by Stacey Lynn
So I sat on the stool, allowing my friends to ply me with alcohol in the middle of the day. I let them get me drunk. I let them try to get me to laugh.
And as the alcohol flowed, the laughing became easier.
“It’s not that it was all bad.” I swayed on my unsteady feet while I waved a pool cue through the air. From behind me, I saw Jules laugh as she ducked out of the way.
Ryker frowned at me from across the table. His hands balled into fists and pushed into the lined felt top of the pool table. He arched a brow. “Faith?”
I waved him off before I bent over, aimed, and completely missed the little white ball.
“I did their books,” I explained. “After a few years, they trusted me enough for that. I made appointments for the other girls. And those girls…” I drawled out and then paused to take another sip of my beer. “They liked it. They actually loved doing what they did.”
From next to me, Daemon grabbed my beer bottle. He set it on a table behind him before he turned back to me. “I think that’s enough, Faith.”
I eyed the beer longingly. It was numbing all my pain and making it easier to talk. I was simply giving them what they all wanted.
“I wanted that.”
Daemon nodded. “I know, but I think that’s enough for today. Maybe you should get to bed.”
“I’ll take her,” Ryker said, his voice low and deep, and if I wasn’t completely drunk, I think I detected concern. “Come on, Faith,” he said and held out a hand for me.
I shook my head and took a step back. Ten sets of eyes were on me although I didn’t know the names of everyone watching me.
I swayed again.
“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” I asked and looked at all of them. Men in their cuts and their women stood next to them. My friends had their eyes narrowed on me. “To get me to talk? But now that I am you don’t want to hear it?”
I shook my head. I tried to stay quiet, but a faucet had been turned on and I couldn’t turn it off. Loose lips sink ships and all that, although I was certain I couldn’t have said that phrase without slurring for the life of me.
“You don’t want to hear about what I did, do you? Because it disgusts you,” I hissed at Ryker. He flinched but said nothing. It proved I was right. “You want me to move on and get over everything… but you don’t want to actually know what I’m trying to get over.”
“Faith,” Liv said, walking up next to me and putting an arm on my shoulder. I shook it off.
I faced her. “Did you know I liked it, Liv?”
Her face blanched. “Faith…”
“That I came even when I was crying. That no matter how much I hated their hands on me, I always gave them what they wanted.” Liv’s hands squeezed my shoulders as I let the words fly. I leaned in closer. “Because I was good at it. I was the best.”
“That’s enough,” Ryker barked, his dark eyes reminding me of a dark summer thunderstorm. A second later, I was swept up in his arms, my pool cue clanking and rattling on the linoleum floor.
My arms went around his neck on instinct as he carried me out of the clubhouse main living room.
“Another jail,” I said softly as he carried me down another hallway. “Another place I have to stay. Another place I can’t leave.”
Ryker sighed. “Faith. We’re trying to keep you safe.”
I ignored the frustrated yet softened tone. It did funny things to my belly. “And I have nowhere else to go. I wonder when Cain will kill me.”
My eyelids drooped in heaviness, partly from the alcohol but partly because talking was making my head hurt. It was exhausting telling them what they didn’t want to really hear.
Ryker’s arms tightened around my back and then I felt his weight shift as he lowered me to his bed. When he unwrapped his arms from under me, he braced his hands next to my head, his arms fully extended.
“Cain will never kill you.”
I couldn’t argue with his words. His black hair draped over his even blacker eyes. A vein pulsed in his neck. He had a slight dip in his chin that I used to tease him about and push my index finger into when we were joking around.
He wasn’t joking around now.
“He’ll try,” I said, my eyelids drifting closed. “My mom’s probably already dead, isn’t she?”
He exhaled a deep breath but sleep was pulling me under. My limbs felt heavier by the second as they sank into the thin mattress.
One of Ryker’s hands brushed lightly down my cheek and I felt him drag his fingers through my hair.
