by Lexy Timms
I took a left between two buildings, practically running towards my dorm. But when I got there, I couldn't go inside. What if Sloane was in there? I couldn't deal with her right now. Her special bitch senses would start tingling the second I walked in the door and she would pounce on me, knowing I was upset. No way. I had one more final tomorrow, and then I was done with school for almost a month. When I came back I would have a new roommate. If I never talked to Sloane again, that would be fine with me, and I really couldn't deal with her now.
I turned and race-walked away from my dorm, my eyes on the ground, trying to deny all the old feelings that had come flooding back when I saw him.
I put my hand in my pocket and touched the smooth glass of my phone screen. I wanted to call him. Just to hear his voice. It had been over a month since I had even had a text conversation with him, and that pulled at me. I hadn't heard his voice since my mom's funeral. I was trying to move on. Trying to forget about him. Trying to create a life that didn't hurt so bad when he wasn't in it.
Even so, I wanted to check one more time and see if maybe, just maybe, he felt differently about me, or could learn to. I'd always been nothing more than the little sister of his best friend, I knew that.
In the six weeks since I'd last seen him I'd dyed a blonde streak in my hair, pierced my nose, even gotten a tattoo. Trying to change who I was? No. I mostly liked me, but I was trying to change how I looked, maybe how he saw me. My hand touched my side where the tattoo was. I wondered if he would ever see it, and if he did, would he understand its significance? I was still the same baby-faced, good-girl, overachiever I'd always been. I couldn't change my basic nature, but being on my own had given me the space to branch out a bit. He wasn't a pure bad boy either. He was complicated. Complex. That was one thing I loved about him.
I hit Campus Drive and stopped to look down at my feet. I wasn't dressed for it, but a hard run would clear my head, get some of this off my chest. Then maybe I could call Talon and see if he was ok. After that I could go back to my room and grab my books to study in the library for my last final tomorrow.
I was wearing jeans, a lightweight sweater, and my cross-trainers. They would have to do. I shoved my phone and my keys and my special forces challenge coin that Talon had given me down deeper in my pockets and took off, keeping a light pace at first, then speeding up. My thoughts churned and simmered and I just let them go. They had to burn themselves out before I could find peace. The trail was almost deserted and I wasn't surprised. Everyone was doing last minute studying. I focused on a tree in the distance and ran at it, always switching to a new one as I got closer.
The late morning air was crisp, but sweat formed on my brow, then began to soak my jeans, making them heavier. I looped back around to where I started, feeling my muscles relax and my brainwaves smooth out. I had gone almost three miles, and even though this was at least a six mile upset, I didn't know if I could go that far. My jeans were chafing me already at the insides of my knees and tops of my thighs.
I rounded a slight curve and felt a bit of unexplainable panic, almost like my intuition was warning me of a large animal stalking me and about to pounce. But that didn't make sense. There were no animals here. My stride faltered and I almost tripped over my own feet.
Something big and hard and fast hit me from the side, lifting me off the ground and into the trees. My vision blackened as my head snapped to the right and the breath was forced out of me. When I could see again, I was face down in the dirt and leaves on the side of the trail, behind two trees, with something heavy pinning me to the ground, my head and body pounding in pain like a rotten tooth.
What in the hell was going on? Had a car jumped the curb and come on to the path and hit me? I hadn't heard a revving engine.
A strange ripping noise sounded behind me and I lifted my head and twisted to see what the hell was going on. A man's hands roughly pushed my head forward again and then wound what could only be duct tape around my head, sealing my lips completely shut. Some of the duct tape covered one of my nostrils and I tried to rear back in fear. I was being murdered! Or kidnapped!
The man on top of me was too heavy for me to move at all. The ripping noise sounded again and I went into a frenzy, trying to buck him off of me. I hit at him with my fists and kicked with my feet but I couldn't make even a single connection from my position.
I couldn't scream. I couldn't move. I could barely fucking breathe.
I was done for.
