THE OUTLAW’S BRIDE Read online

  He got there quickly. It didn’t feel like he’d made it there soon enough.

  There were tons of cars in the parking lot, more than there should have been. Usually, anyway. But it was made up for by the fact that there were more bikes set there – all aligned in neat little rows. So the Bloody Saints was in there, and they were having a good time as usual. He gritted his teeth, resenting it. There was no time for this.

  Without thinking much of it, he walked in. His sprint had diminished to a fast walk, but he slowed it further still until he was just sauntering his normal walk into the bar. As soon as he entered, though, he realized that there wasn’t the usual chaos that could usually be found at this bar. No. While, sure, there were the normal people getting drunk and a little rowdier than usual, there was something wrong. Something off.

  His eyes immediately went to the furthest back corner of the room. Benny wasn’t hanging out at the bar like he typically would, in the center of everything. Instead, he was watching the room and hanging out with a couple of other dudes he and Darren both knew. This was a bad sign. He high-tailed it over there.

  As soon as he did, Benny raised his eyes to meet him and lifted a frosty glass in his general direction. The motion was less happy than methodical, though, and –

  He tried not to think about it.

  As soon as he got over to them, Darren just about broke down explaining.

  “Victoria,” he said. Her name was the first word out of his mouth. It didn’t seem like that came as any surprise to the other men – to Benny, at least – but that didn’t mean they knew who she was. Not really.

  “Brown hair?”

  He nodded. “She used to work here.”

  Looks of recognition painted their faces. So they didn’t know her name. That didn’t matter. At least they knew who he was talking about, anyway.

  “I need to go find her,” Darren said. He almost went ahead and said “we,” but he didn’t want to drag them into this. Still, though, he needed someone's help. Several someones’ help. If she was being held hostage – and she was – he couldn’t just go in solo, guns blazing.

  That was then that he saw it – the looks of recognition morphing into looks of confusion. They knew who she was, they just didn’t know why he would want to do something like this. Why should they? They didn’t know her, not like he did.

  This wasn’t going to be easy.

  “Are you listening?”

  They weren’t, not really.

  They blinked at him in confusion again, and then the still silence of the bar – at least, in that corner of it, because that’s what it felt like to him – dissipated. They erupted in sound, a few of the guys at the table standing up and coming over to Darren where he was still standing. Benny even put his beer down when he went to go get up, and then Darren couldn’t hear anything because all of the words they were saying were running together in a mess he couldn’t discern.

  They were listening. They just didn’t understand. He wasn't crazy; he wasn’t. He couldn’t be. After all he had been through – by himself and with them, the few men before him – this couldn’t be what got him written off as insane.

  But it seemed like it was.

  “Darren. Darren, look,” Benny started. “You can’t deal with this.”

  Darren felt his heart – he didn’t even know he had one, but here it was making one of its many appearances when it came to Victoria – sink low in his chest. This wasn’t what he had been expecting, but it should’ve been. He looked to the others and grimaced, seeing the assent and agreement in their eyes as they thought the same thing Benny did.

  “Yes, I can.” He felt something bubbling up inside him. He wanted to argue – not even to argue; he needed to hit something. He needed to break things and make his problems go away as they drowned in his anger, but that wouldn’t fix this. It wouldn’t make Victoria safe.

  Benny sighed, and he looked over at Darren one more time. “Fine,” he said. His voice was so low that Darren could hardly hear it.

  But then he repeated himself. “We’ll help you find her.”

  Darren couldn’t believe his ears, but he didn’t ask again for fear that Benny might change his mind. It looked like the others agreed to it, too. What he wanted – for what felt like the first time in his life – was actually working out.

  Until Benny coughed, demanding Darren’s attention again, and said, “But you stay here.”

  “That’s not happening.”

  Benny didn’t even bother looking to the other boys. Sighing, he started talking.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Victoria

  Victoria wasn’t sure exactly where she was. The last memory she had was of trying to run away from two guys and being grabbed, and then pushed into a car. She hadn’t been able to guess where they were going based on how the car was turning – she had no way to do it. She hadn’t been paying attention, like she should’ve been. And her head hurt, so badly.

  She cursed. She was so disappointed in herself, but she was disappointed in Darren, too. He’d left her, and now she was going to die. Of course, he’d been trying to help her; that was why he’d left. But she was only here now because he hadn’t been there, and, as much as she hated that she would’ve relied on him to stay safe, at least she would be alive.

  Like she was now. But she was barely living, so that didn’t count. It wasn’t like they’d hurt her – much. She stretched her wrists as much as she could, but they were bound, and all that did was drag the skin there across her restraints. She was zip-tied, and she was bound at the ankles, too. The position she was sitting in was uncomfortable.

