Victoria
The walk back to the living room was more difficult than it should have been. Victoria’s mind was full of visuals of Darren naked. She hadn’t looked at him all that long, but the thought of his body was still burned into her mind. And he’d caught her looking. Great. He was going to tease her for this, in all the ways he possibly could.
That didn’t mean she couldn’t keep him from doing anything about it, though. Sure, he could say things, but it was how she chose to respond that would determine the outcome of this situation. And if she filled her time with other things, there probably wasn't that much of a big deal to be made out of it, right?
The only problem was that there was still nothing to do here. There hadn’t been before she'd seen him naked, and there still wasn't now. Her mind whispered dirty things to her that she couldn’t consider. He was absolutely not an option. But he was so damned attractive.
It was awful.
It was really, truly awful.
She bit her lip, trying to think of anything at all aside from him. There were books here. She could think about books. She could try to cook something, except there was barely any food here. She still hadn’t gotten him to go to the store for her. But maybe they could play a game. There were plenty of games they could play that didn’t rely solely on a board or something like that, and it didn’t even have to involve their bodies.
Why did her mind just go there?
Maybe there were cards. Yeah.
She finally made her way out of the hallway and back towards those treacherous shelves of books she'd seen earlier. She didn’t even pretend that she was going to flip through the books this time, though. Earlier, when she was making her way through the books, she'd seen a small tin box. It looked more like a lunchbox than anything else, really, but that it could have something interesting in it, right?
Unless there was nothing in it at all. But after just a few minutes of searching the bookshelves, she found that there was not one but a couple of lunchboxes tucked neatly in beside the bunch of novels.
She gathered the boxes under her arm and moved to the couch. She could probably put the boxes on the table in front of the couch to make things easier for her when as she scoured through them, but then Darren might sit next to her and ask her what she was doing.
There were five boxes in all. She scooted a little further to the right, and put two boxes on the couch next to her, so he couldn’t sit there. Then she spread out the other three to the left of her, making sure there was well and truly no room for Darren to plop down if he decided to come out immediately.
Not that he would. She didn’t know how Darren operated, but she was under the impression that he didn’t often get the chance to dawdle in the shower. She didn’t even know how long he’d taken this time around. It took her a while to go looking for him. But he probably wanted to be in there for a while. Maybe he was even touching himself.
She shook her head. As bad as her past relationships had been – she'd been burned by a guy more than once or twice in her life so far – she'd never been with a guy like Darren. She hadn’t even tried to flirt with one, actually. That was why she wasn't so happy about working at that shitty bar. She could do so much better, and she hadn’t.
She couldn’t flirt with him. She hadn’t been flirting with anybody. She hadn’t been with anyone in a long time. What would it mean if she broke that streak by trying to get with Darren? It probably wouldn’t mean anything good for her. Yeah, she needed to keep doing what she was doing, minus the whole bathroom fiasco.
She opened each box. She didn’t really look in them, she just undid the metal latches that kept the secrets of the tins guarded. She didn’t know what she was looking for, and she didn’t know what she was expecting, or what she was supposed to be expecting, but she didn’t really care.
It was weird to her that these boxes were here in the first place. Why hadn’t she bothered opening them earlier? Maybe she’d been nervous about what she’d find inside. She was at a club safe house, after all. Could it be drugs? Hit lists? Severed fingers? She rolled her eyes at herself. There weren’t going to be severed fingers in these boxes. Why had she even thought that? Probably stress.
Once all the boxes were unlatched, she threw the lids open as fast as she could, half excited, half dreading what she’d find inside.
A bunch of paper.
A dull pencil. She tried scratching it across a piece of paper to see if she could use it to write anything, but it didn’t work. The word came out dull and faded, and she could barely see it even when she moved the thin scrap of paper so it fell further into the light. So that wasn't going to be good for anything, it seemed. She didn’t see a sharpener. She put the pencil down and went back through the next box.
More paper. There was a post-it note in there, too. A whole thing of them. She brought them out and tried to read the imprint of whatever the last note there had been, but she couldn’t see any indents. Even if she had a pencil that was in working order, she wasn't exactly going to be getting any secrets out of that thing soon.
She sighed.
That box was no good. She made her way to the next one, and its contents were just as disappointing: some rubber bands that looked to be in such poor shape that she almost mistook them for twine; a pen, but it didn’t have its cap and the ink had long since dried out; another mass of paper; and some coins.
The rest of the boxes were similar, until she got to the last one. That seemed cliché, as if there was something she was looking for that she couldn’t get until she'd exhausted all her other options. That wasn't it. She didn’t even know what she wanted; all she knew was that she needed some sort of distraction.
