Hanging up before the woman could talk her into turning her vehicle around, Tiffany turned her phone off. A little voice in the back of her head mocked her for turning tail at the first bump in the proverbial road. Running was her default mechanism, and it was hard to do anything else when the chips were down.
Turning it all over in her head, she couldn’t seem to reconcile the sweet, protective person Ryder appeared to be with the monster out killing other human beings tonight. Then again, she didn’t really know if he’d killed anyone, so why was she judging him prematurely? The trouble was, with them being so tight-lipped about club business, she’d never be sure they weren’t out killing and maiming the innocent.
The moment the thought popped into her head, she chastised herself for thinking Ryder could possibly be a soulless killer. More than likely, he was just an ethical person with no compunction about crossing the line if a situation necessitated something extreme. That put him in the category of a soldier of sorts in her mind.
Deep in thought, she didn’t notice she was home until Ryder’s house came into view. Staring at the house, she realized something was off. Try as she might, Tiffany was unable to put her finger on exactly what it was.
Thinking she was still jumpy from rushing out of the club and worrying herself sick during the drive, she decided to just keep driving and thinking for a bit. Instead of stopping, she passed the house and headed for the interstate. Figuring that Ryder might try to find her, she pulled the battery from her cell phone and from the old-fashioned GPS device attached to her dashboard.
Random thoughts rattled around in her brain for the better part of the night. The gentle hum of the engine and the clicking as she shifted gears turned into a kind of background noise. The thing was, the more she thought about her situation, the more convinced she became that drawing Ryder into her dangerous life had been a bad idea. Even an outlaw didn’t deserve to have to deal with everyone else’s shit constantly.
He lived the life of a vigilante, doling out punishments and taking lives as he saw fit, with no oversight or sanction by the powers that be. Though she trusted that he did so with care, it was hard to accept that at the same time he was an outlaw who played by his own set of rules. The man had blood on his hands, and there was no getting around that fact. That alone should have been enough to get her packing her stuff.
The icing on the cake was the loose morals inherent in the whole club scene. The women left standing after Darkness purged the worst of the worst were still whores as Alyssa so succinctly pointed out. Every single one of them was a woman happy to trade sex and companionship to bikers for room and board.
Though most of the brothers were single, there were a couple of married bikers who messed around with the whores behind their wives’ backs. It was something that everybody saw, and nobody spoke about. It rubbed her the wrong way that she was expected to keep their dirty little secrets. Then again, in what world was it okay to tell some lady you hardly knew that their husband was fucking whores behind their back? For all she knew, they were allowed to. One thing was for certain, it would kill her if Ryder cheated on her.
What had she been thinking hooking up with a biker?
Ven was the only man who consistently avoided whores like they were a plague. Maybe Ryder would take after his father in that regard, and then again maybe not. Hell, maybe Ven had just recently kicked his whore habit. In any event, Tiffany was no Lily, and Ryder had a strong history of playing the field. Something about Ryder fucking whores and then coming home to her, pretending everything was fine, made her chest hurt.
She’d already allowed herself to get sucked in and become way too close to the rough, slightly damaged man. Remembering how his arms felt around her and the way he joked with her when things got bumpy had her missing him like crazy. He was hot, sexy, and more thoughtful and giving than any man she’d ever known. Having sex with him felt like being reborn into a world where she actually mattered. Why the hell was everything in her life so complicated?
Shifting gears, she sped up. A dark thought popped into her head. Ryder didn’t know all her dirty little secrets. What would he think if he knew she’d been forced to eat her meals from a pretty pink, gemstone-encrusted dog bowl? Would he be so thrilled to have her in his bed if he knew all the truly perverted things Stuart had done to her over the years?
She imagined seeing the look Stuart always gave her on Ryder’s handsome face, and that was it. She knew she was never going back. Ryder deserved a nice woman, not some fucked-up object who’d trained herself to disassociate from her surroundings at will.
