The Biker's Sinful Captive

Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

3 months ago

I had exactly eleven dollars and forty two cents to my name when I walked into Ashford Creek.

Eleven dollars. Forty two cents. And a backpack that held everything I owned, which wasn't saying much because I had never been allowed to own very much. A change of clothes, a half empty bottle of water, my sketchbook, and a photograph of nobody because I didn't have anyone worth photographing.

That was it. That was the grand total of twenty one years of Lena Cross existing on this earth.

I'd been walking for three hours by the time the town showed itself through the rain. And when I say rain I don't mean the polite kind that taps on windows and makes everything smell clean.

I mean a full Texas downpour that had soaked through my jacket in the first twenty minutes and was now doing something deeply personal and aggressive to my shoes. Every step made a sound that I was too tired and too cold to find funny.

I hadn't slept properly in two days. The last ride I'd caught dropped me at a junction eleven miles back, a trucker named Dale who smelled like cigarettes and beef jerky and had been decent enough to not try anything.

I'd been grateful for that in the particular way you are grateful for basic human decency when your life has taught you that basic human decency is not actually guaranteed. I kept walking.

Ashford Creek wasn't much to look at. One traffic light, a gas station with a sign missing two letters, a hardware store that looked like it hadn't had a customer since 2009. The kind of town that existed on maps only because someone had to name it something. The streets were mostly empty this late and the rain had chased away whatever was left of any evening activity.

But there was a bar. The Devil's Throat. I read the sign twice because the name felt like either a warning or a dare and I was too desperate to care which one it was. Light poured out from under the door and I could hear music, low and rumbling, and the sound of voices. Warmth. People. The possibility of sitting down somewhere that wasn't the side of a road.

I pushed the door open and walked in. The first thing that hit me was the heat and I nearly groaned out loud at it. The second thing was the smell, beer and leather and cigarette smoke and something else underneath it all, something that had no clean name but felt distinctly like danger.

The third thing was the people. There were maybe thirty of them spread across the bar and the tables and every single one of them had the same energy, the kind that said they occupied whatever space they were in and the space adjusted itself accordingly. Leather cuts with a logo

I didn't recognise on the back. Iron Veil MC. Big men, most of them, with the kind of faces that had seen things and stopped being bothered by what they'd seen a long time ago.

I stood in the doorway dripping rainwater onto the floor and did a very quick and very serious internal debate about whether to turn around and take my chances with the storm.

I stayed. Because eleven dollars doesn't buy courage but it also doesn't buy options. I found a stool at the far end of the bar, as far from the cluster of bodies as I could manage, and sat down.

The bartender, a wide woman with kind eyes and no patience, looked at me the way people look at stray animals that wander in from the rain.

"What can I get you?"

"Just water, please."

She didn't comment on that. Just slid a glass across and moved on. I wrapped both hands around it and tried to look like someone who had a plan.

I did not have a plan. I'd had a plan forty eight hours ago. The plan was to get to Houston, find a shelter, find work, disappear into the kind of city that swallows people without asking questions.

That plan had started falling apart around the fourteen hour mark and had been fully dead since the junction with Dale the trucker.

I needed to think. I needed dry clothes and food and about sixteen hours of sleep and then I needed to think. In that order. What I got instead was a hand on my arm.

"Well, well." The voice came from my left, close enough that I could smell the whiskey on his breath before I turned. He was maybe forty, heavyset, with the particular expression of a man who had drunk enough to feel entitled. "You look exactly like someone I've been hearing about."

My stomach dropped.

I kept my face neutral. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Sure you don't." He didn't let go of my arm. His grip tightened slightly, fingers pressing into my wet jacket. "Roy Cross's girl, right? Little runaway. There's people looking for you, sweetheart. Paying kind of looking."

The bar felt very loud and very small at the same time. "Let go of my arm," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt, which was the one thing my body did for me reliably. Fall apart on the inside, hold it together on the outside. Years of practice.

He smiled instead of letting go. And then, from somewhere behind me, a voice cut through the bar noise like a blade through smoke.

"Take your hand off her."

It wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. It had the particular quality of a voice that was used to being obeyed so consistently that raising it had become unnecessary. Low, unhurried, and carrying the specific weight of someone who had already decided what would happen if the instruction wasn't followed.

The man holding my arm looked up. And let go. I turned around slowly.

He was leaning against the bar two feet away with a glass of something dark in his hand that he hadn't touched, watching the situation with the kind of calm that wasn't passive.

It was the calm of someone who had assessed every possible outcome and wasn't threatened by any of them. Dark eyes, dark hair that was a little too long, a jaw that looked like it had been carved specifically to make people uncomfortable.

A leather cut like the others but something about the way he wore it said he wasn't like the others. The patch on the front said President.

He looked at me with an expression that gave nothing away and said nothing else. Just looked. Like he was waiting for me to confirm I was still standing, which I was, barely.

The drunk man had already moved to the other end of the bar. Nobody said anything about it. Nobody seemed particularly surprised.

"You got somewhere to be tonight?" the man said. Still looking at me. Still giving nothing.

"No," I said, because lying seemed pointless.

He nodded once, slow, like that was the answer he expected. Then he picked up his untouched drink, pushed off the bar, and said, "Come with me" in the same tone a person might say it's raining, simple and factual and not really a question at all.

Every reasonable instinct I had said no. I followed him anyway.

*******

Back in the present

Anton’s hand slid possessively over my c*m-filled p***y, fingers pushing his release back inside me.

“Stay with me,” he murmured, already hardening again. “We’re nowhere near done tonight.”

I smiled throu

gh the exhaustion and pulled him down for another kiss.

No. We were only beginning.