Awakening Claw (Canyon Vipers MC #6)

1. Stormy

Stormy

The snow takes my feet before it takes anything else.

I stopped feeling my toes somewhere back on the highway, back when the transport van was still burning taillights into the dark behind me, and now my legs move on borrowed instructions from a body that has already quit.

Each step punches through the crust. Ice bites up to my ankles.

Something in my heel opened up two miles ago on a piece of gravel and the blood keeps freezing and cracking and freezing again, a red seal that breaks every time I run.

Montana. That is all I know. Somebody said Montana while they loaded us in, said it the way you say a word that does not matter, and I have been holding onto it since because it is the only piece of the world I own.

Behind me, a mile back maybe, headlights sweep the treeline.

I go down into the ditch. Snow closes over my knees and the cold is so complete it feels like heat, like someone laid a strip of molten metal along my shins, and I bite down on the sound trying to climb out of me and hold it behind my teeth until the lights slide past. Diesel engine. Slow. Hunting speed.

They are looking. Of course they are looking. I am inventory that walked off a shelf.

The engine noise thins out and I make myself stand.

Standing is the hardest part. My knees do that shuddering thing where they refuse to lock and I have to put both palms on my thighs and count to four, the way I taught myself in the dark of the shipping container, four in, four hold, four out, because four seconds is a thing you can survive even when the next hour is impossible.

Then I see the light.

It is small and low and yellow, half a mile out across a white field, and it takes me a full minute of stumbling before the shape underneath it resolves.

A long metal building. Corrugated steel, snow banked up the north side, a sodium lamp buzzing over a gravel apron.

Motorcycles under a lean-to, ten or twelve of them, chrome furred with frost, every one of them sitting on a work ticket by the look of the tags wired to the bars.

Past that, a fence. Big fence. Industrial, topped with something I do not have the vision left to identify.

A garage. And one of the bay doors is up. Two feet, maybe three, a black seam of warmth at the bottom of all that steel.

Every part of my brain screams that an open door is a trap.

Open doors are how this started. A man held a door for me eleven weeks ago and smiled and said get in out of the rain, and I trusted the smile because he had been buying me coffee for a month and calling me sweetheart, and I woke up with a hood over my head and my wrists bound so tight my thumbs went numb for three days.

I go toward the door anyway, because the alternative is the field and the field will kill me in twenty minutes.

Gravel under the snow. Then concrete. The temperature change hits me like stepping into a bath, and my whole body seizes with it, a violent full-length shudder that rattles my jaw. I drop and roll under the gap.

Inside smells like heaven and like danger at the same time.

Motor oil. Hot metal. Gun solvent, sharp and chemical and clean.

Leather. Cigarette smoke gone stale in the walls.

Somewhere deep in the building a radio plays something with a slide guitar, turned down so low it is more suggestion than song.

The bay is enormous. Bikes on lifts. A wall of red toolboxes tall as a man. Chains hanging from a joist like slaughterhouse hooks. Two long steel workbenches, and under the far one, a shadowed slot behind a stack of tires.

I crawl.

My hands leave wet marks on the concrete. I get behind the tires and wedge myself into the space where the bench legs meet the wall, knees to my sternum, arms locked around my shins, and I make myself small the way I learned to make myself small, and I wait.

The shivering will not stop. That is the problem.

Everything else I can control. I can keep my breathing quiet, I can keep my eyes open in the dark, I can go so still that men have looked right at me and moved on.

But my body is at the end of its rope and it shakes like a struck bell, and the tires rattle faintly with it, and I am going to be found by my own spine.

Four in. Four hold. Four out.

The radio cuts off.

Everything in me goes to glass.

Boots. Concrete. Slow, heavy, unhurried, the sound of a man who has never once in his life needed to rush.

They come out of the back of the building and they stop, and there is a long stretch of nothing where I know he is standing in the middle of the bay with his head tilted, listening the way I am listening.

Then the overhead lights kick on in banks. Chunk. Chunk. Chunk. Racing down the ceiling toward me, each one dropping a hard white square on the floor, and the last one lands three feet from my hiding place and I can see my own blood in it, a smeared trail leading right to me, obvious as an arrow.

The boots come.

Every muscle I have goes rigid. My hand finds the only thing within reach, a length of half inch bar stock leaning in the corner, cold and heavy, and I get my fist around it and I think, this time, this time I go out swinging, this time they have to work for it.

The tires move. Someone slides them aside with one hand, no effort, like moving a chair.

He fills the entire gap.

He is enormous. That is the first fact my brain can hold.

Shoulders that eat the light. A black thermal shoved up to the elbows and both forearms are dark with ink so dense it stopped being pictures and became weather, and it climbs out of his collar and up the side of his throat in black thorns.

Beard. Buzzed skull. Eyes deep set under a heavy brow, pale as ditch water.

There is a wrench in his right hand. Steel, eighteen inches, more club than tool.

I lift the bar stock and it wavers in the air between us like a joke.

He looks at it. Then he looks at my feet, at the blood, at the ruined slippers that came apart six miles back. Then at my wrists, where my hands are shaking around the bar and the sleeves of the thin shirt have ridden up.

Whatever he sees on my wrists changes the shape of his face.

Nothing dramatic. A muscle jumps once beneath the ink on his jaw. His nostrils flare, one slow pull of breath, and his knuckles go white around the wrench handle and then deliberately, one finger at a time, loosen.

He crouches. He is so big that crouching only brings him down to my height, and he does it slowly, the way you approach a horse that has already kicked one man to death, and he sets the wrench on the floor and slides it away from himself. It rings on the concrete and stops out of reach of us both.

He does not touch me. He does not tell me to put down the bar. He does not tell me it is going to be all right, and I am grateful for that, because I would have known he was lying and then I would have had to fight him.

He says one word, low and rough and quiet enough that it barely carries three feet.

"Alone?"

My teeth are chattering too hard for words. I manage a nod, then a shake, then a nod again, and it comes out as truth anyway. Alone now. An hour ago, no.

He takes that in. His eyes flick past me to the bay door, still open its three feet, still bleeding cold across the floor.

"How far back."

"Mile." The word comes out cracked and shredded. "Two. There's a van."

He stands.

I flinch so hard my skull cracks against the wall behind me and I do not even feel it, because he has straightened to his full height and he is a wall of a man, and the last time a man stood up over me while I sat on the floor it took the better part of a week for the swelling to go down.

He goes still instantly. Every part of him. He stays like that, absolutely motionless, for three long seconds, and he lets me see that he is doing it on purpose.

Then he turns his back on me.

He walks to the wall panel, and slaps a red button, and the chain drive above the bay door groans and hauls, and the three foot seam of night narrows, and the last of the cold gets cut off, and the metal comes down onto the concrete with a boom that goes through the floor and into my bones.

He throws a lever. Something inside the door bank slams like a bank vault.

Then he crosses to the little steel door in the side wall, and I hear more locks going home, one, two, three, and a keypad chirping, and outside, faintly, a heavy gate motor starts to run.

He is closing me in.

I sit in the dark under his workbench with my blood on his floor and my hand around a useless piece of steel and I cannot decide, for the life of me, whether I have just been rescued or bought.