The last box was full of cards. There were three separate decks in there, but they all looked like they were just the type of cards you'd play at a bar or a casino or some crap like that. She liked cards, though, and she was pretty good at them from the times she'd spent playing them with co-workers at bars past. And she'd been pretty good at them as a kid, too, playing them at school and outside of it with the few friends she'd managed to have.
She flipped through the cards. All but one of the packs didn’t have a box or any kind of container for them to rest in, so it was difficult to determine which card belonged to which deck, even though the designs on the outsides of them were somewhat different. Eventually, though, she came to the conclusion that neither of the first two decks she’d flipped through were complete. Damn.
But one pack in the tin had never been opened. The plastic seal was still on it, and that made her feel just a little bit better. This one had to be a full deck, unless something terrible had happened to it. Well, it wouldn’t so much be terrible, at least, not in comparison to other things, as it just would be disappointing. Maybe Victoria had bad enough luck that this deck would have some kind of factory defect and be missing some cards, or have duplicates. If that was the case, Victoria felt like the entire world was stacked up against her.
And maybe it was, but probably not to the extent that a simple deck of cards would be a dud. She cut through the plastic with her fingernails after some struggle, and pulled the cards out. She flipped them in her hands, running her fingers over the thickness of them, and found that the deck did appear to be a full one.
She sighed with relief, running her hand through her hair. She needed to relax. She put the old cards back in the box, setting the full deck on the coffee table in front of her.
Once the deck of cards was safely there, she returned her attention to the boxes. Stuffing everything back where it came from, without really paying attention to what went in which box, she turned her attention back to the deck of cards.
It was tempting to just throw the boxes beneath the coffee table, but that'd probably piss off Darren. Besides, it looked like everything within the safe house was placed there for a reason. It was clean, tidy, minimalist. He, and anyone else who ended up going here, because there was no way she was staying here for long, probably wouldn’t appreciate her making a mess of it.
And though she didn’t want to care what Darren thought about her, she didn’t want to resort to being the type of asshole he was. She sighed again, less happily this time. Then she stood up, taking all the tins in one arm, and moved to the bookshelves, placing each back where it belonged. Well, maybe not exactly where it belonged, but close enough to where the tins had originally come from that she felt no pangs of guilt.
Then she finally made her way back to the couch, pulling open the box again and spreading the cards out on the table.
She just had to take her mind off of the here and now and think about other things. Grabbing a couple cards and trying to put them in order from Ace to King, she stretched and thought about lost, carefree days of playing solitaire.
# # #
Darren
He was still in the bathroom.
He grabbed his jaw, rubbing it thoughtfully. Not that he liked to put that much thought into things. Well, he did, but he didn’t like having people think he was that kind of guy. It'd absolutely ruin his rep. Still, he stood there, just outside the shower.
He’d quit reaching for the towel a long time ago. Victoria had already left and he didn’t need to get dry just yet, so there was no reason for a show of modesty. Besides, there was no modesty to be had; Victoria had seen his cock as it was already.
He wondered how she felt about it. She clearly wanted him, but she wasn't trying to get him right now. And he didn’t want to freak her out in the middle of something as major as this, so he was waiting for her to go to him. Because that was exactly the issue: the only reason they were in the position they were right now was because someone was trying to kill her.
And it wasn't like he should be focusing on the fact that she was attractive, and the fact that she was obviously attracted to him. He should be working on finding her killer. But he couldn’t just leave her here, and there wasn't anyone he could leave her with. Either way, there was definitely no way he was going to leave her in this place by herself.
His mind went through the amount of people who knew where this safe house was. Not many. He could easily trust another member of the Bloody Saints to stay here and look after her if need be, but he really wanted to be the one to make sure she was safe. It wouldn’t be right if someone else did it. Why? He didn’t know why. He didn’t really give a fuck either way, though. Looking too far into it might make him seem overemotional. And if there was something he wasn't, overemotional definitely was it.
He put a hand out and placed it against the wall by the shower. He wasn't so much leaning to support his weight as he was just leaning for the sake of doing it. It wasn't helping him at all, though.
He walked over to the sink so he could look in the mirror that hung above it. His hand went back to his jaw, and he stroked the hairs there. Maybe he should shave. He didn’t. There was no point in doing it. Maybe Victoria liked the rugged look, and what did it matter if she didn’t, anyway? He didn’t feel like it and didn’t even have a razor in the first place.
Of course there were no razors here. Sometimes the people at the safe house weren't there willingly. The last thing on their minds was a shave. His jaw tightened as he thought about it, and his hand fell away. That sucked, but it was life. What point was there in complaining about it? It wasn't like they hurt people here. Sometimes a member of the club made a bad choice, though, and they had to be detained here until whatever they'd fucked up could be settled.
