Anchor point, p.5
Anchor Point, page 5
Ay punyeta!
I jerk my head back and bolt for the bedroom before they can see me. The last thing I need is them thinking I’m intentionally spying on them. Even though I want to know who they are and where they have me, I need to face the fact that they’re in control of this situation. Anything that might raise their suspicions won’t be good for me.
Not at all.
My body is still weak, and I have absolutely nothing here. There’s nowhere for me to go. Nowhere I could run even if I were capable of doing that or I wanted to. I’m at their mercy. Utterly and completely helpless in all of this.
I close the door softly behind me and cringe at the click.
Please don’t let anyone have heard or seen me.
I press my back to the door and hold my breath to listen for the sound of anyone coming. My eyes search the room, taking in all that I couldn't see very well this morning in the afternoon light now streaming in through the window. Someone pulled open the blinds while I was showering, and the new brightness exposes the starkness of the space.
Classic novels line the bookshelves along the wall. I cross the room slowly, taking a moment to scan the titles. My eyes drift down to the chessboard, and tears prick my eyes.
Something about the pieces spread out on the board reminds me of the game of life. So difficult. One I was never good at playing.
I swipe at my cheeks and move to the window to look out. Trees fill the landscape outside, each covered in white snow and crystallized ice. Sunlight glitters off them in a breathtakingly beautiful display that makes me shiver and wrap my arms around myself more tightly.
Winter. One more thing I know nothing about that I guess I’ll have to get used to. The chill in the air. The lack of grass and flowers.
Will I ever feel the tropical heat again? Am I going to spend the rest of my life living with strangers?
Surely, they can't intend to let me stay here. I can't.
But where can I go? What can I do?
The tears fall in earnest now, and I cover my mouth to bite back the sob that threatens to escape. I drop down into the chair Elijah was sleeping in earlier today, lower my face into my hands, and let go.
Of all of it.
All the tension and anguish I didn’t already unleash in the shower. Everything I've bottled up inside. Everything I gave up when I asked them to bring me here instead of going home. The life I can never have again.
But I'm not really giving it up when I couldn't have it back anyway, am I?
I just have to remember that. Remind myself of that fact every time things get tough, or I second-guess my decision to beg Elijah to take me with him. If he hadn’t, I’d either be dead or in a room with the rest of those girls being questioned by some federal employees before being sent back to the people who put me here in the first place.
The door opens, and I jerk to my feet. My knee bumps the chessboard and knocks two pieces to the floor.
Elijah’s eyes immediately dart to where they lie on the bare concrete. A tempest of rage explodes in his icy-blue eyes, and he thunders into the room at me. “What the hell are you doing? Don't fucking touch that.”
He drops to his knees and grabs the pieces with frantic, shaking hands.
I cower back into the chair. “I…I'm sorry. It was an accident. I…”
“I don't fucking care.” He roars at me, his anger a living, breathing thing that wraps around me and squeezes my throat.
“I…I…”
He pushes to his feet, his chest heaving in and out, his fury radiating off him in almost visible waves. “Don't fucking touch anything in here. Do you hear me?”
Footsteps echo down the hall. A tall, thin man with a dark beard appears at the door. His eyes flick between me in the chair and Elijah looming over me.
“E. What the fuck, man?”
Elijah’s eyes widen, and he shakes his head as if to clear it and glances over his shoulder at the man in the doorway. “Fuck.”
He runs a hand over his face, turns away from me, and makes his way toward the door slowly.
The bearded man grabs Elijah’s shoulder to stop him.
Elijah shakes his head and stares at something on the floor. “I'm going for a run.”
The man releases Elijah and lets him storm into the hallway before he turns back to look at me.
He enters slowly with his hands raised. “Sorry about that. I'm Preacher. We haven't met yet.” He approaches cautiously and offers me his hand. “It’s Evangeline, right?”
I reach out and accept his handshake.
His lips curl into a kind smile that matches the warmth of his gaze. “Ignore E. He didn't mean that. It wasn’t about you.”
I swallow thickly.
If that wasn’t about me, what the hell was it about?
Preacher steps back and settles on the edge of the bed. He peers toward the door then back at me. “We're trying to work on a way to help you, but there are a few things I need to know.”
I nod slowly.
He rests his elbows on his knees and watches me cautiously. “I was able to get a little bit of information to get things started, but I need you to confirm something for me first.”
I nod again.
“You don't want to go back to the Philippines?”
I shake my head. He makes it sound so simple. “No. I can't go back. There's a difference.”
He presses his lips together in a firm line. “I understand. And I'm not going to press you any further on that, but you need to know that if you're not going back, there are only so many other options left. You're here essentially without an identity. That's good and bad. It means I can make a new one for you, but there are some things we’re going to need in return.”
Did I hear him right?
“A new identity? You can do that?”
He nods. “We can give you a whole new life, but we need some things from you in return.”
