Chapter 1
POV: Ginger
I’m still closing the door when he hits me.
No preamble. No build-up. Just the flat of his hand across my cheekbone and the small bright explosion that follows., The kind my body has learnt to catalogue and move past before my brain has finished processing it. I’ve had a long time to practise.
I don’t move. Don’t put my hand to my face. Don’t give him the satisfaction of watching me check the damage.
Graves lowers his arm. Looks at me.
He’s early forties, dark hair running to grey at the temples, a jaw that could have been handsome once and maybe still is, depending on who’s looking and what they know about the man attached to it. A scar bisects his left eyebrow, pulls the lid down slightly. He always looks like he’s deciding something.
“Sometimes I think you forget your training.” His voice is even. Conversational. That’s always worse than anger. “The only thing you’re good for these days is spreading your legs.”
I say nothing.
But I feel it, the heat that crawls up my throat and floods my face before I can stop it. A furious, burning red. I hate it. I have always hated it. Ten years and my body still does this, still betrays me with this one involuntary thing I cannot train out of myself no matter how hard I’ve tried.
Graves sees it. Of course he sees it.
Something shifts in his expression. Not quite a smile. A satisfaction so complete it doesn’t need to show itself. He gets off on this. Not just the physical pain he inflicts, but the breaking down. The proof that underneath everything I’ve built and hardened and learnt, he can still find the crack. He always finds the crack.
“Spread those tasty fuckin’ legs for me.” He pushes me back onto the bed.
There’s a water stain on his ceiling. I found it the first time, years ago, and I decided it was a dog. It’s not a dog. It’s just a stain. But the dog is useful.
I breathe. Even and slow. I wait.
Graves doesn’t need me present. He never has. He just needs me there, which is a different thing entirely. I worked that out at sixteen and it was the closest thing to a gift this life ever gave me. He finishes, rolls away, and reaches for his cigarettes from the nightstand without looking at me.
I sit up.
He smokes. I wait for the part where he decides whether I’m worth talking to, or dismisses me.
“The Ravens are becoming a problem.”
He says it the way you’d say the weather is becoming a problem. Conversational. That’s how I know it’s serious.
I wait.
“I think they’ve got police protection. Someone close enough to be useful to them, and I need to know who. I don’t want repercussions from the authorities if we take them down.” He draws on the cigarette, exhales a slow stream toward the ceiling as he studies me. “I need inside information, Ginger. I need someone on the inside.”
The implication doesn’t need spelling out. It never does.
“And if I can’t get it?”
He looks at me. That half-lidded look, his scar pulling his eye down.
“Then I find another use for you. There’s always the whorehouse.” He pauses, rubbing at his spent, flaccid cock. “You know that.”
I do know that. He’s been telling me since I was a teenager. It stopped being a threat a long time ago. It’s just a fact he keeps on the table between us, like a set of keys. A reminder of who holds them.
I hold his gaze. I’ve spent years learning to hold it.
“I’ll get you your intel, Graves.”
He nods. Already looking at his phone. Already done with me.
“You better.”
I take his shower before I leave. I always do.
He doesn’t acknowledge it. Doesn’t look up from his phone when I cross to the bathroom, doesn’t register the sound of the water running. I’m already invisible again, which is the only version of freedom available to me in this room.
The water runs hot. I make it hotter.
I stand under it and I wash him off me methodically, thoroughly, the way I do everything. There’s a particular kind of filth that soap can’t fully reach and I’ve made my peace with that over the years, but I get as close as I can to feeling clean. I always get as close as I can. It matters, even if only to me.
When I’m done I dry off, dress, and walk back through his room without looking at him.
He doesn’t look at me either.
His room is at the top of the Riders’ clubhouse. Mine is next to it, smaller, no window that opens properly, and a lock on the outside of the door that I’m not sure was ever meant for my protection. The other kids he took in have rooms on the same floor as each other. A whole story between them and him. I don’t have that luxury. I never have.
I take the stairs down and head out through the side door.
Outside, the cold air hits me. November biting at my face, my cheek burning wher he sruck me.
Three seconds. I give myself three seconds of just breathing, and then I start thinking, because thinking is the only thing that has ever saved me.
The Blackstone Ravens club runs out of Blackstone Falls, an hour north. Their president, JD, is ex-military if the stories are true. Not a man you walk up to and ask questions.
So I won’t walk up to him.
I bend and strap my knife into my ankle boot, the familiar weight settling against my skin. It’s the one thing in my life that has always been mine. Graves gave it to me. I choose not to think about that.
Routes inside things are always people. Find the person who talks too much, who wants something, who has a gap between what they present and what they are. Fit yourself into the gap.
I’m good at fitting.
I just need to find the gap first.
Lexis is the kind of bar that doesn’t try. Sticky floors, lighting that gave up long ago, and a jukebox somebody unplugged and never plugged back in. It sits at the edge of Blackstone Falls like something the town forgot to pull down. People drink here because it’s cheap and nobody looks at you.
Those are both things I need.
I find a corner table. My hair up, hidden under a beanie, and a baggy shirt drowning my figure, nothing on me is worth a second glance. I order a Coke and nurse it and I become part of the furniture.
Furniture hears everything.
It takes an hour. Two men settle at the bar. They’re big both of them, the kind of settled-in heaviness that comes with years on a bike. They’re both wearing cuts. Ravens. I see the patches without looking like I’m seeing them and I go back to my drink.
Their conversation rolls, unhurried, circular, and looping back on itself. I let it wash over me until something sharpens it.
“Bubbles is not going to be happy about the tents,” one of them says, and there’s something in his voice that sounds like he’s already enjoying a disaster that hasn’t happened yet.
The other one, the younger of the two with the look of a man who finds most things faintly amusing, sets his glass down. “Are you going to tell her?”
“Absolutely not.”
A beat. Then a low laugh. “It’s your funeral.”
“I’ll have died happy.”
Another laugh, longer this time.
I keep my eyes on my glass and I listen.
They talk logistics for a while, the easy back-and-forth of men who have done this before. A few days out. A small group. Just a handful of them, by the sound of it, names I don’t know yet, and a shape I’m starting to build.
“Is it the site off the old mining road?”
The bigger one nods. “Yup.”
I stop moving.
The site off the old mining road. I know exactly where that is. I’ve run that trail. The vehicle access at the head, the flat ground where the treeline breaks, the fire pit that’s been there long enough to be permanent. A small group. An informal trip.
I stay long enough to get the dates, then I finish my Coke. I leave the way I arrived. Quietly, no impression left, just a girl nobody noticed sitting in a corner.
Outside, the cold hits. I’m already someone else in my head. Already building her, the woman I’ll be on that trail. Lost. A little embarrassed. A twisted ankle and a grateful smile and no threat to anyone.
One stray hiker doesn’t raise flags. I know the terrain. I can place myself exactly where I need to be.
I walk back toward the clubhouse and I don’t let myself think about anything except the job. The job is the only thing there is. If I do this right Graves will be satisfied and I’ll have bought myself another few months and that’s what survival looks like.