So, no razors. That way a guy – or a girl, but that had never happened before Victoria – couldn’t attack someone, or themselves. It was for the best, really, but just then it was pissing off Darren to no end. What else didn’t they have here? Victoria was still pressing him to go to the store, too.
He looked in the mirror at his face and the lines there. There was no epiphany that made him look at himself this way; he wasn't hit by anything that made him wonder about his life, how he got here, what he was going to do about it. He already knew what he was going to do about it once he found the bastard who’d tried to kill Victoria, he was going to slaughter them. She didn’t have to know that, though. He didn’t know how she'd take it.
But it wasn't even about Victoria. This entire thing was about him. The only reason someone would bother with putting a hit out on Victoria would be to upset him. They must have thought that she was his girlfriend, and so that meant that someone – or several someones – was out to get him. That wasn't anything new.
People had been trying to get at Darren Saylor since he was just a little boy. That came with being born into a club. You couldn’t really leave when your father was the head of the organization. If you did, that meant you wouldn’t really have anyone to go to. You could come back to the club if you wanted, but then you'd have to join back up again. From the bottom.
Darren would know. That was exactly what had happened to him. It wasn't that he didn’t want this life. There were parts of it that were alright: the way the boys looked up to him, the way he could get any woman he wanted, the bikes, the money, and the late hours. There was a lot of it that was okay. But there were also parts of it that were fucked up, that he didn’t want to get into, that haunted his dreams at night.
And another thing that sucked about being in any club at all, regardless of a man's position within it – there were no answers. He couldn’t just go looking for what he wanted to know and expect to find a neat solution to any question. No, of course it couldn’t work out that way.
And so it followed that there was absolutely nothing he could do to figure out who was trying to harm Victoria. Not from here, anyway. His hands went to his hips where he’d usually wear jeans, searching for where his pistol would be tucked in the back of them. Of course it wasn't there; he was naked. Why had he forgotten that?
And fuck, the way Victoria looked at him. There was nothing about this that could be easy, was there? But no. He was going to leave her alone, until she was begging for him. Until then, he might as well just work on this mystery. Finding a killer was easier than dealing with that type of woman, anyway.
He finally picked up the towel. Dimly, he dried himself off, starting from his legs. He couldn’t stop thinking about Victoria. He had other things to think about, but they also involved her, so it wasn't like this was going to help him at all.
There was only one way this path of thoughts could go, and he wasn't exactly looking forward to it. He ground his teeth at the thought of it. What kind of man could be around a woman 24/7 and not have anything happen between them? He brought his hand closer to his cock, nearly touching it…
…before stopping. No. He wasn't going to masturbate to Victoria. She wouldn’t know that it happened, but it would still feel like giving into her. He refused to do that. He had to figure out what was going on between the gangs, between the Bloody Saints and the Broken Skulls.
So maybe he was going to be forced into leaving Victoria alone, at least for a while. He couldn’t figure out anything about what was going on when he was all cooped up in here with her, anyway.
He dried himself off and got dressed quickly, and then he stepped out into the hall.
He was on his way towards the front door when he realized just how shitty his plan was. He couldn’t just leave her in this house by herself. And even if he called someone to come stay instead to rectify that issue, she probably wouldn’t be cool with it. He didn’t want to have to deal with an upset Victoria, and he didn’t want to deal with Victoria trying to start a fist fight with one of his men. She was way smaller than all of them, but he doubted that would stop her from trying anyway.
So he had to stay. He gritted his teeth again. He didn’t want to stay, but as the time passed it looked like he had fewer and fewer choices. So he would have to figure out what was going on from here. His hands went to his jeans; he felt for his phone, his wallet, and his pistol. They were all there, but that didn’t really comfort him much.
He looked behind him, over his shoulder towards the living room again. Victoria was sitting on the couch. She had her arms out towards the coffee table in front of her, a bunch of cards scattered all over the surface.
It looked like she was playing cards with herself.
He sighed. She must be lonely. But still, she would barely talk to him. What was wrong with her?
What was wrong with him, for that matter?
He felt a dull ache rise in his chest. There had to be a reason that this was bothering him so much, but he wasn't going to bother looking into that. It was better to push things like that away before there was any chance of them hurting him. Not that he could be hurt. He’d put aside what other people thought of him a long time ago, and nothing hurt him anymore. Even 20 punches to the face probably wouldn’t faze him that much, although he couldn’t deny that something like that would cause some pain.
