Torched: A Dark Bad Boy Romance

by Paula Cox

  “Stop, Rox. You’re scaring me. Let’s just talk about the offer. It’s crazy, right? Why would I want to work with someone like Mack?”

  “Because he sounds hot.”

  “Hot? Come on, Roxy. I’m not into that, at least, not anymore. Not after… not anymore. Just the whole motorcycle thing is a turnoff for me. I could never be attracted to someone like that.”

  “You can’t control what you’re attracted to, Anna. You know that. I know that. We’re both into that bad boy thing. Now you’ve got one promising you not only a career, but protection from killers and your ex. That’s a pretty awesome deal. Plus, there’s this way that you talk about him. You haven’t had this much energy in months now.”

  “It’s adrenaline. It has to be. There’s just no way in hell that I’m going to say yes to that.”

  “Then don’t. Think it over tonight. I’m sure you’ll have some sweet dreams about Mack at least… maybe of him enacting some of his control on you.”

  “Rox—”

  “Please. Give me a break. Stop being such a freaking prude and lighten up, Anna. You’re a hot piece of ass. And if we are both out of relationships, at least one of us should get some side tail to enjoy.” She laughs to herself before sensing my stony silence. “Okay. I’m sorry. Either way, just think about it for the night and come back to it tomorrow. You’ll be surprised how much can change with just a little rest and a new outlook on the day. Call me when you figure it out.”

  “I promise. Love you, Roxy. Be good.”

  “Always am.”

  We both hang up, me placing the phone back on the receiver and falling into the couch head first with the rest of me cascading like heavy bricks into the upholstery. Everything dims around me as I allow the world to just drift away from me.

  I don’t know how much time has passed when I wake up. All I know is that there’s two cold hands on my shoulders. Dirty nails dig into my skin as they make their way up to my neck. My blood boils rapidly as a scream festers in my throat before bursting out like a comet. My whole body triggers awake, thrashing at the hands forcing me back down.

  “Get off! Get the fuck off of me! No! No! No!” I can’t see his face. I don’t understand why I can’t see his face. Every time I look up, everything becomes a blur. There’s a pair of dark eyes peering down at me with some mix of pleasure. I kick up, hoisting my hips off the couch. But the air is becoming thin, too thin. I… just…can’t. My muscles grow heavier and heavier and my eyes want to close on their own.

  I’m not dreaming! I yell at myself. You can’t let yourself think that this is a dream! Dreams are death. Dreams are your last moments on Earth. This is real. This man is real. His hands pushing on the bones in your neck are real. And at any moment, the air trapped in your chest, all the reserves you’ve ever saved up, will disappear too.

  I reach my hands up, searching, grasping, flailing. But I don’t find the man. I find another. There’s a hand that reaches mine and holds on. It’s only for a second, but it’s not someone pushing me away or throwing me back down. This hand belongs to someone telling me it’s okay. A second later, air flows back through me and my blood begins to flow again. With eyes open, I see him—Mack, just to the side of me. He’s on top of a man with a knife still clutched in his hands. In the pocket of his camo pants is the outline of a large handgun.

  Mack brings down blow after blow to the man’s face. He sputters and turns in my direction. Blood pours out of his nose and around the corners of his lips. Already, his skin is both blue and puffy. Despite that, I recognize him almost immediately. It’s the man with my tattoo partially drawn up on his arm. I can see the bottom half of the circle just under the curve of his sleeve.

  My first thought is to let this man die. Mack could kill him in a second, and I would be the better for it. There wouldn’t be someone coming for me, no black spot to my name. But it dawns on me that this man had a mission. Him not going back alive would mean that there was no rest when he died. This would always be my night on repeat. New guys, new attempts. I scream out Mack’s name. “Stop! Don’t kill him!”

  Mack holds down the man’s arms as he turns and yells at me, “I’m not going to kill him. I’m going to make him regret ever stepping foot inside this house!” An arm raises and then slams down with the strength of a hammer towards his nose. I can’t bear to watch, but through lightly shut eyelids, I see the man lose consciousness. Mack slides off of him and reaches into his back pocket for some wire or string. Quickly, without a word, he ties the man by his arms and then his legs.

  With him secured, he finally turns back to me. “Grab a bag of your stuff. You’re coming with me. We’re going now.”

  “What?” I ask, my voice scratchy and sore from the attack. “I can’t. My mom is upstairs. What if they come back for her?”

  Mack holds up one long, calloused finger towards me as he takes out his phone and dials a number. He says sternly into the phone my mom’s home address and then adds, “Bring a van for this guy and then I want two men on the clock out here until I say so. None of them leave. I want hourly check-ins. They see anyone with Knights patches, they shoot to kill.”

  I curl my legs up to my chest as I stare at him in some weird mix of fear and awe. “How did you find me?” I ask.

  “Does it matter? We need to get you the fuck out of here. If I found you, they’ll find you.”

