I swallowed my fear and climbed onto his back. He stiffened as soon as I touched him, so deeply not okay with my body against his that I immediately wanted to get off him.
“Hold on,” he ordered.
I barely had time to blink before he was running, running, through the bar as if I was light as a shadow. I could feel the immense power in his body as he thrust us through the front door at an incredible speed and immediately fired off two shots to the left of us where my abusers would be emerging from the side alley if they were indeed following me.
There were shouts and another shot rang out somewhere behind us.
Yep, they were following us.
What the absolute fuck!?
I clung to the stranger beneath me and ducked my head into his neck as he ducked behind a van and halted in front of a motorcycle. Without any degree of gentleness and all haste, he threw me off his back and onto the tiny backseat of the bike before he swung a leg over it and gunned the engine.
“Hold. On,” he gritted between his teeth as he peeled out into the streets, the bike at such a horizontal angle to the pavement that my hair brushed across it before we righted and shot forward into the night.
The shouts faded behind us when we took the first corner. A few minutes later, the eloquent biker pulled over to the side of the road to make a call.
“Got ’er on my bike,” he said into the phone.
I tried to listen to the other end of the conversation but couldn’t hear anything because I’d released him from my tight hold as soon as we pulled over. I was used to an aversion to touch because a lot of kids I worked with at the Autism Centre were touch sensitive. I didn’t want to cause my hero any further discomfort than absolutely necessary.
“Yeah. Yeah. Back at Lotus. Yeah. Yeah,” he responded. “I’ll bring ’er.”
Bring her?
Bring her where?
He hung up the phone and immediately started the bike again so I didn’t have time to question as he swung back onto the street into the dark. I’d lived in Entrance my whole life so I knew immediately where he was taking us when he veered away from the ritzy coastal neighborhoods and into the east side of town.
We were going to The Fallen Compound.
I’d only seen it from outside the huge chain-link fence encircling the industrial lot. I’d been sixteen, just after Zeus had ended our correspondence and I wanted to catch a glimpse of him. I’d waited for three hours across the street in a small strip complex before one of the brothers, a non-descript until you looked at him kind of man with white skin and copper hair, had noticed me. He’d approached me and told me gently to get lost.
I’d obeyed.
And I’d never gone back because I was still living scared and obedient back then.
Now, I watched with my heart in my throat as the metal gates to Hephaestus Auto and Mechanics groaned open and we swung up a slight incline on to the lot.
Zeus’s inner sanctuary.
He was waiting for us at the door to a long, low brick building slightly behind the main garage complex and as soon as my silent companion killed the engine, Zeus was coming at us.
Before I could speak, he plucked me from the back of the bike and plastered me to his side with a heavy arm belted around my hips. Then he promptly ignored me.
“Mute, brother, you did good tonight,” he told the silent man who’d helped me.
Under the huge industrial lights of the complex, I could make him out better and was surprised to find he couldn’t have been much older than me. Mute, appropriately named, was over six feet tall but stocky, so wide with muscle with a face so craggy under his severely buzzed hair that he looked almost like a cartoon drawing of a thug. Then I noticed the way his fingers thrummed against his left thigh in a staccato rhythm, the way his face was blank and absent as he nodded at his Prez.
He was busy with a ritual.
I frowned as I recognized the trait from Sammy, my best bud at the Autism centre who had similar rituals, having to stomp his feet five times whenever he put on his shoes, eat his dessert first thing in the morning before he’d ever have anything savory… I frowned at my hero and wondered if a biker could be autistic.
“Sent Bat, Priest and Axe-Man,” Zeus was growling, his fury a cloak I pulled tight around myself because I found it, strangely, comforting. “They’ll pick ’em up and bring ’em back. Get me when it’s done.”
Mute nodded then turned to walk into the clubhouse but stopped just as abruptly and walked over to me in the circle of Zeus’s arm. He stared hard into my face with an inscrutable expression before he reached out to tug a little too hard on a lock of my pale hair.
“Stay safe,” he ordered with a solemnity I felt in my chest.
I nodded slowly, a gesture he echoed before he turned to go into the brick building.
“Got shit to do so let’s get this over with, yeah?” Zeus finally said, though not to my face because he was already walking us inside.
“I need to go home or like, call the police,” I said, so discombobulated by the turn of events that I didn’t know which way was up or down.
As always in those moments of panic and pain, all I knew was Zeus. So, even though I knew I had to return to Louise’s life in less than six hours, I leaned into Zeus as he propelled me forward and enjoyed his proximity. I took the opportunity to learn his scent, something I’d wondered at for years.
Dark forest; pine and cedar, fresh air bitten with the slight tang of tobacco. I dragged the heady mixture into my lungs, closed my eyes and committed it to memory.
“No police,” Zeus growled as he propelled me through the dark interior and then lifted me up as if I weighed nothing to plunk me on a tall stool beside a bar. “Wait here.”
He didn’t wait for me to respond but stalked off down the hall.
I took the time to take a deep breath and instead of focusing on the craziness of having a gun in my face (somehow not for the first time in my life but the second), I studied The Fallen MC clubhouse.
It was a fairly enormous open room wrapped in dark wood paneling but coloured by the plethora of neon bar signs on the walls that signaled things like “Live Free, Die Hard But Only If You Can’t Kill ’Em First.” There was also a collection of prison photos lighted by an overhead lamp leading down the hallway Zeus had disappeared into. I noticed his immediately, dead center, his scowl fierce, tongue out, rock on symbol constructed by his fingers just beside the plaque he carried so that at first, the emblem of rebellion wasn’t noticeable.
There were two pool tables covered in black felt at the far end of the rectangular room, a jukebox between them that even now was playing hard rock (Zeppelin), and a couple of high tables with stools. A huge antique Harley was mounted on one wall, a massive TV on the other fronted by a couple long, low black leather couches. The recreational space and the bar area that I sat in was partially divided by a black chain-link wall that made the entire place wicked cool and would have been my favourite feature but for the fact that the massive square bar I sat at was absolutely covered in graffiti, the biggest of which was a huge image of The Fallen logo, a skull with fiery, tattered wings, and their motto: Live Free, Die Hard.
“Wow,” I breathed.
“Fuckin’ somethin’ else, isn’t it?” A tall, skinny guy covered in tattoos appeared beside me, sliding onto a stool with a wide smile.