2. Razor
TWO
RAZOR
Riding at night was the only thing that worked.
The compound settled down, it was late. Some brothers went home to their women, some stayed to get stuff done.
The shop went dark, Angel's Rest the club bar, was quiet tonight and already emptying out.
The whole place exhaled, and I should've been able to breathe with it.
Should've been able to sit on the porch with a beer and let the silence do what silence was supposed to do.
I couldn't. The compound at rest was the compound without anything for me to aim at, and that's when my head got loud.
Memories I didn't want, questions I couldn't answer, the restlessness that starts in your hands and works its way up your spine until you're pacing the workshop at two in the morning looking for something to disassemble.
Priest told me once that I had the metabolic profile of a border collie.
He wasn't wrong. Without something to occupy myself, I chewed the furniture.
So I rode. Highway 12 into the hills, no destination, just speed, cold air, and the engine vibration through my legs until everything else went quiet.
Some nights I'd ride for an hour, loop back, fall asleep on my bunk at the lodge with my boots still on.
Some nights I'd ride until the sky started turning gray and the gas gauge told me to turn around. The road didn’t care what was in my head.
The road just asked me to stay between the lines.
Tonight I found a woman standing in the center line with blood on her feet and her hands up, begging me to stop. I stopped. Bruises on her arms, no shoes, and eyes that had seen worse than a bad night. I didn’t need the full story to know that I couldn’t leave her there.
I gave her my jacket. Told her to get on the bike. She hesitated long enough that I thought she was going to run. Then she got on, her hands found my body, and we rode.
I pulled through the compound gates with her fingers dug into my shirt, every one of them distinct. Priest was on the porch despite how late it was and already standing. He’d heard the engine come back heavier than it left.
He looked at the woman behind me. Looked at me. Went inside without a word.
By the time I got her off the bike and through the lodge door, Angel the club president was in the main room finishing up something up before going home.
Ghost materialized from somewhere. He did that. One second the hallway was empty, the next he was leaning against the wall with his arms folded, watching. His road name wasn’t for nothing.
The woman had held it together on the road, held it together on the bike, held it together through the gate, across the lot, and through the door. The lodge was warm, the lights were on, and there were people looking at her. Whatever scaffolding she’d built collapsed all at once.
I'd only seen her in the headlight before now.
Under the lodge lights she was worse. Bruises on both arms, finger-shaped, the grip kind.
Her feet were cut up, bleeding through the dirt.
She was wearing a t-shirt and my jacket and nothing about her suggested she'd chosen to be outside tonight. She looked like someone who’d run and had told me the truth that people were looking for her.
She was shaking so hard her teeth were clicking.
Crying, but crying that came with words, fragments of sentences tumbling out of her in no order.
A ranch. A man. Locked doors. Other women.
She kept saying she was sorry, like showing up bleeding at our door was something she needed to apologize for, and every time she said it my hands tightened.
Controlled internal anger hit me at times I couldn’t predict.
This was one of them, a vulnerable woman being trafficked took me back to why I was no longer welcome in the military.
It was a tiny village in a province I'd signed papers agreeing never to name.
A girl, fifteen or sixteen, had been behind a locked door with my CO's hand on the handle.
The deal he'd made with a local warlord, and the girl as the sweetener, explained to me like logistics. Like she was the only option to get the locals on our side. He explained it like using this girl was acceptable and I knew then that I wasn’t standing for it.
I'd put the CO through a wall for that. Got the girl out and in return I was court-martialed.
Thirteen years later, and this woman standing in Angel’s lodge was making the same scared sound that girl had made.
My hands were shaking and I put them in my pockets so nobody would see.
But Ghost saw it, Ghost always saw everything.
But in this club, we are all ex-military and we all ended up here on the wrong side of right.
"Hey." I kept my voice low. Even. The calm was a lie but I didn’t care. "You're safe. You're in our compound. Nobody's coming through that gate."
She looked at me and I could tell she didn’t believe me. Why would she? She told us that two months ago she'd believed a man who told her she was safe, and he'd locked her in a room.
She told us that much. A boyfriend who'd spent three months earning her trust. A drive to a ranch that was supposed to be a weekend away.