  “I can’t leave without my mom. She’s sleeping. She takes this medicine…”

  “Will she notice if you’re not around then?” He has a point. She never checks on me before work. Our mixed up schedules are never lined up, so she knows better than to try to wake me up before noon.

  “No, she won’t. I guess. But how do I know that there won’t be more attacks? I can’t just leave her here.”

  “You have to Anna. This isn’t a joke anymore. If I wasn’t feet behind that guy, he would have taken that knife and dug it into your throat. Your mom wouldn’t have found your body for hours. We have to get you safe before it happens again, and the only way you’re surviving the night and the next twenty-four hours is to come with me.”

  “But I—”

  “No!” he says sharply. “Stop fucking arguing with me. There is no discussion.” Two headlights streaming through the open windows interrupt his lecture. He looks at me quickly and commands, “Go get your bag and be down here in five minutes. We’re leaving.”

  My feet shuffle upstairs, past my mom’s room. I want to leave her a note or a clue, something to tell her that I’m okay and that she will be too, but how do I write everything that needs to be said? Furthermore, how do I write that when I don’t know if it’s true?

  CHAPTER 5

  “Isn’t this an old fish processing facility? My mom used to work in an office over here and always said that it’s why this neighborhood always smelled strange during the day.” Anna looks up at the building with her hand to her head. She’s stalling; I can tell. Hearing that you’re going to some motorcycle club headquarters isn’t exactly a thing you would be thrilled to be doing.

  “No. It’s our warehouse. We’ve been in this space for years… since I can remember, at least. Now, come on.” I grab her by the elbow and force her off the back of the bicycle. She shakes slightly as I escort her into the building with me leading the way. Some of my guys give me nods. Others stare at Anna as if she’s a farm animal at the auction house.

  While girls have always been part of our club, I minimized their participation when I took over. Our street ladies never walked into the buildings without an escort and a damn good reason to be there. Old ladies, the wives of senior members, were told the location and how to reach the offices if they needed something, but they never got in past the parking lot. And the ladies we used for initiations and parties were shown through the back so as not to see the merchandise and set up inside.

  It wasn’t because I hated women. No, there were a few female riders that have gotten to be an honorary member of the Red Dragon Riders. My mama was
one of them. They always got the patch for going above and beyond the call of an old lady or employee. In my mama’s case, she helped in the war against the Knights of the Dead. She was the lookout most nights, while the boys got their sleep. In the afternoons, she would run the business and books to keep everything flowing.

  She passed about a month before I took over. She would have loved to see me here, living out my dad’s legacy. She probably would have also have loved to know I saved a girl from near death. She was always talking about grandkids and marriages, even though her and my dad had the exact opposite of a Brady Bunch relationship. To this day, I still don’t know if they were even married.

  “What’s she doing here?” Lonnie is the first to greet us at the door. Word must have traveled fast that I was bringing in a non-working girl with me. Behind him, a small crowd of gawkers stare us down as they pretended to move boxes and service bikes. “Jimmy thought you’d just bring her to a safe house or something. Then I hear from Zeke that you called some protection?”

  “Yeah. Things got complicated.” I look back down at Anna, who is looking more wide eyed and cross with each passing second. She watches as tables of men count stacks of cash to the side of another table bagging up small bundles of weed. What did she expect? A legit, legal operation? Selling drugs, robberies, pimping… that’s how most motorcycle clubs manage to keep their membership high. It’s a business. These men are my employees, and I’m their CEO.

  “What the fuck happened?” I spin in time to see Zeke, my second, step forward. Zeke’s been my right hand man for the last five years. We came up in the club together, but he wasn’t the enforcer type. He’s more of the brains. Out of all the guys here, he was the only one who finished college while earning his membership. We call him “the voice” because of how he can talk down a room when he wants to. While some of the new guys he’s mentoring call him “the doctor” for the way he used all those book smarts to figure out plans. He was the one who actually came up with the plan to put another business in next to my sister’s restaurant as a front.

  Either way, I’m just glad to have the guy on my side. If anyone could convince Anna that she should join the business and be under our protection, it’s Zeke. I make a quick introduction as I place a hand on Anna’s curved back to push her through the warehouse and back towards our offices. “Anna Fox, meet Zeke Taylor. Zeke, this is Anna. She’s the one whose house got protection tonight.”

  Zeke eyeballs me quickly, trying to read the situation. If Lonnie knew about the tattoo situation, surely he did too. Still, I don’t blame him when he says, “Do you wanna tell me what the hell happened in there?”

  To my surprise, it’s Anna who answers. “I gave this tattoo… the Knight’s tattoo, and one of your guys saw it. He told Mack, who came and got me. I didn’t listen to him and went home on my own. About an hour later, some guy snuck into my house while I slept and nearly choked and stabbed me to death. If Mack hadn’t followed me home, I would be dead.”

  We pause at the office doors as Zeke places a calm hand on Anna’s bare shoulder. “Jesus. I’m sorry to hear that.” He massages gently around her arm. I grit my teeth, willing myself not to push him off of her. It’s not like I’ve claimed her as my territory. She’s fair game to whomever wants a go at her. He continues touching her as we enter my dark and dingy office. It’s bareness and the lack of light catches me, as if I’ve entered an entirely new space.

