His brow pulled together and he gave her a bitter, stormy look. “I don’t know. I don’t fuckin’ know. We lost contact. Been three hours.”
Her stomach twisted. Three hours out of touch, and an arsenal building here in the clubhouse. Wherever Len was, he was in bad trouble. “Where are they?”
“You know you can’t ask that.”
“Fuck! Why aren’t you with them? How could you let them go on their own? Badger’s just a kid—how is he out there and you’re not?”
“Fuck you, Tash. Get out of my way.” He dropped her bags and shoved past her, knocking her into the bar. “Brothers! Keep! Now!”
The men wearing patches followed him. Tasha watched them go, feeling a frenzy coming to a low boil in her blood. When Isaac pushed open the Keep door, she caught a glimpse of Dom at the table, hunched over two laptops.
~oOo~
The vibe in the clubhouse was tense, but also strangely companionable. People milled about, chatting. Kids played. Babies cried. The club girls scurried about, cleaning up after people and doing the old ladies’ bidding.
Lilli and Shannon and Cory seemed to move in a kind of tandem, taking care of each other’s kids, dealing with questions, directing people this way or that. Even though Show and Havoc were among the men missing, Shannon and Cory both seemed focused on making the lockdown run. They were all a team.
Tasha didn’t know what her place was.
She wandered through the crowd, never feeling comfortable anywhere, always feeling like she was in somebody’s way.
Finally, somebody vacated a chair in a corner; Tasha made a beeline for it and got herself ensconced. Her eyes wandered again and again to the Keep; the men of the Horde had not left since Isaac had led them all in. Nothing was happening. No, everything was happening—just elsewhere.
Having found a place to be still and out of the way, she lost the tight control she’d had on her head, and her thoughts turned with a vengeance to Len. Since that horrible intervention the night before, Tasha had been making a series of decisions and discoveries. She needed Len home. She need him with her. She needed him. That much she knew. She’d told her friends she was in love with him, and that was true.
But this was why it was so scary to think about loving him. This life, this chaotic life. It hadn’t been like this, with life and death so often wavering on a slender fulcrum, when she was growing up, but it had been chaotic and unpredictable, always. The potential for violence and pain ever looming.
She had tried to get away, but now she was back in the bosom. Because she was with Len. The Horde hadn’t even seemed to doubt or question that she and Len were together, and serious, even though they themselves were still negotiating what they were.
No, that wasn’t true. She was negotiating. She was hedging. He was all in. Again and again he’d told her that he was all in. He wanted only her. As Tasha sat in the worn leather chair, tucked into a corner of the crowded Hall, she began to realize the full significance of Len’s desire to commit. She’d been afraid that his—and her—sexual tendencies meant that full commitment was impossible. But she’d been thinking about that all wrong. Len had no problem being forthright. And he was loyal to a fault. He wouldn’t bother to pretend to want something he didn’t actually want—or even something he felt conflicted about. She’d offered him a perfect arrangement, and he didn’t want it. Because he truly wanted only her.
And, anyway, being polyamorous wasn’t about being unable to commit. She knew that. That wasn’t how she was thinking about her and Len, though.
Jesus. Jesus Christ. He was right. Worse—Nadia was right. With a flash of clarity, sitting there churning with anxiety about Len’s safety, Tasha understood her fear. She’d been hiding from him. From herself.
She needed Len home. Home. Here. Signal Bend. The Horde. Her. Home.
Time was moving too fast. She’d been in the clubhouse for hours, and they knew nothing. No word, as far as she knew. No word meant that all of the men who’d gone on the run were in danger—or dead already.
How could it be that Isaac was still here?
Lilli walked over. “Tasha. Do you shoot?”
“What?”
“A gun. Do you know how to shoot a gun?”
“Yeah. Grew up with them. I still do some time at the range.”
Isaac’s old lady held her hand out. “Good. Come pick up a weapon or two. I’m guessing the inmates are going to be running this asylum tonight.”
“Lilli, what’s going on? Do you know?” They walked to the pool table and the pile of guns.
