by Zoey Parker
He found what he was looking for almost immediately. The paper in his hands couldn’t really do much to keep Victoria safe, but it had to be a start on some clues. Maybe something here would tell him what was going on.
It had to be the Broken Skulls. There was no way it was anyone in the Bloody Saints; he’d already been over that, even though Victoria didn’t believe him. And although her doubt made a small little spot of it dot his mind as well, he still didn’t even consider the option.
Still. While he had his suspicions that this was about the RS thinking his club had outed them to the police, he couldn’t be sure. And that hadn’t even come up in a while. But if that was the issue, it wouldn’t come up; that's how things were there, everything was kept on the down low. It was subtle until someone was being stabbed – or, in the case of Victoria and a few others in the past year that Darren could think of, shot at.
He looked down at the paper again. Anyone else who looked at it probably would have no idea what was going on. While the paper was well-hidden and anyone who saw it would be hard-pressed to figure out what was written on the page. There was no such thing as being too careful.
Instead of being written out in English, the page had a series of abbreviations on it. Some of the words were identified only by their first two or so letters. It wasn't made any easier by the fact that all these letters (and some of them numbers) were placed in small cells. The paper was almost like a spreadsheet. Where the letters ended was where the numbers began, and it all stood for something most people would blanch at the sight of.
Debts. His eyes roamed, looking at it. The page kept tally of who owed who what, but it wasn’t like someone would forget just because it wasn’t written down on a piece of paper. And there was no way it was anyone in the Bloody Saints club, but this piece of paper didn’t just have debts by boys in his squad.
No, this kept track of damn near everything that happened in this town. Everything he knew about, which was probably everything that happened. While other people, the Broken Skulls especially, would try to keep secrets, it wasn't that hard to figure them out. If need be.
So maybe they’d figured out something about him, or something about another one of the boys. Debts and favors owed were hard to keep secret, but someone could still try. And just like that, someone could still figure it out.
His mind flashed back to all of the things that might make someone want to harm him. The list was easy: they probably didn’t even need a reason besides him being who he was. Power was attractive to people, and taking him out would be an easy enough way to get power – before his friends freaked out, if someone wasn't actively trying to freak out on them too.
He reached for his phone in his back pocket. Maybe asking someone what was going on would help. He couldn’t be direct about it, though. If he was the only one having issues like this, then it might signal him out as weak and then he’d have even more to deal with. But if he wasn’t the only one having issues like this, then this might tip someone off that he was trying to figure out what was going on.
This entire thing made no sense. And it would make even less sense if he talked to Victoria about it, so no wonder he wasn’t going to her. Even if she wasn’t a stranger, he wouldn’t have gone to her about it. He’d been in a relationship for nearly two years until fairly recently, and still had told the girl almost nothing about what was going on in his life.
This wasn’t his normal phone. This was a burner phone, a flip phone he could use and then throw away at any needed time. He opened it, running his thumb over the buttons and trying to think of who he could call.
But he needed to figure this out first, even though he already knew what he’d see. His eyes flitted from the phone to the paper, until finally he just gave up looking at the phone and stared absentmindedly at the sheet in his hand. He lifted it up, closer to his face. His eyes roamed over the page, seeing:
J | p. to K, MNH | $6k
M | (some scribbled out letters he couldn’t make out) | (a number that had been scratched out.)
M that must be Marcus – had a debt to someone. Darren couldn’t think of who it was, since everything had been uniformly crossed out and then written over. He couldn’t tell where the debt had been enacted either. Marcus must have paid it off.
But J. That must be Jeremy. He owed something to K (Darren couldn’t think of who that could be immediately; he only knew one person whose name started with a K, and she was a woman, so it couldn’t be her), and the deal had taken place in the city. MNH signified that.
It made no sense to the naked eye, unless you knew what to look for. Darren looked for an initial signifying his name: D. But he knew he’d find nothing. Even though he carried debts and owed favors, his name had never been put down in the ledger. He hadn’t gone to anyone in the Bloody Saints about it, after all.
Or any of their friends.
Fuck.
Why had he done this?
He didn’t want to think about it. His eyes went to the ceiling again, looking up there like it’d help him figure out a solution to his problems. It wouldn’t. It wouldn’t even help him avoid them; looking up like this just made him think of God and of everything that had gone wrong with his life. But he wasn’t the praying type. So why was he staring up at the ceiling like an idiot?
As a distraction. From everything. From Victoria. From the paper in his hand. He let go of the sheet of paper. It fell, slowly and then even slower, but he didn’t care. He just didn’t want to hold it anymore. If he did, he’d probably end up crumpling it up in his hand and then he’d really be in deep shit; that piece of paper, and the other, similar ones in the drawer he’d taken it from, had been used to keep track of things for years. So there was no use in getting rid of it.
