CLAIMED BY THE BAD BOY: A Dark Bad Boy Romance (Bloody Saints MC)

by Zoey Parker

  Finally, I did.

  Chapter 12

  Blade

  “Clear!” The word was repeated, shouted, several times throughout the clubhouse.

  I opened my eyes just as the door to our room was kicked in. Suddenly, men in Kevlar vests stood in front of us when guns and flashlights aimed at our faces.

  “Freeze! Put your hands where I can see ‘em!”

  I raised my arms up, holding my hands to shield my eyes from the light. My sheets were still around my waist, hiding the lower half of my naked body—not that it would have mattered. It wouldn’t have been the first time the cops had seen me naked. Next to me, Maggie sat up and covered her breasts.

  “Hands up!” the cop reiterated.

  “You can see her fucking hands,” I told him. “Unless her tits are weapons, you need to calm the fuck down.”

  “Watch your mouth,” the cop growled, the barrel of his rifle right in my face. If he’d even thought about pulling the trigger, my head would have decorated the wall behind me. But he was more likely to piss himself from the adrenaline than to shoot me, so I wasn’t that worried about it.

  “Get up,” the other cop said.

  “Can we get dressed?” I asked as I stood up from the bed. I didn’t lower my hands to cover myself, figuring they deserved whatever they saw since they’d barged into our place.

  Maggie, on the other hand, stood up slowly, moving one arm across her chest to cover her breasts and sliding a hand down between her legs to hide herself from their eyes and lights.

  “Got any ID?” the first one growled again.

  “It’s a bit late for that, don’t you think, officer?” I asked with a smirk on my face.

  “I’m only going to ask for it one more time. Do you have any ID?” He spoke slowly, deliberately.

  “In my wallet, in my pants pocket,” I said plainly, letting the officers know I wasn’t bullshitting them this time.

  “Grab it. What about you?” he asked, turning to Maggie.

  “She doesn’t have her ID on her,” I told him as I got dressed. She stood there, shaking and silent, staring at him with that deer-in-the-headlights look on her face.

  “I was talking to her, dipshit. You worry about your own damn business.”

  “I’m just trying to help you out. I can vouch for her,” I said.

  “And why should we listen to you?” the cop said, turning and stepping to me. This jackass was acting more like a common street thug than an officer of the law.

  “Because I carded her at the club where I was working the door last night,” I told him, lying through my teeth.

  “Then, where is her ID now, genius?” He stood face to face with me, right up against me.

  I had to look down at him, as he wasn’t as big as his mouth. “It’s probably in her purse, which we think someone lifted from the club last night. That’s how she ended up here. She came to me about it, we started talking, and there you go.” I held out my hands and shrugged.

  The officer, accepting that he wasn’t going to get anywhere else with me, stepped back and looked at naked Maggie, still covering herself. “Is that what happened?” he asked her with the same pointed tone.

  She nodded.

  I knew I was sticking my neck out for her and taking a leap of faith by vouching for her to the cops, but I felt like I could help her more than they would. I knew something wasn’t right about her situation, but I didn’t trust their ability to fix that for her.

  “Get dressed,” the officer snarled as he walked with his partner back to the door. He told his partner to keep an eye on us and to take me downstairs once I was dressed.

  Looking past the cops into the hallway, I could see members of the MC being escorted away from their rooms by the police. I had never seen the clubhouse get raided before. We’d had cops stop by on numerous occasions, but I had never seen anything like what was happening in front of me.

  “I’ll be right back. I’m going to find out what’s going on,” I told Maggie as I walked away from her toward the door.

  The officer standing by my door walked me downstairs. I noticed when we made it downstairs that the only people who had been pulled out of the rooms upstairs were our members. None of the girls or old ladies had been pulled. We stood lined up in front of the cops as they came back downstairs.

  “Listen, we got word that there might be an underage girl here,” one of them said. “We’re trying to locate her and anyone who might have any information as to her whereabouts.”

  I tried to keep a blank stare as I listened to what they were saying.

  “We got word that she might be involved in sex trafficking, and we’re trying to locate her. So far, no one here matches her description, but we were told someone here might know more about her.” He paced in front of us as he talked, saying his words slowly, as if we were hard of hearing or a little slow on the uptake.

  I followed him with my eyes so I could try to get a glimpse at everyone else. The others stood straight and tall, each with blank forward stares. They kept their faces unreadable. It was what we did.

  It was obvious they were looking for one of the girls from the auction. The only girl from the auction who didn’t seem to have been properly vetted was Maggie. There was no information on her, and she’d even come in without an ID – the real reason she hadn’t been able to show it to the cops up in our room.