Pressing her foot down on the gas pedal, Tiffany watched through blurry eyes as the road ahead sped by and faded in the rearview mirror.
~ Ryder ~
Staring the prospect in the face, Ryder asked, “What exactly do you mean by dead?”
Cork stood beside his younger brother. His expression was blank, as usual, and his voice was calm. “When Peb called to say that your old lady had bolted, I went to your place to stand guard. She wasn’t there, but some military-type dude rushed me the moment I stepped into the house.” Waving one hand in a gesture of nonchalance, he sighed. “I shot, and you know I never miss.”
“Where’s my old lady?” Ryder demanded, panic swelling in his gut.
“The tracker on her cell looks like she went to the house and just kept right on driving,” Cork said, much to Ryder’s relief. “Since she disabled both the cell phone and the GPS unit in her car, we know only that she was headed west.”
“I’ve a good idea why she left the club, but I’m at a loss to explain why she drove all the way to our house and then didn’t go in.” When he got his hands on her, Ryder had a good mind to turn her over his knee and give her a good, hard spanking.
Cork replied decisively, “My best guess is that something spooked her.”
Ryder took a step closer to the man. “Did anything look out of place when you arrived?”
Frowning, there was a pause as Cork concentrated for a brief moment. “Only a couple of things stood out to me. The first was that her vehicle wasn’t in the driveway. I thought it was because she put it in the garage. Second, I thought she was home because, though the light in the living room was off, the kitchen light was on.”
“Lights being on that we both turned off before leaving the house might have spooked her. Maybe she thought we couldn’t protect her,” Ryder guessed. “She’s been running from that asshole of an ex for a fucking long time.”
Peb’s timid voice cut in for the first time. “I ran her credit cards and ATM card. They haven’t been used, even for gas.”
“She keeps a full tank, but she’ll have to stop for gas, food, or a hotel soon,” Ryder surmised. “Stay on that shit, Peb.”
“I will, man. I’m really sorry—”
“Don’t bother. You can’t make a woman do shit in this world, my friend. We can only be there for them when it goes to hell and pull them through to the other side. Do we know anything about our John Doe?” Ryder asked, needing confirmation for what he was thinking.
Cork spoke up. “He didn’t have any identification on him, nor did I find a vehicle nearby. That makes me think he was either too stupid to keep up with his wallet or a professional who didn’t want anyone to identify him if things went bad.”
With the way things had been going lately, Ryder would bet on the latter being true. “No vehicle means one of two things. Either he parked farther away and walked to the house, or he was dropped off by cohorts. If it was the second, they’d still be after her. That means we have to find her first.”
“You’ve got a dozen of us on this situation,” Peb said. “We’ll figure it out.”
Looking into Peb’s hopeful face, Ryder felt a chill creep up his spine. “I hope you’re right. She told me her ex used to keep her chained up outside in the elements as a punishment when she ran. This is no kind of weather for a woman to be outside all night.”
Cork cursed under his breath, and
Peb’s eyes got big. “I understand. We’ll find her.”
“Let’s get to it, brothers.”
Watching them hurry away, Ryder shoved his hand through his hair. He somehow managed to resist the impulse to punch himself in the side of the head for being so stupidly negligent. Being in love was a totally new experience for him and had clearly lulled him into a false sense of security. He’d been stumbling happily along, laughing, fucking, and enjoying his time with Tiffany.
What he should have been doing was incrementally getting her used to club life, explaining his rationale, and helping her understand that he wasn’t some renegade bent on remaking the world according to some warped concept of right and wrong that he concocted in his own mind.
Instead, he’d just thrown her in the deep end and expected her to figure it all out on her own. She’d put the pieces of the puzzle together haphazardly, and in doing so had created a skewed version of the masterpiece that was his life. That in and of itself didn’t surprise him. It was an easy mistake to make from the outside looking in.
