RIDE (A Stone Kings Motorcycle Club Romance) (49 page)

M
y head was throbbing so painfully
it was difficult to keep my eyes open. At first, I tried to pay attention out the window, to try to memorize the route the men were taking, but it was impossible to concentrate, so I gave up and let my eyes close and my head rest against the window. I told myself that anyway, it probably didn’t make much difference whether I tried to pay attention right now.

I knew exactly where we were going.

When all three of the men had gotten back in the car and slammed the doors — causing a painful clanging in my head — I was roughly strapped into the seatbelt. “You try anything,” Isaiah told me from the front seat, “You’ll be even sorrier than you’re already going to be when this is all over.”

“Check her pockets,” the driver barked. I hadn’t been able to get a look at him yet, but his voice was so familiar… With a shock, I realized who it was.

“Elias?” I croaked in astonishment.

“You shut your mouth, Cherish. You just SHUT your mouth!” He turned in his seat and looked at me, rage evident in his flashing eyes. My brother was furious, in a way I had never seen or heard him be before. “You have brought disgrace down upon our home! You’re nothing but a whore! You need the Devil beaten out of you, and that’s exactly what you’re going to get!” Angrily, he turned the key in the ignition and threw the car into gear with a clunk. The wheels squealed a little as he accelerated abruptly and made a jerky U-turn back toward town.

My heart began to pound hard in my chest as I thought of the few people who I had remembered escaping the Ranch when I was younger. I thought of how dead their eyes looked when they came back and were finally allowed to join the rest of us again. I had always wondered what had been done to them in their time of seclusion, and shuddered weakly now at the realization that I was about to find out.

The man beside me pushed me over onto one hip and checked my back pockets. “Cell phone,” he muttered, pulling out the burner phone Seton had given me. He pushed the button to open the window and flung it out onto the road. My eyes pricked with sudden tears. The phone was the only way I had to contact anyone to come help me. Would I have been able to get a call or a text to Seton or Levi if he hadn’t found it? Would the club have been able to track where I was with it? I would never know now. I’d be leaving Lupine just the way I’d arrived: with no money, no friends who knew where I was, and very little hope.

In spite of the pounding of my head, I must have slept, because suddenly I was being shaken awake by the man beside me. I raised my head painfully and looked out the window. We had stopped at an isolated rest area. “You need to put these on,” he said, shoving a bundle of clothing toward me.

I saw that the other men had gotten out of the car and were standing outside, scanning the horizon for other vehicles. “I’m gonna get out of this car, and you’re gonna change your clothes. You try anything, you’re gonna be real sorry.” Reaching behind me, he cut the plastic tie that had bound my hands. I moaned and rubbed my wrists as the circulation returned painfully.

The man — now that my brain was clearing a bit, I thought his name was Joseph — climbed out of the car and closed the door, but I noticed that his window was cracked just enough that he could see the top of my head. I sighed. There was no way I could do anything to try to get away now, so with a heavy heart, I separated the clothing he had given me. There were temple garments — the undergarments that members of all LDS sects worn — and a thick, heavy dress of the kind I had worn every day of my life until I’d escaped from the Ranch. Robotically, I donned the clothes, but left on the underwear I was wearing under them. The idea of these men seeing my intimate clothing filled me with revulsion.

As I drew on the long, scratchy socks and slid my feet into the ill-fitting shoes, it was almost as though the last few months had never even happened. I stifled a sob that threatened to tear from my throat. Levi’s face appeared, so vivid that I could remember detail: his deep and penetrating eyes, the scratchiness of his beard against my cheek, the strong square jaw. I longed to see him again, to feel that beard, to nestle into the crook of his arm. The probability that I would never see him again was unthinkable.

When I was finished dressing, Joseph took my other clothing and threw it in the back of the SUV with a sour look, as though he was touching filth. The men got back in the car, and Isaiah looked at me for the first time since they had taken me. A disgusted grimace contorted his face. “Contain your hair,” he spat.

“I don’t have anything to tie it back with,” I said, as calmly as I could. Only a trace of the fear spiking through me came through in my trembling voice.