“No. But it’s not good, and there aren’t enough men to keep back, so when they go, it’ll be us and the Prospects and some townspeople holding the home front. Best be ready.” She took a handgun from the table, checked the clip, and tucked it in the back of her waistband.
Tasha picked up a Remington rifle. “You think the clubhouse is going to get hit?”
“I think we’d be stupid not to be ready for anything.” Lilli checked the load on a shotgun, then stared grimly at it. “Come on—come to the kitchen. If we’re gonna run this show, we need to stick together. Let’s talk.”
Tasha nodded, and they crossed the room together, holding their loaded guns. People cleared the way for them. It was a subtle but powerful demonstration of Lilli’s place in the clubhouse and in the town.
~oOo~
With the old ladies all gathered in the kitchen, the room seemed to be off limits to everybody else. Tasha was missing her chair in the corner—she wasn’t an old lady and felt out of place among these women who had made the Horde their life.
There hadn’t really been old ladies around the clubhouse when she was growing up. Several of the original and second generation Horde had been married, but the culture in those years was different. The club then was for the men themselves, almost like a secret society. They kept their wives and children away, for the most part. Isaac had been the exception. And then, after her mother left, Tasha had joined him in that exception. But Isaac had always been looked on as Horde-in-training. Even by his father, who’d had little good to say about him. All the Horde had taken an interest in him. Tasha had been alternately pampered or ignored. Her experience of the clubhouse was not one of potlucks and Super Bowl parties. She knew about booze and sex and cigars.
So it was strange to stand in this kitchen, which hadn’t changed much since her childhood, and see these women standing around a butcher-block island. Cory carried her sleeping son in his little Snugli. Lilli had toddler Bo on her hip. And Shannon was helping four-year-old Gia make a big bowl of chocolate pudding. There were rifles and handguns lying on the counters around the room.
It made Tasha’s head hurt to contemplate what was going on outside this clubhouse—to Len, to Show, to Havoc, to Badger—and here inside, with these women in this domestic space surrounded by guns.
Shannon and Gia put the big bowl of pudding in the fridge. As they were washing their hands, Nolan, Cory’s oldest, leaned his head into the kitchen, looking serious and distracted, but smiling nonetheless. “A lot of the kids out here are getting obnoxious. Can I put a movie in for everybody?”
Cory smiled at her son; Tasha saw how brittle that brave face really was. “Thanks, kiddo. That’d be great.”
“Hey, Gia. You want to come with me and pick?”
Gia turned to Nolan with a dramatic, happy gasp. “Mulan! I want Mulan! Mulan!” She hopped down from the stool and took Nolan’s offered hand.
Bo squirmed in Lilli’s arms. “Go Gia. Go Gia!”
Lilli looked at Nolan. “Do you mind?”
“Nope. Lori’s out here, too. We’ll herd up all the rugrats. Could we have popcorn?”
“Sure. Coming right up. Thanks, Nolan. Hey—you okay?”
His grin faltered, and he gave a halfhearted shrug. He didn’t bother to answer with words.
After the kids had left, the women stood awkwardly. Finally, Tasha couldn’t stand it anymore and asked, “Is there something I ca
n do?” She looked at Lilli, who returned a somber aspect.
Shaking her head slowly, Lilli replied, “For now, we wait. Something tells me you’ll be busier than anybody soon enough.”
“Lilli, don’t. Please.” That was Shannon, with a hitch in her voice. Perhaps it was unkind, but Tasha was glad to hear her voice break. It brought some reality to a situation that felt all too surreal.
“I’m sorry, Shan. God, I hope I’m wrong. But we have to be ready. We’ve been talking for months about how to be ready. Well, this is not a drill.”
“What’s going on? You know, don’t you? Hav never tells me anything. What is it?”
“I can’t tell you what your old man won’t, Cory. You know that.”
Cory scoffed bitterly. “That’s rich, coming from you. Like you’ve ever given a shit what you are or aren’t supposed to do.”
“I’m not putting myself between you and Hav, that’s for sure.” Lilli’s eyes were bright with anger.
