Iron Battalion MC Series: Books 1-6 (Books)

Cap

They put my girl in a cage.

That was going to be their biggest regret.

I didn't know how long I'd been out before the first boot connected with my ribs.

I came back to consciousness swinging, which didn't do me a whole lot of good with my hands already bound behind me, but the instinct was there.

Old habits. The kind you couldn't turn off even when your brain was still trying to figure out where the hell it was.

The second kick landed across my shoulder and flattened me against the concrete.

I tasted blood before I even understood that my cheek had split.

Somebody grabbed a fistful of my hair and yanked my head back, and I got a real good look at the ceiling of wherever they'd put us, cracked plaster, one bare bulb swinging like it was apologizing for being there, before a fist came across my jaw and put the lights out for a second.

I knew better than to fight it. The darkness, I mean. You let it roll through you and wait for it to pass. Fighting the black just exhausts you faster. I'd learned that a long time ago in places a hell of a lot worse than this.

The hands grabbed my collar and dragged me. I let my weight go dead. Made them work for it.

My back hit cold wire mesh and I felt the cage door slam shut behind me, that specific metallic finality of a lock clicking into place.

Footsteps retreated. Somebody laughed at something down the aisle.

Then the sound faded up a staircase and left me with the dark and whatever else was breathing in it.

I gave myself about ten seconds to just lie there.

Then I rolled over and started taking stock.

Ribs, hurt like hell, but I'd cracked ribs before and this didn't feel like that.

My jaw was sore, and I had a headache behind my right eye that told me I'd taken at least one solid hit, but the nausea was already fading, which meant if there was a concussion, it was mild.

My hands were cuffed behind me, wrists already chafed.

My left elbow had caught something on the way down that I'd probably be pissed about later, but right now it was background noise.

I could work with all of that.

What I couldn't work with was the sound of Ariel's breathing from the cage next to mine.

I recognized it. The way it came in short and caught at the top, like she was trying to keep herself from losing it completely.

She'd made that same sound the night she read something upsetting and thought I was asleep, and I'd listened to her try to steady herself for twenty minutes before I finally asked if she was okay.

She'd said yes. I'd let her have the lie because she needed it.

I couldn't let her have it now.

"Ariel," I said, low enough to stay between us.

A sharp breath. A pause. Then, quiet as anything: "Cap."

Good. She'd remembered to use my road name without me having to tell her. That was my girl. Scared out of her mind and still sharp enough to know better.

"Keep your voice down," I said, already moving.

I rolled onto my stomach and got my knees under me, working my way toward the edge of the cage by feel.

The floor was cold concrete, and in the dark it was near impossible to see anything, but I didn't need to see it.

I just needed to find where our cages met.

There was a seam between the panels. Somebody had put these together in a hurry. The weld was ugly, and there was a gap where two sections didn't quite line up, just wide enough to fit a hand through if you knew where to push.

I found her fingers before I found the gap.

She reached through first.

I worked my hands through the chain connecting my cuffs, not enough slack to be useful, but enough to get my fingers through the wire, and caught her hand on the other side.

She was shaking. Not just a little, but the deep, body-wide kind of trembling that comes from adrenaline and terror fighting each other for the same real estate.

I couldn't pull her through. The steel said no, and I wasn't in a position to argue with steel at the moment.

So I did the next best thing. I shifted myself up against the seam and put as much of me between her and the rest of the room as I could.

Made myself a wall. Let her press her forehead to the wire opposite mine and just breathe.

"In for four," I said. "Out for six. With me."

"I can't see anything," she said.

"You don't need to. Just listen. Count."

She counted. Four in, six out. I felt it settle into her through the mesh, the rhythm of it, the same way it always worked. Give the brain something to do and it stops eating itself.

We weren't alone down here. I already knew that. Someone to our right had a cough that didn't sound great. Wet at the bottom, the kind that meant her body was fighting something. Someone farther off shifted now and then. There were other cages. Other women.

I filed all of that away.

"You're bleeding," Ariel said quietly. She'd found my wrist where I had it pressed against the wire, and she must have felt it. The cut on my cheek was still slow-dripping.

