I took it. My hands were shaking too hard to find the sleeves, and he waited while I struggled with them, keeping three feet of space between us because he seemed to understand that not giving me space right now would be the wrong move. I got my arms through eventually, the jacket heavy and warm, and it hung past my thighs and the sleeves covered my hands and for a second I just stood there inside it, breathing,
He got back on the bike. Looked over his shoulder.
"Get on."
I stared at the back of his vest. The patches, the club name, the insignia I didn't recognize. I thought about Tyler, who'd had kind eyes and a warm laugh and had delivered me to a room with a boarded window and a mattress on the floor. I thought about how wrong I'd been about a man who'd looked safe.
This man didn't look safe. Nothing about him looked safe at all. He looked like the thing you’d cross the road to avoid. And he was sitting on a motorcycle in the middle of nowhere, offering me a ride to a place I'd never been, and every rational part of my brain was screaming that this was how I got into trouble in the first place.
But Tyler had looked safe. Tyler had looked like everything a woman was supposed to want. And Tyler had been the most dangerous man I'd ever met.
Maybe the math worked differently than I'd been taught. Maybe the danger you could see was less dangerous than the danger you couldn't.
I got on. I put my hands on his sides because I didn’t know where else to put them. My fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt. Under my palms, the heat of him, solid muscle and bone. The bike started moving and the road behind me began to shrink.
I didn't know his name. I didn't know where he was taking me. I didn't know if the calculation I'd just made was the best decision of my life or the absolute worst.
But what I did know was that the wind was on my face and the ranch was getting further away with every second, and that was enough. For right now, sitting on the back of a stranger's motorcycle with blood drying on my feet and someone else's jacket over my shoulders, that was enough.
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 thegas 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 likesomeone 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.
