Stolen: Hell's Overlords MC (27 page)

Like a robot, I pivot and follow him, leaving behind the last traces of Lucila. Just like that, she’s gone. I wonder how her son will eat tonight. I hope there is someone else who can take care of him. I doubt very much that his mom will ever be coming back.

It’s strange how, all of the sudden, I can leave all of that behind. One moment I’m terrified, raging internally at how cold Clarissa had been. The next, though, I’m just like her. I forget the whole thing. Like Lucila never mattered. Like she never existed. The ease of the transition scares me on its own. I need to get away from El Cruce before the town steals what little soul I have left.

I slink between the beads. The music slaps me in the face, pulsing hard and aggressively through the air in the room. Eduardo, standing on the other side, grabs my arm again. I start babbling before he can say anything. “Eduardo, Lucila hasn’t shown up, and she’s never been late before. I’m worried she—”

“Enough,” he says, waving me off. “Forget about her.”

“But…”

“I said enough. Do you work for me or what?”

I sag my shoulders and let my head droop forward. It’s impossible for me to deal with all of these things at once. How could anyone handle this much? It’s inhuman. “Yes, Eduardo.”

“Good. Then do what I tell you. I need you to go serve the private room. There is a man in there; he will want a drink, yes?”

I give him a dumb nod and he releases me. “Go,” he barks, pointing towards the bar. “Now.”

I propel myself towards the bar. Why is this town so hungry? All it does is take and take. It has taken my friends, my husband, my dignity, and so much more. Lucila won’t ever return. The more I say that to myself, the truer it feels. She’s never coming back. Her son is probably hungry right now, and crying for his mother. But he doesn’t know that, most likely, she is drugged into unconsciousness and on her way to a life as some rich man’s toy. No one deserves that kind of fate.

I’m sinking into a spiraling depression. My hands move on their own accord as I reach the bar, grabbing a tray and a set of glasses, filling them with ice, tucking a towel into my back pocket. Tomas, from the far end of the bar, gives me a curious eyebrow raise, but I ignore him. I wouldn’t know what to say anyway. He can’t help Lucila anymore than I can.

I turn to go to the private room. It sits tucked behind the stage at the end of a short ramp. Big double doors, covered in plush red velvet, separate it from the main area. Most of the time, the guys who rent the private room are hitmen who’ve just finished a major contract, or
capos
celebrating the close of a new shipment. They are always the drunkest and cruelest. They think they are invincible. I hate serving them.

When desert tortoises get scared, they pull their head into their shells. They shut the world out, pretend it doesn’t exist. As if closing one’s eyes makes the predators disappear. I suppose that tactic works, up until a certain point. Either way, I feel like that’s what I’m doing, retreating into myself and leaving my emotions on the outside of my shell. I am more of a patchwork of skin and bone and blood than I am anything resembling a functioning human. I am inanimate. I am still.

Lucila is gone, yes, but so is everything else. I want to squeeze my eyes shut tight and keep it that way forever. How long can I keep this up? How long can I pretend this awful world isn’t real? I don’t know, but I’m willing to find out. Retreat, deny, delude. Hide from it all. There’s no room for caring or connection in this life. The second you show you care about someone, men in black come swooping in to abuse her body and take her away. To sell her, if Clarissa’s intuition is right. And why wouldn’t it be? I can’t think of a worse fate, and that seems to be what fate has in store for girls like Lucila and me. Pain, suffering, and just enough of the good things that the bad things stand out that much starker.

I shiver. The air is cold, but my heart is colder.

I begin heading towards the foot of the ramp. I’m lost, not quite in thought, but in some soundless, lightless region deep in my own head. As I walk, a flash of silver snags my eye. I see Eduardo on the other side of the room. His hands gesticulate, waving through the air like they always do when he is nervous. I wonder why he is pointing at me.

Then I see them.

The men in black from last night are confronting him. Even from here, I can tell that their fists are clenched. The downward slope of their shoulders has a violent tilt to it, like someone preparing to explode in rage. Their mouths bob up and down furiously. They must be yelling, demanding something. What could they want? Why are they here?