"Not badly," I said.

"That's not the same as not at all."

"I'm aware." I let her hold onto my hand. "Tell me about the pink dress."

A pause. "What?"

"The one you wore on our first date. The one from the discount rack."

Another pause, and then I heard something almost like a laugh underneath the fear. "The hem was crooked."

"You fixed it with a stapler."

"You noticed that?"

"I notice everything you do," I said.

She breathed out. Long and slow. Six counts. Something in her shoulders released, at least a little. I felt it in the way her grip on my fingers changed.

I let her have that moment, and while she took it, I got to work.

I listened to the room the way I'd been taught to listen to rooms a long time ago, not just for what was making noise, but for what the noise was telling me.

The stairs were off to my right, twelve or thirteen steps by the sound of footsteps when they'd dragged me down.

Wood construction, not metal, and the fourth step from the top had a soft spot that popped under weight.

The door at the top had a latch that didn't catch clean.

There was an air duct somewhere above us.

I could feel the thin hum of it more than I could hear it.

The walls were old, and the cage I was in had been dragged in and set down crooked.

I could feel the groove in the concrete under the front edge.

None of it was an exit. Not yet. But everything was information, and information was the first step toward getting Ariel the hell out of here.

"Cap," she said. "How did they find me?"

That was the question I'd been chewing on since I woke up.

We'd been careful. I'd been careful. Whatever Ariel and I had going, we kept it quiet, buried way under the surface.

The club knew because the club always knew, you couldn't keep that kind of thing from people who lived inside each other's blind spots, but it had never gone further than that.

I didn't let it. I made damn sure of it.

The whole point was that she stayed clean.

So either somebody inside the Iron Battalion had talked, which I refused to believe without evidence, or whoever these people were, they were better at watching than I'd given them credit for.

Neither option made me feel good.

And then there was the other thing I couldn't shake.

Why cage her near me? If she was leverage, you kept her somewhere else.

You kept her out of reach, out of earshot, somewhere I'd have to imagine what was happening to her instead of knowing.

That was how leverage worked. You put her next to me, close enough to touch through steel, and that wasn't leverage.

That was something else. I just didn't know what yet.

"I don't know," I said, honest. "But I'm going to figure it out."

Footsteps from somewhere to our left. Not on the stairs. From farther down the row. The woman with the cough shifted and went still like she'd done it before, like stillness was something she'd learned to wear fast. Smart.

"Left cage," I said, keeping my voice barely above a breath. "What do I call you?"

A pause. "Juno." Quiet. Careful.

"Across?"

"Tess." Older voice, rougher. "Kid over there is Sunshine."

I looked toward where I thought Sunshine's cage was. The cough had gone quiet, which I wasn't sure was better or worse. "Sunshine. You breathing okay?"

A small sound. Close enough to yes.

"Keep it that way," I said.

Ariel's fingers tightened on mine. "How long have you been down here?" she asked Tess.

"About a week, I think." A dry pause. "Hard to tell without windows."

That sat heavy in the room for a second.

"Ariel," I said.

"Yeah."

"If I say flat, you go flat. Don't ask why, don't hesitate. You just do it."

"Okay."

"If I say quiet, you breathe into your shirt. Nothing above a whisper."

"Okay."

"If I say bless me—"

"Why would you say bless me?"

"Just cover your ears."

She was quiet for a second. "That's not reassuring."

"It's not meant to be reassuring. It's meant to be a signal."

Tess, across from us, made a small sound that might have been approval.

I shifted against the cage, testing the wire with my shoulder, checking the welds at the corners.

Shoddy. Fast. Whoever built these wasn't planning on anyone being in them long-term, which told me something about the operation.

Either things moved through here quickly, or they didn't think they needed anything permanent. Either way, that was a vulnerability.

I just needed to find the right one to pull.

"Cap," Ariel said quietly. Her voice had steadied, but just under the surface of it I could still feel the tremor. "If they come for me—"

"I'll be in the way," I said.