Besides, he wasn't even on the list. So why did it bother him so much?
Chapter Twelve
Darren
Not a lot of time had passed before he finally decided to get over himself and use his phone again. He’d never put the thing away. It’d just been sitting there in his hand, waiting for him to actually do something while he just ran his fingers over it, over and over again.
He tried to tell himself that he didn’t know who to call, but the fact of the matter was that he did. He just didn’t like going to people for things. Sullivan's number was so easy to remember. He didn’t even have to look it up before he keyed it in.
Sullivan picked up on the third ring.
“Hello?” he said.
His voice was suspicious and slightly raised, like he thought this was either a collect call or something bad about to happen. Probably the latter. Darren hadn’t seen Sullivan in at least a year; he’d left, gotten out of the city. It’d been too much for him and he wanted to run off with some girl, but then she broke his heart. They couldn’t patch it up, but he’d left anyway. Not that that was a bad thing. Darren got it.
He’d never run away, but this wasn't about him. It wasn’t even about his opinion on Sullivan’s choice, which was, at the very least, understandable.
But it hurt that Sullivan didn’t know it was him.
“Hey,” Darren said. “It's me.”
Sullivan would at least recognize his voice. And he did; Sullivan’s voice perked up instantly, getting less gruff and a little happier at realizing who was on the other end of the line. It made sense that Sullivan didn’t know it was him. After all, this was just one of many phones Darren had had over the years, and he’d never called Sullivan on it before. It didn’t make sense to just assume that Sullivan would know it was him, after all.
“Darren!” Sullivan's voice was almost cheery, except for the fact that members of the Bloody Saints never had voices that were cheery – or, when they did, they were never cheery when they weren’t committing some kind of mischief. But Sullivan wasn’t much into mischief anymore, and he wasn’t a member of the Bloody Saints, even though Darren could argue that with him to the death. His voice sounded like it dropped a notch when he spoke next, so i
t was deeper. Even deeper than Darren's. “What's the matter?”
Darren let out a sigh. This was it. He’d called Sullivan, so he was going to have to go through with letting the man know everything. Sure, he could hang up now, and Sullivan probably wouldn’t go to anyone they knew about this. But that wouldn’t change the fact that something had happened, and it might make Sullivan trust him less.
He drew in another breath. Yup. He had to go for it.
“I think someone's watching me,” he said.
This got a laugh from Sullivan. It wasn’t what Darren expected. Part of him felt like a weight had been lifted from his chest; his old friend, as usual, wasn’t going to judge him for what was going on. He probably wouldn’t even take Darren seriously. But then another part of him just felt irritated. This was serious; it was no time for giggles. It was time for nothing that wasn’t of the utmost importance, and he breathed in sharply before speaking. It felt like all the words he had were pooling up in his stomach. They were about to fall out. But he couldn’t let that happen. He was used to keeping himself restrained from others, and this was no different than the countless other times he’d had to do it before.
But Sullivan was a close friend. They’d known each other when they were both just boys, and now they were both men. Even if Darren hadn’t mentioned something to Sullivan, and even if he hadn’t been weird at the beginning of this phone call, he probably would’ve had to tell him anyway. Sullivan would’ve just guessed that something was wrong.
“I'm being serious, Sullivan,” Darren continued.
This got Sullivan's attention. As much as he had laughed just a few seconds ago, Sullivan was no fool and he was able to tell when something was seriously wrong. Darren wasn’t the type to play jokes like this. If that changed for some reason, Darren wouldn’t be this serious about a joke – he wouldn’t let it go this far.
There was something in Darren’s voice that was deadly wrong.
“What's going on?”
“There’s this girl here,” Darren continued, then paused. He wasn’t sure how much he should say to Sullivan. He trusted Sullivan more than he could trust just about anyone right now, and that even included himself. He decided he was going to tell Sullivan everything. Everything that he could, at least; there wasn’t a whole lot going on besides what Darren had pieced together himself. Even then, he’d only really thought about it on the drive back from saving Victoria, and in this little room here.
Suddenly, he felt really self-conscious of the way his voice echoed as he talked. He knew that no one could hear him in here anyway, and that there probably was no echo, and he was likely just imagining it, and that there was no point in worrying.
He kept talking. “Victoria Parker,” he decided to say her name. Maybe Sullivan would know who he was talking about if he put a name to her. There was no way Darren was going to be able to put a face to her; Victoria was already hard enough to describe, and all he had to work with was some basic terms. “You know her?”
