Exposed_Fury Riders MC

by Sophia Gray

  Abby knew he was just being nice, but for some reason, she felt irritated. She didn’t need his fucking sympathy or his diagnosis of trauma. She’d been through hell before and come out on the other side of it relatively unscathed. She wasn’t going to let some arsonist get under her skin. “I’m fine,” she said instead of rambling like she wanted to. “I’m fine.” A thousand other words sat on her tongue, ready to launch themselves off into the air and attack Jagger’s poor ears, but she held herself back. She knew that no matter how annoyed she felt with him right now, he was just trying to help. He didn’t deserve her baggage.

  Silence fell between them again, but Abby could hear noises from the lower floor, people yelling, people laughing, the sound of footsteps hitting the wood floor forcefully. “What time is it?” she asked, sitting back up again and pulling her hair back into a ponytail.

  “Like 3, 4 am,” Jagger replied.

  “You guys always stay up this late?” she asked. It was clear that people were partying, almost as if they were celebrating something. It was strange, being surrounded by happiness yet not feeling any relation to it. She almost felt like she was intruding, carrying her sadness and fear and worry into some sacred place where the MC members and their friends somehow managed to feel young and free.

  Abby could see Jagger shrug in response to her question. “Sometimes, yeah. It’s a part of the life.”

  “It’s hard to picture you with them,” Abby said without thinking, her inner monologue spilling out of her mouth without her brain’s permission.

  “What do you mean?” Jagger asked.

  It was Abby’s turn to shrug, trying to avoid answering the question. She didn’t want to admit that she had been analyzing Jagger, attempting to figure out just what kind of man he was. Once again the words came out of her mouth, bursting out like they were escaping a trap inside of her. “You seem so serious, you know? Like, so focused. It’s hard to visualize you doing anything but working. Like, I imagine that you don’t sleep. You just work on the fires, searching for any answer you can possibly find. It seems lonely.”

  There was a long pause where Jagger said nothing. Abby’s heart started pounding in her ears, blood rushing painfully in punishment for saying too much. Then, mercifully, a few seconds later Jagger finally spoke. “I could say the same thing for you,” he said in a tone so soft, her skin prickled. “That’s why…. never mind.”

  “No, what?” Abby asked, curiosity burning a hole in her stomach. She needed to know what he thought of her. It was pathetic, how desperate she was to know.

  “I just don’t think you should get involved in the investigation. Not anymore. That’s all,” Jagger said quietly.

  “That’s… fucking stupid,” Abby said as bluntly as she could. She was, as always, a little regretful after the words left her mouth, but by that point, it was too late. The deed had been done, and she had to carry on being the bitch she always was. It was like she was incapable of being soft and kind anymore, except when it came to her patients. Abby figured she should file that away as something to beat herself up about later. For now, she had a job to do: convince Jagger that he was wrong. “I’m sorry, but why do you think I can’t help you? Like you said, I’ve pissed off the arsonist. I got them to show themselves and give you more evidence to work with than you had before.”

  “Yeah, but at what cost?” Jagger said. “I don’t need you endangering yourself by getting involved anymore. If you could just stay here…”

  “Oh, my God, come off it,” Abby snapped, cutting him off. “There’s no way I’m just going to hang out here and sit pretty until you solve the case. I’m going to help you. Learn to fucking deal with it.”

  “You can help…by staying out of it, okay?” Jagger suggested. “I’m a professional. I can handle this. It’s my job to solve cases like this.”

  “Yeah, which is why it’s happened almost a dozen times, and there have been no results,” Abby muttered. She heard him inhale a little shakily in response, and the guilt hit her square in the chest, heavy and sharp all at once, but she tried to talk herself out of regretting it. She was right, wasn’t she? Jagger hadn’t succeeded yet, and a man had died. If she were looking for someone to blame, maybe he’d be a reasonable place to start.

  “You can be angry at me if you want,” Jagger calmly said. “I understand. But I know what I’m talking about here. There are people in the world that will do anything to hurt another person if they get in their way. I don’t want you to get hurt. Is that so bad?”

  Shame burned its way up and down the back of Abby’s neck, turning her skin beet red. She was thankful for the darkness for hiding her from Jagger’s gaze. “Fuck. I’m sorry,” she sighed out. “I’ve just been… I haven’t been myself lately. Or maybe I have, and who I am is just an awful, ungrateful cunt. I don’t know. But I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped at you. It’s not your fault.”

  Abby felt like she was split in two, the separate sides of her at war, tearing each other apart. On the one side, there was an angry little girl, still sick, still bitter, still trapped in a hospital room, biting into anything and everything that stood in her way. On the other side, there was an adult nurse, the person who took care of other people, the person who healed, the person who soothed. The person who didn’t set fire to everything she touched. She wanted to be the latter, but it was hard. Most of the time she felt like she was faking it, playing a part that didn’t fit her.

  “It’s okay,” Jagger whispered a moment later as if he were weighing her apology in his mind and had only now realized that it was sufficient. “Please just stay out of it, okay? As a personal favor to me. Or for Robert. Please.”