  Something wasn’t right. I felt it in my gut. When I’d told the cop I was vouching for Maggie, he took my word. She must not have matched the description of the girl they were looking for. I didn’t dare ask any questions. I remained silent and listened as the officer talked.

  “As usual, no one knows anything, huh? Well, unless someone speaks, I’m taking you all down to the station,” he threatened.

  “Look, man, no one here is involved with sex trafficking,” our president, Senior, spoke up. “I wouldn’t allow it, and if I find out that anyone is, rest assured, you won’t have to deal with them, officer.” Senior looked around at the rest of us with his last statement and gave us all a stern stare.

  “Thank you for your cooperation,” the officer said. He, too, looked us over one last time. “If anyone can think of anything, please call the station.” He looked back at Senior and handed him a business card. “And if you find out anyone is involved in this sex ring, you let me know.”

  “Got it,” Senior said as he took the card.

  “All right, boys,” the commanding officer said, summoning the other cops to fall in with him as he left the building.

  I wondered who could have tipped them off that someone was here, at the clubhouse. The auctions had never been raided. They were secret. The only people who knew about them were participants. Then it hit me: there were a few gangs who knew about the auctions and had been trying to move in on them. It was entirely possible that one of them was behind this little underage sex slave scare.

  Luckily the cops hadn’t said anything about the auctions, just about the sex trafficking. They probably didn’t know anything about the actual operation.

  We dispersed. Senior grabbed me by the arm as I started to head back upstairs. He pulled me aside while everyone else went on about their business. “Do you know anything about this underage girl they’re talking about?” he asked me under his breath.

  “No way, but I can probably find out,” I told him.

  “The only reason I ask is because I know you occasionally work for Vlad, and this sounds like the kind of shit he’d have his hands in.”

  “It does,” I agreed, “but I haven’t heard of anything like this through his men. This is new to me.” I had to walk a careful line. No one knew I had a girl from the sex auction up in my room. They didn’t know the nature of the work I did for Vlad. It was like Senior told the cops: if he had known, the MC would have handled it.

  “Well, let me know if you find out anything. We can’t have the cops hanging around the clubhouse like this.” In his tone was a warning to handle it myself. In hi
s eyes, I saw he knew something wasn’t kosher about the whole situation.

  “Right, I’m on it,” I told him, pulling out my phone like I was going to start making calls. He clapped a hand on my shoulder, dismissing me.

  I hurried upstairs, back to my room, where Maggie was going to be waiting for me. The run-in with the police left me with a few questions. After being on the street as long as I had been as a biker, and fulfilling as many roles as I did for other “organizations,” I knew when something smelled fishy, there was usually a reason for it.

  In other words, someone didn’t show up at random at a sex slave auction without someone being behind that person’s appearance. To top it off, everyone backstage had seemed a little on-edge all night, worried someone was going to show up to start trouble. I was starting to think that person had tried to live vicariously through some of the girls who had been there.

  I opened the door to my room and glanced in. Maggie was back under the covers, sleeping soundly. I considered waking her to ask her more about the boyfriend she’d been running from when she ended up on the street. If he had any connections, he would have been just the person to call the cops or set her up.

  Before I could walk into the room, my phone went off in my hand. I didn’t recognize the number. I closed the door and stepped back into the hallway. I stared down at the number. I didn’t feel comfortable answering a number I didn’t know, but the timing was just too coincidental not to be significant. Accidents never happened in my line of work.

  They were almost always planned.

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Blade?” a man’s nervous voice asked on the other end.

  “Who’s asking?” I said in return.

  “Look, man, I was told to call Blade. It’s about last night.”

  Last night? I wondered. “Yeah, this is Blade. Who am I speaking with?”

  “My name’s not important. I was there last night, and I need to talk to you about a problem. It’s about one of the girls,” the man on the other line said.

  My heart sank into my stomach. My veins turned to ice. The hair on my arms stood on end. I glanced at the closed door to my room. I’d never had a night go so wrong after the fact, but here it was, the middle of the next day, and the night before kept getting worse and worse.

  “First, tell me who you are,” I said in a slow, deep voice. I wanted to let him know I wasn’t going to tolerate any games when it came to talk of the auction.

  “I used the name Titus Bard last night. That’s all I can tell you,” he said.

  Titus Bard had been one of the buyers. I knew if he were calling me, there had to be a big problem with the girl.

  Chapter 13

  Maggie

  “Blade?”

  I jerked awake in the bed as his name flew from my lips. I looked around the room and ran my hands across the covers next to me. He was gone. The room and the bed were both empty. I didn’t panic. It was no different from any other time I’d woken up to find myself alone in a hotel room or some dude’s bedroom from the night before.

  The strange part was what I had seen that night, leading into the morning, had actually started to convince me Blade was one of the good guys. Apparently, no matter how good he was, he was still just a guy. No better than any of the rest.

