I’ll text you when it’s time to come home. Just a quick message asking if you’re feeling okay. You tell me yes if you’re ready to go and no if you’re delayed. We’ll take it from there.”

  “What if someone sees you?” Hannah asked.

  I smiled at her.

  “Don’t worry about me. I’m real good at this shit. Why do you think they made me president?”

  Mandy

  Sara was available, thank God. We’d packed the girls into the stroller with their favorite blankies and stuffed animals, on the off chance she managed to get them to nap. Not that it seemed likely, but it was the decent thing to try. She had to suspect something was up, but she didn’t ask any questions and we didn’t offer any explanations. She just asked us to come and pick them up by three. That’s when she had to leave for work.

  Shade messaged me at 12:30, and we came back to find four bikers in the living room. The first thing I noticed was that the Reapers weren’t wearing their colors. I’d never seen them without the distinctive, patch-covered vests.

  It was weird.

  The second thing I noticed was that our living room was way too small for four big bikers. I could hardly turn around without hitting one of them. They seemed to be using up more than their fair share of the air. I knew Dopey, but the other two were strangers, and Shade didn’t introduce them. They didn’t waste any time, taking a few minutes going over the plan, which was mostly just Hannah calling Randy and convincing him to come over.

  They’d take it from there.

  “You ready?” Shade asked her. She nodded, but she looked nervous. I caught her hand, giving it a squeeze.

  “Hey, Randy,” Hannah said, somehow managing to hold her voice steady even though her hands were shaking. “We should talk. I found some drugs in the bathroom. You need to pick them up in the next ten minutes or I’m throwing them away.”

  She held the phone away from her ear as Randy exploded, shouting “Fucking cunt!” and “I’ll kick your ass, you little bitch.”

  Nice. Classy to the end. She waited for him to run out of insults, then spoke again.

  “I don’t care what you think,” she said quietly. “And you can yell at me all you want, but I’m not having this shit in my house. Get your ass over here and pick it up or I’ll throw it away. I don’t care how much money it’s worth.”

  Another explosion, but this time it didn’t last as long. We all watched as she held the phone, waiting for her chance. Finally, she managed to get in another sentence.

  “Last chance, asshole. You’ve got fifteen minutes. Then I flush.”

  “Nice,” Shade said, and he seemed to mean it. Hannah gave him a strained smile, sliding her phone into her pocket.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “We wait. When he gets here, you’ll let him in and then we’ll discuss whether he’s got anything else hidden in the house. After that, we’ll move on to figuring out who his friends are.”

  “And you’re sure he won’t bother her again?” I asked, swallowing. It just seemed too good to be true. Too easy.

  Shade offered me a feral smile. “Yeah. I’m sure.”

  I believed him.

  Ten minutes later, Randy pulled up in his battered little car. It was some kind of hatchback that spewed black smoke every time it started and couldn’t go more than fifty on a good day.

  Still better than what the mother of his children had.

  The bastard looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. His hair was all messed up and his clothes were wrinkled. He scowled as we peeked at him through the window, stomping up onto the porch like he owned the place. I guess in his mind, he did. I glanced toward Shade, who nodded toward the door.

  Hannah reached for the knob and started to open it. Randy shoved through, nearly knocking her over in the process.

  “You fucking cunt,” he hissed, raising a fist. “You touch my—”

  “I don’t think so,” Shade said quietly. He’d been standing behind the door, waiting. Dopey stepped out of the bathroom, followed by the other two Reapers. That’s when I realized one of them was about the same size and build as Randy, with similar coloring. Coincidence? I swallowed, making a conscious decision not to think about it.

  Randy had frozen, staring at Shade with an almost comical expression of shock.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he asked.

  Shade smiled. “I’m the man who’s gonna kill you if you don’t tell us everything. Girls, go wait outside and don’t come back inside no matter what you hear. And make sure nobody bothers us, okay? If anyone asks you why Randy’s car is here, just say he came to pick up some of his stuff and you wanted to give him space.”

  Maybe it made me weak, but I was thankful for the reprieve. Randy didn’t deserve our pity. Now that this was really happening, though… Well, I didn’t feel good about it. But I sure as hell didn’t feel bad enough to stop them, either.

  Hannah and the girls will never be safe with him around, I reminded myself. And his friends are a danger to other children, too. You shouldn’t have to go to jail to protect this asshole, and your sister shouldn’t have to live in fear, either.

  “Let’s just sit on the porch and hang out,�
�� Hannah said. “It’ll be okay. It’s all going to be okay.”

  God, I hoped she was right.

  Shade

  Turned out, Randy boy wasn’t quite as much of a badass when his victims weren’t women. We made him strip and then duct taped him to a chair, immobilizing his hands and feet as we “discussed” the situation. It’d only taken three hits before he started crying, and then I’d pulled out my gun and pointed it directly at his head. Probably could’ve started with the gun, but I enjoyed punching the bastard.

  He started talking so fast I could hardly follow the words, admitting that he’d hidden more meth and some other stuff in the electric baseboard heater in the children’s room. Lucky thing we hadn’t had a cold snap. I sent Dopey after it and smacked Randy again, this time for being such an irresponsible cockwad.

  Five minutes later, Dopey came back with one baggie full of crystals and a second one full of pills. He also held a wad of cash—not much, maybe a hundred bucks—that Randy hadn’t bothered to mention. Fucking moron. I had a damned gun to his head, yet he was still spewing bullshit.

  “Found this in the light fixture,” Dopey said, holding up the cash. I turned to Randy, seriously considering just shooting him on the spot. Unfortunately, we needed him to find the others. This guy was just part of the problem.

  “I don’t think you understand what’s going on here,” I told him. “If you don’t tell me the truth—all of it—in the next ten seconds, I’m going to kill you.”

  His eyes widened.

  “You can’t!”

  “Give me one good reason.”