Chapter Two
Lennox
The bike slowed and I didn’t let go of his jacket.
Thirty-odd miles with my fists tangled in his jacket.
Somewhere along the way it stopped being something I held and became the only thing keeping me upright.
By the time the engine dropped into a lower gear at the gate, my fingers wouldn’t obey the part of me that knew to let go.
He didn’t comment. He rolled to a stop in front of a high chain-link fence topped with razor wire.
A man stepped out from a small lit booth and walked to the side of the bike, and the two of them spoke in voices too low for me to catch over the idle of the engine.
The man at the gate looked at me once. Not long.
A flick of the eyes, top to bottom, the cathedral train of the gown bunched around my thighs and my feet hooked against the foot pegs.
Then he looked back at the man in front of me, said something short, and the gate slid sideways on a rail.
We rolled through.
The compound was bigger than I’d let myself imagine on the ride in.
The headlight cut a yellow channel across packed gravel, and along it I caught the shapes of things -- a long low building with a peaked roof and bikes lined shoulder to shoulder beneath the awning, the orange wink of a fire pit gone down to coals in the middle of an open yard, a garage with its bay doors half closed and a wedge of fluorescent light spilling across the dirt.
A man in a denim cut stood under the awning with a rag in one hand and watched us roll past without lifting it in greeting.
Somewhere past the tree line, well off to the right, a dog barked twice and stopped.
Two younger men in jackets without patches crossed the yard between the garage and the main building and turned their heads as we went by.
The one in front said something to the one behind him. The one behind him said nothing.
Four buildings, then I lost track. Six men, then I made myself stop.
The bike came around a long curve in the gravel and then slowed again, stopped, this time near a row of smaller structures set back from the main building under a line of pines.
Cottages. Square little porches. One of them had a wreath of dried hydrangea on the door, so ordinary I almost laughed. Then almost cried. Did neither.
He killed the engine.
After the engine died, the compound felt unnaturally wide-open. My ears rang. My thighs were shaking from holding the seat for half an hour and I hadn’t noticed until the vibration of the bike ceased.
He didn’t say anything. He sat still on the bike for a beat, looking somewhere past the cottages, then reached down and put his hand over both of mine where they were still clamped in his jacket.
The heat of his palm was the first warm thing I’d touched since I’d left the bridal suite.
He didn’t pull my hands free. He just left his hand there until my fingers remembered they had bones in them, and one at a time they came loose.
“Off.” The word was quiet. Not unkind.
I got off. The gown caught on the back of the seat, and I yanked at it harder than I needed to. It came free with a small, dry tearing sound. It was the dress my mother had had flown to New York three times to fit, and I didn’t feel anything when I heard it tear.
There were already two women walking toward us across the gravel.
One of them had a long dark braid down her back.
The other had cropped silver hair and a coffee mug in one hand that she set on the porch rail of the nearest cottage without looking, pure habit.
Behind me I heard Rogue’s boots on the gravel and then nothing.
At least, I assumed that was his name. It was on the front of his leather vest. Rogue had signaled them somehow. I knew it without seeing it happen.
They stopped a few feet away me and looked at me.
Their gazes met over my head -- one short exchange, eyebrows raising and lowering, but nothing said -- and the one with the braid peeled off without a word and walked toward the cottage two down from where we stood.
The one with the silver hair came the rest of the way to me and put her hand, very lightly, just above my elbow.
“Come on, honey.”
That was it. Not “what happened?” Not “who did this?” Not “are you all right?” Just “Come on, honey,” in the voice of a woman who’d said it to many girls in her life and meant to keep saying it.
I went. Up the two wooden steps and through a screen door that wheezed on its spring into a small front room that smelled of cedar and laundry soap and nothing else.
A lamp was on. A quilt lay folded across the arm of a chair.
The braided woman came in behind us with a stack of clothes in her arms and set them on the foot of the bed in the next room -- a folded gray T-shirt, sweatpants, a pair of clean socks balled on top.
She set a glass of water on the nightstand beside them, straightened, and looked at me once more.
Somewhere along my escape, I’d dropped my bag, and thinking I saw someone following me, I hadn’t stopped to retrieve it. The clothes she offered were very much welcome.
“Bathroom’s through there.” The silver-haired one pointed with her chin. “Hot water takes a minute. Lock’s on the inside if you want it. Get some sleep if you can.”