“You’re the only one in this room whose man isn’t probably dead. Fuck you for holding out on us. What is going on?” Cory started to cry. Tasha’s heart went out to her. That little boy strapped to her chest wasn’t even two months old yet.
Shannon put her arm around Cory’s shoulders. “Lilli, isn’t there anything you can tell us?”
“I am telling you straight up—there is nothing I can tell you that will be of any kind of use to you. I don’t know as much as you seem to think, and what I do know can’t help. I’m sorry.”
“My dad used to say that the best way for a man to take care of his family was to protect them from who he really was.” The other women stopped and turned to Tasha. She didn’t know why she’d said that out loud. She hadn’t even been thinking it, as far as she’d known.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”
Lilli shook her head. “No, it’s okay. You grew up in the clubhouse, didn’t you?”
“I did. It was nothing like this, though. It didn’t even look like this. Back in those days, the Horde was into different stuff. Lower key, I guess. And my dad did say that, but he wasn’t very good at protecting me from who he was. I saw a lot more than I should have. But anyway, for what it’s worth, I do think Lilli’s right. As long as there’s nothing we can do, then knowing what’s happening can’t make it better. Could make it worse, though.”
Suddenly, Lilli cocked her head as if she were listening. Then she turned, grabbing her shotgun from the counter and bringing it up to her chest. “Fuck! Grab a gun or stay back and down. Cory, you get down with Luke.” She went out into the Hall. Tasha followed, grabbing the Remington she’d selected earlier.
As Tasha was about to ask what was wrong, the front door flew open, crashing against the wall. An armed man ran in. Tasha had seen him on the lot when she’d arrived.
“What’s goin’ on, Steve?”
“We got trouble, Lilli. We need Ike now.”
“Talk to me, Steve.” Isaac came hot through the Keep door, his gun drawn. The other men were right behind.
Steve answered as Isaac crossed to the front of the clubhouse. “Two vans outside the gates. Guys with big guns. Ike, they shot the boys.”
The boys—the young men who had been at the gates, in charge of running it open and closed while men stood guard.
Somebody in the crowd screamed.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Len stirred to a grudging consciousness at sound of the heavy wooden door scraping over the broken concrete floor. He forced open his one working eye and tried to see. He could barely focus, but he could see that the room was dim but not dark. Some kind of basement, with high, narrow windows, covered in grime, giving just enough light so that the utter absence of hope was brilliantly clear.
Three men were dragging Show in, while a fourth stood guard with an AR15. Show was unconscious and leaving a smear of blood. They dropped him against the far wall and left, scraping the door shut and slamming it. Len lay where he was and listened to the locks being set—a bolt being thrown. Chains. The heavy drop-dangle of a padlock.
“Show.” Almost no sound had left Len’s throat, so he forced a cough and tried again. “Show.”
“He’s…he’s…out cold.” Badger. “I can see…he’s…breathing, though.”
“How you doin’, kid?”
“M’okay. You?”
Len could hear Badger breathing—the sound was wet. He tried to lift his head to get a look at him, but the pain in his eye exploded. He was going to lose that fucker. It had come out of the socket during the last beating. They’d shoved it back in, but Len knew it was dead. He guessed it really didn’t matter. They were all dead, or would be soon enough.
In the meantime, these fuckers were just playing with them. When he’d first come to, he’d been in this room. They’d all been in here, bound up like Christmas turkeys, lined up in a row. They’d had no idea how long they’d been there, and bouts of unconsciousness made trying to keep time a lost cause. Len used his pain and the clotting of his injuries to make a very rough estimate. Half a day. Maybe longer. Felt like longer.
Every hour or so, that blasted door would scrape open, and four men would come in. Then one of the Horde would be dragged out, or dragged in.
Now, they weren’t even tying them up anymore. Not one of them had strength left to put up a fight.
But they were just playing. Not a single question—not one—had been asked of any of them. Barely any words had been spoken. They were taken, they were tortured, they were thrown back to fester, and then it started over again. Len was trying to work through what this was about, but it was hard to think at all, with so much pain.
