Fastening the buttons on the breakaway dress she’d rip off during the first high swell of music in the song she’d selected, Grace looked in the mirror. She still had to use black eyeliner to put some more drama on her face—she’d quickly learned that there was a difference between makeup that looked good on stage and makeup that worked for a normal night out. The midnight wings she drew under and over her eyes went higher and were thicker for work. Powders were darker with more shimmer. The lipstick was so red that it looked like she’d been drinking fresh blood.
With a sigh, she bound her hair into a bun and settled back in the chair. Old habits die hard and she hadn’t been able to stop showing up much earlier than she needed to be. Pulling out her phone, she checked the latest headlines and waited for her turn on the stage. Between dances, she’d have to work the crowd, though she didn’t care about boosting her tips. But it was the best way to keep an eye on the girls and the men, who’d started to blur together. She grouped them automatically as she wound through the thick crowd of people every night.
The frat boys who drank beer and swallowed thickly, hooting at women and mostly keeping their hands to themselves.
The bachelor parties, which came in two flavors: awkward and inappropriate. She had a soft spot for the awkward bachelor parties, the men who’d come in because they thought it was the right thing to do for their friend before he got married. People tend to spend time with similar people, and in those groups she’d always see that the man of honor looked uncomfortable, like he’d rather be spending the evening with his bride to be instead of stuck in the dark dungeon of sin that seemed to be a rite of passage.
The inappropriate parties made her feel bad for whatever woman the man in question was going to marry. They were the ones who got too drunk and grabbed for her ass with fingers made clumsy by too many shots of whiskey. Always the jokes about the groom’s life being over and the old ball and chain, as if he hadn’t asked the woman to marry him.
She hated working for those groups.
The lonely, single men who came in looking for conversation and maybe a quick blowjob in one of the bathrooms. It was illegal, technically, but she wasn’t here to bust johns or the women who made extra money servicing them. So she looked the other way as long as none of the liaisons moved toward the back door. They were easy to work for, anyway, and tended to tip generously if their clothing was decent and poorly if it wasn’t. Either way, Grace couldn’t help but wonder what had led the men to sit alone in a strip club to watch strangers take off their clothes.
Businessmen sometimes came in together, but it was usually during happy hour, which wasn’t the shifts she was scheduled for. Women had been taken at night, so Grace always, always worked the late shift.
It was starting to drain her.
Her life goal hadn’t been to be a police officer—it had been to work with people who needed help and, in Detroit, this seemed like the way to do it. She thought of her gun in her coat and the badge she’d left at home, wondering if all of this was worth it. Since she’d left the warmth and comfort of California, those dreams had fallen by the wayside, leaving a larger, darker pit in her stomach every day that she did nothing but wait.
The room felt cold tonight. The heater was on the fritz again, which wasn’t a problem in the larger room stuffed with bodies and pumping with hot music. Peter was unlikely to fix a problem if it didn’t affect his patrons, so she made a mental note to bring a robe to work the next time she was on shift.
The song changed and she walked to the edge of the stage, where she could look through the door and watch the woman dancing on the main stage. Mandi was an excellent dancer—she could command a room in a way that few woman who worked at the Ladies Night could. Part of it was her delicate, ethereal beauty, like a fairy who’d stumbled into a strip club only to discover that taking off her clothes gave her a boost. The rest was her fantastic control. Mandi always waited until the right moment to remove each piece of clothing, always smiled and simpered at the perfect time to make the crowd’s blood flow faster.
Mandi saw Grace watching and winked before flipping upside down and sliding down the pole. She couldn’t help but grin at her friend’s cheeky expression as she kicked her legs out in the air and whipped her head around, her long blonde hair brushing the floor. The men closest to the stage were slathering at the view and that was before she rotated, leapt off the pole and pulled off the very small top she’d worn until now.
Through the lights that pulsed, Grace saw the door open and recognized the silhouette of the man who stepped inside, nodding to the bartender before sliding onto a stool and taking the drink the man immediately brought to him. Despite her best efforts, the sides of her lips curved up and a warm glow started in her chest and spread through her belly. Tom pulled out his phone and looked down at it, scrolling through whatever information was on the screen while she watched, secreted away in her hidden nook. From where she stood, she couldn’t see the details of his face—the faint shadow of the beard that felt so rough against her skin when his lips made a path down her neck, or the lines around his eyes that crinkled up when he grinned at a joke she made—but she wanted to cross the room and just lean against him. Just be with him.
But Mandi’s song was done and she walked off the stage to raucous cheers.
“They’re all fired up now,” she said, grabbing one of the thin cotton robes that hung in the back. She’d wear it for the ten minutes she spent pulling on a new outfit and fixing her makeup and hair. “You ready to go out?”
“As ready as ever,” Grace said. “How was your date tonight?”
“Fell through.” Mandi’s mouth puckered in an expression Grace might have called a frown on someone less adorable. “His parents came into town and I guess he didn’t want me to meet them, because he cancelled me but kept our reservation. He met me at the door of the restaurant and said that we’d get together this weekend.”
