Chapter 22 Darla #2
He looked like he’d crawled out of a meat grinder.
Blood painted his left cheek and dripped from his jawline, soaking the collar of his cut.
His eyes were a wild, icy blue that missed nothing.
He looked at me—really looked—and something in his face cracked.
He jammed a switchblade between my wrists, sliced the zip-ties in a single motion, then caught me before I collapsed.
His hands were callused, but they held me like I was breakable.
“Darla,” he said, and his voice was both a curse and a prayer. “Can you walk?”
“No,” I croaked. “But I can crawl.”
He actually grinned, just for a nanosecond. Then he shifted me against his chest and half-dragged, half-carried me out into the night.
The ditch was littered with glass and spent shells.
Moab and Shivs had flanked the van, using it for cover as they laid down fire on the two men holed up behind a splintered billboard.
Bart was already down, face-first in the grass, a red bloom soaking the back of his skull.
Sarge was alive, but not for long. I watched as Shivs popped up from behind the Harley’s seat and squeezed off a round, catching Sarge right under the jaw.
His head snapped back and he toppled with the jerky, puppet-limp grace of the newly dead.
Vin barked a command. “Clear!” It echoed down the embankment. The gunshots stopped. For a second, everything was wind and the ticking of cooling engines.
I tried to stand. My knees were pudding. Axel caught me again, holding me against his side like a busted-up doll.
“You’re okay. We got you,” he whispered, brushing the blood from my temple with his thumb. “You good to ride?”
“No,” I said. “But I’ll do it anyway.”
He laughed, short and wild, then swept me onto the back of his bike. It wasn’t gentle, but it was careful—like he’d learned the hard way that sometimes kindness was just doing the thing that needed done. He mounted in front of me, twisted the throttle, and the Harley came to life with a roar.
Vin and Moab rolled their bikes over the bodies. No hesitation. No memorial. Just the cold, necessary logic of men who’d run out of time for funerals. They fanned out on the blacktop, forming a wedge around Axel and me as we peeled away from the wreck. The night screamed past us, cold and pure.
For the first mile, I clung to his waist because I thought I would fall. For the second, I held on because I never wanted to let go.
By the third, I was laughing and crying into his jacket at the same time. I could taste blood and wind, and underneath, something that might have been hope.
***
Detective Carter’s office was about as cozy as a mortuary slab.
Bare walls, one dusty clock, and a half-dead spider plant drooping over the edge of a chipped mug that said “I [heart] Mondays.” There was a coffee pot in the corner, the glass stained brown so deep it looked more like blood than caffeine.
The air was heavy with cold tobacco and the kind of desperation only a lifetime of other people’s secrets can ferment.
I sat in the metal visitor’s chair, still wrapped in Axel’s cut.
It was too big and smelled like sweat, leather, and gun oil, but I wasn’t about to give it up.
My left arm was bandaged where the zip-ties had cut through skin.
My jaw was starting to bruise, turning the world a little blue at the corners.
But I held my head high, because no one in this place wanted to see me fold.
Axel stood with his back to the wall, arms folded, looking like he might tear the building down if anyone blinked wrong at me. Vin was a silhouette through the frosted glass of the hallway, pacing slow and steady, hands in the pockets of his jacket.
Carter herself looked like she’d just finished a double shift and was halfway through the next one. She tossed a folder onto the desk between us and flipped it open to a blank page.
“Your full name?” she asked, voice clipped and nasal.
“Darla May Maple.” My voice shook a little, but steadied out by the end.
Carter wrote it down. “Age?”
“Thirty.” I kept my eyes on her, even when she didn’t look up.
She reached for the coffee pot, poured some into a Styrofoam cup, and slid it across the table to me. “You want cream? Sugar?”
“I’ll take it straight.” I did, too, though it tasted like burned regret.
“Tell me what happened,” Carter said, and for the first time her eyes met mine. They were slate-gray and so tired I wanted to crawl inside them and sleep for a year.
I started from the beginning—the van, the men, the pills, the warehouse.
I told her how Bart and Sarge worked for my father, how my father worked for the Lord, and how the Lord had a side hustle moving girls across state lines.
I told her everything I’d heard in the van and through the vents in the house.
Carter didn’t blink. She just wrote, nodding at the right places, letting me drown myself in confession.
Axel never moved, but I felt his eyes on me the whole time. Like he was daring me to flinch.
When I got to the part about the gunfight, Carter leaned back. “You’re saying the Royal Bastards MC rescued you?”
“They’re not the villains here,” I said. “Not this time.”
“Funny,” Carter murmured, “I got two dead men on a rural highway and a dozen witnesses saw motorcycles leaving the scene. You want to tell me what’s really going on, or do I need to read you your rights?”
“They had me in the back of a van, Detective. If Axel hadn’t found me, I’d be another fucking Jane Doe in a drainage ditch.”
Carter drummed her pen on the table. “You understand your father’s a pillar of this community. You got any proof he’s running this operation?”
I pulled out the battered spiral notebook I’d swiped from my dad’s office—the one with all the names, all the codes, all the dates. I slid it across the desk. Carter took it with a look that was part disbelief, part hunger.
“Where did you get this?” she asked, voice finally cracking.
“The last time I was in the house alone, I took it from his desk and hid it in the bushes out front. We stopped and picked it up before coming here,” I said. “I’d overheard them talking about moving the ‘merchandise.’ The new location is on the last page.”
She flipped through, stopping at every other page, her lips moving as she read off the code words and dollar signs. Her hands were trembling by the time she closed it.
“You know what this means, Darla? He’s going away for a very long time, probably forever.”
I stared at the coffee until my eyes blurred.
“I’m scared. He’s got everyone on his payroll—cops, judges, fucking city council.
I thought if I came forward, I’d end up worse than before.
” I took a shaky breath. “But then he sent Bart and Sarge to kill me. Or sell me. Or both. You ever see a man pray over a coffin he made himself, Detective?”
Axel put his hand on my shoulder. “Nobody’s touching you, unless they have a death wish.”
I put my hand on his.
Carter shook her head, and for a moment, I believed she actually cared.
“I didn’t want to be the next coffin,” I said. “So I called in the only people crazier than my father.”
Carter leaned forward. “Will you testify?”
“If I live long enough.”
Her mouth twitched. “We can keep you safe. We’ve got programs for this.”
“You got a program for the second coming of Archie Maple?” I said, voice low and venomous.
She didn’t answer, just clicked her pen and started writing again.
“She’ll be staying with me,” Axel said.
I let her work, watching the lines of exhaustion in her face. There was something almost beautiful in how hard she fought not to look away from the truth. When she finally looked up, her eyes flicked to Axel.
Carter nodded, once. “You can go. But don’t leave town. Not unless you want to make all this for nothing.”
I stood, feeling the tremor in my legs but forcing them steady. Axel opened the door for me, but I stopped just long enough to look back at Carter.
“Thank you,” I said.
She didn’t look up from her notes. “Don’t thank me yet. There’s a long road between here and freedom.” She then looked up. “The FBI has picked up your father. He’s in custody now.”
Axel walked me out. Vin was waiting by the vending machine, hands deep in his pockets, eyes on the parking lot.
We stepped into the night, and for the first time in years, I felt something almost like safety. Axel laced his fingers through mine, rough and warm, and I squeezed back, hard.
“Where to now?” he asked.
“Anywhere but here,” I said.