Joseph reached back to the clothing I had just taken off, and grabbed my shirt. Violently, he tore it along the bottom, rending it until he had a long strip of fabric. “Here,” he said tossing it at me. I did as I was told, and tried to push down the unreasonable sadness I felt at seeing one of the only remnants of my former life being ripped to shreds.

We rode in silence for a long while, angry tension so thick in the air it felt as though I would choke on it. Eventually, Isaiah spoke.

“Did you really think I wouldn’t find you, girl? Did you really think you’d get away that easily?”

I said nothing at first, afraid that anything I replied would be met with another slap to the face. Finally, I dared a question. “How did you? Find me?” I asked in a small voice.

“You can’t survive out in Satan’s garden without proof you’re one of them,” my brother Elias sneered contemptuously. “The second you had to get the record of your birth, the man you spoke to at the county courthouse got hold of us. Did you really think it would be that simple to disappear from us?”

Oh, God, no…
I closed my eyes briefly in disbelief and regret. How could I have been so stupid to believe the man on the phone who told me he would help me? I realized with horror that when he had told me to send the application form directly to him, I was falling right into a trap. At his request, I had sent this stranger the form filled out with all the information Isaiah would need to find me in Lupine. Anger and frustration at how stupid I had been overwhelmed me, and silent tears began to stream down my face.

“So you went straight to a criminal who cavorts with the Beast,” my brother spat with loathing. He meant Levi, I realized dimly. “Did you open your legs for him right away? Did you give yourself to him, defiling your body and making your flesh rotten like the filth that you are?”

I couldn’t help but flinch at the violence in his words. “No,” I whispered. “No.” I wasn’t denying that I’d slept with Levi, though they couldn’t know that. But in my heart, I couldn’t stand them saying that what had happened between Levi and me was wrong, or filthy. I knew I would probably never see him again. I knew that I had almost certainly lost him forever. But I could not and would not let myself be ashamed of what had happened between us. Let these men think what they wanted. Let everyone at the Ranch loathe and judge me. Inside, I would never let myself agree. I had been in love with Levi. I was
still
in love with Levi, I thought fiercely. And that made what had been between us beautiful. Even if he didn’t feel the same. My love for Levi was
mine
. It was in
my
heart. And no one else could ever make it anything bad.

“What will happen to me?” I asked quietly.

“You will be punished,” Isaiah retorted. “The others in the community shall know what you have done. You will live in isolation, in penance, until you fully repent for all of your sins. When you rejoin the community, you will atone publicly, confess to all, and ask for forgiveness.”

“Will… will I be going back to your home, Isaiah?” A tiny part of my heart jumped at the idea of seeing the children again. I had always tried to love them as well as I could, and I knew they had loved me. But the thought of Isaiah coming to my bed again in the night made me want to retch.

Isaiah turned and looked at me directly. There was no mistaking the loathing in his eyes. “I would not share a bed with a whore such as you. You shall be divorced from me. I doubt that any other man will want you, knowing what you have done. You will live out your days atoning for your sins and trying to correct the dishonor you have brought upon your family.”

So I was to be brought back to the Ranch, only to be an outcast. Why, oh why hadn’t they simply let me go? I thought desperately. I couldn’t see any reason why they wouldn’t have just written me off as a lost soul, like they had with Levi.

Levi
…

With a lump in my throat, I leaned my forehead back against the window and stared at the landscape outside. The thumping of my head had lessened to a low throb, but the swelling of my cheek and mouth had started, leaving me with a different sort of pain.

Someday
, I told myself. Someday, I would escape again. I’d be smarter this time. I would go somewhere else, somewhere completely new. I would change my name, cut all ties, and disappear. After a while, they would have to get sick of looking for me, and give up. I’d be like a ghost to them, and they would forget about me.

I’d be like a ghost for Levi, too. A tear rolled down my cheek, stinging my cut lip with its salt. Someday, it would be like I’d never even existed.

