Page 35 of The Biker’s Second Chance (Chrome Creed MC #2)

HE’S FLIPPED

JAYNE

C haos rattles my bones. I can't shy away from it, though. I asked for this.

I jump down from the truck and the air hits me like a wall.

Salt, diesel, old fish, and gun smoke. My eyes water.

The warehouse lights flicker and smear everything with that sick hospital yellow.

Men are yelling. Boots hammer concrete. Somewhere to my right a woman sobs so hard it sounds like she is choking.

“Jayne. Cages.” Spike’s voice cuts through the noise.

“I see them,” I call back, even as my stomach tilts.

Eight cages line the far wall like a row of animal kennels, the kind you see at a pound on kill day. Chain-link shines under the dim light, like spot lights. It's maddening. How could anyone be asked to survive like this.

Fucking animals wouldn't survive.

Padlocks hang like little iron hearts. Inside, bodies fold into themselves. Knees jammed to chests. Arms wrapped tight. Eyes blown wide. One girl clutches half a teddy bear, the stuffing coming out of a seam.

I swallow hard, grip my med kit until my knuckles creak, and run.

“Hey. I am here. We are getting you out,” I say, dropping to my knees in front of the first cage.

The lock is thick, ugly. Lash’s bolt cutter snips it like a breadstick, metal squealing.

I pull the gate wide and raise both hands, palms up.

No sudden moves. “I know you are scared. My name is Jayne. I am with the men in the vests. We are Chrome Creed. We are not here to hurt you. We are here to take you out of here, right now.”

They do not move. Four pairs of eyes track my hands like I am holding snakes. A fifth pair lashes from me to Lash’s gun, then back. A girl about sixteen bares her teeth at me. Her lip splits where it is already split and a bead of blood pushes to the surface.

“I get it,” I say softly. My throat is tight. My heartbeat rams my ribs. “This looks like a trap. I know it does. But listen to my voice. We are leaving. Today. You are not property. You are not stock. You are breathing and you are leaving.”

Behind me a shotgun booms. The sound slams through my bones and rattles my teeth.

I flinch and press lower, a hand out to shield the girls even though there is nothing but air to shield them from.

Someone hits concrete and the wet smack of it yanks bile up into my mouth.

I do not look. I cannot. If I look, I will freeze. If I freeze, someone dies.

“Water,” I whisper, shoving a bottle through the opening to the girl with the teddy bear.

She stares like she has never seen clear plastic before.

“It is sealed. Watch.” I twist the cap and that little crack of plastic is the best sound I have ever heard.

I drink first, a swallow, then offer it again. “See?”

Her hand trembles as she reaches. Our fingers brush. Her skin is cold as a fish. She does not drink. She just holds the bottle like a relic.

“Blankets,” I yell over my shoulder. “Rumble, I need blankets now.”

“On it,” he shouts, voice thick and nasally.

I do not have to turn to know his face is a mess.

He sounded like that when he broke his nose last time.

A minute later fabric hits my shoulder. I drape a blanket around the nearest girl like a cape.

She flinches hard, then slumps under the weight of warmth.

“Can you walk?” I ask. “I can help you. We will stay low and go straight to the truck. There are two. See that door? Big white box. That is safety.”

“Liar,” the lip-split girl hisses. Her voice shakes but it has steel. “You are just moving us. He said he would move us today anyway. Says we will be trained better. New place. New rules.”

“Who said that?” I ask, even though I know the answer.

She stares at me. I know that look. It is the look of a kid who has learned that names are weapons and information will get you beat.

“You know what,” I say, voice steady somehow, “you can keep his name. Keep it like a fist. But I am not him. I am not them."

Something flickers across her face. Not trust. Not yet. But maybe the shadow of it. She slides her hand into mine like she is expecting teeth. I tighten my grip and pull her gently to her feet.

We move.

It is a stumble more than a walk. The concrete is slick.

