Page 4 of Biker's Dark Revenge

I turned and strode towards the door, and Chuck called to me one last time before I vanished.

"And hey, Lee?"

I turned to face him. He cocked an eyebrow at me.

"Don’t get yourself killed."

I grimaced in response. It was a fair point. Lombardi had switched things up these last few months, and I got the feeling he would have relished the chance to take out the Dogs’ second-in-command. I didn’t hold myself in particularly high esteem, but if Lombardi did, then he might use that to push a little further into our territory.

Not that I cared much what happened to me, not really. Fuck, if I got hurt, so be it – I had plenty of battle scars from over the years, knife wounds, bike accidents, whatever. I barely even felt them most of the time. It took someone else pointing out I was bleeding for me to even notice that there was anything wrong. Most of the time, I felt so numb I could hardly tell when I was hungry, let alone when I’d been hurt.

I was going out there right now. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight, tossing and turning, wondering what was going on with Liana – if she was alright, if she was hurt, if they were already selling her through that twisted, fucked-up brothel. My gut instinct was warning me that there was more to her absence than there seemed, and there wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to risk the possibility that I could be right.

I headed to my room in the compound and grabbed a gun, shoving it into the holster at my hip – the same as I had done on that night, all those years ago, when I had gone after the man who killed my daughter. I brushed that thought aside. That was the last thing I needed to get hung up on right now, there were more important things for me to deal with, and I couldn’t let myself get distracted.

Once I was armed, I headed outside to my bike, throwing my leg over it and revving the engine. Just a stakeout, that’s all Chuck had given me permission for – he knew that if Lombardi’s men saw one of the Dogs in their part of the city, they might take it as a declaration of war, and that was the last thing we needed right now.

But fuck it – if I saw Liana there, then I was going to go after her. No doubt in my mind. I was going to bring her back safe. I didn’t care what it took.

Caring about someone this much felt...dangerous. Risky. Like I was putting more on the line than I even knew about. I barely knew Liana. She’d worked at the Kennels for a few years, and I had always found myself looking forward to the grins she flashed me across the bar when she handed me my beer. She’d tried to make conversation with me a few times, but I always brushed it off. A sweet little thing like her, she didn’t want to hear my life story.

Nobody at the club knew what I had been through before I joined the Dogs, and that was the way I wanted to keep it. Nobody needed to hear that shit, nobody needed to know the details. I had been through enough as it was, and I wasn’t about to turn my life story into some tragedy so everyone would feel sorry for me. It had happened, it was in the past, and all I could do right now was move forward.

I revved up the engine and pulled away from the compound, heading out on to the dark city streets beyond.

Chapter Three – Liana

"Hey, hey, sweetie, you’re alright" I murmured, as I wrapped my arms around Kara, pressing my head into her hair. Squeezing my eyes shut, I did my best to pretend I was anywhere, anywhere other than where I was right now – though I didn’t know how much longer I could keep up the facade.

The damp smell filled my senses, so thick and heavy it felt as though I was going to throw up at any moment. The only light in the room filtered through a tiny window in this cell-like room, picking out the golden strands in Kara’s hair.

I didn’t know how this had happened. I didn’t know how this had turned out the way it had. I’d felt the bag over my head, the pressure of hands on my arms, and before I knew it, I had been spirited away to this dank building God knows where in Atwood, locked up in a room with another woman.

It had been at least two days – it was hard to tell, with the small amount of light visible through the window. A few hours ago, one of the guards had pressed his face to a crack in the door, flashing me a dark grin.

"Tomorrow you’re going to be shipped out," he told me. My heart dropped.

"What does that mean?" I demanded, springing to my feet as my eyes widened. He shrugged.

"Lombardi has a lot of brothels that need whores like you," he sneered at me. My stomach dropped. So this was what I thought it was. As much as I wanted to believe it was something else, I had known from the moment the door slammed behind me why these men were kidnapping me. Sex trafficking. They were going to move me across the country to God knows where and set me to work.

The thought of it made me feel sick. No. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t. I had...I had barely been with anyone throughout my life, and they wanted me to work on my back? Wanted me to open my legs for anyone who would pay enough to make it happen?

"You can’t do this to me," I told him, pleading with him. "I won’t - if you send me out there, I’ll-"

"Shut the fuck up, bitch," he replied, and he slammed the door in my face once more, leaving me in the dark of this room once more.

However, I wasn’t alone here. No, when I first arrived, I noticed another figure in the darkness – a woman, a little younger than me, with a mop of messy blonde hair, her form slumped over in the corner of the room.

"Hello?" I had whispered to her, reaching out to touch her arm. She was warm, so she was alive, at least...

"Hello," a little voice had replied, and I had nearly jumped out of my skin. What the...?

And then, to my horror, a little girl made her way out of the darkness and into the light. And my heart dropped.

No. No. This couldn’t be happening. A little girl? What did they have a little girl here for....?

She was quiet, barely speaking at all that first day, as I tried to get any information I could out of her – she was four years old, she told me, and she was the daughter of the other woman in the cell with me. She had that same mop of blonde hair, and, later, I could see she had the same hazel eyes as her mother too.

---