“Um, who are you?” I asked.
The one with silver hair smiled. “My name is Monica. I’m visiting from another chapter. My old man is thinking of transferring here, so I’ve been helping out where needed, getting to know everyone.”
“And I’m Danica,” the other offered. “I’m with Ranger.”
They walked out, leaving me alone. I stood in the middle of the front room of a stranger’s cottage in a torn wedding dress, with my bruised wrist tucked up against my ribs, and I listened.
Outside, on the gravel, I heard boots. Two heavy steps.
A pause that lasted longer than two steps should account for.
Then the boots moved again, going the other way, back toward the long low building with the peaked roof, and I stood there in the lamplight and listened until I couldn’t hear them anymore.
* * *
Rogue
The clubhouse smelled like every clubhouse smelled at midnight -- old smoke worked into the upholstery, beer gone warm in the bottoms of bottles, the faint sweetness of fryer grease from whatever someone had eaten three hours ago and left on a plate at the bar.
I came in through the side door so I didn’t have to walk the length of the room and went straight to the cooler instead of waiting on the Prospect eyeing me from across the pool table.
The Reckless Kings insignia hung on the back wall above the bar -- the same metal cutout that had hung there since I’d been patched in -- and below it the wood was scarred to hell from forty years of glasses and elbows and the occasional knife somebody had set down too hard.
To the right, the long row of framed photographs of the men who’d come before us watched everything anyone did under their roof and offered no opinion on it.
I cracked the beer on the lip of the bar and turned around.
The crowd was thinner than it would’ve been on a Friday.
A handful of patched brothers around the pool table.
Two more by the dartboard. Brick was at the far end of the bar with his back to the door and one boot up on the rail, and that was the man I’d come in here to find.
I crossed to him and tipped my chin at the empty stool beside his.
He nodded, which was all the invitation I needed.
I leaned on the bar at his shoulder, dropped my voice under the music coming through the speaker over the door -- some old Skynyrd song the Prospects kept queuing up like it meant something -- and said, “Got a problem.”
“Heard you came back with a passenger,” Brick said, without turning his head.
“Heard fast.” And yes, I’d been empty-handed. I couldn’t very well finish the job once I’d found the battered bride. Wasn’t like I could walk away and pretend I hadn’t seen her.
“Heard it from Silas at the gate. He said she came in wearing a wedding dress and you didn’t look like you were bringing home club pussy.”
“She isn’t.”
He set his bottle down. He turned half a degree toward me. He waited.
Behind us, on the other side of the room, one of the Prospects at the pool table -- the taller one, the one who’d been with us six months and still didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut -- laughed at something his friend had said, and the friend’s voice was loud when he responded, “… the one off the news, that missing bride, you saw the picture they’re running… ”
I turned my head.
I didn’t do anything with my face. I didn’t need to.
The taller Prospect caught the angle of my look across the room and the rest of the sentence died in his mouth, and the cue in his hand went very still over the felt, and his friend, who was slower, kept talking for another half a beat before he caught up and went quiet too.
Conversation died off around the room in uneven pieces.
“Outside. Now.” The shorter one nodded twice and set his stick down on the rail, and the taller one didn’t look at me again, and they went out the front. The screen door wheezed.
Brick watched them go. Then he came back to me.
“The fiancé.”
“Yeah.” Didn’t surprise me they’d already run something on the news.
He pulled in a long breath through his nose and let it back out, then picked up his bottle and took a swallow he didn’t want, set the bottle back down.
“Beast had a call about three hours ago. Friend of ours up in Nashville. Said a man from out east had been making calls to half the businesses on the strip looking for a girl who matched the description on the eight o’clock news.
Mentioned the man’s name was Stewart. The man’s family had bought a U.S.
senator in ‘19 and was working on a second one in the off-year. Supposedly, the senator they already owned had picked up the phone for them at ten p.m., which tells you something about how that family makes a phone call.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It does.”
“He’s not local money. He’s the kind…”
The label of the bottle in my hand was a thin paper thing pasted on with glue that was meant to come off in an ice bucket, and I felt it give under my thumb before I knew I was working at it.
By the time Brick finished his sentence I’d torn it clean down the side, a long, ragged strip of it curling against my knuckle.
I set the bottle on the bar.
“Church,” I said.
“Tomorrow morning,” Brick said. “Beast’s already called it.”
I nodded once and pushed off the bar.