Chapter 2
Talon
Whip ran in front of me, crouching through the unfamiliar, dilapidated building, pointing his gun forward but slightly to the ground, the way we had both been taught in the army forty years apart. The gun I was holding felt strange in my hand, not like it belonged there anymore. That part of my life was over, had died with my military career, had been blown away with part of my leg.
A door slammed in front of us, somewhere down the hallway, the sound reverberating through the dark building. We weren't prepared for this, but we were there anyway. Jaze was in danger.
Whip slowed as the corridor divided in front of us. He stopped and looked to the right, then motioned for me to follow. The second he turned the corner, the corridor lit up with what looked and sounded like fireworks, but I knew they were gunshots. Whip jerked backwards and fell to the ground, even as his gun hand came up and fired off several shots down the hallway. My instincts took over and I leapt past him, looking at him long enough to make sure he would alter his firing path enough to not shoot me in the back. I emptied my magazine as I ran, then dropped it, slamming another one home in less than a second. I ran crouched, with nothing but sheer adrenaline to keep me going. I knew there were only two ways this could end. With me dead, or with me walking out of here with Jaze. Nothing else was an option.
I couldn't see anything ahead of me in the gloom, but the gunshots had stopped. I didn't dare stop firing myself, because I knew as soon as I did, I would be toast.
I saw a dark fabric full of holes hanging in my way, a strange red light shimmering behind it.
God only blesses the bold. I'd learned that many times in the sandbox.
I ran right through the hanging fabric, brushing it aside with one hand and bursting into the room beyond, crouching so much I was almost crawling, feinting left and right to minimize the possibility I would be hit by bullets. In the monstrous quiet, I could hear Whip coming behind me. The rattle of his breath told me he'd been hit in the chest. That would have been bad, except I knew he was wearing a bullet proof vest.
I was on a loading dock open to the outside air. In front of me, tires screeched as a pickup truck pulled away from the dock. My every hope fractured in despair as I saw what was in the back of the truck.
Jaze. Eyes closed. Lifeless. Fresh blood spurting from his head. Smoking holes in his shirt.
I ran as hard as I could and launched myself at the fleeing truck. It had to be fifteen feet away already and gaining speed. My fingers grazed the tailgate, but I slammed into the ground, rolling, my leg screaming in pain. I ignored it and ran hard, praying it wouldn't give out. I put my entire life into my strides.
It didn't matter. The truck pulled easily away from me in the long parking lot.
"The bikes!" Whip shouted from behind me.
I looked up, still in mid-stride and realized where we were in relation to the motorcycles we had left on the street. The truck reached the end of the lot and turned left. My eyes raked the license plate but it was splattered with mud and dirt and all I could make out was a 7 and a K. I ran out of the parking lot, past the chain link fence and turned left too. By the time I was ten feet from my motorcycle, a sick feeling of dread wound through me. My tires were completely flat on their wheels. Whip's were too.
It had all been a setup.
Chapter 3
Crystal
My dad's face flashed through my mind. Words he had told me once floated through my consciousness, even as my vision began to blacken.
&nbs
p; Don't ever give up. Don't ever let someone take you. Always fight. Don't ever get in a car with someone just because they have a gun pointed at you. It's better to die on your feet in a few minutes than be tortured in someone's basement for a month.
The words weren't attached to any specific incident or memory, but it sounded like the kind of thing my dad would say to me. He'd had a hard life, my dad. A horrible life sometimes. He'd been captured in Vietnam, I knew that. He'd been to jail many times. He'd even lost his only love, my mother, less than two months ago to a suspicious car accident. When he said things like that, it had always seemed to hold some sort of empty threat, like I knew that stuff happened to other people, but not to me. Until now.
I pressed my forehead into the ground and lifted my back up with all the strength I had, using up the last of my oxygen, seeing my dad in my mind's eye. His image faded and Talon's face replaced it.
I would see Talon again. And when I did, I would tell him how I felt.
