Angel: Dark MC Romance: Iron Vikings MC 4

Chapter 21

The steady hum of an air conditioner disturbed the further quiet, pitch-black room with its damp smell. Nora rubbed the drowsiness out of her heavy eyes with the palm of her hands. She wondered how long she’d been out of it.

Nora stretched her slumberous legs. The rattling of a chain attached to her left ankle chilled her bones. What happened between going out for a drink with her roommate and waking up chained to a concrete floor?

A foggy memory of Rosie clinking her glass to hers flashed before her eyes. She instantly recognized the Irish pub in her flashback.

Nora shifted on her knees, biting back the bile rising in her throat. She had never felt this nauseous before.

Did someone in their rustic college town spike her drink so they could trap her here? Where it those Storm Riders? Did they also take Rosie?

Nora reached out into the dark and found stainless-steel tubing that reminded her of a dog kennel door. She wrapped her fingers around the tubing before pushing it.

The cage rattled but didn’t open.

”Rosie? Are you here?” Nora”s whispers died without a response.

“Sit still and stay quiet,” an irritated female voice spat from the right-hand side of Nora’s cage.

Too relieved she wasn’t alone in the dark, Nora ignored the girl’s order and said, “Who are you? Where are we?”

“Please… If they hear you, they’ll punish everyone,” a different, softer voice said from Nora’s other side.

The fear in this girl”s voice fueled Nora”s determination to escape even more. Nora couldn’t silently accept whatever heinous fate some stranger had planned for her. Just as she was about to kick her cage door, a distant voice drew her attention.

“Nora? Are you okay?”

Nora recognized her friend’s voice and launched herself against the steel tubing, shouting, “Rosie!”

“If you two don’t shut the fuck up, I’ll find a way out of here and slit your throats myself,” the girl who’d spoken first said with such grit that Nora instantly skidded away from her kennel door.

“Threaten us again with your skank ass mouth. I dare you,” Rosie bit back, revealing her biker brat background.

“Please… They’ll come down again if they hear us talk,” the soft-spoken girl said.

Rosie bristled. “Good! Let them come down. I’ll show them?—”

The fierce girl sitting on Nora’s right-hand side snorted loudly. “You think I haven’t tried? Millie’s at day sixteen and I can’t even remember how long I’ve been stuck down here.”

Sixteen days.

Millie’s sob in the darkness broke Nora’s heart. And no matter how tough the other girl seemed; her anger couldn”t hide the desperation in her voice.

“Millie, it’s going to be okay,” Rosie said, attempting to comfort the sobbing girl.

“It’s not going to be okay! You have no fucking clue what you’re up against,” the other girl grated.

“Piper, please. She’s just being nice,” Millie said between hiccups.

Piper scoffed. “Being nice… my ass. She can delude herself all she wants, but don’t let her give you false hope.”

The click of a lock somewhere above their heads silenced them instantly.

A stream of light reached them from the upstairs hallway since the descending man had left the door to the stairs open. Nora’s pulse quickened with each loud step on the creaking staircase.

Nora quickly scanned the basement now that they had some light. She counted thirteen steps to reach a hallway, but she couldn”t see anything from the upstairs landing.

In her search for another exit, Nora spotted five cages, including hers, while the one in the far back was empty. She wondered if there had been a girl in there who’d been brought upstairs or if these animals would kidnap another innocent girl.

“Well, well, well. You girls starting the fun without us?” the man who’d joined their basement said, sounding eerily excited for Nora’s liking.

Nora jumped when he kicked his biker boot against Millie’s cage. “Quit crying, Millie Monster. You know I can’t stand your whining.”

Nora met Rosie”s determined gaze, knowing without a word being said that Rosie would make damn sure they would survive. Nora wished she could match Rosie’s resilient courage.

The blond man, fully dressed in leather, walked by Nora’s cage and held still before Piper’s cage. He slid a hand over his pale, pockmarked face and said, ”Piper, you disappoint me. Talking to the new sluts? Will you ever learn?”

