by Eve R. Hart
My eyes met Ky’s and it was like he was saying ‘I knew something was going on.’ Which he had attempted to call me out on at least once before. But I could tell he didn’t have a clue before now who that person was that I was sneaking away to see.
Chris just blinked at me. I didn’t know what to think of that. Guessed it didn’t really matter anyway.
“How long?” Brand asked and I honestly thought that question would have come from Iron first.
I cleared my throat.
“Pretty much ever since we moved her out of her fancy-ass condo.” That was as close enough to the truth as I could think right now. I didn’t want to go into all the other stuff before then.
There was no point in hiding it, that this had been going on for a long time right under their noses.
I could see the shock and betrayal written on most of their faces. This wasn’t the time to go into it. Laurel was missing. Every second counted. Especially because it had taken us so long to catch on. I blamed myself for that. If I hadn’t cut her off then maybe I would have known sooner.
I knew Laurel had a tendency to be a bit flaky with her friendships. Truth was she only had Cami and Chris now.
As soon as all the scandals started up and it was out there that she had been cut off, all those yuppie fucks dropped her like last seasons… Gucci or something. I didn’t know a damn thing about designers, but I was sure I’d heard that one a time or two. My point was that they turned their backs on her, just like her family.
She never directly came out and said anything, but I could tell that it hurt her. I could tell that she was lonely. I also noticed that while she was grateful that she had Chris and Cami there, she still didn’t think she was worthy of their love and support. And maybe she was a little bit ashamed of what she’d become too. It was a hard balance for her. Sometimes her pride got in the way of letting her accept the good things in her life. And sometimes her vulnerability was too much for her to hide, which led to her avoiding people.
So, while it was shitty that neither Cami nor Chris had noticed something was wrong until a week later, it didn’t really surprise me. I’d been in the background this whole time and I’d seen the way she would brush off their calls and texts. Hell, sometimes she just flat out ignored them. And as much as I would have liked to have said it was because she was wrapped up in me, I also knew better.
“So I have a little better understanding, just what the hell is going on?” Iron asked looking at me for answers.
I launched into it, only giving the details that I thought were important right now. I kept my eyes on Iron’s because I couldn’t handle seeing the looks on the faces of everyone else in the room.
“The night she came up to the bar was the last time I’d seen her. Talked to her, even. I…” This time I did look down. I was so ashamed of that night. What I’d done cut me to the bone then but right now it was suddenly worse. Because I felt like this was all on me. “I ended things that night. Whatever we had going on wasn’t doing either of us any good.”
There. I’d said it.
“Why?” Cami asked and though it was off topic, I felt like she deserved an answer.
They all did. Only how was I supposed to explain without making Laurel look bad? Like she hadn’t been using me all these months. To be fair, I had let her. And it wasn’t like I really had any room to complain, I loved every minute I spent with her.
I let out a deep sigh.
I was man enough to admit that this whole week I’d missed her. That I had thought about going to her and taking back what I’d said. I’d thought about letting her see me weak. But I also knew it wouldn’t have done any good. So I stayed true to my decision even though I couldn’t get my Queen out of my head.
“Because she was using me as a distraction. As long as I was around she wasn’t going to face the fact that her life had been turned upside down. She wasn’t going to accept it and deal with it head-on. And I guess I wanted more than she was willing to give.”
I wasn’t ashamed to admit that I cared deeply for her. And I didn’t care that they all knew. I just hated that one decision had led us here.
She was missing.
And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about that.
Worse than that, I felt completely at a loss and useless. I didn’t have the first clue on where to start.
“You care about my sister?” Cami asked and the dense shock was clear in her voice. It was also given away by the scrunched-up, confused face.
“Yes, Cami,” I said pointedly. “I really fucking care about Laurel.”
“Brand told me that Cami nor Chris has been in contact with her for a week. And she hasn’t shown up to work?” Iron asked.
“No,” I said shaking my head deciding that I was now talking for all of us. “I called Cable when I didn’t find her at her place and asked him to see if he could find out if she was in any of the hospitals.” I turned my attention to Cable.
He just grimly shook his head.
“What if she was admitted and had no identification on her?” I asked but was pretty sure that someone would have recognized her. The Benson family was pretty well known in this city.
“There were no Jane Does at either hospital. Not for a few weeks now.”
“So then we need to try to retrace her steps after she left here that night.” Iron spoke the thing I needed to hear the most. Because I was at a loss as for where to go from here.
“She left the bar and told me that she’d called an Uber and was meeting it out front. I offered to walk her out but she waved me off.” Chris hung his head as he recounted the night’s events. “I started to protest but she told me it was already waiting outside. I let it go, thinking the place was busy enough and I knew there were probably people hanging out front. It’s not like someone would be stupid enough to roll right up to a motorcycle club’s bar and start shit.”
That was true.
“Now that I think about it,” Chris said suddenly looking up at me. “She said that right after I saw you slip out the back.”