My boots squeak. Alarms bleat somewhere deep in the yard.

The whole building hums with violence. I breathe through my mouth.

I taste smoke and copper and fish. A man screams in the office behind us and the scream turns into a gargle that turns into nothing at all.

“Eyes on me,” I tell the girls. “Do not look around. One foot, then the other.”

We pass the mattresses. Two women still tied wrist and ankle.

One is making the high rabbit-pitched sounds of a person trying to scream through duct tape.

I veer. I cannot not. I slide the little scissors from my kit under the tape and cut slow so I do not slice her lip.

“You are okay. I have you.” The second I peel the tape free, she inhales and the sound she makes is a ripped thing.

I lay a blanket over her nakedness and hate burns up my throat so hot I gag.

“We are taking you out. Stay. I will be right back.”

I shove the first set of girls into the waiting truck.

Tella is at the back, a rifle across his thighs, jaw tight, eyes soft.

“You are safe with him,” I tell them. “He looks scary. He is a teddy bear who bites other people. Not you.” One of the girls almost smiles.

Tella’s mouth twitches like he is trying not to.

“Jayne,” he says low. “Keep moving. We have to turn this place inside out and be gone.”

“I know.”

Back at the cages I scoop another two out. A woman with bruises blooming like black roses on her thighs. A grandmother with hair gone white in clumps. “Hold on to me,” I tell them, and they do, fingers digging crescents into my arms that will bruise later. Fine. Take what you need.

“Please,” the white-haired woman whispers. “Please do not let them take me back.”

“They will not,” I say. “Swear it.”

We move again. Over the din I catch a familiar cadence, low and lethal. Spike. He is in the office, voice pitched calm. I know I shouldn't be eavesdropping but I can't help myself.

“You have a staffing problem,” he says. “Chrome Creed solved it.”

My heart drops to my ankles. He is talking to Xavier. I know it like I know the taste of his mouth.

“We have your girls. We have your paperwork. We have your phones. If you want any of it back, you are going to cut us in.”

Cut us in.

The words thud through me. For one stupid heartbeat everything tilts.

I see Spike standing in a darker room, money in his hands, my face on a poster behind him that reads hypocrite.

I want to throw up. I want to run into that office and rip the phone out of his hand and tell Xavier that he can choke on his own tongue.

I hear Spike again. “You deal. We distribute. We take a piece.”

I stop dead. The girl on my left stumbles and I catch her with both arms, steady her against my body. She stares up at me, terrified and trusting me anyway, and that snaps something back into place.

No. This is Spike. My Spike who would burn the world to keep me breathing. My Spike who held a dying boy and bled in the dirt and then cried into my neck until he could breathe again. My Spike who hates himself when he hurts anyone who does not deserve it.

He is playing a part.

He has to be.

I press my forehead to the girl’s for half a breath and make myself a promise.

I will not cut him off at the knees in the middle of a rescue because my fear decided to throw a tantrum.

I will ask him later. I will look him dead in the eyes and demand the plan.

But right now I will choose him. I will choose us.

“Nearly there,” I murmur, and start walking again.

Rounds crack overhead. The noise bounces off steel.

The last Burnings Souls still standing scream and run and then stop screaming.

I focus on the small things. The rasp of the blanket against my wrists.

The sticky line of someone else’s blood drying across my shin.

The heat of bodies pressed to my sides. The rhythm of the guys voices behind me, cold and patient.

We load another wave.

“More clothes,” I call to Rumble, who looks like he lost a fight with a brick wall and liked it. He salutes me with a wad of T-shirts and wobbles off bloody and grinning.

I go back for the women on the pallets and cut their bonds.

The rope peels off their skin with a rasp.

One has grooves sunk so deep into her ankles that I can see where the circulation tried to die.

I wrap them with gauze and hate the shaking in my hands.

“You are safe,” I say again. It feels like a lie because nothing that happened here will be undone, but safety has to start somewhere, so it starts with my voice. “You are safe.”