“That sucks.” Grace wrapped her in a one armed hug and tapped their heads together lightly. “You want to get some waffles after we’re off work? We can talk about how terrible men are and how we should buy a house by the ocean without them.”
“I’d say yes, but I think you have an admirer here who will want to go home with you.” Mandi’s eyes lit up as she looked out at the club. “It’s nice that you have someone. He doesn’t even look at the other women the way most of the men here do. But when he sees you, he has this smile. Like he’s just glad you’re there.”
“He and I don’t have plans,” Grace insisted, though the glow in her chest intensified. “I’d like to spend some time with you.”
“Talk to him and we’ll see.” Mandi kissed Grace’s cheek and pulled away, leaving the faint hint of Beautiful perfume and waxy lipstick behind. “Maybe all three of us can go. Or maybe I’ll snag a fourth.”
Grace laughed and stretched as the music started. “You won’t have any trouble if you want to bring someone else with us.”
“I know,” Mandi said, grinning. “Get out there.” A light tap on Grace’s back urged her toward the stage and when she took the first steps out in front of the crowd, she looked across the sea of men to Tom, who turned on his bar stool and smiled at her. She smiled back. She couldn’t help herself.
_____
Tom hadn’t felt a surge of jealousy in his life. Women were nice enough and he had a lot of respect for them—his father, mother and sister had seen to that. But the ones he’d dated had never inspired anything more than an erection and occasionally the desire for conversation. But something about Dakota made his insides twist up whenever she walked into a room.
The crowd of men pressing toward the stage as she took a few steps toward the pole at the center made his hands clench. She wasn’t his, exactly, but that didn’t mean they had the right to leer at her like that.
Two nights before, a man had grabbed her breast while she’d worked the room. Tom grabbed him by the arm and took him out to the alley—then he’d snapped his wr
ist with a crunch that sounded like a booted foot slamming into a full bag of cereal. The man pissed himself and fell to the ground while Tom moved his hand up the arm to the elbow and considered snapping that too.
“Dancers aren’t your property,” he hissed into the whimpering man’s ear. “Don’t fucking touch a woman who didn’t ask you for it.”
Then he’d kicked the man once and gone back in to keep watching Dakota.
But still, she wasn’t his woman. Maybe Jack had gone and gotten himself hitched and sure, his father and mother had been in love, but that wasn’t for him. Maybe once he’d had softer feelings and a different plan for another kind of life. Something with a family. Someone who would share his home and his bed. But that was gone as surely as Butch had killed his father. The second Butch pulled the trigger, the entire trajectory of Tom’s life changed.
Dakota wasn’t part of the plan.
But damn, he couldn’t stop coming in here when she was working. Half the nights she’d leave with him and they’d stuff their faces with food while he asked her questions about his life and half-answered his. Part of him wondered what she was holding back. Sometimes she’d pause before answering a question, like she had to get it straight in her head before she said anything. Simple shit, too. Like whether she’d ever wanted to go to college and how she’d ended up becoming a stripper.
But Tom knew he wasn’t forthcoming either, so he didn’t push. Though the urge grew stronger every time he was with her.
He liked watching her dance. She was beautiful and graceful and so fucking sweet that his teeth almost ached just looking at her. But his favorite part of the night was still to come, so he sat back and waited for her dance to be over, silently raising his glass to her when the music faded and she looked over the crowd of people to match gazes with him.
Then she was gone, backstage, and he was just waiting. It would come soon enough.
He swirled the amber liquid in his glass and wondered how much of the faint trail he already had on Butch he was losing by coming in here every night. It was a lot of wasted time, he knew, because no one here knew a damn thing. Other rats waited for him to find them, track them and exterminate them—but instead he was here because he didn’t want to leave her alone.
He read the news. It was no secret that women had been taken right off the streets in recent months, and most of them worked in adult entertainment. Dakota was strong—he’d seen that for himself—but he couldn’t trust that strength in the face of what he already knew was wrong in the city.
The year before, the Storm Runners had tracked down Jack’s woman. She’d been taken by the same human traffickers who had kidnapped her best friend the year before. Tom was there the night they’d taken the women back from the monsters—and found a group of other women from South America waiting to be sent out of Detroit with Anna. But he’d gone after Butch so he’d missed the worst of what waited in the house where they’d held his brother’s woman.
Still, though, Ace had insisted the club see how deep the rabbit hole went and the answers they’d found in the last year weren’t encouraging. One of the reasons Butch had set up the massacre that killed Tom’s father was that he was pulling the Storm Runners back from illegal activities. In the age of the Internet, things were different—crimes were being tracked nationally and they couldn’t be sure the drugs and guns they were selling weren’t coming back to haunt them when they moved the next shipment.
Butch had casually suggested moving into the human flesh market at one point—not outright suggesting trafficking, but the intention had been shimmering behind his words. It was a normal day at Church, gathered around the large table in the meeting room of the clubhouse and Tom could still remember the look of disgust on Max’s face as the president considered the words Butch, his vice president and second in command said.