I shoved a hand in my pocket, thinking I could call 911. Maybe the police could trace my location and would send a car by. If I wasn't dragged off by then. My fingers traced the coin Talon had given me and the image of Talon in my mind leapt into Technicolor. That was my lucky coin.
Now I knew I would get out of this. My fingers dug deeper and found something else.
A desperate weapon for a desperate time.
I pulled my keys out and dropped my stomach to the ground, tucking my right shoulder underneath me and twisting my body with every ounce of strength I possessed. As I rolled, I fit my room key between two fingers, so the end stuck out like a tiny knife. As soon as my shoulder was free enough I slammed the key as hard as I could at the shape above me, aiming for a dark hole I thought was an eye.
A tortured scream rewarded me and the hands that had been holding me disappeared. My keys ripped out of my grasp and hot wet liquid splashed on me. With my now-empty hand I ripped the duct tape off my mouth and pulled in a gasping breath.
My vision returned.
The man on top of me had his hands over his bloody face, my keys dangling over his thumb. I scooted backwards, almost hyperventilating, then pulled my feet out from underneath him and kicked out at him with all my strength, knocking him backwards. My keys fell to the dirt with a tiny, unimportant jingle as he groaned and grabbed at his eye.
I rolled, gasped, and scrambled to my feet, hooking my keys with one hand, and ran.
Eventually, I was able to scream.
Chapter 4
Talon
I woke up with a jerk, almost falling off the office chair I was perched on. My eyes locked on the clock on the wall. I'd slept for almost three hours.
So it had all been a dream ... ?
Hope surged through me like it had each time I'd fallen asleep for the last twenty-six days, only to be awakened by the exact same dream.
The three blackened nails on my right hand caught my attention. No, it had really happened.
Fuck.
And we still hadn't found Jaze or his body. Still didn't know what had really happened, or if it had been our bullets that had ripped through his chest and head.
In my mind, I knew he was dead. I knew I had killed him.
It was destroying me, one haze-filled day at a time.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out and looked at the screen. Crystal. I couldn't deal with her right now. She didn't even know Jaze was missing. Whip had forbidden me from telling her so she wouldn't fail her final exams. She'd never been close with her mother, but having to come home for her mother's funeral in the middle of the school year had still dealt her a blow, put her behind. She'd almost not gone back to school, and to me, that was unacceptable. She had to be the one to make it out of this small town, the one to live her dreams, the one to finally be happy.
I pressed ignore and shoved my phone back in my pocket.
I looked around the small room, searching my mind, trying to throw off the pall of dread the dream had left over me. Why had I come here?
My eye fell on the full closet and I strode to it, pulling clothes out and stuffing them into the duffel I had brought. I had rented a house two months ago in order to provide a home for my brothers after my mom kicked them out, but I still hadn't managed to move all my shit from this tiny room at the clubhouse where I had lived since I returned from my time at Womack Army Medical Center. It had been low fucking priority, but now I was running out of clean clothes.
My shirts twisted on the hangers as my thoughts piled on top of each other. I yanked at the hangers, sweeping several of them onto the floor, then having to kneel and pick them up, ignoring the twinge in my right calf. Womack. God I had hated that place. Those fucking doctors had lied to me, experimented on me, and finally thrown me away because of one simple mistake, launching my hopes of being career army into the fucking trash can.
I stuffed the shirts in the duffel and stalked across the room, blowing air noisily out of my mouth, not wanting to go down this road, even in my own thoughts again.
What's done is done.
A knock sounded on the door and I turned to it, pissed and glad at the same time. "What?"
"Whitey told me to check on you," Rams called through the door, his voice making it sound like he hadn't wanted to. I twisted the shirt still in my hands and flung it on the bed. Yeah, I knew I'd been a grumpy fucker lately. Keeping a dozen fucking secrets would do that to a man.
"I'm fine. Took a nap," I fired back.
"Got it," Rams said and I heard his boots clomp down the hallway.
