The Devil’s Viking (The Road Devils MC #3)

Chapter Three

Uinta Mountains, Utah

The Garden of Divine Light

Eleven women stood in the corner of the women’s dormitory room, very silent and still in their long white nightgowns. Normally the women would be dressed and at their chores right now, while the men slumbered on for another four hours before rolling out of their beds to sparkling floors and steamy showers, hot coffee and fresh-baked bread.

Not today, though. Today was definitely not business as usual.

“Servant Rose already informed the Master about what’s happening,” Guardian Michael told a yawning and grumpy Guardian Jonah. “You need to wake up and get your head on straight, because he’ll be here any second and he’s gonna have questions about what you saw in this room last night.”

The two men shot baleful looks over at the huddled women, who all flinched and pressed their backs against the wall. No, the men weren’t hitting them – at least not yet – but if Iris wasn’t found soon, things might well turn physical, they knew. If it got bad enough and went on long enough, they’d probably start confessing to things they hadn’t done or even thought of doing, just to make it stop. The women had all been in that situation before and more than once: Gideon assured them that the discipline was good for them and kept them honest and pure, despite the fact that they were the embodiment of Original Sin.

“I didn’t see anything ,” Guardian Jonah said with a sullen twist to his thin lips. “After the Ritual, I dropped the dumb slut off at her bed and left.”

The men looked over at the corner again, this time zeroing in on Servant Violet. Guardian Jonah glared at her and motioned with his head, his cheeks already purple with rage.

“Come here, bitch. You’ve got some explaining to do.”

Ever-obedient, Violet pushed herself off the wall right away but her steps faltered when she saw the massive shape in the door.

The women stood frozen and staring at the concrete floor, barely breathing as the man entered the dormitory with his measured stride. As always, he brought to mind the strangest combination of jungle cat and cobra – he was a predator circling and stalking his prey, and yet also seemed to be tightly coiled up and perfectly still.

Either way, he was always watching for weakness, always waiting for a chance to strike. The thing about this man was that he went for the jugular every time, fast and fierce – and he never missed. His effect on the Guardians was equally visible and immediate, as the men straightened their uniforms and their spines and fell silent, waiting for the Master to speak.

Gideon stopped in the dead center of the room, almost as if he’d measured the distance exactly with a ruler, and looked around at his Guardians and women-servants. As expected, nobody met his intense, ice-blue eyes so he took his time to look at everyone – really look at them – to gauge what was going on beneath the surface.

All he saw was confusion, panic and fear. His three favorite emotions.

“Guardians,” he said, knowing that his quiet voice was the one that terrified his followers the most: it was the calm before the storm that was about to break everything and everyone. “Tell me what you know.”

“Master,” Guardian Jonah said. “I saw Servant Iris last night, when I brought Servant Violet back here to bed.”

“What was Iris doing?” Gideon asked.

“Nothing, Master. I mean, she was sleeping, so well… nothing really.”

“Are you sure that she was sleeping?” Gideon asked, his voice a blade wrapped in silk. “Did you do a standard bed-check, as demanded by protocol when doing a post-Ritual walkthrough of the dorm?”

Jonah hesitated, torn between telling a lie (which was bad) and telling the truth (which was worse), because of course he hadn’t checked on a bunch of drugged-out sluts and why would he? He almost never did. The whole point of drugging them, after all, was to get time off from the constant watching and monitoring, from the endless walking in circles and around perimeters. Jonah followed every rule to the letter in every other way, every minute of every day, except once the women-slaves were in bed.

Four years ago, when he’d first been made one of Gideon’s twelve Guardians, he’d done the bed-checks religiously, severely, proudly… he’d shone the light in the women’s faces, looking for eye movement, and he’d turned them over without warning, looking for genuine floppiness in the limbs. Sometimes he’d even twisted their nipples or yanked their hair, to see if they felt any pain. Now he just saw a group of pathetic doped-out bitches and a chance to relax for the night an hour earlier. He wasn’t the only one with this attitude, but he was the one on the hot seat now, so he’d better just come clean.