“We aren’t using women like currency,” Max said. “I don’t care if you want to open strip clubs—that’s different and we’d only employ willing women who want to work there. But we aren’t grabbing women off the street and drugging them so they’ll sleep with men for money.”
“You’re looking this the wrong way,” Butch insisted, leaning forward in his chair. A strange light entered his eyes and his fingers drummed on top of the table. “You have no idea how much money we can make off this. It would eclipse our arms sales for the past three years.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve done the research.”
The silence between the two men stretched thin while everyone else held their breath. Max was a good man and a strong leader—but if he had a weakness it was his inability to control himself when someone said or did something nasty to a woman. A man who loved his wife as much as Max did couldn’t stand to see any women in pain. Tom had grown up in a club where every woman who entered was safe from coercion and supported when they needed help, even if they were a random sweet butt who’d wandered in with some newbie.
“How did you do that research?” Max finally said. The threat loomed in his eyes and even Tom felt his muscles clench. His father was on the edge of snapping and he didn’t want to have to pull the two men—both built like bulls—apart.
“I talked to some people in the business.”
“Who?”
“I can’t give names.”
Max nodded, then rose from his chair. “Everyone get the fuck out of here.”
“What?” The murmurs ran through the assembled club members.
“Get the fuck out. Except you Butch. You stay in your fucking chair.” Butch nodded and the men trickled out of the room one by one. Tom was the last one out the door. He put his hand on his father’s shoulder.
“Do you want me to stay?”
“No, son.” Max’s eyes had softened as he looked at the man he’d raised from a boy. “Butch and I just need to work a few things out. Stick around if you can. I have a hankering for a pizza from Paulo’s.”
“I’ll wait.” Max nodded and then turned away before Tom walked out the door. He sat on the couch and played games with one of his brothers, wincing when he heard a crash from the meeting room. Minutes later, Butch and Max walked out. Butch hastened toward the stairs, but not before Tom could see that his mouth was bleeding.
Max had been dead weeks later.
The club hadn’t known why. Hadn’t understood that the human trafficking issue Butch raised was one he was willing to kill for—because the money really was that good. Maybe Dakota would never be targeted, but he wasn’t able to walk away and leave her defenseless when there was the smallest chance that she could be. They’d found Anna through pure luck. He couldn’t chance losing Dakota and not being able to find her before she was hurt.
More than once, he’d considered telling her about the danger that lurked on the streets, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He’d warned her about bad men and cautioned her to keep an eye out after her shift, but he didn’t know how to tell her about the real threat out there when that led to Butch…to his father.
That wasn’t a wound he was ready to pick open.
So when she stepped out of the main door, freshened up after her dance, he rose and crossed the room to her. It was more difficult every night to stop himself from spending the entire time with her. He wanted to. Wanted to pull her over to the bar and chat with her until her shift ended and he could get her back to her apartment, where she’d change into sweats and a tank top and he’d spend an hour thinking about all the ways he could get them off.
She enchanted him. It was like her very presence pulled him through crowds of men and past women with cocktails on trays, precariously perched on their hands. When he was within reach of Dakota, he felt that spark inside that only ignited when she was close to her. Part of him hated it, how it reminded him of the man he used to be. But all of him craved to feel it heat and ignite.
“Hey you,” he said, standing close enough to her that the words could be soft. Not yelled over the roar of music and the crowd.
“Hey.” Her gentle lips smiled at him and she leaned up on her toes to press a quick kiss to his cheek. “I didn’t think I’d see you tonight.” He’d told her that he had a lot of work to get done.
“I have enough staff that I can choose where I spend my time,” he told her. Still, he should have been putting in more hours at the bar. Ace had even talked to him about it more than once—about how the club couldn’t complete Max’s dream of going straight if they weren’t willing to put in the hours. But he still scheduled other people to cover the bar so he could come to this dive and see her.
“I’m glad you choose to spend it here,” she said. “I have to work the crowd a little.”
“Come by the bar now and then,” he said. “I’ll move up when you get back on the stage.”
“Thanks,” she said, then she walked away from him and he watched, wondering why he hated to see her go.
_____
The club was packed and it was only getting busier as midnight approached. Maybe the cold weather had people looking for alternatives to dive bars that had less bodies and, by extension, less heat.
All Grace really knew was that she felt overwhelmed. The impossibility of wanting something to happen, for the case to move forward combined with her desire to get out of the Ladies Night and it all pressed down on her like a weight. The music was too loud, the scents too strong. Months could pass without something happening here and, even if it did, there was no guarantee she’d hear the right words that would lead them to a break.
Or, worse, she’d be pulled off and then someone else would be taken.
So she danced and charmed the men who came up to talk to her, encouraging them to buy drinks and suggesting other girls for private dances. Tom stayed at the bar unless she danced, still focused on his phone. She wondered whether he was doing work when he was here with her, if he was putting off doing something he needed to do.
STRIKE: Storm Runners Motorcycle Club 2 (SRMC) Page 8