  I thought I’d heard him come back a few minutes after the police had taken him downstairs, but I couldn’t remember too clearly.

  I looked at the window facing out of the room. “Good, it’s still daylight,” I mused to myself. “I need to figure out how I’m going to get out of here.”

  I slid out of bed, still naked, and pulled on my clothes from where I’d left them on the floor. There was still time in the day to figure out where to go. I didn’t want to impose. I didn’t want him to worry about me. I certainly didn’t want to get stuck in another dead-end relationship with another man who was just going to use me for my body. I wasn’t going to be convenient for anyone. I was going to be me and I was going to be ever-present in someone’s life, or not in it at all.

  I poked my head out of the room and looked up and down the hall. Giving myself the all-clear, I walked down to the staircase. It was time to plot my escape, time to get away. Blade seemed like a good guy, and I made a million excuses in my head for what I was doing, but it all boiled down to the fact I just wanted to get away. I had started running from Axel, and I didn’t want to stop just because I’d found another guy who was nice in the beginning.

  “Hey, you’re the girl Blade brought back with him last night,” a voice said behind me. I turned around and saw a woman with tan skin and frizzy black hair. She wore black eyeliner, a thin T-shirt that exposed her midriff, a black leather vest without any of the MC’s colors, and skin tight blue jeans. She held a cigarette between two long, thin fingers. It wasn’t lit, but she held it like it was.

  I froze. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what was okay to say.

  “Relax, hun. I won’t bite. You’re not my type. What’s your name?” she asked in a rough voice that told me she’d spent a lot of time with these guys.

  “Maggie,” I said cautiously.

  “Nice to meet you, Maggie. Name’s Bre,” she said. “I’m Bean’s old lady.”

  Who the hell is Bean? I wanted to ask her. I didn’t really need to know. I was going to be out of there pretty soon.

  “You lookin’ for Blade?” she continued, like it didn’t faze her at all that I wasn’t answering her questions.

  “Yeah, I was just about to go downstairs to see if he was down there,” I lied.

  “He ran off a little while ago, after the cops left. Said he had something to handle,” Bre told me.

  “Did he say how long he was going to be?” I asked.

  “Honey, I’m lucky he told me anything. I just happened to be hanging out in the hallway when he got off the phone.”

  “Off the phone?” I asked, mostly to myself.

  “Don’t be one of those girls, getting jealous of every person he talks to. You’ll go crazy. These guys live free, baby. You want to keep one of them faithful, you gotta keep up with him. You can’t be sleepin’ all day and expect one of the Marauders to just hang around waiting on you,” Bre explained.

  “I see,” I said, nodding. I was thinking about what that phone call must have been about. I wondered if someone from the auction was looking for me since he’d taken me away the way he did.

  “Besides, it sounded like it was business anyway, so don’t sweat it, honey.”

  I smiled. I wasn’t sweating it the way she thought I was. Something was wrong, and that realization added yet another item to the growing list of reasons why I wanted to leave. Bre was on that list, too.

  “So, how’d you two meet? I haven’t seen you around before.”

  My breath caught in my chest when she started probing. I decided to use Blade’s story from earlier. “We met at the club. He helped me when someone jacked my purse.”

  “That must have been some kind of help he put on you this morning.” She smiled as she looked me up and down.

  I wondered what she meant from that, or how she knew what had happened in the room that morning after we’d come back from the children’s home.

  “It doesn’t take much to see what happened between the two of you,” Bre said, as if she could read my mind. “Be careful, honey. I hope you stick around.”

  “You know, Blade isn’t the first rough type I’ve dated,” I announced quickly. “I know I probably look like I’m new here, like I’m new to this life or whatever, and I know I’m acting a little unsure of myself, but that’s because my life got turned upside down last night. Blade was there to pull me out of the situation I found myself in, and he brought me here so I had somewhere safe to go. So, take your judgmental eyes on down the hallway.”

  I expected Bre to snap back at me. She looked like the kind of woman who started – and finished – a lot of fights.

  Instead of bowing up at me or trying to start anyth
ing, she laughed. “You got some spunk, kid. I can see why he brought you back here. You keep that shit up, you’ll fit in just fine around here, girl.” She gave me a big smiled as she talked and nodded approvingly at how I’d responded to her.

  “I don’t want to be underestimated because I might seem a little nervous right now. But I don’t know you, and I don’t know anyone else here other than Blade, so forgive me if I’m a little guarded,” I said, with as much authority as I could muster.

  “Hey, it’s no problem, girlie. What happened last night?” The dreaded question.

  “I don’t want to talk about it. You really don’t know how long Blade is going to be?” I asked.