She'd been held for two months while other women moved through the property, a week or two at a time.
She'd been kept because she'd seen the face of the man running the operation.
A witness and a problem, waiting for someone to decide what to do with her.
She'd gotten herself out. Nobody rescued her. She'd rescued herself, and the fact that she'd ended up standing in front of a stranger's motorcycle on a highway was the result of her own decision-making, her own legs, her own refusal to stay in that room and wait.
Angel listened the way Angel listened to everything, completely focused, his body angled toward whoever had his attention. When she finished, the room went quiet. Something shifted at the table.
"You did the right thing bringing her here," Angel said to me. Then to her, the voice that ended conversations, "You're staying tonight. We'll figure the rest out in the morning."
She nodded but she was still shaking.
Angel looked at me. He didn’t need to say anything and I nodded.
"I'll get her settled."
I walked her to one of the spare rooms at the back of the lodge.
She moved like someone walking through a building she expected to become a prison, her weight on her back foot, her eyes measuring every doorway we passed.
I noticed and didn't comment, because commenting would've been worse than useless.
The room was small. Bed, dresser, a window that opened. I pointed at the window.
"That opens. Just so you know."
She looked at me. Looked at the window. Understood what I was telling her. This wasn't a room with a boarded window and a mattress on the floor. This was a room she could leave.
"There's a bathroom across the hall. Towels in there. Kitchen's back the way we came, if you're hungry."
She was standing in the middle of the room with my jacket still on, her arms folded over.
"What's your name?" I said.
She looked at me for a long time. Long enough that I thought she wasn't going to answer.
"Melissa."
I nodded. "I'm Razor. I'll be down the hallway if you need anything."
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Then, very quietly, "You don't have to do that."
"I know."
She sat on the edge of the bed. I stepped out and pulled the door closed behind me and took a breath
I sat down on the bed in my room. Back against the headboard, legs stretched out in front of me, my hands resting on my thighs.
The lodge settled around me. Priest had gone back to the porch.
Angel and Ghost were talking in low voices in the main room, the sound of it reaching me as murmur without meaning.
After a while they stopped. A door closed.
Then another. The lodge emptied out eventually with the final brothers going back to their women or their rooms.
I checked her room a couple of times, I knew she was still awake because the light was on.
Eventually after a couple of hours light went off. I listened to the silence on the other side of the wall and wondered if she was sleeping or just lying there in the dark, and I sat with the wondering because there was nothing else I could do for her right now except be here when the sun came up.
Somewhere outside, a truck downshifted on Highway 12 and the sound faded into nothing. It was the kind of quiet my brain always struggled with.
Two years of cage fighting after the discharge.
Bare knuckle, underground circuits, warehouses where men paid cash to watch other men hurt each other.
I was good at it. That was the problem. I was very, very good at it, and I liked it too much, and the line between using my hands to protect a girl in a village and using my hands to break a stranger's jaw for money was thinner than I wanted it to be.
Angel had found me at one particular fight. He sat in the crowd at a warehouse fight, watched me break a man's jaw, then waited in the parking lot and said two words. "You done now?"
I wasn't. But I wanted to be. And wanting to be was enough for Angel.
The club gave me a channel. Brothers, structure, a table to sit at with men who understood.
When someone showed up at the gates needing help, I was the one they pointed at the problem.
I was useful. But some nights, sitting on the porch, lying awake, riding the highway alone, the question found me anyway.
Whether I was a protector or just a weapon that happened to point in the right direction.
Whether the thing in me that put a CO through a wall was the same thing that broke jaws for money.
Behind the door, the room was silent. She was asleep or she was lying in the dark staring at the ceiling, and either way, she was behind a door that had no lock, the window opened, and if she wanted to leave she could go.
I stood there for much longer than I should, thinking about her.
I thought about her hands on my ribs. Somewhere on the ride back, her fingers had dug in and her face had pressed against my back. I was still carrying it, hours later, and I hadn’t expected that. It was heavy, structural. The kind of thing that doesn't come loose just because you'd like it to.
I tried to suppress whatever this was. Men like me aren’t supposed to feel anything.