Chapter 3
EMILY
The compound was not what she expected.
She didn't know exactly what she had expected to be honest. Something out of a movie, maybe.
She imagined there would be dirty floors and pool tables and women in cut-off shorts draped over things.
The kind of place that smelled like cigarettes and beer.
It smelled like vanilla and leather, a much more pleasant smell.
She took it all in. Leather and chrome adorned the inside of the clubhouse, mirroring the style of the men occupying the space.
Black leather furniture filled the spaces, with silver chrome looking tables.
It was as if she’d been plunked out of reality and placed into the ultimate wide open man cave.
Two large pool tables were in the back corner, a large bar with multiple stools were along one wall.
Stairs led up to what she assumed were office spaces.
Spread out across the room were several seating areas with couches and oversized chairs.
There were flowers on the tables and throw pillows on the couches.
Soft, feminine touches. Bookcases adorned the walls and among the books were stacked board games, coloring books and art supplies, colorful jars of playdough.
On the opposite side of the wide-open room were four tables each seating twelve.
Behind the dining area were two large swinging doors.
A man was coming through it and she could see a large kitchen on the other side.
The man named Irish, who Rampage had spoken with back at the gas station, was roughly the size of a refrigerator. She was surprised when he crouched on the floor and let an enormous, brown and black dog lick his entire face.
"That's Clover," said a woman who appeared at Emily's elbow from nowhere. Mid-twenties, hair pulled up, wearing a Watchmen hoodie three sizes too big. She had warm eyes and a kind smile. "I'm Nicole. Don't let Irish pretend he's intimidating. Clover ruins the illusion."
Irish, still being actively groomed by the dog, pointed at Nicole without looking up. "Not another word."
"I didn't say anything untrue." She shrugged.
Emily laughed. It surprised her. The sound came out a little broken around the edges, but it was real, and the tightness in her chest loosened by about ten percent.
"Come on." Nicole touched her elbow, light and careful, like she understood that right now Emily's skin was still wound too tight for anything more. "Let's get you something warm. Have you eaten?"
"I—" She tried to remember. Lunch. She'd had lunch. That felt like it had happened to a different person in a different century. "Not really."
"Okay. Food and then we'll find you some stuff for the night." She looked over at Rampage and got a quick nod of permission.
“I need to debrief some of the men and catch Lucky up on the turn of events. Then make a couple calls, let Dax know what happened tonight so law enforcement can be aware and give Phantom the head’s up.
You two behave. I’ll show her upstairs in about an hour, maybe less. Are you okay going with Nicole, baby?”
Baby.
She didn’t know why, but the pet name made her stomach nice and warm. “Yes, I’ll be fine.” She started to walk across the room with Nicole, very aware of her settings and all the men hanging out.
“Tater almost always has something delicious cooking in the kitchen when the other Dad, um,” she quickly corrected herself, “members aren’t cooking.”
“Tater? Irish, Savage, Lucky, Phantom… Do they all have interesting names?” Emily asked.
“Well their nicknames are interesting, they have very boring biological names that really don’t fit any of them,” Nicole told her.
“They are all military veterans, special forces operators. They earned their names in a variety of ways. Well, Tank earned his by his size alone. He’s the largest man I’ve ever met.
Even bigger than all of them—” she gestured to the men in the room.
“I can’t imagine,” Emily said, following Nicole towards the kitchen. The swinging doors shut behind them and she climbed onto a barstool at the kitchen island and let Nicole move around the space with easy familiarity, pulling things from cabinets, and she sat there and breathed.
The adrenaline was leaving now. She could feel it going. A horrible draining feeling, like something had been holding her up and had now quietly let go. Her hands were still unsteady when she wrapped them around the mug Nicole set in front of her. Warm chocolate milk. She hadn't even asked.
"You don't have to talk," Nicole said, settling across from her. "You can just sit."
"Thank you." Emily meant it for more than the milk.
Nicole seemed to understand that too. She just nodded and didn't push.
The kitchen was warm. Clover appeared from the common room and immediately put his enormous head on Emily's knee, and she dropped her hand to his fur without thinking, and something in her chest cracked open a little more.
Not in a bad way. In the way of something that had been clenched finally letting go.
You're okay. You're here. You're safe.
She was doing the thing again, the thing that made her wonder about her own sanity sometimes.
Quiet internal narration. There was a gentle voice in her head that sounded like no one she could name, that showed up when the world got to be too much.
She'd done it since she was small. Talked herself through things.
Narrated herself to steadiness. Her therapist said it was perfectly normal.
Her friend Holly said it was her little voice.
Whatever it was, it helped her. She spoke truth and calm when life was chaotic.
Warm mug. Dog on your knee. Nice lady across the table. You're okay.
Nicole small-talked to her about the Clubhouse and told her a bit about how she came to be there with her sister. She was dating Slash. She has a daughter who was with her sister tonight, as she and Slash were on a date when Rampage got the call.
“I’m so sorry I ruined your date!”
“Not at all,” Nicole dismissed. “It’s not the first nor the last time MC business will interrupt our dates. Besides, we were just watching a movie. No biggie. Really, you are more important than a movie.”
“What were you watching?”
“Beauty and the Beast! It’s my favorite. I dream of being Belle. My own castle with a huge library? Count me in.”
Was she? Could she be? Was Nicole a little too? Maybe it was wishful thinking. The girls continued with small talk and Emily found herself relaxing. Nicole reminded her of the girls in her book club. She felt very comfortable around her. Rampage came through the kitchen about twenty minutes later.