Ryder would be the first to admit that in his fast-paced world, there never did seem to be enough time for all the things he wanted to do. Preparing Tiffany to deal with club life should have been at the top of his list of priorities. It would have been if this thing with Darkness hadn’t cropped up so unexpectedly.
Finding out her ex was still stalking her had also been a huge fucking distraction. Rolling from one complex, dangerous situation to another had him off balance and struggling to keep everything tucked in around the edges.
A rough voice pulled him from his internal recriminations. “Hey, dipshit, your mind is wandering off into Neverland. It needs to be focused on the here and now.”
Pivoting around to face Ace, Ryder shot him an annoyed look. “Thanks for that amazing piece of unsolicited advice. What are you going to pull out of your sleeve next, a bunny?”
Taking a few steps closer, Ace shoved his hands into his pockets and kicked at the gravel with the toe of his boot. “Just trying to get you back on task, brother.”
“Yeah, I’m all kinds of aware of exactly how I fucked this one up.”
“Did you fuck it up or did she?” he asked seriously.
Ryder felt his brow drop. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
Ace’s head snapped up to look him in the eye. “The way I see it, you treated her like gold. You brought her here when she had no place to go and gave her a nice home, bought her anything she wanted, and showed her how you felt. Hell, you even made nice with me for fuck’s sake. Any bitch would have been happy with you, so don’t go blaming yourself.”
Ryder bristled. “First of all, my old lady ain’t no bitch. If I had wanted a woman who considered herself lucky to trade a nice lifestyle for companionship, I’d have picked a club whore. I chose Tiffany because she’s decent, kind, and loving. I should have known that she’d be put off by the killing and whores. The thing is, sometimes people need to be killed, and there’s no getting around it.
“Unfortunately, there’s no way to take my dick back out of all those whores. I should have worked harder to get her to see that being with the club girls is nothing like being in love. I don’t know that she could ever square herself with the occasional killing, but it destroys me that I didn’t even try to explain to her how bad shit can get around here. The bottom line is, she can’t understand if I don’t explain it.”
Listening to his tirade, Ace’s expression continued to get progressively grimmer. “It used to be that club business was club business. We didn’t tell bitches nothing.”
“That was back when we mostly took whores for old ladies,” Ryder told him. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but that little red-headed archeologist you got your eye on ain’t no whore.”
Ignoring his jibe, Ace pointed out the obvious. “You’re investing a lot of time and money in a woman with high moral standards who might not end up staying after you explain all that shit.”
“Call me stupid,” Ryder volleyed back, “but I don’t want her to end up being abused by that shithead ex-husband of hers. She never talked much about him, but what she did say left me in a murderous rage.”
Jumping right on board, Ace asked, “Where do we start?”
“My old man and Hickory left out this morning on a flight to her hometown. They’re gonna gather firsthand information on Stuart Chamberlain. He was at a charity event last night and got pictures of him in the local paper. What do you think about that?”
Ace’s gaze grew distant as he mulled the information over. “It sounds like last night was the night she was supposed to get grabbed, and he wanted an alibi.”
Shit, Ryder hadn’t considered that possibility, but Ace had a point. “Maybe,” he conceded. “Then again, it could be that he’s just some stupid, rich fucker who goes to events like that all the damn time. My pops will get to the heart of the matter. I want to see this fucker who was at my place last night.”
Ace glanced nervously back at the shop. “We’ve got his body in the garage. I was just getting ready to dump him.”
Heading in that direction, Ryder slipped in through a side door. Flipping on the lights, he walked over to a body rolled in a large, thick black tarp, as per their usual protocol. The body had been stripped bare. The man’s clothing and personal effects were lying in a pile nearby. Pulling back both flaps of the tarp, the body of a man in his mid-thirties was revealed. He had pale white skin that looked as if it had never seen the light of day and there were several tattoos. One was an image of a swastika and another an image of a bandoleer of bullets wrapped all the way up his right arm.
