Razor's Mercy (Forsaken Angels MC #7)

1. Melissa

ONE

MELISSA

The lock turned at six every morning and eight every night.

Two months of listening to it, counting the seconds between the deadbolt sliding home and Tyler's footsteps retreating down the hallway, and I could tell you the exact sound the mechanism made when it caught.

A small, definitive click. But it was the kind of sound that stops meaning anything after the first few weeks.

There were four of us in the room. Two mattresses on the floor, a bathroom with a door barely hanging on its hinges, and a window that had been mostly boarded over with plywood so thick you could barely see light through the seams. The other girls slept in shifts.

I didn't sleep much at all anymore, which was fine.

Sleeping meant dreaming, and dreaming meant waking up thinking I was somewhere else.

The five seconds between opening my eyes and remembering where I actually was had become the worst part of any given day.

The ranch sat at the end of a dirt road somewhere in the Montana hills.

I knew that much from the drive in, two months ago, when I'd still been Tyler's girlfriend and the blindfold hadn't gone on yet.

I'd watched the road narrow, the trees close in, the last mailbox disappear behind us, and I'd thought we were going to a cabin.

A romantic weekend away. He'd been talking about it for weeks, the quiet, the stars, and the need for me to get away from my textbooks and breathe.

I'd believed him. I’d believed every word because he'd spent three months earning the right to be believed.

Patient, funny, interested in my classes, interested in me.

He drove me to clinicals when my car was in the shop.

He brought me coffee the way I liked it without asking.

He remembered things I said in passing and brought them up weeks later, and I'd thought that meant he was paying attention because he cared.

He was paying attention because it was his job.

Tyler was a recruiter. That was the word the other girls used.

He found women. Young, isolated, and just stressed or lonely enough to mistake calculated attention for affection.

Students, waitresses, girls new to town.

He dated them. Charmed them. Then dismantled their support systems one relationship boundary at a time until the drive to the ranch felt like a romantic gesture, the blindfold felt like a surprise and the locked door felt like a misunderstanding that would be explained in the morning.

The morning never came. At least, nothing that resembled the one I’d hoped for.

I was two semesters from finishing my degree.

I'd had friends, a lease, a cat named Professor who my neighbor was watching for the weekend.

Two months later I didn't know if Professor was alive or dead and my lease had certainly been broken and my friends had probably filed a missing persons report that went nowhere because Tyler was apparently very, very good at making women disappear.

The boss came by on Tuesdays and Fridays.

He drove a truck that sounded like every other truck on the property, and the only reason I knew his schedule was because Tyler straightened up when he heard it.

Posture changing, voice dropping, the performance of a man reporting to someone he feared.

The boss walked the rooms, checked the locks, spoke to Tyler in the hallway with the door open just enough that I could hear the tone of the conversation even if the words were muffled.

Inventory. That was what it sounded like. A man taking stock.

I saw his face once through a gap in a doorway Tyler forgot to close.

Ordinary. Brown hair, medium build, the kind of face that belonged to every guy buying coffee at a gas station or standing in line at a hardware store.

Nothing about him would make you look twice.

Nothing about him would make you remember.

He saw me looking.

Tyler hit me for that. The only time his hands went past grabbing and shoving, and afterward he told me that if the boss decided I was a liability, what Tyler did to me would feel like kindness.

He said it calmly, the way you'd explain a workplace policy.

And I believed him, because by then I'd learned that Tyler only told the truth about things that could hurt me.

That was why I was still here.

The other women moved through. A week, sometimes two, then gone in the night.

Replaced by new faces with the same hollow look, the same bruises in various stages of healing.

The ranch was a waypoint, a processing center, and I'd watched women cycle through my room like inventory on a shelf.

But I'd seen the boss's face, and that made me a different kind of problem.

Too dangerous to move through the normal channels.

Too inconvenient to deal with right now.