Yeah, he had to go back. His hand was at the doorknob before he realized it, though, and he let his hand fall away with hardly any sound at all. A soft sigh escaped his lips, gruff in its quietness. And then he turned back, getting ready to go down the hall and towards the living room. Back to Victoria. Back to where some part of him felt like he belonged.
But he had something to do first.
He’d just checked it a few moments ago, but that didn’t comfort him any. His hands went back to the back of his jeans, making sure he felt the familiar coldness of his gun there. Content that everything was where it should be, he continued on his way.
But he didn’t start back off through the hall and all the way into the living room, as he’d originally intended. He could always go back to Victoria, or so he hoped. Even if she wanted nothing to do with him after all of this was through, she was still here right now.
Being around her could come later. Everything that he had to do had to do with her anyway, so it wasn't like he was neglecting her just because he wasn't spending time with her. Part of him didn’t even think that she wanted him to spend time with her, anyway. If she did, she could come to him.
But not right now. He made his way down the hallway and turned off to his left, before he got anywhere near Victoria. Yeah, she couldn’t even see him from here. He was safe.
He kept going. Victoria wouldn’t know that this second hallway was here. Not yet, at least, and it didn’t matter anyway. Maybe eventually, if the two of them were stuck here long enough, he would have to show her around. Until then, he was more than happy enough to keep the safe house's secrets.
The second hallway was small and couldn’t even be considered a hallway, really. Not unless you knew where the other entrance to it was. He made his choice and went a few feet traveling in one direction, looking for the door that was end of this hallway.
He found it quickly. He didn’t even have to put his hands out and go searching for it in the half-dark. Not all of the lights in the house were on. He could see the shimmer of a few behind him, as well as all the lights Victoria had turned on: the one in the living room, the one in the kitchen. He couldn’t see what else, but it was easy to guess that there were a few more on he wasn't naming.
It was difficult to ignore the fact that she was there, that she existed. That he was the one who was going to have to take care of her, regardless of how she felt about it. That was okay, though; he didn’t have to ignore it. He just didn’t need to think about it right now.
He pushed the door open.
There were a lot of places in the safe house that were invisible to the naked eye. Nearly invisible, anyway, so much so that the average person wouldn’t be able to figure out they were there without having someone like him to explain it to them. That was the point. He briefly wondered if maybe he should let Victoria know about any of these places, but he figured there would always be time to do that later. Besides, it wasn't like she needed another place to hide right now – she was already hiding.
The room the door opened into was more of a closet than a room. It wasn't the tiny size that Darren had gotten accustomed to when he hid over at his friends' apartments, but it was still a closet nonetheless. His hand dragged along the wall, looking for the light switch he knew was there.
He found it. Instantly, a light went up on the ceiling of the room, the only source of light being the dull light bulb hanging from the ceiling on a string. It didn’t look the best, especially not in comparison to the rest of the house. People didn’t usually go in here anyway, though.
Across from where he stood, the light illuminated a low bench. The bench was built into the wall, so that if someone wanted to sit on it and wait in this room without being seen they could. To the left of the bench was another small door. When it was opened, it would reveal a small cabinet that held boxes he hadn’t opened in God knows how long.
He didn’t bother thinking about what was in there, though. That wasn't what he was interested in dealing with. He walked over to the bench, sitting down on it as quietly as he could. The room was soundproofed so that Victoria wouldn’t hear him from where she was, and probably not from anywhere, unless he was being really loud and a door or two was open, but it was habit. Darren wasn't used to being the type that could just exist as he wished; he had to hide, sometimes.
Not that he liked it. But when he didn’t hide, things like this happened. He sighed. He could remember this for later and change so it didn’t happen again, but he probably wouldn’t. That wasn't the type of thing for him to do.
His hand reached to the right of where he sat. He dragged his hand over the wall, looking for the lines he knew would be there. Finally, he found it. There were a bunch of lines etched into the wall. Some of them were just lines, but others were something more.
Pressing against the wall lightly with his fingers, he added more pressure to the wall until he heard that familiar click he was looking for. The wall opened, revealing a little hollow. It looked like an average drawer that had been unlatched, never mind that the latch there wasn't visible and it was hard enough to find even in the light.
He probably wasn't going to be able to look through all of it just sitting here, though. He leaned over, so it was easier for him to get what he was looking for out of the spot in the wall. He crouched down, holding his weight on knee with the other up while he rifled through the little space.
He found what he was looking for almost immediately. The paper in his hands couldn’t really do much to keep Victoria safe, but it had to be a start on some clues. Maybe something here would tell him what was going on.