He came in the way he seemed to move everywhere, taking up the right amount of space and not an inch more. His eyes went to her first. Checked her over, quick and thorough before he spoke.
"Ate something?" he asked.
"I'm eating." She held up a piece of toast Nicole had produced. "See? Toast."
"Good. Although toast is hardly a meal. Do you like peanut butter?"
“I do.”
He spread peanut butter across the toast and cut up an apple and added it to the plate. “Still not a meal but better.” He poured himself coffee and leaned against the counter and didn't leave.
Emily concentrated on her toast.
Nicole disappeared quietly, with the particular tact of someone who understood when two people needed to exist in a room alone.
The silence wasn't bad. That was the strange thing.
She'd expected it to be awkward with him standing there, her sitting here, the weight of everything that had happened pressing down on the room, but it wasn't. He didn't seem to feel the need to fill it, and being around someone who didn't need to fill the silence made her realize how rarely she'd encountered that.
"The car was tampered with," he said eventually. "Savage called. Preliminary look before they loaded it up."
Emily set down her toast. "What does tampered with mean, exactly?"
"Means someone made sure it would break down." He watched her. "This wasn't a coincidence."
She suspected it. But hearing it said plainly out loud was different.
"He knew my car," she said. "I drove it there the first time I came to scout out the gear before I got the U-Haul.”
“Baby, how many times have you been to Grand Ridge?”
“Um,” she felt like the answer would upset him.
“Truth, little girl.”
“Three.”
“And how many of those times did you tell someone you were coming?”
“Um, one. I came out the day before I met you just to see how much space I needed for the U-Haul. Then the day we met and today.” She felt like she was confessing to a crime. A naughty girl in the principal’s office.
Rampage nodded. Said nothing, because there was nothing to say.
"I shouldn’t have come back." She pressed her palms flat on the island. "He texted me and said he'd forgotten to include the hardware bag with the squat rack. I thought—" She stopped. "I thought I was being paranoid when I got a bad feeling. I went back anyway."
"If I was your Daddy, we’d be having a discussion about safety and keeping secrets and being too independent.” He paused. "But you're not at fault for someone else’s actions, baby.”
Did he say what she thought he’d said? She chose to ignore it, for now. "I know that." She did know it, more or less, in the rational part of her brain. The other parts were running a different calculation. "I just keep thinking about what would have happened if Chloe hadn't answered."
"She did."
"But what if—"
"Emily." His voice was quiet, but it landed with enough weight to stop her mid-sentence. She looked up at him. "You called. She answered. We got there. What didn't happen isn't something you need to carry."
She held his gaze for a moment.
The thing was, she believed him. Not because he said it gently or wrapped it in comfort because he hadn't done either, but because he said it like a fact, the same way you'd say the road goes north or the sun came up.
Like the world he operated in ran on what was real and not on what might have been.
"Okay," she said.
He nodded. Pushed off the counter. "I'll show you upstairs."
The apartment was on the second floor. He took her to a door at the end of a hallway, and then into a space that was small but clean, deeply, almost aggressively clean, with a bed that had been made with military precision and a window that looked out over the back of the property.
There was a couch, a desk and a large TV. It reminded her of a nice hotel room.
"Bathroom's through there," he said from the doorway. "There are toiletries under the sink and Nicole came up ahead of us and stocked it. You need anything, you knock on the door right next to yours. That's my apartment, I’ll be there all night. I was going to put you up in there but then Lucky reminded me that this guest room was empty right now and it’s right on the other side of the wall.”
Emily stood in the middle of the room. She was tired. No, that wasn’t right. She was exhausted. The bone-deep, wrung-out exhaustion of a body that had run on fear for several hours. Her feet hurt. She wanted to brush her teeth.
She also, suddenly and without warning, did not want him to leave.
She didn't say that.
"Thank you," she said instead. "For tonight. For coming."
He looked at her from the doorway. Something moved through his expression, something she couldn't read, not exactly, but it wasn't nothing.
"Get some sleep baby," he said.
Then the door closed, and she was alone.
Emily stood there for a moment. Looking at the door.
Then she sat down on the edge of the bed and called Chloe, and they talked, and after she hung up she brushed her teeth with a toothbrush that had been sitting under the sink in its unopened packaging, and she changed into the spare shirt Nicole had left outside the door.
She lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling.
Her car had been tampered with.
Marcus Delling had known her car, known her name, had her number and presumably her general location, and God knows what else.
This wasn't a wrong place, wrong time situation.
She'd been chosen.
The thought sat on her chest like something with weight and teeth, and she breathed around it, in and out, and reached for Clover before remembering Clover was downstairs, and the absence of something soft to hold onto made the thought heavier.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door. She pulled the blanket up closer to her chin. “Who is it?”
“It’s Da…” he cleared his throat. “It’s me, baby. Can I come in, just for a second?”
“S-s-ure.” She said. Did he start to say Daddy? Did she imagine that?
“I thought you might want this.” He held out Cheeseburger.
“Cheeseburger!” She yelled and reached for the orange red highland cow stuffed animal. “How did you get him?”
“Cheeseburger?”
“Yes, because he’s orange and a cow. Get it. A cow, covered in cheese.”
“I get it baby.” He was smiling and she was taken aback by how handsome he looked with the wide grin across his face. “I saw him seat belted into your car and asked Irish to grab him.”
“Thank you! Thank you so much!” She held Cheeseburger close against her chest and buried her face into his soft fur.
“Goodnight baby. You need your rest.” Rampage turned and quietly left the room again.
Suddenly, Emily didn’t feel so bad. She had her stuffy in her arms and down the hall, just through the wall, was a man who'd driven to rescue her.