“Yeah, she must have followed me back to my room. I hadn’t been there long before she knocked on my door.” I sighed, knowing what happened next. I knew they did too so I just kept going without saying it. “Then what would she have done?” I looked at Cami thinking that she knew her the best. They were sisters after all.
“She probably never even ordered an Uber.” Cami looked off in the distance like she was trying to work something out.
“She would have walked home,” I said through gritted teeth.
I knew it.
And I hated that I hadn’t thought beyond the moment that night.
“She’s broke,” I went on trying to hold down my anger. “You know that. We all do even if we act like it’s not true. She’s barely able to keep the lights on in that shit box she lives in. She never had any intentions of paying for a ride home. She couldn’t even if she wanted to.”
“But why? She knows we would have paid for it. Or gotten one of the sober prospects to take her home.” This came from Mouse.
“Pride,” I grunted. “And she probably thought she was going to stay in my room when she followed me there.”
“Now that you mention it,” Cami said cutting in. “She seemed hesitant about coming out. And I don’t think she paid for a drink all night.” She looked over at Brand. “Everyone kept buying them for her. Is that why she kept flirting?”
The realization of it hit me right then. Like a big slap to the face. She wasn’t trying to push me away. She wasn’t trying to ignore me. She was trying to hide the fact that things were that bad for her. That she had to resort to getting my brothers to buy her drinks in order to keep up the façade.
“Fuck!” I roared.
She pretended I wasn’t there because she knew the moment she looked at me that I would know. Because whether or not she had wanted to, she’d let me in and she couldn’t hide things from me like she wished she could.
How t
he fuck couldn’t I have seen it that night?
Why am I just getting a damn clue now?!
“Calm down, brother,” Ky said in an oddly soft tone.
“Yeah, okay,” I said holding my hands up because though he sounded calm, his body looked rigid and ready to tackle if need be. “So say she walked home…”
I didn’t finish that thought. I was out the door and down the stairs before I even realized it. I needed to retrace her steps to find some damn clues. If there was anything left to find. It had been a fucking week after all. But I had to try. And fast, because the day was quickly losing light.
It wasn’t two blocks from the bar when I found something. A shoe. It could have been anyone’s, but I knew. I fucking knew it was hers. Right there in the tall grass beside the road. I picked it up and hung my head. It was all the confirmation I needed. Something had happened to Laurel.
“Did you find something?” Ky asked coming to my side.
I couldn’t speak so I held up the shoe to tell him what he needed to know. I couldn’t move either. I was frozen in my spot, staring down at the ground like she’d somehow appear there. Even as Ky patted me on the shoulder and stepped away I couldn’t unglue my feet from their place.
“Hey,” Ky called out a moment later. “This hers?”
That was enough to have me snapping to. My head jerked up and sure enough, there was Laurel’s tiny purse thing. A clutch, I think she’d called it at one time.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure she had something like that.”
“Let’s, uh, take it back to Cami. She can look through it,” Ky said knowing full well it was a big no-no to go through a chick’s purse. While I tended to agree with that, this was kind of a different situation.
“Just open the damn thing,” I grunted and continued to look around. There had to be something else. Something to tell me what happened here.
I looked back the way we’d walked. Then turned and looked at the area ahead. Though it was slight, I could tell the grass had been trampled down in a clear curved line. Like a car had veered off the road and then back on. There was no way to tell if it had stopped or not but I was desperate for the answer. There seemed to be two options here. One, someone swerved and possibly struck Laurel while she was walking. Or two, they had wandered off road on purpose and Laurel had been taken. Both thoughts made my blood boil. And for whatever reason, I didn’t even think that there was another option where the car tracks had nothing to do with her. I may have had tunnel vision and was grasping at anything to find an answer.
Whatever Ky was trying to say to me I didn’t hear because I was too focused on finding something that gave me some kind of clue.
“No blood,” I mumbled. There wasn’t anything that might have resembled spots of blood anywhere but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t have fallen and hit her head. Or the impact of the car could have broken her leg.
Had she been out here, left for hours, or days, all alone? Had she crawled her way somewhere trying to find help?
But Cable said he couldn’t find her in any of the hospitals.
“Search the fucking area,” I bellowed causing my brothers all around to come running. “Something happened. Right here.” I scanned the thick brush and trees that were just six feet back from the road.
“We’re losing light,” someone said. Mouse, it might have been.
“Get fucking flashlights. A fucking search dog out here. Something. Don’t tell me what I already know. If she’s out there, then we need to find her now!”
“Uh, B,” Ky said coming up beside me, Laurel’s tiny purse thing still in his grasp and something pinched between his fingers. “I think it might have been less one sided than you thought.” He reached out, a thick folded piece of paper pinched between his pointer and middle finger. For some reason, my hand shook as I reached out and plucked the paper away from him. “I didn’t read much. I stopped when I figured out what was going on,” he said the words low so that only I heard them then he walked off.