I
tried calling her burner
, my fingers so shaky from adrenaline I could hardly punch the numbers. It went right to voice mail. “FUCK!” I screamed, and resisted the urge to throw my phone against the side of the clubhouse.

“What are we gonna do?” Seton asked, her eyes wide with panic.

Grey spoke. “First thing, ride the road she usually takes coming home on her bike. Maybe she’s got a flat and she’s walking home.”

“She would have been home at least an hour ago, even if she had to walk,” Seton shook her head. “And I drove that road on the way here. No sign of her.”

“Do you really think the people from… before… that they took her?” Seton whispered.

My jaw tensed in anger. “Yeah. I do.” Something in my gut told me it was true. This wasn’t some random bunch of thugs. The Ranch had found her, somehow. I didn’t know how they’d done it. But I was pretty sure I knew what they would do to her now that they had her.

“We have to go after her.” I turned to Grey. “She’s not safe with them. They’ll hurt her. Women aren’t worth shit to them, they’re just possessions. They’ll treat her like a disobedient dog, beat her and tie her up so she won’t run away again.”

“Oh, my God. What do we do?” Seton asked.

“We know where they’re going,” I said. “Best thing is to catch up with them on the way, before they get back to the Ranch. The community has friends in the government and the police force up there. If they make it across the border before we overtake them, it’ll be a lot harder to get her back.”

“Okay.” Grey nodded, thinking. “First, we need to ride the road she took, to look for any signs of her.” He looked at me. “Take Repo and Cal. I’ll have my phone. Call me if you find anything.”

I headed out with the men a few minutes later, struggling to go slow on the bike so we could look for any signs. Cal and I found her bike in a ditch, abandoned but otherwise fine. Repo had ridden on a bit further, and a few minutes later he returned to where we were and held out the crushed remnants of a phone.

“Looks like it’s been run over a couple of times,” he said.

“Fuck.” Cal shook his head.

“What do you want to do, brother?” Repo asked me. “You know the club is with you. We’ll do whatever it takes to get her back.”

“Let’s go back to the clubhouse. We’re gonna need a few more men.” A thousand different emotions were swirling around in my head at once, primarily fear and anger. I let the anger take control. It was better that way. “We’re gonna find her, and then we’re gonna make sure those bastards never touch a hair on her goddamn head again.”

T
here was only
one road that would take you from Lupine to the town nearest to the WFZ Ranch with anything like a direct route. I had to assume that the men who had taken Cherish would follow it.
If
they took her
, a voice said inside my head.

No
. I couldn’t let myself think about the possibility that it wasn’t them. Because if I was wrong, if she hadn’t been kidnapped by her Isaiah Whitehead and taken back to the Ranch…

Then I had no idea where she was. Which meant I had no way to save her.

O
ne reason
I’m the Sergeant at Arms of the Stone Kings is that I don’t crack under pressure. I have long experience of keeping my emotions in check, keeping my cool in times of danger, and not letting anything show on my face that I don’t want to show. But damned if I wasn’t struggling with the adrenaline shakes as we set out to find Cherish. My normal ability to compartmentalize my emotions wasn’t working in this case. I kept thinking of all sorts of things the WFZ men might be doing to her right now. None of the scenarios I was imagining were good. I wondered how she was doing: if she was terrified, if they had hurt her… My fist clenched tightly around the throttle as I imagined them touching her. Whatever they had done to her, once we found them, they would pay, and pay dearly.

There were ten of us, riding in formation as we sped down the one highway I was praying would lead me to Cherish. I glanced around at my brothers and felt a surge of gratitude for this family of men who always had my back. As soon as Cal, Repo and I had gotten back to the clubhouse and briefed the men, every single one of the Stone Kings had volunteered to come with us with no questions asked. Grey had some of the brothers stay behind to post guard just in case anything funny happened. Seton was at the clubhouse, and had called some of the other old ladies to stay and wait with her. She had assured me that she would call me or Grey right away if they heard anything at all.