  Abby bristled at that, feeling like Jagger was trying to manipulate her into doing exactly what he wanted her to do. Instead of answering, she just sighed, long and ragged, and collapsed back against the bed. Abby wouldn’t say yes or no. That way she wouldn’t have to lie.

  “What about my other patients?” Abby asked. “They need my help. It’s not their fault there’s a psychopath on the loose.”

  Jagger was quiet a moment. “I’ll go with you tomorrow night, then. You shouldn’t be alone.”

  Abby opened her mouth to fire off a retort, but ran out of words to use. None of them were going to work on him. “Fine,” she mumbled, rolling over onto her side to bury her head into her pillow. She was all out of fight for tonight. Maybe in the morning she’d press the issue again, but somehow, she knew that he wasn’t going to let her out of his sight.

  She would have to find a way to help with the investigation, even if it wasn’t with Jagger’s permission. He didn’t fucking own her. He didn’t get to tell her what to do. Nobody got to do that to her. Not anymore.

  # # #

  Jagger

  Jagger’s beeper went off in the early morning, around six-thirty. He jolted awake in the chair, banging his head on the back of the wooden seat, but Abby appeared to have slept through it at least, cuddled up with the blankets on the bed. Jagger stared at the back of her head before checking the notification on his beeper. Her hair was still a total mess, but there was a weird kind of beauty to it. Jagger was tempted to reach out and tangle his hand in it, rub her scalp until sweet dreams penetrated her skull and embedded into her brain.

  Creepy, he said to himself. You’re fucking creepy. Knock it the fuck off. He felt like he had a sickness: the illness of caring too much. He barely knew this girl, but he felt like he had a responsibility to keep her safe. If that meant he had to lock her up in the compound for a week until he solved the crime, so be it. He could deal with the consequences of his actions later. He had far too much experience with people being pissed at him, especially recently, that it no longer deterred him from doing what had to be done.

  He finally pulled his beeper out of his pocket and checked the message that had woken him up: BENNET STREET. LEVEL FOUR. Oh, fuck. That meant a fire had started and was liable to spread if the wind caught it. Jagger leapt out of the chair, hu
rrying out of the room and across the hall where he kept his backup equipment in a spare closet. He hurriedly got dressed before heading downstairs and out to his car, heading toward Bennet Street as quickly as possible. Technically he was supposed to meet up at the station with the other men and use the fully functional truck to put out the fire, but Jagger was closer to Bennet street than they were. He could get there faster and help if anybody was trapped inside.

  He sped to Bennet street, arriving in under ten minutes. There were already sirens and flashing lights in front of the apartment building by the time he arrived, overwhelming Jagger’s senses so much that it took him a long time to realize that he’d been at this exact location only the night before.

  Oh, no. Oh, fuck no.

  Abby’s apartment.

  Flames engulfed the entire building. Abby’s neighbors stood outside on the sidewalk, staring up at their homes crackling and crumbling above them. “Is everybody outside? Is everybody out?” Jagger demanded as he approached the burning building.

  “There’s a girl who lives on the top floor. We barely see her. I don’t know if she got out…” one of the older ladies said to Jagger with tears in her eyes, wrapping a blanket tightly around her daughter’s shoulders.

  “Abby? Is that the woman’s name?” Jagger asked, and the senior woman nodded.

  For a brief, beautiful second, Jagger didn’t feel anything other than relief, sweet and soothing inside his veins, calming his blood. At the very least, nobody was in physical danger. Everybody was okay. Everybody was safe, including Abby. Jagger rushed to get his phone out of his pocket, dialing his best friend Tony’s number. Tony lived in the compound, on the same floor that Abby was staying on.

  “Whaaaaat?” Tony groaned on the other end of the phone. Jagger had clearly woken him up early.

  “The woman I brought to the clubhouse last night. Is she still there?

  “Hold on,” Tony said, grumbling a little before putting the phone down to check. Jagger fidgeted on the sidewalk, the flames of the building keeping him warm despite the winter cold. “Yeah, she’s sleeping like a rock,” Tony said a minute later. Jagger exhaled heavily, so loudly that Tony must have heard it. “You okay, man?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine, I’m fine,” Jagger mumbled. “Listen, I got to go. Just… Make sure she stays there, okay? I’ll call you in like an hour or so.” He hung up without saying goodbye, rushing to his car to stick his phone and beeper inside before putting on his helmet and running into the building. Maybe he could save some of Abby’s stuff, at the very least.

  By the time he got to the top level, it was practically a cinder. Everything was either burnt black, crispy and ruined or otherwise turned straight to ash. Jagger stepped over the flames, carefully placing his feet on the secure spots on the floor, to check the remains of the dresser for Abby’s cash. But it was ruined, turned to dust. That was it, then. She’d officially lost everything.

  The arsonist had done this. There was no way around it.

  Jagger could feel his stomach boil over in anger, but he had a job to do. He couldn’t afford to focus on his rage until the fire was out. Over the next thirty minutes, he and the other firefighters that showed up salvaged what they could from the flames all while dousing the building with water.