It had to be the Broken Skulls. There was no way it was anyone in the Bloody Saints; he’d already been over that, even though Victoria didn’t believe him. And although her doubt made a small little spot of it dot his mind as well, he still didn’t even consider the option.
Still. While he had his suspicions that this was about the RS thinking his club had outed them to the police, he couldn’t be sure. And that hadn’t even come up in a while. But if that was the issue, it wouldn’t come up; that's how things were there, everything was kept on the down low. It was subtle until someone was being stabbed – or, in the case of Victoria and a few others in the past year that Darren could think of, shot at.
He looked down at the paper again. Anyone else who looked at it probably would have no idea what was going on. While the paper was well-hidden and anyone who saw it would be hard-pressed to figure out what was written on the page. There was no such thing as being too careful.
Instead of being written out in English, the page had a series of abbreviations on it. Some of the words were identified only by their first two or so letters. It wasn't made any easier by the fact that all these letters (and some of them numbers) were placed in small cells. The paper was almost like a spreadsheet. Where the letters ended was where the numbers began, and it all stood for something most people would blanch at the sight of.
Debts. His eyes roamed, looking at it. The page kept tally of who owed who what, but it wasn’t like someone would forget just because it wasn’t written down on a piece of paper. And there was no way it was anyone in the Bloody Saints club, but this piece of paper didn’t just have debts by boys in his squad.
No, this kept track of damn near everything that happened in this town. Everything he knew about, which was probably everything that happened. While other people, the Broken Skulls especially, would try to keep secrets, it wasn't that hard to figure them out. If need be.
So maybe they’d figured out something about him, or something about another one of the boys. Debts and favors owed were hard to keep secret, but someone could still try. And just like that, someone could still figure it out.
His mind flashed back to all of the things that might make someone want to harm him. The list was easy: they probably didn’t even need a reason besides him being who he was. Power was attractive to people, and taking him out would be an easy enough way to get power – before his friends freaked out, if someone wasn't actively trying to freak out on them too.
He reached for his phone in his back pocket. Maybe asking someone what was going on would help. He couldn’t be direct about it, though. If he was the only one having issues like this, then it might signal him out as weak and then he’d have even more to deal with. But if he wasn’t the only one having issues like this, then this might tip someone off that he was trying to figure out what was going on.
This entire thing made no sense. And it would make even less sense if he talked to Victoria about it, so no wonder he wasn’t going to her. Even if she wasn’t a stranger, he wouldn’t have gone to her about it. He’d been in a relationship for nearly two years until fairly recently, and still had told the girl almost nothing about what was going on in his life.
This wasn’t his normal phone. This was a burner phone, a flip phone he could use and then throw away at any needed time. He opened it, running his thumb over the buttons and trying to think of who he could call.
But he needed to figure this out first, even though he already knew what he’d see. His eyes flitted from the phone to the paper, until finally he just gave up looking at the phone and stared absentmindedly at the sheet in his hand. He lifted it up, closer to his face. His eyes roamed over the page, seeing:
J | p. to K, MNH | $6k
M | (some scribbled out letters he couldn’t make out) | (a number that had been scratched out.)
M that must be Marcus – had a debt to someone. Darren couldn’t think of who it was, since everything had been uniformly crossed out and then written over. He couldn’t tell where the debt had been enacted either. Marcus must have paid it off.
But J. That must be Jeremy. He owed something to K (Darren couldn’t think of who that could be immediately; he only knew one person whose name started with a K, and she was a woman, so it couldn’t be her), and the deal had taken place in the city. MNH signified that.
It made no sense to the naked eye, unless you knew what to look for. Darren looked for an initial signifying his name: D. But he knew he’d find nothing. Even though he carried debts and owed favors, his name had never been put down in the ledger. He hadn’t gone to anyone in the Bloody Saints about it, after all.
Or any of their friends.
Fuck.
Why had he done this?
He didn’t want to think about it. His eyes went to the ceiling again, looking up there like it’d help him figure out a solution to his problems. It wouldn’t. It wouldn’t even help him avoid them; looking up like this just made him think of God and of everything that had gone wrong with his life. But he wasn’t the praying type. So why was he staring up at the ceiling like an idiot?
As a distraction. From everything. From Victoria. From the paper in his hand. He let go of the sheet of paper. It fell, slowly and then even slower, but he didn’t care. He just didn’t want to hold it anymore. If he did, he’d probably end up crumpling it up in his hand and then he’d really be in deep shit; that piece of paper, and the other, similar ones in the drawer he’d taken it from, had been used to keep track of things for years. So there was no use in getting rid of it.
Besides, he wasn't even on the list. So why did it bother him so much?