“Why do I always feel less conflicted about a Nazi winding up dead on our watch?” Ryder asked rhetorically.
Tossing him a dark look, Ace pointed to the man’s chest, which had five distinct bullet holes. “Even super heroes kill Nazis, brother. Look around that hole in the lower abdomen. It looks like there might have been a surgery scar of some type.”
Ryder ran a hand over the man’s body. “My gramps had something like this from laparoscopic surgery. See here and here?” Pointing to two other tiny scars on either side of his stomach, Ryder explained, “I think they poke the main instrument in the larger incision, and the smaller ones are for smaller surgical tools. They work inside there using a little camera or something. This type of surgery is mostly used on the stomach and shit like that.”
Ace frowned. “That’s kind of vague, brother. And useless information, since thousands of people have the surgery every year.”
“Well, these scars look old,” Ryder told him. “So far we’ve got a few clues. He’s a fit male in his thirties with gastric problems who is an actual Nazi or Nazi sympathizer.”
“I’m gonna go with actual Nazi, ‘cause I sympathize with a lot of causes, but I don’t want their images inked on my skin. I reserve that shit for ideals that run deep.”
Closing the tarp, Ryder began going through the man’s personal effects and pulled out a small coin made of a gold alloy. Holding it up, Ryder read the inscription.
“Do we add video game arcade player or Alf pog collector to our list of clues?” Ace asked with a touch of amusement in his voice.
Shooting Ace a lopsided smile, Ryder tossed him the token. “You’re showing your age on that last one. This one’s an AA sobriety coin. Looks like our dead Nazi enjoyed three years of sobriety before he broke into my place and got himself shot.”
Holding the token up in the air, Ace eyed it under the florescent lighting of the garage. “Yep, it has the sobriety prayer on the back and everything.”
Digging through the rest of the dead man’s possessions, Ryder mumbled, “We’re gathering up a shitload of barely interesting clues leading down the path to nowhere.”
“Information is power. Never forget that, brother.”
“Goddamn, you are fuckin’ full of meaningless catch phrases today, aren’t you?”
Ace pinned him with a disgusted stare. “What is yo
ur problem?”
“I think the phrase you’re looking for is knowledge is power, you dimwit,” Ryder jabbed back.
Ace was clearly growing agitated. “You get knowledge from information, so it’s the same fuckin’ thing.”
“Clearly it’s not the same thing at all.” Waving one arm arrogantly in the air, Ryder continued. “The world’s full of fucking information. In any given situation, only relevant information is power.”
“All I meant was—”
Darkness’ annoyed voice interrupted from the doorway. “If you two ladies are finished stroking your own egos, maybe you could meet us in my office. Your old man landed and is gathering intel already.”
Grabbing the few items he dug out of the dead man’s pocket, Ryder came smoothly to his feet. “Fuck me, that was fast.”
~ Tiffany ~
Stopping at a rest area, Tiffany tore open the back of her SUV and dug underneath her spare tire. After no small amount of groping, she pulled out a makeup bag. Slipping back into her SUV, she locked the doors and opened one of her few remaining emergency kits and began rifling through the contents as her mind drifted back to her father’s grim look when he sat her down after her second failed attempt to leave Stuart.
She’d been bruised and battered from being roughed up by him. He’d found her within twenty-four hours at some second-rate motel where she’d taken a job cleaning rooms. Her father had picked her up the moment Stuart left the house and taken her straight to her godparents’ cabin.
Tiffany woke up the next morning to find a total of six little makeup bags lying in a neat line down the kitchen table. Beside each empty ten-by-twelve-inch rectangular pouch was a grand in small, unmarked bills, two prepaid credit cards loaded with a grand each, a fake state-issued photo ID card, a gym membership card, and two prepaid cell phones. He’d also bought her a cheap little tablet for each pouch and a couple of flash drives. It had been so bizarre that she did a double take between him and the table.