6. Razor #2
All at once. The warehouses, the crowds, and I was back in front of the men who wanted to take my head off.
My body remembered the rhythm before my brain could catch up.
I hit him. My right fist into his ribs with everything behind it, the satisfying give of muscle and bone under my knuckles, and he doubled over, and I hit him again.
An uppercut that straightened him out and sent him backward into the desk.
The laptop crashed to the floor. Papers scattered.
He grabbed the desk edge and tried to stay upright and I was on him, both hands on his shirt, lifting him off the desk and driving him into the wall.
He fought against the wall. Still trying.
A knee aimed at my groin that I turned away from, an elbow that caught my ribs and sent pain flaring through my side.
I pinned his arms with my body and hit him again, close range, short punches with my fists tight, into his body, his face, his ribs.
Each one carried the weight of what he’d done to Melissa and the other women he was trafficking.
My anger rained down on him blow by blow.
He stopped fighting back. His arms dropped.
His head sagged. But I wasn't done. The cage fighter had the wheel and the cage fighter didn’t stop when the opponent dropped his hands.
The cage fighter kept going until someone pulled him off, and there was nobody here to pull me off except Ghost, who was still leaning against the doorframe watching, understanding and making no move to intervene.
I hit him again. And again. His face was a mess, his breathing labored, ragged sounds coming through his broken nose, and the satisfaction of each impact was the thing I'd spent five years trying to outrun, the thing that made me good at the warehouses, the part of me that liked this.
I stopped.
My fist was pulled back for another hit and I stopped it in the air and held it there and the effort of holding it cost me more than any of the punches had.
Every muscle in my body wanted to finish this.
The warehouses wanted it. The man wronged by the military wanted it.
The padlocks and the mattresses and the boarded windows in this ranch house wanted it.
I lowered my fist instead. I grabbed the front of his shirt with both hands and hauled him up and pinned him against the wall with his feet off the ground.
His face was swollen and bloody. One eye closing. He was breathing through his mouth because his nose had stopped working and his ribs were probably cracked in several places. But his other eye was open. He was conscious. He was listening.
"Melissa," I said. My voice was raw. "The woman you held for two months.
The woman you tagged like she was fucking yours and sent men to find.
She's under the protection of the Forsaken Angels.
If you or any of your people come looking for her, I will kill you.
That's a fact, the same way the sun comes up every day. Do you understand me?"
He made a sound. Wet, pained.
"There's more. You're fucking done in Montana.
Whatever you've built here, the routes, the properties, the men, the infrastructure, you're tearing it down and you're gone.
The Forsaken Angels know your face. We know your truck.
We know your operation. And we don't forget.
If we hear your name, if we hear about a single woman behind a single locked door anywhere in this state, we will come for you.
And I won't be having a conversation." I leaned closer. "I'll be finishing what I started."
I let go. He dropped to the floor and slumped against the wall and sat there bleeding onto his own carpet.
Ghost looked at me. He hadn't moved from the doorframe the entire time. His arms were still folded. The gun was still under his boot. His pale eyes tracked from the boss slumped against the wall to me standing over him with bloody hands, and his expression hadn't changed once.
He'd watched the whole thing. Every punch, every hit I took, every second of the cage fighter coming out and the rage pouring through my fists.
He'd had the gun. He'd had the doorway. He could have ended it any time he wanted, and he'd stood there with his arms folded and let me do what I needed to do.
If the boss had gotten the upper hand, if the gun had come out differently, if a knife had appeared or a second man had come through a door, Ghost would have finished it before I hit the floor.
That was the deal. That was what Ghost did.
He watched your back by watching you, and he only stepped in when you couldn't step for yourself.
He bent down, picked up the gun and tucked it into his waistband
"You done now?" he asked. Same flat voice. Same pale eyes. Like he'd just watched me change a tire instead of beat a man unconscious.
I looked at my hands. Split knuckles, blood that was his and mine mixed together, the tremor in my forearms from the punches I'd thrown and the one I'd held back.
The cage fighter in me was screaming. The man who sat at a table with his brothers and chose this work, the man who knelt on a floor with his hands open for a terrified girl, told the cage fighter to shut up and sit down.
"Yeah," I said. "I'm good."
Ghost looked at the boss and then looked at me. “You know, I think you missed a spot," he said, and pushed off the doorframe and walked out.
I almost laughed. I just dropped my head and shook it. I didn’t, because my lip was split, laughing would’ve hurt. But Ghost could do that. Find the driest words in the English language and drop them into a room full of blood and broken furniture and make you feel like a human being again.
I turned and walked out behind him.
Every door in the compound was open. Women sat in the main room wrapped in blankets that brothers had pulled from closets and beds throughout the house.
Doc moved between them, checking injuries, quiet and thorough, his hands gentle in the way combat medics learn to be gentle when the fighting is done.
Rook was on the phone, voice low, coordinating where the women would go next.
Shelters, safe houses, the network the club had built over years of doing this work.
Some of the women were talking. Some were silent.
One was standing by the open front door, looking at the night sky, breathing the air, and the expression on her face was the expression of someone who hadn't been outside in a long time.
Angel stood in the hallway and looked at the doorframes where I'd torn the hasps out. The screw holes in the wood. The splintered frames. He put his hand on one of them, ran his fingers across the torn wood, and didn't say anything.
There was nothing to say.
On the ride home, dawn started breaking over the mountains, and the sky was going from black to gray to pale gold.
My hands were steady on the handlebars. My lip was swelling, my cheekbone was throbbing and my ribs ached where he’d caught me.
I could still feel the tremor in my forearms from the punches I'd thrown.
The brothers rode beside me. The formation was looser now, the tension drained out, the bikes spread across the road in the easy pattern of men heading home from a job that was done.
Hawk was ahead of me, Duke beside me, Ghost somewhere behind, and the engines filled the valley and the dawn filled the sky and every lock in that building was broken and every door was open.
The compound gates were open when we pulled in. Priest at his post, counting bikes. Angel first, then the rest, filing through.
Angel walked to the porch. Turned around. Counted heads. Every brother home, mostly in one piece.
Melissa was in the lodge doorway.
She'd been there for hours. I could see it in the way she was standing, one hand on the doorframe, her weight forward, her eyes scanning the bikes as they came through the gate. She found me. Her hand came off the frame and she stepped down off the porch and started walking.
I killed the engine. Got off the bike. My hands were wrapped in a rag from my saddlebag because the knuckles were still seeping, and my lip was split and my cheekbone was darkening and I looked like something that had come out of a fight that wasn't quite finished.
She met me halfway across the lot. She looked at my face. My mouth, my cheek, the blood on my shirt that wasn't all mine. She took it in, all of it, the cost of what I'd done, written across my body in bruises and split skin.
She put her hands on my chest. The same place she'd put them the night of the tracker, when she'd chosen me for the first time.
I pulled her in and her arms came around me while we stood in the early morning light and the brothers walked past us toward the lodge.
The sun cleared the mountains and the compound settled into the quiet that comes after something heavy is finished.
"Stay," I said.
She pulled back. Looked up at me. The woman I'd found on a road in the dark one night, barefoot, bleeding, and brave enough to flag down a stranger on a motorcycle because standing still was the one thing she refused to do.
"I'm already here," she said.