“Am I going to prison,” one whispers. Her eyes are ringed in mascara like bruises. “I heard the cops. I was here. I did things.”

“You lived,” I say. “That is what you did. Come on.”

We pass the office again. Spike’s tone changes, silk over steel. “You bring a taste to show good faith. Cash. We bring proof of life.”

“I am learning what will get you to sit down,” Spike says.

I swallow the stone in my throat and keep walking.

A girl no older than fourteen crouches in a corner by a stack of crates. I almost miss her. She is so still she looks like part of the shadows. Her hands are wrapped around her ankles. Her nails are bitten until they bleed. When I kneel, she shrinks, eyes flat and empty.

“Hey,” I say. My voice cracks. I clear it and try again. “Hey, little bird. I am Jayne. You do not have to move yet. I can sit here with you.”

We sit. Around us men drag bodies. Boots scrape. Someone groans and then stops. She watches my hands. When I reach slowly into my kit she flinches. I freeze until her breath evens a little. I pull out a foil packet. Graham crackers. I break one and put half on the floor between us.

She stares. Ten long seconds slide by. She pinches the edge and brings it to her mouth like it might bite her first. She chews. Swallows. Her throat works like it hurts.

“Can I touch your hand,” I ask. “Just your hand. We are going to the truck. That is the whole plan.”

She nods so small I almost miss it. Her fingers slide into mine.

She is ice. I cover her hand with both of mine and rise slowly, pulling her with me.

I do not let go. Not until Tella reaches down from the truck and lifts her like she weighs nothing and deposits her into a circle of blankets where another woman opens her arms and the girl folds into them like she belongs there.

I wipe my face with the back of my wrist and taste salt and smoke and something bitter.

I do not know if it is grief or rage. Maybe both.

My cheeks ache and when I touch them I realize my mouth is smiling.

It is a cracked, wet, wrecked thing, but it is a smile.

Not because any of this is fine. Because she ate a cracker.

“Load them,” Leo calls. “Move.”

We do. Bodies into trucks, then another sweep, then another, until the cages are empty and the mattresses are stripped and the corners hold only dust and a bent paperclip and a clump of blonde hair that I refuse to think about.

The hum of the warehouse settles into a low moan of engines and a steady whisper of women breathing the kind of breath you take when you are allowed to again.

I take one last look down the line where the cages stood. There are little squares on the concrete where the pads protected the floor and everywhere else is stained. My chest tightens. It feels like guilt. It feels like a fist closing around something soft.

I could have come sooner. If I had pushed harder. If I had not run at all. If I had never left the club. If I had been smarter. If I had been braver. The ifs pile up like trash.

I press my palms to my thighs until my hands stop shaking. No more ifs. Not tonight.

This is what I am supposed to do. Not run off alone and get myself killed for a headline.

Not scream into the void and wait for someone else to answer.

I can be the woman at the door with the water.

I can be the hands that cut tape and hold broken wrists.

I can make the clinic at the shelter an actual clinic.

I can set up safe rooms at the clubhouse.

I can draft a list with Nisa for trauma supplies and clothes and a damn washing machine that does not quit every three cycles.

I can do intake like a nurse and triage like a medic and walk them through the dark into something that looks like a morning.

I climb into the truck and scan the faces that stare back at me from under blankets. Some are blank as stone. Some are wrecked and red. One smiles. A tiny flash of white teeth that feels like someone lit a match in my ribs.

Spike appears at the door and meets my eyes. There is blood on his jaw and a what looks like a book under his arm. His gaze searches my face like he is asking a question he does not want to say out loud.

I nod once and try to smile. I don't know if he believes it or not.

He taps twice on the metal and steps back, shouting orders, pulling us out, turning this blood-soaked place into a caravan heading home.

New question, though, curls in the back of my skull and refuses to budge. How do I make sacrifice worth the risk in a world that just put one of our brothers in the ground.

I do not know yet.