It doesn’t take long for me to find out. Eduardo extends one chubby finger in my direction, and they turn to follow it. They see me. We lock eyes. I freeze.

They want me.

My brain takes note of every angle in an instant. The doorway to the club is too far; they’ll cut me off before I reach it. Ditto for the hallway leading to Eduardo’s office, as well as the one that opens towards the dancers’ room. The men leap over a couch and begin to run towards me. There’s only one way to go: up the ramp. I drop my tray and sprint.

I guess rock bottom was still a ways to go.

Vince

I’ve always hated strip clubs. Such a fucking desperate atmosphere in every single one of them. Sad girls and sadder men. Sure, there’s always that overly optimistic feminist angle you could take on it, that the dancers do it because they want to and they should be allowed to trade whatever parts of themselves they want, blah, blah, capitalism, blah. Whoop-de-fucking-do. That sounds great until you talk to them. It’s a shitty situation. Girls who don’t know what else to do with themselves, who are used to being treated shitty by the men in their lives. I may not be the world’s idea of a gentleman, but at least I’m not slapping women around when they talk back to me. Usually, I’m gone before they ever get the chance to.

But as pitiful as the situation is that traps strippers into their day jobs or night jobs or whatever you’d call it, the men who come crawling into establishments like this are ten times worse. When I walked through the big, dark room housing the main stage, I’d taken a glance at the crowd littering the couches and shady booths. Fuckers made my stomach rise.

There are a few different types that populate the seedier strip joints. There are the cheaters, the businessmen clinging to a youth that had blown by them decades ago and left some savage tire marks on their bodies in the form of wrinkles, liver spots, and ulcers killing them one acid drip at a time. These men always tip the most. There are the young kids, too green to know that life is conspiring to fuck them over in the very near future and nowhere near ready for the ass kicking they will soon encounter. These men always tip the least. And then there ae the connoisseurs. These are the guys no stripper wants to encounter. They are the criminals, drug dealers, and murderers, the kind of men who’d put a bullet in a girl’s head for talking to them the wrong way and then go home to kiss their wives and complain about a boring day at the office. Cruel, dangerous men. They don’t tip at all—they take what they want and leave behind what they don’t. They’re vultures. They’re brutes. I despise them most of all.

A man’s got to have a code. If you don’t know what you won’t do, then what are the limits to what you will do? Don’t get me wrong, I’m like the criminals in that I take what I want, too. But unlike them, I don’t leave a trail of broken, innocent bodies behind me. I hurt the men who deserve hurting, fuck the girls who deserve fucking, and then I move on. Simple as that.

That’s my code. I do the right thing at the right time, then I leave. One night only. The next episode is always just a short motorcycle ride away. Still, I can’t help but wonder how long that can last. I’ve been restless my whole life. When I was young, joining the Inked Angels MC was the best way I could think of to keep moving, never pausing for breath, never stopping for longer than it takes to get my nut and hit the road again. But the more I move, in wider and deeper circles, the closer I get to what one might call sticky situations. I’ve got enough scars to verify that. Not to say I’m scared of anything. I’ve got enough scars to verify that, too. I just wonder what will happen if I get into something I can’t find my way out of. Do I get wiped off the map, just like that? Am I reduced to a stain of blood on the asphalt? Or is there part of me that will last?

I think of Devin’s blue, staring eyes, and shiver. Mortar has something that will last. He and Kendra have a baby who will carry their name and their blood, even after both of them are long in the dirt. I don’t have anything like that. No heir, no legacy. Considering the business I’m in, I’ll be lucky to even get a gravestone. I feel something akin to a fist curl up inside of me at the thought.

Another pair of blue eyes pops into my head: Rose’s. I was hoping to see her tonight, but so far, no such luck. I still have her nametag pressed into the palm of my hand. She’s an itch I can’t scratch. I hate the thought of a girl like her getting away. She shouldn’t be slipping through my fingers, she should be climaxing beneath them. A girl like her needs to be bent over my bed, moaning my name and clawing at the pillows while I drive into her. That fragile little body needs a strong hand to work it to its heights.

