“What?” I reach over the bar and touch her shoulder. “Monica, if it’s not safe—”
She giggles and waves her hand airily. “I’ll be fine. Although, if one of them wants to tie me down, I won’t complain.” I gape, and her eyes dance. She comes around the bar and picks up one of the trays. “I should make you do this.”
“What!” I squeak. “No. Monica, no!”
“Oh, come on.” She holds the tray out. “I would love to see what those guys would do with you when you pull that mousy shit on them.”
I bite my lip, giving her a pleading look. Imploring her to understand. The way she’s described those guys, I get the sense of something dangerous and forbidden. Something I have no idea how to handle, like getting too close to a flame.
As if taking pity on me, she grins and picks up the second tray, balancing one on each palm. “Relax. You can’t go in there anyway. You aren’t a club girl.”
I push out a breath. She was messing with me. “I’ll pay you back for that.”
She sticks her tongue out. “See you in a few minutes. Unless I’m having fun.” She winks.
My cheeks go very hot. I’ll never get used to girls being so forward. It’s awesome, the way she can talk like that without missing a beat. I feel a little envious of her as she disappears, head high, around the corner in the direction of the rooms reserved for private parties and lap dances.
Monica comes back a few minutes later and loads up a tray with more booze for the “bikers”.
“Oh, Steph, could you take those empties out for me while I take these to the boys?” She grabs a couple of boxes of cigars and puts them on her tray, then nods to the boxes of empty beer bottles over by the wall. “Harold was supposed to take those out before he finished his shift. He didn’t, and I almost tripped over them.”
“Sure.”
I load up the boxes on a trolley while she disappears down the hall again. Then I grab the key card and the keys to the storage shed off the wall behind the bar and wheel the trolley down the hall toward the back of the club.
At the end of the hall to the left of Dee’s stairs, I swipe my key card through the security scanner on the door there. Then I make my way down the long hall that leads to the alley.
To the left and right of me, doors lead to other rooms. Ahead of me, Monica slips into one of the rooms and rowdy catcalls and male laughter drifts into the hall before the door closes.
Shutting down my worry for her, I push open the steel door at the end of the hall and step out into the balmy night air.
Outside, I gasp at what I see sitting in the alleyway.
To the left of the doors, a row of five motorcycles sits along the wall. They look huge and heavy, leaning on kickstands.
I’ve only seen a motorcycle once. It was in a photo shown to the congregation by Deacon Harman. He’d stood up as a guest speaker during a sermon, telling us all about his life before he joined His Holy Peace. He’d showed us a photo of him sitting astride the motorcycle he used to ride before he mended his ways, cast off his wild life of sin, and became the clean-living man he is today. We’d all been shocked to see this reserved, soft-spoken, usually proper man sitting on one of those things with a big smile on his face.
A realization hits and I slap my forehead. “Bikers. Wow. Duh.”
Except I have a feeling there’s more to the term than just owning or riding a motorcycle like Deacon Harman did.
Inching closer, one motorcycle in particular catches my eye. Thin silver lines that look like the threads of a spider’s web stretch across the dark, electric blue metal of what must be the gas tank. A spider sits in the middle of the web.
I ogle the motorcycle with wonder. The beast reaches past my waist. There’s something about it that screams of danger, something wild and a little frightening. My fingers itch to caress the well-worn leather seat to see if it’s as soft and supple as it looks.
What kind of man drives a vehicle with no protection against the elements or other vehicles? If he was hit, he’d be a splatter on the pavement. He’d have to be incredibly brave.
Or insane.
When Deacon Harman did his speech, Pastor Seth had called motorcycles chariots of the Devil. Seth is a pompous, creepy jerk who serves the higher leaders of the church, but even so, I’m not sure I want to meet the rider of that thing.
Feeling as though I’m standing at the gateway to temptation itself, I tear my eyes away from the mechanical monstrosity and glance around the deserted alley for the storage shed.
A living room-sized rectangular structure sitting at the dead end of the alley, it’s in a part of the lot that isn’t well lit, out of reach of the security light above the door to the club. I’ve never been out here before. This is usually a job done by the male staff. Now I see why.
There’s no one else out here, and deep shadows leave plenty of places to hide in dark corners. With the door shut, the pounding music from inside is cut off, leaving behind a heavy silence.
I take a deep breath and push the trolley up to the front of the shed. At the door, I freeze, staring at the padlock.
In the Colony, when we went against the rules set out by the church, we were punished. Sometimes sinners were lashed, but the worst violations earned offenders time in isolation—which was a wooden shed near the back of the property shared by the elders. A shed that looked remarkably like this one. It even had a padlock on the door, and like this shed, it had no windows.
Tamping down the memories that flood back, I close my eyes, reminding myself that this isn’t the Colony, and that part of my life is dead and buried.
It doesn’t work. My hands shake as I open the padlock. The door gives a loud squeak of its hinges when I open it, making me cringe.
As soon as I step inside, the door swings shut, and darkness swallows me whole. Panic seizes me.
I was in isolation a few weeks before I escaped. It was for three days, and that was long enough. When I was in there, the lights were turned off most of the time, plunging me into blackness. Silent, dead blackness, deprived of any sound or human contact, except when the pastors pushed food through a slot in the door.
I swallow hard, feeling along the wall for the handle on the door. When I can’t find it, I feel for the light switch. There isn’t one. My breathing sounds loud in my ears.
Those days in isolation were terrifying. It wasn’t just that the pastors could turn the lights on and off from outside whenever they chose. There was no sound in there. It was total sensory deprivation. The rest of the world disappears, and there’s the constant fear that you’ll be forgotten, that the door will never open.
That same familiar fear of being left in the dark for eternity claws at me now.
Get a grip, Emma. It’s just a shed, not an isolation chamber. Get it together.
Shuffling forward in the black, I feel around with my hands. Nothing but air.
Something long and thin brushes my face. I almost cry out, swatting it away with my hands. Until it brushes my shoulder and I realize what it is. It’s a metallic chain, the kind that hangs from light bulbs.
I growl at my own stupidity and yank on the chain.
There’s a click, and a single bulb above me floods the shed with light.
“Wow, Emma. You are so stupid.”
Now that there’s light in here, the room doesn’t look anything like the isolation shed in the Colony. In that shed, there was nothing but four empty walls. Here, shelves line every wall, each stacked with boxes of empty beer and liquor bottles and kegs. It’s not much, but the sight dozens of brand name beers is enough to ground me in the here and now.