The Biker's Sinful Captive

Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE

His name was Anton. That was the first and only thing he volunteered about himself as he walked me through the rain toward the compound, which was two blocks from the bar and completely invisible from the main road, hidden behind a wall and a gate that opened with a code he blocked from my line of sight with his body out of what seemed like pure habit.

"Anton," I repeated, because silence felt more dangerous than conversation.

He didn't confirm or elaborate. Just pushed the gate open and walked through and I followed because turning back was no longer a geography I had access to.

The compound was bigger than I expected. A main building that sprawled low and wide with lights on in half the windows, a garage to the right with the doors rolled up and three motorcycles inside that even I could tell were worth more than everything Roy Cross had ever owned.

A scattering of smaller structures around the edges. It was worn in the way of a place that was used hard and constantly, not neglected.

It felt, bizarrely, like somewhere people lived. He stopped outside the garage and turned to look at me properly for the first time under the light. I became very aware that I was soaking wet and hollow cheeked and probably looked exactly like what I was, which was a person running from something.

"You got a name?" he said.

"Lena."

"You from around here, Lena?"

"No."

"Where then?"

I looked at him steadily. "Does it matter?"

Something shifted in his expression, very briefly, and then was gone. "It might."

"Denton," I said, which was true and also useless information since Denton was three hundred miles away and I had no intention of going back.

He looked at me for another moment, not in the way the drunk man at the bar had looked at me. Not like I was something to take or use. More like I was a problem he was deciding whether to solve.

"I've got a room above the garage," he said finally. "Nothing special. Cot, bathroom, heating that works most of the time. And I'm short a housekeeper. Someone to keep the main building clean, cook if you can, run errands around the compound." He paused. "Pay is fair. Cash."

I stared at him.

"Why?" I asked, because I had learned the hard way that nothing was free and the price of things was always better negotiated upfront than discovered later.

"Because you need somewhere to sleep and I need the help," he said, like it was the most straightforward transaction in the world. Maybe to him it was. "But I have three rules. You stay out of rooms that are closed. You don't ask questions you don't actually want answers to. And you don't touch my bikes."

"That's it?"

"That's it."

I thought about Houston. I thought about the shelter I was going to find and the job I was going to get and the clean disappearance I was going to execute. I thought about the eleven dollars and forty two cents and the eleven miles of rain I'd already walked tonight.

"Okay," I said.

He nodded once and pulled a key from his cut pocket and held it out. When I took it our fingers didn't touch but I was aware of his hand in the way you are aware of things that could either help you or hurt you and you haven't figured out which yet.

"Breakfast is at seven," he said. "Don't be late." And then he walked back toward the main building and left me standing in the rain holding a key.

I looked up at the room above the garage. One window with the light off. Mine, apparently.

I didn't sleep well. The cot was narrow and the heating made a noise that suggested it was working against its will, but it was dry and it was locked and those two things alone put it ahead of every place I'd spent the last two nights.

I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling and listened to the compound settle into quiet and told myself this was temporary. Two weeks. Enough to save some money and get back to the plan.

I was down at the main building at 6:58 the next morning with my hair still damp and my last clean shirt on.

The kitchen was large and slightly chaotic and there was a man in it already, sitting at the table with a coffee he wasn't drinking, who looked up at me when I came in with the kind of eyes that didn't miss much. Dark skin, built solidly, face that was calm in a way that felt permanent rather than situational.

"You're the new girl," he said.

"I'm Lena."

"Ghost." He looked at me for a moment and then back at his coffee. "Anton said you can cook."

"Anton doesn't know if I can cook. He didn't ask."

Ghost looked up again. The corner of his mouth moved. It wasn't quite a smile but it was in the neighbourhood. "Fair enough," he said.

I found the eggs. By the time the kitchen started filling up I had made enough food for twelve people, which turned out to be exactly the right number. They came in in ones and twos, leather and morning silences and the general energy of people who operated nocturnally by preference.

Nobody paid me much attention at first and I was fine with that. I moved around the kitchen and kept my head down and watched everything from the corner of my eye the way I had learned to do in rooms where I wasn't sure of the rules yet.

And then Ryder walked in. He was good looking in the way that made you notice it before you could decide not to. Easy smile, light eyes, the kind of face that had probably gotten him out of trouble as many times as it had gotten him into it.

He poured himself a coffee, turned around, and found me immediately, like he'd walked in knowing exactly where to look.

"Well hello," he said, and smiled like we already knew each other.

"Morning," I said, and turned back to the stove.

He came to stand at the counter anyway, close enough to be deliberate. "Didn't know Anton was hiring. He usually doesn't bring in people he doesn't know."

"He didn't bring me in. He offered me work."

"Mm." He tilted his head slightly. "There a difference?"

I didn't answer that. I pulled the last pan off the heat and started transferring food to the serving dishes and kept my body language completely unbothered, which was a skill I had refined to an art form. Don't react. Don't engage. Don't give them anything to work with.

"I'm Ryder," he said to the back of my head. "I'm the one you want on your side around here."

"Good to know," I said pleasantly, and turned to put the pan in the sink, and found Anton standing in the kitchen doorway.

He was looking at Ryder. Not at me. At Ryder, with an expression that was completely flat and completely unreadable and lasted only about two seconds before he moved his eyes to the table and sat down.

But I had seen it. And from the way Ryder straightened almost imperceptibly and angled himself away from me, so had he.

Breakfast was loud and chaotic and I moved through it and kept everything filled and said nothing beyond what was necessary and filed everything I was seeing away in the part of my brain that had been cataloguing danger signals since I was old enough to understand what they meant.

Ryder watched me the entire time. Anton didn't look at me once. I was back in the kitchen cleaning up when the door opened behind me and I turned to find a woman leaning in the frame with her arms crossed, eyebrow raised, looking at me with the frank evaluating stare of someone who had decided to have an opinion about me and was now confirming it in person.

Short dark hair, sharp jaw, a scar on her collarbone that disappeared under her collar. The kind of face that had stopped performing softness a long time ago.

"You can cook," she said. "I'll give you that."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. I'm not complimenting you. I'm just noting a fact." She pushed off the frame and came into the kitchen properly and poured herself a coffee. "I'm Scout. And I'm going to tell you something once because I don't repeat myself." She turned and looked at me directly. "This place has a way of feeling like home before you realise the walls have closed in. Don't get comfortable. Save your money. And whatever you're running from?" She paused. "Make sure you actually ran far enough."

She took her coffee and walked out. I stood in the kitchen alone and replayed the last twelve hours in my head and tried to locate the feeling that would tell me whether I had made the right call last night or the worst one.

I couldn't find a clean answer. What I found instead was my jacket pocket, which I reached into for no particular reason, and pulled out the receipt I'd been using as a bookmark in my sketchbook.

There was writing on the back of it that hadn't

been there before. Seven words, in a handwriting I didn't recognise.

You were followed from Denton. Be careful.