I went back to my packing, forcing myself to fold everything neatly. When I had filled my duffel I slung it over my shoulder and headed into the hall.
Music and laughter greeted me. Fuckers. Having fun while Jaze was missing. They should all be out looking for him. Whip and his fucking secrets, telling the boys Jaze was in Vegas. Only a few guys knew and Whip had threatened to disown them if they said a word before Whip was ready.
If I thought it would do any good I would spill it to everyone, but Whip had insisted I didn't. He and I had spent every day since we'd seen Jaze lifeless in the back of the truck asking questions to anybody we thought could possibly know something, but we hadn't turned up anything.
Whip said the cops knew Jaze was missing, and I figured the deputy chief did. Him and Whip went way back, all the way to school days, before Vietnam, before the Mad Marauders MC was even a dream. But was there an APB out on Jaze? Were cops on the street looking for him? Had there been any investigation into what had gone down in the warehouse? Whip wouldn't say. I knew better than to push.
But that didn't mean I could just fucking leave things either. I had my own investigation underway that Whip didn't know about. He'd be pissed as hell if he found out. Oh fucking well. I was never one to blindly follow orders.
"Talon, that reporter is outside again," Rams said from his seat at the smoky bar.
I grunted and kept walking, ignoring my phone as it buzzed in my pocket. As I reached the door I heard one of the prospects fake-whisper, "If he was fucking airborne, how come he don't wear the badge? I bet he was just a leg."
I stopped and dropped my duffel. The talk in the room cut off but my heartbeat stayed steady. Ordinarily I didn't care what anyone thought of me, especially some fucking prospect, but my nerves were worn thin already. I wouldn't try to prove I'd been where I'd been and done what I'd done. What was done was fucking done and I didn't like to talk about it anyway. That was why I didn't wear my badges, even though I had earned a metric fuck-ton of them. Because people asked too many questions about things I wanted to bury.
I turned and found the prospect at the pool table and walked towards him. He saw me coming, and too late, realized his mistake. He put his hands up and his eyes went wide. "Sorry man, Talon, I was just fu—"
I cut off his words with a head butt to his jaw. Down he fucking went. "Those badges didn't do shit for you, did they?" I snarled, nodding at the sharpshooter and airborne badges
he had pinned over his left tag.
I returned to my duffel and hauled it out the door.
"Get him out of here," I heard Whitey snarl behind me. "And when he wakes up, tell him not to come back. He can talk to Whip but till Whip's back, he stays the fuck away."
Good. I didn't like that guy anyway. It would save me the trouble of having to vote no fucking way for him if Whitey didn't like him either. Now that the other guys had seen the vice-president throw him out of the clubhouse while he was knocked the fuck out, opinion would turn against him real quick.
My mind turned back to my real problems and I held on for the ride.
Chapter 5
Talon
I pushed out the door into the sunlight. The hot dry air pressed against my face, warming it immediately. I pulled my sunglasses out of an inner pocket of my leather cut and put them on, already noting the reporter in her car at the gate. She didn't quite dare to come in the parking lot. Someone must have had a talk with her.
Good. She needed to go away.
I strapped my bag to the back of my Dyna, then threw my leg over the seat and fired it up. The roar of the engine soothed me immediately. If I couldn't be one of Uncle Sam's mean and unseen, then I would ride a beast for the rest of my life and never think it was second-fucking-fiddle. I didn't have to ride it to somewhere. Just riding it was enough.
My phone buzzed in my pocket but I didn't care. If it was Whip, ignoring him would be payback. Anyone else didn't matter right now. Crystal's face popped into my thoughts but I ignored it. She was happy. Working hard. Chasing her dream. She didn't need me.
I twisted the throttle and rode to the street. The reporter was already out of her car and moving towards me. I headed straight for her, then jogged around her at the last minute, enjoying the look of alarm on her face. I wasn't trying to be a fucking outlaw, most days, but if she thought I would just as soon run over her than talk to her, she might leave me alone. I would never give her an interview.