"You can't take all of them."

"I don't need to take all of them." I tightened my grip through the wire. "I just need the one who thinks he's the brave one. The rest make mistakes when he drops."

Silence.

Then the door at the top of the stairs banged open.

Three sets of footsteps. The third man wore hard-soled boots and hit every step wrong, which told me he was new to this place. Hadn't learned the rhythm of it yet. A flashlight came on and swept wide, carving the room into shapes and shadows.

"Still breathing?" one of them asked, like it was boring, like it was a checklist.

A cage rattled somewhere to our right. Somebody made a small, frightened sound.

The guy laughed. "Good. Fresh is better."

The beam moved down the row and hit me full in the face. I kept my expression flat and let it rake past me. It swung to Ariel.

"Well, isn't she something," the same voice said, slow and greasy.

My whole body went tight.

"She's been marked," another voice said, colder, more businesslike. "Nobody touches that one."

"Shame." A low chuckle. "Looks like it'd be fun."

Ariel didn't make a sound. I felt the shaking come back through the wire where her hand was locked around mine, but she didn't make a sound. I was so damn proud of her I could barely stand it.

A bang from above, a truck door, hard and impatient. A voice came through the floorboards, the kind of voice that belonged to someone who didn't like to wait.

"Boss is early," hard-boots muttered.

"Then we move," the cold one said. "Now."

They swept through fast, checking locks, slamming latches, the flashlight doing one last pass before it cut off. Then boots on stairs, the door, the latch. Silence.

Ariel pressed her forehead back to the wire. Her breath was shaky. "Marked," she said quietly. "What does that mean?"

I didn't want to tell her. But she deserved the truth, and she deserved to hear it steady, not flinched at.

"I think it means they're saving you for a specific buyer," I said. "Which means they have a reason to keep you safe until then. And that buys us time."

She absorbed that. I watched her do it. Or tried to, through the dark.

"Cap," she finally said.

"Yeah."

"Tell me you have a plan."

"I have the beginning of one."

"That's not the same as a plan."

"Give me until morning," I said. "We're not prisoners, Ariel. This isn't a kidnapping."

A pause. "Then what is it?"

I let the word sit in my mouth for a second before I handed it to her.

"Product," I said. "They think we're product. And that's exactly why they're going to underestimate us."

She gripped my hand so hard the wire bit into both of us. I let her.

Across the row, Tess said nothing. Juno said something under her breath, too quiet to catch. Sunshine made a small sound, not fear, more like something settling in. Like she'd heard the worst and survived the hearing of it.

"Okay," Ariel said.

Just that. Okay.

Like she'd decided something.

I pressed my jaw to the wire opposite her face and felt the cold of it on my split cheek. "First thing tomorrow, we learn the patterns. When they eat. When they sleep. When the stairs creak and when they don't. Everything becomes information."

"And then?"

"And then we make a hole," I said. "I always find the hole."

A long quiet. Then, from somewhere in the soft dark: "It took you four months to find the hole in my fence."

I almost laughed. "Your fence was built by somebody who actually knew what they were doing."

"You literally own a construction company."

"Which is exactly why I recognized quality work when I saw it."

She made that sound, the one she made when she wanted to argue and knew I was going to win, and it was the best sound I'd heard all night. Something in my chest unwound just a little.

I could hear voices upstairs going quiet. Water ran somewhere, shut off. A chair scraped. Things getting settled. Normal sounds in an abnormal place.

I closed my eyes and built the room inside my head. Stairs, door, cages, duct, crack in the concrete behind me. Footsteps that came in threes. A boss nobody down here had seen yet. Men who counted us like inventory and didn't know a damn thing about what inventory I had left.

"Get some sleep," I told Ariel.

"I'm not going to sleep."

"Then close your eyes and rest. Either way, we've got work to do when the lights come back on." I pressed my wrist to the seam so she could find my pulse in the dark. "I've got you. I meant what I said. You're going home on the back of my bike. I'll stake my life on it."

She held onto my wrist and didn't say anything else.

That was fine.

She didn't need to.