Nora watched Millie skid towards the back of her cage, her chain rattling as she pulled her knees to her chest. Even though this biker wasn’t even talking to Millie, the frail redhead still put as much distance between her and this biker as if he could lash out at her any moment.

Nora could relate to Millie’s frightened state. Out of everyone in her family, Nora was the worst little chickenshit to find herself held hostage by a rival biker gang. With a twin sister nicknamed ”Whirlwind’ and a half-sister baptized ”Brass Balls”, the club’s nickname ‘Quiet One’ for Nora said it all.

Nora wondered if she would ever see them again. And Angel. Her eyes teared up, knowing how she’d left him last night. Their fight seemed so stupid right now. So what that he’d done shit with Gwenn months ago? Sure, he should’ve told her. But it all seemed so insignificant now that there was a real prospect of never seeing Angel again.

Nora had learned from a young age to push down any uneasy feelings of hurt or anger.

Rolling with the punches and trying to make life easier for everyone at home by staying out of trouble is what Nora did best. She always made sure her grades were up and she laid low whenever her parents were in one of their fighting moods.

The kidnapping biker ripped her away from those sad memories by opening her cage door with a slow creak that instantly made her freeze in horror.

”Let”s see if you live up to the hype,” he said.

”W-what do you mean?” Nora whispered.

”My friend upstairs explicitly asked for you. He crowed how you still got that innocent look about you, even though your family is in deep with IVMC.”

”Your friend sounds like a sick bastard,” Rosie spat from across the room.

The asshole had the audacity to chuckle. ”Eager little bitch. Jealous he wants her first and not you, eh? You”ll get your turn soon enough. Don”t worry.”

Nora”s eyes locked on Rosie”s as the biker yanked her out of the cage. A whimper escaped her lips as his grip on her arm tightened while he unlocked the chain from around her ankle.

As if he could read her mind, he said, “We like nothing more than a good chase. Please risk it and run… Millie Monster can tell you exactly how much we like it.”

Millie’s gangly arms around her knees started shaking before she silently rocked herself, probably blocking out the memory.

Lead filled Nora”s legs with every step up the creaking basement stairs while the biker pushed her forward. She blinked as she reached the top of the stairs, the flickering light in the hallway irritating her eyes that had grown accustomed to the dark.

The penetrating smell of urine made her nauseous all over again, as she tripped over empty beer cans in her quick assessment of the upstairs landing. Three closed doors on either side of the narrow hallway led to a dirty stained yellow door.

The biker kicked the door open with his scruffy boot, dragging her along outside the dilapidated house and into the assaulting heat. Nora groaned, protecting her eyes against the blinding sun with both hands.

“Come on,” the biker said as he yanked one of her hands down by grabbing her wrist.

Nora gulped for air since the dry heat almost directly cut off her air supply. Aware that she needed to memorize her surroundings if she ever wanted to escape this hell, she tried to stall the biker by traipsing over her feet.

Nora’s fall didn’t require acting work since her spaghetti legs still suffered from the drugs, they’d obviously used to kidnap her. The rough and uneven texture beneath her hands and knees instantly radiated heat back at her. The coarse gravel and sharp pebbles cut right into her left knee after taking the brunt of her fall.

“Useless cow! Get up!”

She ignored the glaring sky watering her eyes as she frantically looked around. The rugged terrain with a seemingly endless expanse of sand and rocks, differed greatly from her small college town. Or her hometown Austin, for that matter.

The filthy, warm breeze against her skin convinced her that the pale biker also didn’t originate from this arid land. As he dragged her along towards a second house, one with the grandeur of a villa, she wondered if they were still in Texas. A prickling gut feeling told her that this douchebag had taken them far away from their friends and family.

While she’d done anything in her power to distance herself from IVMC months ago, right now she couldn’t wait for her family to show up unannounced like they always do.

The grand wooden door slowly opened to the low-lying concrete residence wrapped in weathering steel. Another biker with several guns strapped around his torso walked in front of them over the deck that connected two rectilinear volumes of the villa.

Whomever owned this place clearly lived like a king or queen in this deserted spot. If she had any hope of surviving this, she had to believe that Angel would find them, anyway. He just had to.