Gideon knew everything anyway. He always did.

Jonah took a deep breath, lowered his head. “Master, Servant Iris was in her bed. I know that. But I didn’t check with the light and the turning over test. I – I also didn’t do a walkthrough of the woman’s building.” He gulped, mentally running through the list of possible punishments to come, prayed hard that he didn’t get blasted with freezing water in the basement. “I – I failed in my duty, and I’m sorry.”

Gideon looked right on through him with that other-worldly blue gaze; it was clear that he was waiting for more. The thing was that there wasn’t any more: Iris had been there, the dorm had been silent and still, Jonah hadn’t seen or heard anything.

Time to throw suspicion on the dumb sluts, then. What other play did he have?

“But –” He threw a glance at the women. “But Servant Violet was still awake when I left the dorm, Master. She drank her milk and lay down, but she wasn’t sleeping yet. Maybe… maybe Servant Iris had some help?” Jonah gulped as Gideon’s eyes focused on him more intently. “I mean – surely she’d never be able to manage escaping without a lookout or someone to get her out the front gate, right? She isn’t anything like smart enough to do it alone. Is she?”

“Is that the really important question?” Gideon asked amiably. “What do you think, Guardian Michael?”

The younger man started. “Me, Master?”

“Yes, you.” Gideon tilted his golden head. “Do you think that Iris being capable of planning an escape without any help from anyone is the big question here?”

“I…” Michael hesitated, looked over at Jonah and shrank from his baleful glare. Jonah didn’t like him and never had, and contradicting him in front of the Master wasn’t going to help matters. But Gideon had asked him a direct question and he needed to answer. “I don’t think that’s the main issue, Master. I mean, the thing that I’m wondering is how she even… because at night…” He stopped, wondering how to bring up the spiked milk without actually stating it openly: the women were stunned cows who had no clue they were drugged nightly, and Michael wasn’t about to enlighten them.

Thankfully, Gideon seemed to know what he was thinking. He jerked his head towards the door and the three men stepped outside.

“You were saying?” Gideon asked Michael.

“To be fair, I would never have expected Servant Iris to get out of here on her own, Master,” Michael said. “But I’d also normally say that she’d never be able to even get up in the middle of the night. She should have been fast asleep by the time Servant Violet returned from the Ritual, and Servant Iris should have been out for another few hours. So… why wasn’t she?”

“And that’s the question that we need answered,” Gideon said approvingly; Michael felt both pride and relief that he was in the Master’s good graces. “It’s very obvious that Iris wasn’t under the influence of any drugs, and so she was able to get up and walk around freely. So freely, in fact, that she walked right through the compound, slipped under the fence and disappeared into the woods.”

“The fence and the woods?” Michael repeated. “She didn’t go out the front gate, Master?”

“No.” Gideon shrugged. “Not according to the surveillance video that I watched.”

“She just – just walked into the woods?”

“With nary a stumble,” Gideon said. “She was fast, she was organized, she had a clear plan of action and she carried it out. She even made a quick stop in the library and grabbed what looked like an envelope that she’d hidden in the bookshelf. I’m assuming that it’s full of money, which means that she’s been planning all of this for a while. Not the actions of a woman drugged day and night, don’t you agree?”

The two Guardians shook their heads and then nodded.

“So!” Gideon exclaimed, making the other two men jump. “Since Iris arranged this as well as she did, she has a destination in mind. Where would that be?”

Eager to regain favor with the Master, Jonah jumped in: “The bus station.”

“Of course, the bus station!” Gideon said almost cheerfully. “Which is why I’ve sent Guardians Aaron and Ezekiel to town to investigate. Surely Iris was noticed when she stumbled into the bus station in the early morning, wearing a woman’s nightgown and men’s boots.”