“You know,” I said, finding the strength to open my eyes a little bit. “He beat me and then he left. Then he told those other men to do whatever they wanted to me.”
He cursed through a hitched breath and the muscles in his jaw tightened.
“Except for that… but it doesn’t matter… because I gave that away willingly, you know? I don’t even know if I remember what it feels like to want someone’s hands on me.”
“Faith… Cain will die for what he did to you.”
I blinked slowly. Ryker leaned down closer and I felt his breath dance across my skin. I inhaled the supremely masculine smell of his body wash or cologne. I didn’t know which, but it smelled delicious and made my already heavy head begin to spin. “I liked it.”
His throat dipped as he swallowed and his eyes stayed fixed on mine. His nose twitched.
“You don’t want to hear that, but I did. I liked what they did to me, Ryker.”
His black hair swished back and forth right as tears welled in my eyes and spilled over. “Getting off and liking it are two different things, babe. But I know that someday, you’ll want it again. And when you do… we’ll go slow.”
It was such a nice promise from the man I had once loved; the only man who had ever touched me in a way I wanted. I didn’t know if I’d ever feel like that again. I didn’t know if I could.
But still, it warmed my body from toes to ears as Ryker brushed the tears off my cheeks. I curled my knees to my chest and settled under the blanket he draped over me.
“Go to sleep, Faith.”
“He has a brother,” I slurred, my eyes closing again, and this time I couldn’t force them open again. “Owns a resort on a lake… Miltona, I think. I don’t remember… he sends him money every month.”
As sleep and darkness pulled me under, I felt Ryker’s full, warm lips brush across my forehead.
“We’ll take care of it.”
Another promise. For once, I wanted to truly surrender to the idea that there were people looking out for me and protecting me, instead of trying to find ways to damage and hurt me.
I felt a small smile tip at the edges of my lips right before I surrendered to sleep.
I stared at Faith and watched her settle into sleep. The bruises on her cheeks and jaw were now a pale yellow, and as her breath became low and steady, I fought the urge to run my lips over every injury she’d received while strung up by Cain’s men.
I doubted she’d remember all the talking she had done by the time morning hit. All the leads she had drunkenly handed to us.
But it filled me with a sense of calmness and peace that I hadn’t felt since the first time I ran into her, weeks ago, in the doorway to Penny’s when I saw what her life had become since I’d left.
I made a promise to her and I meant it. I’d take care of this. I’d take care of Cain and I’d give Faith a reason to hope that she’d never have to live owned by anyone or scared of anyone ever again.
Pushing off the bed, even though all I wanted to do was strip out of my clothes and lay down next to her, I spun on my heels and headed out to the club room where the music was still pounding against the walls.
It was early. Tripp, a club member and only about ten years older than Daemon and me, had taken my turn at the salvage yard as soon as Faith started drinking earlier. I didn’t have shit to do for the rest of the night except fill Daemon in and hope like hell he’d get a group of men ready to ride.
I almost hated to interrupt him when I saw him wrapped around Liv as I hit the main room. They were finally able to begin a relationship they had fought for years to have. And with the way Liv’s leg was wrapped around Daemon’s hip, him pressing her against the wall with his arms caging her in, it was clear that they were tired of waiting for the right time to have something good, too.
I thought about giving them their moment.
Then I remembered the pale, dead look in Faith’s light blue eyes.
Fuck it.
“Hey, Daemon,” I called, loudly enough to get his, along with everyone else in the club room’s, attention.
Snickers filled the air when Daemon pulled away from Liv and growled at me. I smiled when Liv wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“You fuckin’ me right now?” he shouted, annoyed.
“Nope.” I grinned and headed toward them. “Neither is Liv.”
“Asshole,” he muttered, and then gave Liv a kiss on the cheek before he met me near the bar. “You had better have a good reason for this.”