  When the fire was finally extinguished, he pulled out his phone from his car to call Tony again. “Hey. Wake her up, okay? I need to tell her something.” He figured that for the sake of efficiency he really should have just had Tony break the unwelcome news, but it needed to come from somebody she knew, even if they were still barely more than acquaintances.

  “What?” Abby’s irritated voice said on the other end of the phone a moment later. It was clear that she was highly annoyed at being woken up.

  “Hey. Abby, I need you to come to your apartment building, okay?” Jagger said, slowly enunciating his words so that they’d get through her sleep-clogged brain.

  “Why?” Abby asked, her voice still caught somewhere between sluggish and angry.

  “I just… I need you to come here. Something’s happened. Something bad.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line, punctuated only by the shallow noises of Abby’s breathing. “Did… Are my neighbors okay?” she asked after the long pause.

  “Yeah, they’re fine, they’re all fine,” Jagger said hurriedly, looking over at the huddle of old people sadly looking at the embers of their home. “But your apartment… Just come look, okay?” Jagger didn’t know why he was struggling to get the words out. Maybe he should have had Tony do the job for him after all. There was something keeping him from saying the truth out loud. It was too terrible, too awful to say. Somehow, he was afraid that if Abby heard the news directly from him, she’d hate him forever.

  “I don’t have my car anymore, remember?” Abby snapped at him.

  “Ask Tony to bring you. He’ll take you here.” Jagger responded quietly, struggling to get his voice to rise above a whisper, his throat still sore from the smoke.

  Abby hung up on him without saying goodbye. Jagger almost smiled at that, but the circumstances of the situation kept him frowning as he stared down at the sidewalk, looking at his own shadow. He felt so fucking inadequate, so goddamn insufficient. Why hadn’t he camped out at Abby’s apartment to see if the arsonist would return? He could have caught the guy and prevented this whole mess. Now the trail had gone cold again.

  Then agiain… maybe not. Come on, think, he insisted to himself. The arsonist’s attacks were targeted, but they’d gotten broader than just members of Satan’s Blazes now. There was no other connection to this apartment building, as far as Jagger knew, except for Abby. Maybe the arsonist knew that she came to the compound, Jagger thought. But for that to be true, it’d have to be a current member of Satan’s Blazes. There was no way an arsonist could camp out far enough away that nobody would notice them and still be able to see Abby coming in.

  So, maybe it didn’t have to do with her coming to Satan’s Blazes’ clubhouse. That meant the arsonist had wanted to kill Abby tonight instead of just scaring her like before. Jagger felt anger sear its way up his spine at the thought, all his muscles stiffening. There was nobody to fight yet, nobody to punish. I have to find him now. No way around it. He can’t get away with this, whoever he is. Abby was an innocent in all this. She wasn’t affiliated with Satan’s Blazes in any way. Why did the arsonist have to come after her? What was their game plan?

  Except… she wasn’t entirely unconnected to Satan’s Blazes, was she? The link had to be Robert, Jagger realized as he stared at the smoke that still billowed out of the top of the building. Maybe Abby noticed something in Bobby’s house, maybe she knew something about the arsonist that no other witness to any of the arsons had. Whoever the perpetrator was, he terrified of Abby, so much so that he was trying to kill her.

  Jagger’s thoughts were cut off when he noticed a new car rolling up to the apartment complex. Tony. That meant Abby was here, too. Through the front window of the car, Jagger could see her face, watching her mouth fall open and her eyes widen as she realized what had happened to her home.

  Even if she blamed him for it, even if she hated him for it, he’d be there for her. He had to be.

  # # #

  Abby

  Abby jumped out of the car as soon as it slid to a stop, bolting toward the black hunk of brick that used to be her home. Somebody yelled out her name, one of the neighbors, but she ignored it, heading for the open archway at the front of the building. My money, she thought as she ran inside the building. My fucking money. Before she could make it to the crumbled remains of the stairway, a pair of strong arms wrapped around her chest and yanked her backwards, back out into the smoky night.

  “Fuck—let me go!” she screamed, kicking her legs to try to shake herself free. It was no use. Whoever was holding her was too strong.

  “It’s not safe yet. There’s nothing left in there. I looked,” the man holding her said softly into her ear. Jagger.
Of course. That fucking asshole telling her what to do. Abby kicked her legs a few more times, hoping he’d get the message and let her go, but he kept walking backwards, taking her back with him until he put her down on the hood of his car.

  “I checked, Abby,” Jagger said, letting go of her once she stopped squirming in his strong arms. “There’s nothing.”

  “So, everything’s gone,” Abby said, her voice coming out dull and hard, devoid of any emotion, even though her blood rushed through her veins.

  Jagger nodded slowly, his eyes glued to the pavement, as if he were afraid to look at her. He should be, Abby thought angrily, wanting to feel tough and scary rather than small and meek, which was the truth of the situation. She was hopeless. She was useless. Everything she owned had been taken away from her and there was nothing she could do about it.

  At least I have my mother’s necklace, she thought sadly, patting the pocket in her pants to make sure the little wooden box was still secure. If I have that, I can be strong. I can be tough. I can survive.