  The two take seats opposite of me as if they were in the principal’s office. Zeke doesn’t even bother waiting for me to sit behind my desk when he begins. “When I heard about the incident in the tattoo shop from Jimmy, I figured I should do some research. I went through the archives from when we last had a recorder, and I found a couple passages…” He fishes out a small brown, leather notebook from his back pocket and hands it to Anna.

  She reads from the page marked with the yellow post-it note. “December 9th: Killing on Maplewood today. Young tattoo artist affiliated with the club. Joey Davids. Detectives say that he was murdered by a gunshot to the head about ten minutes after giving the tattoo. His machines were still hot.” Anna turns to me and says, “This was eleven years ago.”

  “I remember it. I went to investigate with my dad. He was on the executive board of the club at the time and he had connections with the county sheriff. They had thought we had something to do with it since we had ties to the kid… my dad volunteered to go tell his girl about the killing.” It’s funny how those little things never seem to escape you—the voices of the detectives describing the killing as if it was just procedure, the smell of a body sitting out too long, the screams of a woman getting bad news…

  “But this was eleven years ago?” Anna cuts off my thoughts before they fall into that hole I don’t want to travel into. “Maybe yesterday was just a fluke or just one guy doing it.”

  Zeke lowers his voice as he replies, “There’s more too. I marked each one with a post-it note. And that was just in that year. I have six more books filled with post-it notes. The only connection is the tattoo.” Anna turns away from him and faces the wooden bookshelf I constructed myself. There’s nothing on it but a few journals I’ve kept and the logs from all of our business doings. Nothing in this office is something she could cling to for hope.

  Zeke again reaches over towards her and places his hand on her shoulder. This time, he catches my eye. The hand goes down as quickly as it went up, and he stands as he continues on, “So I called a guy that used to be a member of the Knights.”

  “What? Who the fuck do you know?” We don’t socialize with other clubs in the area, and we certainly don’t hold associations with old Knight members. We should have killed them all, but my dad took mercy on them and let them go free if they swore not to affiliate themselves with another Portland club again. This was the first I had ever heard of any of my guys getting hold of one of the past Knight riders.

  “He’s a friend, Mack. And now, he may be helpful. He knows more about what’s going on than what we do.”

  I’ve about had it with Zeke. I stand up, my hands planted flat on the face of my metal desk. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean, Zeke? You saying that I’m missing things? You calling me out for this? I just saved the girl!”

  “What does it matter!” Anna cries out, looking quickly between the two of us. Her dazzling blue eyes stop me where I am, almost pushing me back in my chair. “All I want to know is what the hell is going on and what’s going to happen to me!”

  I bite the corner of my lip, remembering my place. Control, Mack. Control. This is not keeping it together. This is losing it. She doesn’t need to see that, and neither does Zeke. Zeke is my biggest ally in the club and probably the only one who could convince the guys to get on board with the whole tattoo business, if it comes to that. With a small nod, I give him permission to continue while I find my place back behind the desk.

  “Henry said that the tattoo has meaning. Each line represents the people involved. The circle is the shield of the Knights. It’s like the patches they always had with the hunter green circle and the ‘K’ in the center. The first line represents the club member getting the tattoo. The line is unbroken and powerful. It’s part of the club, but it’s first and foremost. The second line is the target, the guy they’re going to kill first. The third is the tattoo artist. Each of the smaller lines are dependent on the first.”

  “So…” Anna says as she puts everything together, “If he came for me, he had to have killed someone earlier today. Maybe if we track down the murders in town, we can get a bit closer to who the guy is?”

  “That’s the thing, Anna,” Zeke says as he looks her over carefully. “There were no murders tonight. I’ve had the police scanner on for the last four or five hours since Jimmy came in with the news, and there’s nothing. There was a robbery about ten minutes from your shop, but that’s the only thing that seems club related, and frankly, I think that was one of our guys.”

  “You’re saying that they’r
e just targeting tattoo artists now? How does that make sense?” Anna doesn’t look like the girl that would be the target on anyone’s list. It has to be random that she got caught up in this shit.

  “The only thing that Henry knew about the current club is that to be a member, you have to have a kill, and the orders are coming top down from a guy named Ricky.”

  “Ricky Barber? From the Thug Shop? He hasn’t run anything since he got shot in Reno last year. No way you’ve got the right name there.”

  Anna shifts in her seat as she looks just past me, towards the shuttered window. Her face has gone white with splotches of pink around her cheeks and neck.

  Zeke pauses, his face contracting a bit. “No. That’s not his name... “ He pulls out a piece of paper from the journal Anna was reading from. “The guy’s name is Riley, Riley O’Connor. It’s a new guy, from all I’ve heard. He’s been riding around with clubs for the last few years trying to get memberships, but no one would take him since he was batshit insane.”