I grabbed a bottle of Jim Bean off the bar, unscrewed the top, and took a shot from the bottle without bothering to get a shot glass. Daemon watched the whole thing before repeating my same move once I set the bottle down.
“Faith talked,” I said. “I need men for a ride.”
He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the bar, hands clasped together. I waited for him to call Jaden and Xbox over.
“Faith said Cain has a brother who I’m assuming isn’t in the club,” I said once the men were huddled around the bar.
Xbox frowned and shook his head. “Never heard of him.”
Which meant that Cain was either keeping his brother hidden from the club life, or his brother was keeping himself hidden. Xbox was a scrappy, skinny guy but he was able to hack or track anything the club needed. He had proven himself valuable to Daemon time and time again in finding shit that no one wanted found.
If Xbox didn’t know about him, then the man was hidden on purpose.
“Said something about him having a brother on Miltona. Runs a resort. That mean anything to you?” I asked the group of men.
“Miltona’s near Alexandria, about four hours southwest of here. An hour West of St. Cloud,” Jaden filled in.
I checked the clock on the microwave behind the bar. “We can be there by midnight if we leave now.”
“We’re not riding now,” Daemon said. He ran a hand through his light brown goatee and then scrubbed the back of his neck. “Too many men have been drinking for too long today. We’ll head out first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Daemon—”
He silenced me with a raised hand. “Tonight, Xbox will figure out who he is and where he lives. We’ll go in the morning, be there by lunch, and hopefully get the answers you need by dinnertime.”
“I have to go.”
Daemon’s lips thinned before he leaned in and fixed his narrowed eyes on me. The rest of the men hushed as we stared each other down. “I get what you need to do, but you put that cut on and you know you’re not your own man anymore. You wait until your brothers can have your back and we’ll go in smart. You got it?”
I got that I wanted to punch my little brother in the face.
But I also got what he was saying.
I glared at Xbox. He looked confident and calm as his fingers tapped mindlessly on the bar top. It was a tic he always had when he was getting ready to hunt down information in cyberland.
“You can find what I need?” I asked.
He looked at me with his slick black hair tied in a pony tail that fell halfway down his back. One of his hands rubbed his goatee.
“Two hours, tops. I figure there can’t be that many resorts, and he can’t be that hard to find. The simple fact we’ve never heard of him probably tells me he’s clean.”
I nodded and exhaled.
I wanted to ride.
Jaden’s firm hand clamped on my shoulder and kept me tethered to the floor. “Wait until we can all go fuck the asshole up. It’ll be more fun that way.”
When he put it that way…
I grinned. “You got it.”
The late morning air was already stuffy and humid as the four of us pulled our bikes into Grady’s Resort on the southeast corner of Lake Miltona. Families with children played outside in the grassy area that ran alongside a dirt road behind a line of vacation trailers and motorhomes. I laughed to myself, not surprised, as moms took in our leather cuts with the Viking skull patches on the backs, and our bikes, and then quickly ushered their kids inside the trailers.
I wiped the sweat from my brow as we pulled up to the main cabin. They were a pathetic gray in desperate need of a good power wash and painting at least a decade ago. The dilapidated office sign hung crookedly from two metal hooks outside a screen door where one edge of the screen curled up.
“Xbox is a master,” I said quietly to Daemon as he climbed off his bike and joined me. From the quieting of the engines and crunching booted steps behind me, I knew Jaden and Tripp were right behind us.
In truth, it had taken him thirty minutes to find Nathan O’Reilly, supposed brother to Cain.
Daemon glanced at me before heading up the first crooked and broken cemented step in front of us. “Let’s just hope Cain would turn to him if he needed help hiding,” he said right as he opened the creaking woodened door.
It slammed shut right after Tripp entered. Combined, the four of us consumed the small waiting space that held a small folding table covered with “Grady’s Family Resort” T-shirts, a scratched wooden desk, and decade old computer in front of us.
From behind the desk, there was a narrow stairway that led to what I assumed was the owner’s cabin on the second floor.