Fuck, I’m getting hard just thinking about her. She felt so delicate in my hands when I’d held her in the parking lot. I can’t get the desire out of my head. But I need to put her aside for the moment. I’m here for business, not pussy. And business right now is not looking good.

I glance at my watch. It’s almost one in the morning, and Cesar still hasn’t shown up. The last few times, I’d been annoyed. But this time, I’m concerned. Cesar’s words are still swirling around in my head. He’d been fucking terrified when we spoke earlier. Even for a twitchy, nervous guy, he had looked like a human live wire in the diner this morning, jumping damn near out of his seat whenever someone so much as glanced in his direction. He was genuinely afraid that the Diablos had eyes and ears on him, even then. What had got him so spooked?

He was short on information and long on fear. In my experience, that’s a bad combination. Paranoia makes a man do stupid things, and a man in a line of work like Cesar’s could not afford to be stupid. The second that one lets rumors and reputations shake him from his normal routine, he gets sloppy. Sloppiness leads to accidents. Accidents get men killed. I just hoped that wasn’t the case.

Another few minutes tick by. I’m tapping my foot on the ground. He needs to show up. I need to know more about this new cartel leader, El Diablo Blanco, or whatever the fuck his name was. The pieces just won’t lie right in my head. Why are the Diablos reforming now? Where did this motherfucker come from, and who the hell is he? I guess that’s all semantics, though. The most important thing I have to figure out is what they are planning. For the sake of the club’s survival, we need to get a jump on preparations. Any inside scoop could forestall war. Things have been good since Mortar took over, but we’re still not completely out of the woods. Our weapons stock is low and a significant amount of our money is tied up in investments that won’t come to fruition for a while longer. We need to be smart with what resources we have. That means good planning, and good planning requires good foresight. Sending me down here was Mortar’s way to get a head start on that. But I wasn’t expecting Cesar to be this shaken up. Why had a few nasty-sounding rumors done such a number on his sense of safety? I couldn’t be sure; he hadn’t given me much to go on. But one memory from my childhood keeps flashing in my head over and over again, like a warning beacon.

I was six years old, standing on the beach with my father. He worked on boat crews of all shapes and sizes, from chartered fishing vessels to massive cargo ships that crisscrossed the ocean for months at a time. He would be gone for massive chunks, weeks on end passing by without my seeing him. But he was a good man during those rare moments when he was around. We used to walk on the beach together. He’d have a glass beer bottle swinging in one hand and a cigarette dangling from his lip. I learned to love the smell of smoke early on. When I made him laugh, he’d let me steal a sip of his beverage after checking around to make sure no nagging old ladies were looking.

That day, the clouds were low and roiling overhead. “Hurricane on the way,” he mumbled around his cigarette as he cupped a hand to light it against the stiffening breeze. My eyes must have grown round as dinner plates, because he looked at me and laughed, then passed the beer over so I could take a tiny swallow. “Wanna know a secret?” he asked me.

I nodded. Of course I did. What son didn’t want to conspire against the world with his father? We kept walking down the beach. The pier jutted up ahead. Crumbling, salt-stained wood rose above us, barnacles clinging to the bottoms of the posts where the high tide would roll in.

“There’s one surefire way to know there’s a bad storm coming,” my father said.

“What’s that, Dad?” I asked. We were passing under the pier now. The shadows were cool and moist. A briny smell from the tide pools filled my nostrils.

“Look up.” He pointed upwards and I followed his finger to gaze at the underside of the wooden planks. At first, I saw nothing. Then I noticed it: a blurring, skittering gray motion weaving between the wood. It took me a moment to figure out what it was. It looked like a river of fur. “The rats always run when a storm is coming, Vince. They know. They can smell it coming, and they’re smart enough to get the hell out of the way before they get sucked out to sea.”