“Can I help, Master?” Michael asked, determined to not be shown up by Jonah’s sudden enthusiasm. It was Jonah, after all, who had dropped the ball on checking that all the women were actually asleep. He knelt in front of Gideon, lowered his head, and uttered the words that had been drilled into his head day and night for almost two years. “How can I serve?”

Gideon stared down at the Guardian prone in front of him, his face suddenly expressionless. Jonah held his breath, marvelling yet again at how quickly the Master could go from joking and jovial to chilling and terrifying.

It still wasn’t clear how the Master really felt about that bitch Iris running away, it still wasn’t obvious which face being shown was his real one – and then it came to Jonah in a blinding flash that neither was true in this moment, none of his feelings or faces were true, ever. The real Gideon was a mystery and always had been; his strength came from keeping his followers off-balance and guessing. He gained power through the weakness of others, he used mind games and nothing more.

This was not a comforting thought to have: it was disloyal and weak, and Jonah banished it as quickly as it had appeared. After all, Master seemed to be able to read minds, and the last thing that Jonah should do was give anything away. He was on thin ice as it was… he had a punishment coming and if Gideon knew about his flash of awful, accurate insight, it would be worse than whatever was planned right now.

So he did all that he could to save himself and the situation. He fell to his knees next to that kiss-ass ex-pimp Michael and bowed his head, hoping that by lowering his eyes, his traitorous thoughts would stay hidden.

“Master,” he said, fighting to keep the tremble in his voice to a minimum. “How can I serve too?”

“Well, well,” Gideon said in a drawl that struck terror into the men’s hearts. “Here I’ve lost a woman-servant and gained two dedicated, honest, servile men in her place. Pretty good deal. Unless…”

Both men literally stopped breathing.

“ Unless , of course, one of my oh-so-honest Guardians, men who I trust with my life and values and property, actually helped my woman-servant escape.”

Thunderstruck, Jonah and Michael forgot themselves; in unison and without permission, they raised their heads to stare at Gideon’s hard, handsome face. Was he actually saying that one of them had risked their necks to get a pathetic whore out and away? And then they voluntarily stuck around the morning after?

“Master,” Jonah faltered as Michael made inarticulate sounds of pure fear. “Please – I didn’t –”

“You didn’t?” The silken blade was back. “Really?”

“ No . I mean yes, really! I mean no, Master, I’d never –”

“You were the last in the women’s dormitory, were you not, Guardian Jonah?” Now the blade was a cobra’s hiss. “Hmmmm?”

“Yes – yes, but –”

“And you failed to make all checks according to protocol that I specifically demand of my trusted Guardians?”

“Yes. But Master –”

Gideon nodded at Guardians Adam and Solomon, who had appeared as if out of thin air. Without a word, they marched forward, grabbed Jonah under his armpits, and hauled him away down the stairs without grace or care, banging his legs on the cement and the railings. That was when he realized that they had been standing there the whole time, just around the corner, waiting for Gideon’s signal.

Which meant that Gideon had decided that somehow, Jonah was fully to blame for Iris vanishing into the winter night; he’d decided it from the beginning. He’d entered the women’s room with his mind made up that Jonah was the problem, so it was Jonah who was going to take the fall.

And what a fall it was going to be.

“No!” he screamed, losing all control and dignity, frenzied with terror. “No, Master! I didn’t help her! I’d never help her! Please –”

Gideon, Michael, and the women all listened as the keening got quieter and farther away, then fell totally silent. Michael had his head down again, cursing his stupid mistake of looking up without being told, praying hard that it didn’t result in punishment. He stayed still, his knees aching on the biting, freezing floor, but not daring to budge an inch. If Guardian Jonah had been declared the one to blame, all Michael had to do was not make a mistake. Another one.

“Guardian Michael.” Gideon’s voice was soft again, but Michael knew that some of his Master’s words resembled velvet jewelry boxes: warm and welcoming, then they slammed down on you, ripping off your fingers. “Raise your eyes.”