So I stayed, and every Tuesday and Friday the truck pulled up and I listened to the tone of a conversation I couldn't hear the words of, and I waited for the visit that ended differently.

So I stopped looking. I kept my eyes on the floor, on the mattress, on my own hands.

I counted locks and footsteps and the gaps between meals.

I memorized the layout of the building through sound because I couldn't see most of it.

Main house connected to two outbuildings by covered walkways.

Front door, back door, side door by the kitchen.

The side door had a deadbolt that stuck, and Tyler had to slam it with his hip to get it to catch.

I heard it stick every time. I heard it not quite catch once, and the sound was so small and so specific that nobody else would have noticed.

But I had noticed.

I’d been planning without calling it planning. Naming it meant living with the possibility of failing. Easier to just pay attention. Easier to just notice things and file them away without attaching hope to them.

My bag was under a shelf in the corner of our room.

The same one I'd packed for the weekend away, a canvas duffel with my clothes still folded inside it because nobody had bothered to take it from me.

Two months and it was still there, shoved against the wall.

I'd added a water bottle three weeks ago.

A granola bar from a tray that came back with extras.

Nothing that would be missed. Nothing that looked planned.

I wasn’t being strategic. I was being both scared and smart at the same time.

It happened on a Thursday.

Tyler's routine was tight, but routines have joints and joints have give.

He brought dinner at six, locked the deadbolt, and walked down the hall.

Came back at eight to do a check. Between six and eight we were locked in and he was in the main house doing whatever Tyler did when he wasn't being our jailer.

I didn't know and I didn't care. What mattered was the two-hour window when the hallway was empty and the only thing between me and the side door was the luck of whether it had caught.

At seven-fifteen, one of the other girls started crying. It happened often enough that Tyler had stopped responding to it weeks ago.

I put my shoes on. The other women watched me. One of them, a girl named Dana who'd been through enough to stop hoping, shook her head slowly. She was calculating my odds and deciding they were bad.

She was probably right.

I picked up the bag. Walked to the door of our room. Tried the handle.

Locked. Obviously.

But the lock on our room was interior. A bedroom lock, the kind with the push-button on the knob, cheap interior hardware from when this was a ranch house where a family lived and the doors locked from the inside to keep children safe in their beds.

Tyler used a key on it, but the mechanism was flimsy.

I'd been working a hairpin into it for three weeks, five minutes at a time, always when the crying was loudest because it covered the sound.

The lock gave. The handle turned. I opened the door six inches and listened.

Hallway. Empty. The sound of a television from the main house, muffled through the walls. Tyler's laugh, distant and easy, the laugh of a man watching something funny while four women sat in a locked room thirty feet away.

I stepped out. Closed the door behind me. Bare feet on the hardwood because shoes made noise and the hallway was twelve steps long and every one of them mattered.

The side door. The deadbolt that stuck.

I reached for it. My hands were shaking so badly I had to use both of them, one on the deadbolt and one braced against the frame. I turned it. It stuck.

I pressed harder. Everything in my chest compressed into something small and dense.

It gave. It opened without catching. Without slamming. Without making the sound that would bring Tyler down the hallway at a pace I couldn't outrun.

The cool air hit me all at once. Darkening sky. Dirt under my feet because I was holding my shoes in my hand and the ground outside was rocks and scrub grass and I couldn't stop to put them on because stopping meant not getting away quick enough. I dropped them somewhere in the first field.

And I ran.

Open country in every direction, hills, grass, dark shapes that could have been trees or fences or nothing at all.

No road visible. No lights except the ones behind me, getting smaller with every stride.

My feet hit rocks, sticks, something sharp that opened the skin along my arch and sent pain up my leg.

But I kept running. The pain meant I was still moving, and moving was enough.

I ran until my lungs burned and then I ran farther because lungs burning wasn't enough reason to risk stopping. I ran until the ranch lights disappeared behind a ridge, the dark complete, nothing left except my heavy breathing, the wind, and the silence of Montana at night.

I found a road.