Riding the speed limit, the trip from Lupine to the nearest town to the Ranch would take someone about seven hours, if they only stopped for gas and to piss. Seton told us that at the most, Cherish would have been gone about three hours. We flew out of Lupine at about thirty over the limit, increasing it to near forty on the open straightaways. Instead of our usual formation, I was riding in front on Grey’s right, with Repo taking the spot I normally held as Sergeant at Arms. I needed to be able to see into vehicles as we passed, and communicate with Grey by hand signals if necessary, even though we had headsets as well.

It was frustrating as shit flying blind like this, especially because we had no idea what kind of car we were looking for, but as we came up on other vehicles, we fell into a routine of slowing down so that I could spend a few moments looking through the windshields to evaluate who and what was inside. The cars were fairly easy; it wasn’t hard to see two parents with a couple of kids horsing around in the backseat, or a lone driver rocking out to the radio.

I figured I was looking for at least two men, probably in a van or maybe something with dark windows, and probably Arizona plates, though I wasn’t willing to bet on that. The WFZ men tended to wear a kind of uniform of long-sleeved button-down shirts in dark green, gray, or blue, so that was also something I was looking for. I didn’t know if I’d see Cherish if she was in the car, so I wasn’t necessarily looking for a woman. Since she had been abducted, she could be tied up in a backseat or — I tried not to think about it — even in a trunk.

Even as fast as we were flying along, every second was agonizing as my brain went in circles trying to figure out if there was anything that could tell me where Cherish was right now. In the back of my mind, was the nagging thought, cold and lethal as a dagger: what if we were on completely the wrong track? What if Cherish hadn’t been taken by the men of the Ranch, and by the time we figured that out, it was too late?

For the hundredth time I pushed the thought away.
No
. It wasn’t possible. Somehow, I knew, almost more strongly than I’d ever known anything, that if something had already happened to Cherish — if someone had hurt her, even killed her — I would
feel
it. I would know it in my gut. A world without her in it was unimaginable. She was a light that couldn’t just
go out,
just like that, without… I don’t know, without some sort of earthquake, or tidal wave, or something.

If she was gone, if someone took her — took her
from me
— how could life just continue? How would my heart just fucking continue to
beat
, like nothing had happened? No, I told myself firmly. It wasn’t possible. We
would
find her. And it would not be too late.

All the effort I had made to try to stay away from Cherish in the last days, all the work I had put into trying to tell myself I could just let her go and get over her — I saw now that it had all been a fucking ridiculous game I had been playing with myself. I could no more leave Cherish alone than I could fly to the goddamn moon by flapping my arms. Ever since the first day I had seen her in the parking lot of the clubhouse, I had been a goner. I pictured her now, in that ridiculous damn Minions shirt that I would give everything I owned to see her in again. My throat closed up at the memory, and I swallowed painfully. Next to me, Grey must have heard the low, strangled sound I had made in my throat through his headset, because he turned to look at me and cocked his head. “You good?” he asked. I nodded but said nothing, not trusting my voice.

I wasn’t a religious man. It was hard to be, after everything I’d seen growing up. But as I ate up the highway on my bike with my brothers next to me, I found myself thinking that if God did exist, He wouldn’t let anything happen to Cherish. She was too good, too brave, too beautiful. Almost without meaning to, I sent up a silent prayer.
If you are out there, don’t take her from me. I won’t let her go again
.

We’d been riding for a couple of hours when we came up on the approach of a small town. A few buildings on the outskirts faced the highway, to lure in people passing through with gas and food. As we had agreed to, the formation stopped about half a mile from the first buildings, so as not to attract attention. Grey and I went ahead to see what we could see. We approached a truck stop that had a small restaurant and a small grocery-convenience store. We parked the bikes at the furthest gas pump from the store and pretended to get ready to fill our tanks. I was scanning the large trucker parking lot to the left of the store when Grey lightly tapped me on the shoulder. “Hey,” he said.

I glanced over in the direction of his gaze. Coming out one of the side doors of the convenience store was a man in a dark blue shirt and black pants. Behind him, another man in a gray shirt followed, holding the arm of a woman. She wore a light blue dress made of heavy fabric, and her head was down.

Cherish
.