He did, and met Gideon’s blue gaze with his usual surge of awe and amazement: despite Michael being afraid of wrath and retribution, Master was so pure, so beautiful, so inspiring! More than anything, Michael wished fervently to be his Right-Guardian, his most beloved Guardian, the man who was inside the Master’s circle of trust and confidence, who dined at the Master’s right hand and who knew his truest thoughts. Guardian Zachariah occupied this position now, but Michael hoped that if he was the one to find Iris, if he saved the situation before it spun out of control, maybe he’d move up the Guardian hierarchy. If he did, he’d be one step closer to Right-Guardian, to the golden circle of Gideon’s approval and love.

“Master,” he said with reverence. “What is your will?”

“To have you carry out a task for me, one that requires a quiet, careful approach. Don’t call any attention to yourself at all.” Gideon smiled and when he did, Michael swore that a halo appeared over his Master’s tousled blond head. “I need you to go to the police station in town.”

Michael nodded, though he didn’t understand why on earth anyone would involve the police. How would he explain a runaway woman-servant who escaped because she hadn’t consumed her sedating, pacifying drugs?

“Normally I’d send Guardian Zachariah,” Gideon said. “But he’s known in town as being from the Garden… but you aren’t. Not yet.”

Michael nodded again, thrilled beyond belief that for once, his newness was counting in his favor. It was true that he’d only been promoted to Guardian three months ago, and that he hadn’t left the Garden since he’d joined two years earlier. No way he was known in town, no way that he’d be identified by anyone outside the compound as one of Gideon’s trusted men. He was totally anonymous, to the point that he never even thought about his birth name now. His entire life before the Garden – his parents, his sister, his hooker ex-girlfriend, his pimp and drug-dealer days – had been firmly forgotten when the Master called him to serve at his side.

“There’s a police officer named Briley Cross that I need you to go visit,” Gideon said. “She has full access to the traffic cam footage, and I need you to get copies of it for me. I want to see all traffic going in and out of town for the past two days and nights.”

“Master?”

“You have a question?”

“Yes, Master.”

“Go on.”

“You don’t want traffic video of the bus that Servant Iris took out of town?”

“No. Guardians Aaron and Ezekiel will get the video from our contact at the bus station, just to see if Iris actually did get on the bus. If so, we’ll be able to see the bus number and destination from that tape.”

“But you – you think that maybe she didn’t take a bus?”

“I think,” Gideon said slowly. “That if she had taken a bus, we’d have gotten a phone call from our man at the station as soon as she’d appeared – that’s why he’s on the payroll, after all. I also think that Iris planned this very, very well. So well, in fact, that it’s possible that she had a car waiting for her.”

“Ohhh,” Michael breathed. “Oh, I see, Master.”

“Yes. So I need you to change out of your uniform and take the truck to Walton. Park it far from the police station at the edge of the woods, and walk the rest of the way. Briley will be expecting you, I’ll see to it. She’ll fully cooperate with anything we need.”

“And she’ll have no problem helping us, Master, even though she’s a cop?”

“No.” Gideon gave him a grim smile. “She knows her place.”

Michael didn’t ask what that meant; he wasn’t even remotely interested. All he cared about was getting to this cop and then returning to Gideon with what he needed to get that dumb bitch Iris back where she belonged. If he helped do that, then his Master would be pleased with him, and Michael would be elevated and celebrated in the Master’s eyes. He’d be one step closer to all the love and glory he’d been promised ever since coming to the Garden.

Gideon lifted his chin, and Michael struggled to his feet, his legs numb and cold. As he watched his Master stride to the door of the women’s room and order them to get dressed and to their posts, he shook some life back into his limbs. Silently, he recited the Garden’s Prayer, written by Gideon himself:

I will make my Master proud of me, I will earn his trust and love. His want is my servitude; his will is my duty; his desire is mine own heart .