Darren could almost imagine Sullivan shaking his head on the other line, his somewhat long hair moving before he realized Darren couldn’t see him from where they both sat in separate rooms.
“No,” Sullivan dragged the word out. “Can't say I do.”
So he was going to have to explain everything about her. “You know that run down bar off Main?” But as soon as he started describing everything, he knew that this wasn’t going to work out in his favor. Sullivan had left a long time ago, and the Bloody Saints switched up the bars they frequented often enough that Sullivan probably wouldn’t know what he was talking about.
“She’s a bartender,” he started. “Well, she was…”
# # #
Darren wasn’t sure exactly what time it was when he got off of the phone. He’d check out the window to use the sky as his clock; that way he could try to guess at the time by how low the sun was in the sky. But, alas, he was still in this little cornered off room. There was no window in here for him to look out of.
He still had his phone in his hand. He had this bad habit of leaving it out to stare at it, just sitting there and doing nothing. It’d make more sense to actually get up. He tried to think about how long he’d been in here, but nothing came to mind. Not really. He could look through his phone log to see how long the phone call had lasted, but he didn’t really want to do that.
Victoria was probably pissed, though. Or neutral. She seemed like the type of girl who didn’t care about much of anything. That didn’t make him feel much better about it, though. And that thought made him pause and take another look at himself. Why did it matter how he felt about it, and why was he even feeling anything?
He tried to quit thinking about it. He also tried to wipe off the look he knew had to be on his face, the look of concern and mild disgust; both of his attempts were unsuccessful. It was easier to just walk and try not to think. Making his mind empty was easy, it was just his heart that was the issue. How the fuck was he starting to care about a girl he hadn’t even really talked to yet? This made no fu –
His thoughts started to cut out as soon as the hallway started to run out. It hadn’t even been a minute since this thought process had started, and he was already starting to see into the living room.
Victoria didn’t see him yet. The cards she’d placed out in front of her on the table were still spread out everywhere, and all of her attention was focused on them. As alert as she liked to think she was, she had no idea that Darren was staring at her, much less that he was approaching her.
# # #
Victoria
She looked at the cards in her hands. She loved this game, usually. But it was a simple game and eventually it bored her; just because she could play solitaire by herself, in a sad room in a safe house, didn’t mean she wanted to. And the game was easy, too. She flipped through the cards in her hands. Finding the card she was looking for, she put it in the correct order beneath even more cards. All in all, she had six or seven stacks she was working on.
Darren was probably hiding somewhere in the house trying to keep from hanging out with her. That figured, though. It wasn’t like they’d hung out with each other properly in the time she’d been here, anyway. He probably didn’t even have any interest in her. And why would he? Why would she ever think otherwise? There was nothing between them, and realistically there never would be.
She accidentally dropped a card as she thought that. God damn it. So of course, he was going to go and stress her out. But was it even really his fault? No. He’d done nothing. But she’d dropped things because she was thinking about him, so he might as well have done something.
She was in the middle of thinking about this and trying to re-organize her cards when she noticed him. It took a minute or so, though; she wanted to say she was aware, but there was some trait about Darren that always caught her off-guard. She didn’t think she would ever get used to it, even if they were around each other all the time. And that wasn’t what was going to happen.
He was watching her. She wasn’t sure why, and she didn’t think to ask. She was distracted by his eyes. They roamed over her with purpose, looking around slightly before descending on her. She raised her head and looked back, sticking a little bit of her chin out for good measure. While she was sure that in the past Darren had had a lot of people look away from him, or look at him like they were terrified of him, she refused to be one of those people.
So she raised her head, looked him in the eyes, and spoke first. “It took you long enough.”
She hadn’t imagined that he might actually stand her up. They were both stuck in the same small space, and they would probably have to see each other again within a few hours. Neither of them could avoid each other forever, so if he just didn’t want to deal with her, he might as well have just said it.
“I was doing something.” He sounded like he was making excuses, but that wasn’t a very Darren thing to do. From what he’d shown her so far at least.
She raised
an eyebrow at this, throwing in the usual sass. He just shrugged at her, and, moving over, began to make his way towards where she sat on the couch.
She started moving away as soon as she realized he was trying to sit next to her. She knew she shouldn’t push him away. Then he’d never tell her anything. And just because she wasn’t going to ask more about what was going on didn’t mean she didn’t want to know, but she felt like asking him about it first would make her seem desperate. Still, there was no reason for them to be physically near each other, not really.
Images of his naked body wrapped in steam flashed through her mind. She struggled to shake them away, and in the end she found she couldn’t. She bit her lip. God, he was hot.
And he was only about two feet from her. She moved to the other end of the couch, making it as obvious as she could. All this did was make Darren smirk, but he did nothing about it.