“Hav—you back, brother?”
Silence.
“Hav?”
Badger coughed thickly and groaned. “Not here. Len, you…okay?”
“Not seein’ so good. They fucked my eye up hard. But I’m hanging in. You don’t sound so good, brother.”
“Chest…hurts. Broken, I guess.”
Show groaned then and roused. “Fuck. Everybody whole?” His words had the muddy quality of a man who’d lost some teeth.
“Hav’s been out there a while, I think.” Len forced himself to ignore his head and sit up. The pain in the rest of his body, though intense, was manageable considering the thick, hot blade of agony embedded in his left eye socket. He used the pain to focus, and he cleared his vision in his good eye.
“Christ, brother. What they do to you?” Show had rolled onto his back and was looking at Len.
“S’alright. I had a spare. What the fuck is goin’ on, though? Why aren’t they killing us?”
Badger, lying on his side with his arms crossed tightly over his chest, gasped, “They gotta want…somethin’, right? This isn’t just some…fucked up…horror movie we fell into?”
“Isaac.” Show’s voice in that word was clear. “They want Isaac.”
“They say something to you? Because they’re not asking me a fuckin’ thing. Just talking Spanish to each other.”
“Me, either.” Show spat and struggled up to lean his back against the cinderblock wall. His face was badly swollen, and his chest was streaked with blood. Len focused more tightly. Shit—Show looked like he’d been put through a shredder. The skin across his pecs was in tatters. “But it’s gotta be. They’re keeping us alive for a reason. They’re tryin’ to break us for a reason.”
Len knew Show was right, and the full truth was even more ominous. “Whole thing was a fuckin’ setup.”
“No other way to see it. Served up Halyard to get us. But what do we have that’s worth losing that guy?”
“Why?”
“I’d say they know what we’ve been planning—I’d say the whole alliance is fucked. But Isaac’s the one who got that plan moving.”
“Holy fuck. Bart.”
Show nodded once. “Yeah.”
“You…think he sold us…out?” Badger tried to sit up as he asked, but he only got as far as his elbow, then fell back
to the floor. Len was worried; the kid was struggling too much for breath.
Show turned to Badger. “No, little brother, no. I think he’s fucked. If I had to make a guess who sold us out, I’d guess his friend—Rick. But I don’t know. Somebody did. Somebody knew what Bart was up to.”
“Shit. Show, if they got him…” Len didn’t finish.
But Show did. “Yeah. This is a spa weekend compared to what they’ll do to him.”
That fucking door scraped open, and the Horde fell watchful and silent. Their captors brought Havoc in, and Len saw that his hands and feet had been reduced to vague chunks of raw meat. They dropped him in the middle of the room—he was conscious, barely, and panting.
And then they came again for Len.
~oOo~
At first, he fought waking as hard as he could. He didn’t want to come back to that fucking room—or worse, to the other room. And fucking Christ, he hurt—so bad that he was beginning to lose the ability to distinguish one part of his body from any other. He was an amorphous mass of white-hot pain.
“You back with us, brother?” At the sound of Havoc’s strained voice, Len made himself man up. He opened his eye. Just the one—they’d taken the other completely out. And then they’d…he shut that thought off. No need to relive it. The pain was a sufficient reminder.
“Yeah. Fuck. Hav—good to hear your voice.”
“This is some fucked up shit. Can you get over here? Badge’s bad, and I can’t…my hands…”
Len forced himself to his knees—he could get to his knees, which was better than he’d expected—and shuffle-crawled to Hav, where he sat next to Badger.
The kid really did look bad. Len focused his eye. “Holy fuck—they…Jesus, they flayed him.” The skin was gone from Badger’s chest, almost to his navel. They’d taken his Horde ink. And his chest was oddly cratered on one side.
As far as Len could see, that chest was not moving.
“Check for a pulse, Len. I can’t…” Havoc held his hands up. His fingers were gone. Every one of them, black blood clotting thickly at the ends of his palms.
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