Of course, they do.
“Like what?”
He runs a hand along his beard. “Well, first…assurances.”
“What kind of assurances?”
“That you're not going to rat us out. You know enough about us already to have the guys uneasy. And the longer you're here, the more dangerous you become to us.”
Which is exactly what Elijah was alluding to when I asked him to take me from that ship. That maybe coming here wouldn't be any better than where I already was.
“If we help you, if we get you set up with a new life with someone we trust who can help you, will you take it and be able to put all of this, including us, behind you without asking questions that we can’t give you answers to?”
“Yes.” The answer comes out before I even have time to consider what he's asking.
All I know is that it's an offer I can't turn down, no matter the consequences or repercussions that may come down the road.
They’re offering me a new life. Even if the assurances can’t be the only thing they’ll want in return.
People don’t do things simply out of the goodness of their hearts. There are always ulterior motives. Always things brewing beneath the surface. That’s a hard truth I learned during all this.
So, while Preacher sits here offering me the moon and stars, all I can wonder is…
What else do they want from me? At what cost?
He climbs to his feet.
This all seems too easy. Something isn’t right here. “Preacher?”
He turns back, and his soft brown eyes hold no hostility, only concern.
Maybe I misjudged him and the situation after all.
His brow furrows in concern. “What?”
“What else?” I hold my hands out. “What else do you need from me?”
He offers a slight shrug. “That’s still to be determined. For now, just try to get better.”
It seems easy enough, but it’s far from it.
7
Elijah
“I don't like that look on your face.” Cutter's voice cuts through the silence in my truck.
A silence I was enjoying. Asshole.
I glance over at him with a scowl. “It's dark outside. How the hell do you even know what my face looks like right now?”
Seriously, it’s almost two in the morning, and out here, there aren’t any streetlights or business lights to cast any sort of illumination into the cab.
What the hell is he talking about?
He snorts, shakes his head, and refocuses attention to using the binoculars to watch the building down the road and across the street from us. “I may be blind in one eye, but it doesn't take perfect vision to see that girl is affecting you.”
“I don't know what you're talking about.”
My answer may have come a little too quickly, especially for someone like Cutter, who is suspicious and analyzes everything down to every fucking minute detail.
The man is meticulous. It makes him brilliant at his job, but it’s annoying as fuck when he turns that focus and those analytical skills on you. It’s one of the reasons we all avoid discussing anything personal with him. Though, I don’t talk about anything personal with anyone…
Typically, Cutter isn’t one to launch into touchy-feely conversation, so the fact that he’s bringing it up now means he’s really concerned.
He leans forward slightly, changing the angle of his view. “You know you scared the crap out of her.”
Shit.
I grit my teeth and try to forget the look on Evangeline’s face when I lost my shit on her. “I know I did.”
I scared the crap out of myself.
And afterward, I felt like a fucking asshole.
She didn’t do anything wrong. After the hell she experienced, she needs to be handled with kid gloves, not bellowed at by an angry man who, for all she knows, is a violent psycho. She saw us come in and kill the men on the ship. She knows what we’re capable of, and I scared the fuck out of her even more. All because I couldn’t keep my shit together over a damn game.
Cutter sighs heavily and leans back in his seat. “You need to be careful, brother. We're walking a fine line with this woman. You piss her off or scare her too badly and the first place she goes when we set her loose is to the authorities. She’s seen all of us long enough that she can identify us easily, and even if we blindfold her when we take her out of the warehouse, she's going to be able to describe the place and what she could see from the windows. Things like that. You get a smart cop and it won't take them long to zero in on us. And it's not like we blend well around here.”
Now, it's my turn to snort and shake my head. “None of you assholes do.”
It's ironic, really. I'm the only one with a felony record—and murder at that—yet I'm the one who everybody says looks like the boy next door. My tattoos are well hidden as long as I'm clothed, and my blue eyes and sandy blond hair tend to make me far less intimidating than the rest of the guys and their darker coloring.
But Cutter is right—Evangeline is a liability.
A beautiful one.
The moment I took her against everyone's wishes, I put all of us at risk. And then, when I walked in and saw her knock the pieces off the board, I gave her a reason not to trust us.
I shouldn't have lost my temper. She couldn't have known not to touch it, couldn’t possibly know what it means to me, and I can't expect her to stay in bed and do nothing else until she's fully recovered and able to leave. If I didn’t want her exploring and touching my things, I should have told her and not Hulked out on her.
That’s Rion’s thing. Not mine.
I hate to admit it, but Cutter’s right about something else. She’s a major problem for me. And not only because of what happened in my room earlier. Because she reminds me so much of her.
Sweet.
Trusting.
In need of love and protection.
And looking to me for it.
I clench my fists and shake off the images that have kept me awake at night for over ten years. The mix of joy and pain, anguish and love, agony and desire alternatively pull at me, tearing me apart from the inside out.