  She looked up to the ceiling. It was gray to the point that it looked colorless, and she didn’t even want to start counting all of the tiles across it. There were so many, and they ran into each other so they were almost overlapping.

  She pushed her head down again, not wanting to look at it. It hurt. The back of her neck dully ached now, too, and she didn’t want to move. But she had to. Her eyes turned to the wall directly in front of her. The wall looked like it had a door in it. The outlines of the door were hard to see, and it looked like it almost blended into the brick-tile of the wall. Her breath caught in her throat.

  She heard it.

  There was the sound of people coming from outside the door. Men, specifically, but then she thought she heard it: a woman’s voice. She couldn’t make out any of what they were saying, but that didn’t change the fact that it was there. That she was hearing it. She felt sick. But even though she wanted to puke, she couldn’t allow herself to get ill from this.

  That is, until she heard the door start to crack open.

  Breathing in shallowly and as rapidly as she could without passing out, Victoria tried to stay calm. The woman who was with the men seemed to have left, and two cruel faces peered in through the doorway at her. One sneered; the other just frowned and punched the other one on the arm, and then that guy left.

  She had to get out of here. The guy who was guarding her was just standing outside the door. The door closed and then she was left in the room again. At least it wasn’t dark.

  This could be so much worse. She didn’t need to keep trying to convince herself of that. Images of “worse” kept running through her mind, terrifying her. She was in danger. If she stayed here, she was going to die, and she wasn’t sure exactly whose fault that was, but she had an idea.

  Her hands stretched against the zip-ties again. She had to get out of here, no matter what she was going to do to accomplish that. She just needed to get the guy watching the door to turn his back away from her, and then she could run for it.

  But first, she had to untie herself. She needed to calm down, to breathe, to think about how she was going to do this. She couldn’t find a way to save herself when she was struggling to understand how or why this was even happening to her.

  And then, as she started trying to squirm against her binding without attracting the attention of the guy at the door
or of anyone else who might show up, she remembered. She wasn’t a damsel in distress. When she was younger, she'd taken a few self-defense lessons. Just because she hadn’t worked towards doing anything with her life in a long time, and just because she’d never had to save herself before, didn’t mean that she couldn’t do this.

  The zip ties that were holding her there didn’t feel like they were as tight as she first thought. If she could just slip her hands free from them, then she could untie her feet and she could escape. The problem was that there were people waiting out there for her, and if they caught her trying to break free from this she would be dead.

  The obvious solution was to wait for the guy outside the door to move away. As soon as that happened, she could make her escape. But first, she had to find a way to get out of these ties without anyone noticing. And then after that, she was going to have to find a way to make the person, or the people, if those others were still waiting around and she just couldn’t see them from where she sat, disappear.

  She could ask to go to the bathroom, and then run for it as soon as he opened the door. That might solve the problem of waiting for him to go away; if she just waited for him to disappear, that could take ages. And she wasn’t too afraid to remember the self-defense lessons she’d taken when she was a teenager.

  But could she take him in a fight?

  She tried to move without making it obvious to anyone who might be looking in. She was in the farthest corner of the room, away from the door, and both her hands and her feet were bound. From where she was positioned, she could see anyone who was out there, unless there was a corner or something for someone to lurk around. She didn’t know what the hallways looked like. She brought a hand to her forehead again, feeling the pain there. She couldn’t identify the pain, though. Was it a sharp ache? A dull headache?

  The knots that were tying her hands together were more important to get rid of now. No matter what she did, it was clear that if she did nothing, she would certainly die. She looked out past that door again. The shadow of that guy was still there, but it didn’t look like there was anyone else out there with him. He couldn’t stay there forever, and he was already moving. Holding her breath, Victoria sat there and watched the bulk of his back walk away. He turned – so there was a corner – and disappeared around the hall.

  Victoria didn’t know which way he was going to go, and she didn’t know when he would be back. She needed to work fast. If she wasn’t done with this by the time he came back, he might find out and he might kill her; if she finished and made a run for it as soon as he was gone, he might kill her; if she didn’t even try to take this chance, she might never get the opportunity to escape again. She had to do it now, or die trying.

  She struggled for a little bit more with the ties, and then she felt them starting to loosen up. It would only take her a few more squirms to make sure she had everything going right for her, and then they would just fall off. But she had to do it fast. She felt tension build in her chest; what if she couldn’t do this? What if she was trying this for nothing? There was no way she was going to be able to get out of here, she was just a girl.

