Chapter 3
DOLL
The hand stays where it is. Big, palm up, patient.
I’ve spent years reading dangerous men across glass tables, and this one reads wrong in every direction I test. Leather vest over wide shoulders, patches I can’t decode, a split lip still bleeding.
He hasn’t grabbed me. He’s had ten seconds to grab me and he’s holding the lid open instead, giving me room. Durey didn’t give me room. He stood too close in an elevator built for twelve. This one is built like the elevator and keeps his distance in a dead-end alley.
I lower the pallet wood. I take the hand. It closes around mine, careful, like he knows exactly how much of his own strength to leave out of it. He lifts me over the lip of the dumpster as if I weigh nothing, cardboard and coffee grounds raining off my coat.
“Let’s move, Miss Hale. Your friend’s driver is going to wake up with a headache and opinions.”
Miss Hale.
I never told him my name.
I step away from him. One step away and nowhere to go. I’m literally in a dead end.
“You know my name.”
“I know your uncle.” He doesn’t move toward me. He doesn’t move at all. “Different problem. Same address.”
“Who are you?”
He glances toward the mouth of the alley as if expecting trouble. Then he talks, it’s fast and flat, a man laying cards face up because there isn’t time to play them.
“Truth, so you can decide quick. My club and Victor Hale have history. Bad history. His project died today, and some of what killed it was us. I’m not neutral and I’m not a stranger who happened by.
I was watching his building when I saw them walk you out.
” A beat. “You can go. Right now, any direction, and I won’t follow you.
Or you come with me, get on my bike and you’re behind a gate no man in a suit like his walks through. Ten seconds. Your choice.”
Your choice.
I stand in the rain in a ruined coat and try to remember the last time anybody handed me a choice. My job was decided for me, my address, my car, my phone.
A few minutes ago, I was traded across a conference table without one word spoken in my direction, and this stranger asks me what I want to do.
I’ve got no phone, no money ... He says he knocked out Durey’s driver but the man is about to wake up angry.
“Bike,” I say.
He’s already moving. “Good choice, Doll.”
The bike waits one street over, black and heavy, nothing like the machines in Halcyon’s lifestyle renderings.
He pulls a helmet off the bar and puts it on my head, his hands quick and impersonal, cinching the strap under my chin like he’s done it a hundred times.
Then he knocks twice on the top of it, and the absurdity of the gesture almost undoes me. He gave me the only helmet.
“Hold on to me, not the seat bar. Lean when I lean. Don’t fight the turns.”
I have never been on a motorcycle in my life. Every vehicle I’ve entered since my parents died has been chosen, owned, insured, and tracked by Victor Hale.
I put my arms around a stranger, and we drop into traffic like a stone into water.
The engine climbs through my sternum. Rain needles my knuckles, the city smears into wet ribbons of light, and his body cuts the wind so completely I ride in the calm behind it, pressed against the first person I’ve touched in years who wasn’t shaking my hand.
I’ve been driven around this city for years in vehicles I couldn’t feel. Climate-controlled. Sound-proofed. Upholstered like coffins.
This morning the Sound was a flat gray backdrop behind conference glass, something Halcyon would have rendered in. From the back of his bike, it’s enormous and silver and moving, all of it at once, and I understand that I’ve spent ten years looking at postcards of my own city.
I can feel everything now. The road, the shift of his muscle before every lane change, my own heartbeat where my chest presses against his spine.
At a red light on Denny, his gloved hand leaves the bar and lands over both of mine where they’re clasped against his stomach. One squeeze. A question with no words in it. Still with me?
I squeeze the answer into his ribs before my brain approves the message.
The light changes.
He pulls over once, at the edge of a gas station lot where the floodlights don’t quite reach, and puts his boots down and turns his head. I brace for the interrogation. Who was the suit? What did you hear? What do you know? What are you worth?
He reaches into the saddlebag and hands me a flannel shirt, soft and dry.
“You’re shaking,” he says. “Arms through, then hold on again.”
I get it on under my wet coat, and love the warmth of it. He watches me in the wing mirror while I do the buttons. He asks nothing.
“You don’t want to know what happened?” My voice comes out smaller than I plan.
“You’ll tell it once, inside, to everybody who needs to hear it at the same time.” He says it like policy. “Nobody’s going to make you tell it twice.”
I don’t have a word for the ache behind my ribs. In my uncle’s world, information is currency, and I’ve watched people mined for it my whole life. This man has a witness from inside Victor Hale’s office shivering on his passenger seat and all he cares about is me being warm.
“What do I call you?” I ask.
“Angel.”
Of course. I lived my whole life with the devil I know, and the day the devil finally sells me, an angel pulls me out of the trash. My dad would have laughed until he had to sit down.
“Sloane,” I say, which is stupid, because he knows, but I need to be the one who gives it to him.
“I know.” He kicks the stand up, and I catch the shape of a smile under the split lip. “Hold on, Doll.”
Doll. He said it in the alley too, corporate doll, and it should upset me. He sees me like an object that was kept on a shelf by my uncle. It doesn’t. I don’t have time to work out why before the engine takes the question away.
The city thins into industrial blocks, warehouses and razor wire and dark rail spurs, and he slows at a fence line topped with floodlights.
A kid in a leather vest hauls a rolling gate open, and we come through into a yard full of motorcycles parked in a row like cavalry.
I look up at the front of the building and everything in me goes still.
The sign is painted.
THUNDER BASTARDS MC. SEATTLE.
I know this name. I know it from board meetings where Victor’s voice went a register too high.
The word he uses for them with investors, spitting it like a pit: terrorists.
The saboteurs. The thugs bleeding Halcyon at every corner.
The enemy my uncle blames for everything, including, as of this afternoon, the death of his empire.
Some of what killed it was us, Angel said, back in the alley, and I got on his bike anyway.
Men are coming off the porch. Big men, unhurried, and every one of them is looking at me like I’m a lit match somebody carried into the powder room. One of them turns and goes inside fast. I don’t need to know how this place runs to get it. Somebody is being warned that Angel brought someone home.
The gate rolls shut behind us.
A fence is a fence. I’m behind one after all, same as Durey wanted, same as Victor arranged. But nobody carried me in. I climbed on this bike myself, and I held on the whole way here.
It isn’t freedom.
It’s the closest I’ve ever been.