Footsteps immediately began approaching on the stairway. I reached inside my cut and felt the cold handle of my gun.
“Patience,” Daemon scolded next to me right as a man turned the corner of the stairway and faced us. He was small and scrawny—the complete opposite of Cain’s large size. His hair was unwashed and greasy, and his frame showed the result of a man who had lived solely on liquor for far too long.
His eyes instantly widened and his face turned white as a ghost.
The four of us stood intimidatingly in front of him.
“You have two choices, Nathan,” Daemon spoke, not giving the man a chance to deny his name. “You can tell us what we need to know and live. Or tell us what we need to know and die.”
He took a step back toward the stairway as his eyes danced around the four of us. Jaden, closer to the desk than I, copied each footstep of Nathan’s.
“I don’t know anything.” His shaky voice almost made me happy.
“You don’t know what we want, yet.” Daemon’s statement held a touch a humor. Under the humor was the voice of a man who held the power in the room.
The man stumbled into the stair railing and Jaden was on him in an instant. His hand cupped the man’s throat, and he raised him by the grip on his neck until his feet dangled against the ground.
“Where’s Cain?” Jaden hissed.
Nathan choked and rapidly shook his head back and forth. “I don’t know anything.”
“The woman?” I asked, taking a step forward as I unsheathed my gun from the holster. “Where is she?”
Nathan’s hand clawed at Jaden’s forearm, but it did nothing. His cheeks turned pink with a hint of purple as his eyes bulged out from the loss of oxygen.
“I don’t…” He coughed and sputtered. I glanced back to Daemon, who stood still with Tripp at his back. Both men had their arms crossed against his chest.
Daemon nodded once at me, his expression cold and unmoving.
I raised my gun. “I can kill you, but we’ll still find Cain eventually. And I’m assuming once he’s dead, you’ll stop receiving the two thousand dollar monthly payments you get from him now.”
“How did you find out?”
“We have our ways,” I
told him, aiming my gun at his knee. “Have you ever been shot? It hurts like a fucker, you know.”
Jaden loosened his grip on Nathan’s throat. It was enough for him to swallow and gulp in a large breath.
“Where is he?” I asked him.
Nathan shook his head. “I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him in months.”
“Do you know what he did to my woman?” I asked, realizing that was how I thought of Faith. Mine. She had always been. “Her back is covered with so many lashes from his belt that there isn’t an inch of skin on her that isn’t damaged. Do you know he forced her to become a whore? Forced her to have sex for money until she did it so often that she started thinking she liked being used by men like that?”
“My brother is sick. That’s not my problem.”
“It is when you know where he’d go. Or maybe he’s here. Your guests won’t mind if we search their cabins.”
“You can’t,” he stuttered out right as Jaden let go of his throat completely. Nathan sunk to the floor, his hands rapidly rubbing the abused skin on the front of his throat.
Without saying anything, Jaden pushed him to his stomach on the floor, pulled out a rope, and began wrapping his hands behind his back.
“Maybe we should hang him up like Cain did to Faith?” Daemon suggested. Jaden was already on the move, pushing Nathan up the stair way. The man cursed as he fell and his knees jammed into the edges of the stair way.
I moved to follow them but hit Daemon’s hand on my chest. “Search the empty cabins and shelters with Tripp. They have to have a place to hide from tornados somewhere around here.”
“I’m going with Jaden,” I said, stepping forward.
“We’ll take care of him. If Cain heard us come in, he’s gone or hiding. Find him for Faith, and we’ll take care of the brother.”
“Daemon…” I warned, but the argument fell silent on my lips.
His head tipped down toward my ear and his arms encircled my biceps. “You don’t need more blood on your hands yet, Brother. Let Jaden and I handle this.” Fighting the instinct I had to kill anyone related to the fucker who hurt Faith, I hesitantly nodded and took a step back with Tripp.