  The zip-ties at her hands fell off.

  Her feet were still tied, though, and she had to fix that now. She heard something come from the hallway, and lifted her head up in fear. Was the guy back already? Had he just gone to the bathroom? It didn’t take guys that long to pee. Looking deep inside herself for some kind of hope (the kind that she’d lost ages ago after dealing with too many people’s bullshit), she hoped that the guy was busy pooping.

  Her hands went to her ankles. These ties were easier to get off because her hands weren’t bound, and she freed herself in seconds. Springing up to her feet, she made her way to the door.

  Now what was she supposed to do?

  She didn’t know what was going on out there. She had no idea where anyone was, if anyone was there, and how many people were out there. More importantly, she didn’t know how many people out there were willing to kill her if they saw that she was free. To that last bit, she guessed the answer was all of them.

  There was no point in waiting, though. Even if that guy wasn’t going to be back for a while, someone else might come looking for her. There was no way she could just sit here, unbound, in this room forever. But…

  How was she supposed to fight her way out of here? She was just one woman; the people out there were an unknown number of probably armed creeps. What would happen if Darren showed up looking for her? But what if he didn’t? She had to rely on herself, but it wasn’t really clear what she could do to make sure things turned out the way she wanted – the way she needed – them to.

  The door was closed, and she couldn’t really tell how far it would spring open if someone pushed it. If she was behind it, though, at least no one would be able to see her immediately. So she did the only thing she could do, and went there.

  A few seconds passed. Then a few minutes went by. Nothing was happening, and the guy who was supposed to be watching her wasn’t even back yet. Or, if he was, he was standing in a way that made it so she couldn’t see the back of his head.

  But that meant that he couldn’t see her either, so it was more likely than not that the man just wasn’t there. This couldn’t be good. Where was he supposed to be? She loved that he wasn’t there, but she was also concerned. If no one was watching her, that meant that something was going on. And that was either very, very good for her, or very, very bad.

  That’s when she heard it.

  The gunshot rang through the air like a deadly bell. It was quickly followed by several more gunshots, and then there was the sound of people shouting and the din of running feet on tile.

  The feet were running away from where she was, though, so that must mean that the gunshots were coming from closer to where she was. Kind of far away, but still close enough. Why the hell didn’t people just punch each other anymore? Why did they always have to bust in and then try to shoot each other and murder each other? It was ridiculous.

  But it helped her.

  If there was gunfire and there was shouting, that meant that whoever was here wasn’t on the friendliest of terms with these people. And unless it was some weird coincidence, that meant that the Bloody Saints were here – and that meant that she was this close to safety. All she had to do was a find a way out of here, and that meant she was home free.

  There was still shouting, but she couldn’t hear what was being said outside of the walls of this room. If the door was locked, that meant she was shit out of luck. Moving so she wasn’t hiding behind the door anymore, she brought her hand to the knob.

  It opened.

  Was this a trap? The guy had left her and the door was unlocked. There was no time to think about that now, though. She just had to make sure she got out of here. Besides making sure she somehow survived this thing, she also had to make sure she didn’t run into Darren. She didn’t know if she could take that.

  As soon as she was out in the hallway, she realized it probably wasn’t going to be as hard to get out of here as she’d originally thought. The turn she’d thought was there earlier was barely a turn at all, and just led down the same hallway. For the most part, this hall was clearly straight – and there were only two directions you could go. She went in the opposite direction from where the chaos was coming from. The gunfire had died down in the last minute or so, but there was still shouting and now there was the sound of things shattering as they were thrown to the ground.

  This, of all places, was the last place she wanted to be in the world. She should be back at her apartment. Why the hell did she get involved with Darren in the first place? He might not even be here. It was almost definitely the Bloody Saints that were here, but Darren had already told her about their rivalry with the Broken Skulls. Whatever was going on here, it probably had nothing to do with her. And it probably had even less to do with the feelings that she hoped Darren had for her.

  She ran down the hallway. Her hear
t was hammering the entire time; what if someone ran and decided to go this way instead? Just because there were issues going on over there didn’t necessarily mean that everyone had forgotten about her, and if they hadn’t –

  There was a turn in the hallway. She took it and kept going left. If going right meant she was going to go right into everything else, then she sure as hell wasn’t going to go that way.

  She didn’t have a long way to go before she found a door. She turned her head to make sure that there wasn't someone behind her, someone chasing her that she just hadn’t seen for some reason. Like she’d expected, there was no one there, but the worry didn’t go away as she pushed her hands on the thick weight of the door.

  This door had to be unlocked.