I shook my head and tucked it into my pocket. My emotions were too heightened right now for me to add anything else. I had no idea what was there but if what Ky had said was any indication, I had a strong feeling I needed to be alone and locked away before I read it.
An hour of searching later and we came up empty-handed.
At a loss, we all shuffled back to the clubhouse. The look on Cami’s face when she realized we had nothing was heartbreaking. I couldn’t take it. I needed a moment to collect myself but I didn’t feel like I deserved it.
“Cable,” I barked, causing everyone’s eyes to turn to me. “You got feed saved from a week ago?”
“Yeah, don’t know how much good it will do. Cameras barely catch anything beyond the parking lot. Might be lucky if we see some tires.”
“I don’t fucking care if we see a shadow. If there was a car and it passed by here, I want to fucking know about it.” I was losing it. But luckily, Cable just snapped his mouth shut, nodded, and walked out of the lounge.
“Take a breath, man,” Mouse said placing a firm hand on my shoulder.
I turned my head and glared at him. His hand remained in place and he didn’t even so much as flinch.
“I get it,” he said softly. “I do.” Then he gave my shoulder a squeeze and backed off.
“B-ry,” Iron called out. “Take a fucking break.”
And because it sounded more like an order rather than a suggestion, I turned and left the room.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Laurel
I thought I had something to complain about before.
Little did I know that things could get worse.
I never imagined I would fall so hard.
I never envisioned that I could be someone that ended up here.
Yet, as I looked around at the place I had been trapped in for over a week now, I knew that this wasn’t some nightmare that I could shake off.
This was real.
And I was the one caught and trapped by a lock and a bunch of bars. Oh, and I couldn’t forget about the crazy man. The dirty one that looked completely off his rocker. The one that watched me with dark, lifeless eyes.
I was naked but I think at this point I wasn’t even fazed by it. After all, it was the least of my worries.
Bryan called me his Queen. He treated me like one in his own way. But right now, I was far from sitting on a royal throne. I was a prisoner. I was a gilded bird trapped in a cage. Quite literally on the cage part.
A cage that felt like it was made for a midget. Little person? I wasn’t sure which was more politically correct. I supposed I should have taken notice of such things, but it wasn’t like I was faced with that in my life, really.
I didn’t have enough room to fully stand up, so if I wanted to stretch my legs, I had to walk around hunched over. Not that there was much room to walk anyway. Not even five feet by five feet, meaning the so-called bed that was at one end wasn’t nearly long enough for me to spread out in.
I had a bucket in the corner to use… for things that I never imagined doing out in the open. But here I had no choice. Just like I had no choice to do it when the creepy man was sitting there watching my every move.
So far, it seemed like this was a one-manned operation. There hadn’t been anyone else that entered the room. And the place wasn’t soundproof at all. The only voice I had heard this whole time was his. Even as he moved around the house cooking, watching TV, and oddly even vacuuming. Which you would have maybe thought that would have made it easier to escape. But it didn’t matter if I knew where he was because I was locked in this cage.
Locked.
The key? I had no idea because I hadn’t seen one for the big door of the cage yet. These cages had been built with the type of smartness that could only have come from someone that was mentally unstable. And yes, there were three of them in the room I was in. Mine was dead center. The others were empty though and I feared the day they would be filled. What would that mean for me? I s
upposed that was a bit selfish to think, but it was my life on the line and all. I wouldn’t doubt that when he got a shiny new toy that the old one would be forgotten about.
Back to the cages. They had a smaller door in the corner where the bucket was. The space was only big enough so he could remove the bucket to clean and then replace it. From what I had seen so far, there was no escape for me. I was tiny, but not nearly small enough to slip through that little opening.
Not even if I kept wasting away.
He fed me, sure. At first, I refused to eat. But I knew I needed to keep up my strength. So I took his taunting and cruelty. And when he brought a bag of cheap, flat hamburgers in, I made a decision on the third day. He laughed and shoved his mouth full of those burgers. They actually smelled so good that my mouth watered. I knew I was desperate then because that smell should have made me think of how bad they were for me. But it didn’t and all I could think about was knowing if they tasted as good as they smelled.
He threw the last little bites through the bars of the cage and I scrambled to get to them, pushing them into my mouth without an ounce of hesitation. There wasn’t a moment to care about anything else. Not the fact that those little morsels had his germs all over them. Or that they had bounced off of the dirty cage floor. Or that a few of them had actually hit the outside of my waste bucket. I didn’t care. I dove after each one as he tossed them in. I had no idea that one could consume so many burgers at once, but he did.
In the end, I think I might have actually gotten enough to make a full burger. It didn’t feel like it was enough but it was something at least.
“I wonder how he would feel if he could see you now?” the crazy man asked. Though, I didn’t think he was really looking for an answer.
I wasn’t sure if he was aware of it or not, but he sort of clued me in just a little. I was here because of someone. I imagined that by his tone this was his way to get back at someone. Take something from this person that had wronged him. Or cut him down? I had no idea. Just like I didn’t have the first clue as to the he that he was referring to.