And Evangeline is making everything a hundred times worse.
Since the moment I saw her cowering and sick, chained to that damn wall in the ship, I knew I couldn’t leave her. Even after Cutter told me to.
I can’t and won’t examine why.
Maybe I was naïve to think things would be better on the outside. I thought it was bad when I was in the joint, when I had so little to distract me from what happened but the daily routine of living behind bars, but it's so much worse out here. Here, the reality of my life smacks me in the face every fucking morning when I wake and every night when I go to bed alone.
Seeing Warwick, Cutter, and Preacher find their happiness should thrill me. I should be happy for them. That they were able to overcome everything they've all been through to find that little bit of love and peace in the world.
In reality, all I am is angry. Angry that I lost it, and angry that I can never have it again.
But I can't let that cloud my judgment. Not tonight. Not ever. Especially not where Evangeline is concerned.
We have a job to do.
And that job just walked out of Smitty’s Bar and over to his motorcycle.
Cutter pulls his Glock and slaps me on the shoulder. “Here we go.”
I pull away from the curb, with Warwick and Rion in the SUV directly behind us, and head toward Viking as he fires up his bike. The man is completely oblivious to our approach down the road, and he pulls out onto the highway directly in front of us.
It's the perfect place for an ambush. Dark, desolate, and dangerous.
The drop off that runs along the left side of the road is three hundred feet straight down into the valley below. All it will take is one little nudge to send him careening over. And it will all look like an accident—like he was drunk and lost control, or a car came around the curve and ran him off the road.
A quick death isn’t ideal, and it doesn’t even remotely make him pay for what he did to Everly or Liz. He deserves to be raped and beaten and tortured the same way he did to them.
An eye for an eye.
But sometimes, the need for revenge and allowing wrath to take control of your decisions leads you down a road you can’t come back from. I know that firsthand, and none of us are about to make a mistake that’s going to get us sent away…or worse.
This end for Viking is necessary in this case.
After the way we took out the other fuckers from the MC, we have to be more careful about how we do the hits. We don't need them retaliating against us, and even though Everly is adamant there are good guys in the club who would probably do the same thing to the shady members themselves if they knew what really had happened, we can't take that chance.
So, while Cutter would love to use that gun on his lap, it's only a last resort. If we can make this look like an accident, all the better.
Viking reaches the curve in the road, and I gun it. The truck slams into the back tire of his motorcycle, and I push left. Warwick drives up alongside me on the right to ensure Viking can't veer back toward the road.
The bike wobbles and slams into the guard rail before coming back and hitting the side of my truck again. I push it left, and it smashes into the guard rail again. The metal gives way, and Viking has nowhere to go but over and down.
Cutter glances back toward the hole in the guardrail as we continue down the road. “Good riddance.”
“No shit.”
After the raid on the MC headquarters a few months ago, Preacher said the only way he dealt with the guilt of what he had done was to think of us as avenging angels sent to right a wrong. I could relate to that. And watching that fucker go over the side gave me the relief of knowing we're finally done with the MC.
The monsters who were responsible for what happened to Liz and Everly have all paid the price.
Now, it's time to focus on other things. Like the Albanians.
My hands tighten on the wheel.
After my experience with them, I shouldn't be so surprised they moved on to human trafficking. That they were capable of kidnapping women right off the street and making them do unspeakable things, of selling them to the highest bidder. It’s definitely in their wheelhouse. Just one step beyond what they were already doing.
They may think they found a gold mine, but all they've done is put a target on their backs. One I'm ready to hit.
What they did to those women, to Evangeline, is the lowest of low. They aren’t even human; they’re fucking animals. Animals who need to be put down before they harm anyone else.
The guys are in agreement on that one hundred percent, but we need a plan. A way to remove them permanently without starting World War III and leaving Valentina at the center of a mob war in Chicago.
Things are already tense with the Rose Cartel since Val was forced to let them sell in her territory. Mr. Rose wasted no time cashing in on their agreement and getting his product out on the street, and Valentina can’t do anything but sit back and allow it. It’s the price she had to pay for getting Everly back alive. She’s just waiting for him to make a mistake, to somehow violate their agreement so she can destroy him and have a reason.
We’re already on the verge of one conflict. The last thing we need is a fight with the Albanians, too. We have to be smart about this. Just like we have been in dealing with the MC by taking the guys out one by one over time and in different ways, all untraceable to us.
If only it were that easy when it came to the Albanians. But they’re a hardened, well-trained, vicious crew. Aleksander Gashi swooped in after his brother’s death and made sure the organization was a well-oiled machine full of men willing to follow his commands without question.
I never would have taken him for the type to move onto trafficking, but maybe it’s not that huge of a leap considering his headquarters were a strip club, and it was well-known his girls mostly came from Albania and other Eastern European countries. For all we know, maybe he was trafficking the whole time, just doing a better job at hiding it.