I gazed at the rats scampering along the boards, away from the ocean that had begun to withdraw. The breeze had stopped, I realized. The waves ate less and less beach. Nature was getting ready to put on one hell of a righteous display. I felt fear gnawing at the lining of my stomach. It wasn’t the rats that scared me, although the current of rodents flowing past us overhead would have terrified most of the kids I knew. It was what they represented. Like cockroaches and Twinkies, rats could survive just about anything. If they were running away, whatever they were running from must be something truly terrifying.

I never forgot those rats.

Funny that such a random memory would occur to me now, although I suppose it isn’t that random after all. Cesar is a rat. If he is getting ready to run, then maybe it really is time to be scared.

The door to the private room I’m sitting in creaks open. Someone slips through. Three thoughts flash through my head in quick succession. At first, I think it’s Cesar. But the moment the person steps into the light, I see that it’s a female. Tan skin and long, dark hair swinging over her face. My second thought is that it’s Rose. I notice with surprise and then irritation that I suck in a breath. Like I’m dying to see her. When I finally see that it’s a random stripper, I let the breath out in a long whistling exhale and lean back against the leather couch. What is this feeling slushing in my stomach? Disappointment? I need to get that shit out of the way real quick. Rose is just a girl. One I don’t even know. There’s plenty more where she came from. The best thing to do would be bang someone else and get her out of my head.

As if she can hear my thoughts, the stripper sidles over to me. “Hey, baby,” she says with her lips brushing against my ear. She places a small hand on my chest to steady herself as she swings a leg over my thighs and plants herself on top of me. The red-tinged lights shine down mutely from above. Every few seconds, the music from the speakers outside rattles the walls.

Inside this private room, though, the speakers are playing more softly. Bump and grind R&B oozes low and sensual around us. I survey the body of the girl on top of me. She’s got massive tits. The bikini top she’s wearing does virtually nothing to keep them up. She must agree that it’s not doing much, because as I watch, she reaches a hand behind her back and undoes the knot. The scrap of garment falls away from her torso and she casts it aside.

“Like what you see, papi?” she murmurs. She picks up each of my hands in hers and brings my palms to her breasts. Her hips start to grind back and forth over my jeans. I haven’t said a word yet. “I can give you a dance, if you’d like,” she continues. Her teeth are tiny, like white chiclets, but the tongue she lashes out across them looks wily and capable of anything. The lust emanating from her eyes is enough to make a weaker man come in his pants.

What the fuck is wrong with me? The feeling of disappointment has taken root in my loins and won’t let go. This stripper is bobbing up and down on my cock, stroking my bulge with her hands, giving me “fuck me” eyes like I’ve never seen before, and yet I feel nothing.

“Or,” she whispers, leaning forward to kiss my neck with pillow-soft lips, “we could lock the door and do a little bit more.”

And yet, nothing.

It feels like my body is betraying me. I’m fully soft, not an ounce of physical attraction anywhere in me. My hunger to fuck, normally so omnipresent and eager to be sated, has vanished. In its place is a weighty, metallic-tasting depression. I don’t want this girl. I want the one whose nametag I’m still holding.

I want Rose.

“Not tonight,” I say gruffly. I scoot back on the booth seat and push the girl off of me.

She frowns. “Oh, come on, Daddy, let’s have some fun,” she protests.

I ignore her. “Not tonight.” I look at the nametag in my hand. I’d wonder what’s wrong with me, but the answer lies between my fingers.

I don’t look up as the girl turns haughtily on one heel, scoops her top from where it fell on the floor, and marches out of the room in a huff. I’d rather be alone than with another girl right now. I don’t know what the hell that means, but the grating irritation of her presence is all I have to go on.

My watch chirps from my wrist. One o’clock. Cesar is an hour late. In the underworld circles he and I move in, tardiness is not an option. Something bad has happened. I know it with the same immediacy and certainty that recognized and latched onto Rose. I don’t need to reconsider or think it over; I just know.