Cora
I go about my work like a zombie, performing all my tasks adequately but hardly aware of what I’m doing. I don’t make any mistakes, but I don’t fully engage, either. My attention is focused on trying to stop myself from being sick, thinking about Logan and the baby, and wondering how this horrible business with the mafia is going to end. I bite my lip to fight away the sickness. I take as many deep breaths as I can. At lunchtime I sit on the toilet with my head in my hands, breathing steadily like the clopping of a cantering horse. That seems to fix it; just breathe, just breathe. I’m able to exert some control over my body, and for the rest of the day I beat the sickness back.
I wonder more and more what it’d be like to keep the baby and be with Logan, really be with him. At first I wonder as a sort of joke, letting my mind drift that way the same way I used to let my mind drift to fantasies of being a Viking shield-maiden when I was a teenager, strutting around my bedroom with a mirror as a shield and a hairbrush as a sword. I would alternate singing for a while and then playing the Viking afterward. I entertain it as a fantasy, seeing myself as though I’m an observer, sitting on a rocking chair with the baby in my arms, my handsome man leaning over me, his hair falling down to tickle my ear. Then I wonder what it’d be like if that actually happened. I’d have a family and a man I care about and enough money to be comfortable for the rest of my life …
In any case, I want to spend more time with Logan. I know that for sure.
At around four o’clock, Cecilia swaggers over to me and taps me on the shoulder. Her perfume smells like the sea today. “There’s some guy downstairs. Says he’s with something called the Demon Riders. I told him—I’m sorry, but I had to say it—that that sounds like some kind of gang. He smiled in a very rude way, looking me up and down like I’m a piece of meat! Anyway, he’s in the lobby. He said to tell you that Logan is in trouble and you need to come right away. Hey—Cora!”
I sprint down the hallway, heart pounding at the back of my throat, feeling like it could leap up onto my tongue. I swallow over and over, but it makes no difference. I kick through into the lobby and approach the man. He’s tall and skinny and calmer than he should be. The jacket doesn’t look quite right on him, with his suit pants and shiny shoes, but these are fleeting thoughts. The main thought is that he’s going to take me to Logan.
“Are you Cora?” he asks.
I nod.
“Follow me. Logan was shot. He’s asking for you. We don’t know if he’s going to make it.”
“Is he at the hospital?”
I follow him into the afternoon sunlight, down the street toward a black sedan. “We’re not sure,” he says. He opens the backdoor and nods in. “We need to hurry the fuck up.”
I climb into the car and the door locks. There’s a man sitting next to me, his hair jet-black and plastered to his hair with gel, his jacket a little too tight for him, squeezing at the shoulders and the arms. I run my finger along the door lock, almost flush to the door, wondering … And then the car starts, the tall man driving quickly away from the dentist’s office. His fingers are long, spindly, weird-looking. He taps them on the steering wheel as he drives.
“Are you guys Demon Riders, then?” I ask.
“You could say that,” the man next to me replies. “My name is Crusher. Yeah, that’s my name. I’ve been a Demon Rider ever since I was a kid. I used to go to the junkyard and play in the trash there, finding pieces of bikes and sticking them together and all that shit. I love bikes. Bikes are what I live for. Nothing like riding around on a hog and feeling big and strong and cool, getting oil all over your shoes and letting the wind fuck up your new suit.”
The driver sniggers.
“Yeah,” the man called Crusher goes on, although I’m starting to think his name is not Crusher, that I might have made a fatal mistake. “There’s nothing quite like rolling around in oil, is there, nothing quite like it at all. I love it, in fact. It’s the best thing there is. Why would you go down to the strip club and fuck a couple of whores when you can spend your time in a junkyard full of other guys, lathering each other up in oil? What a fun fuckin’ time that is. Nothing gay about that.”
The driver sniggers again, making a left turn. He’s going so fast that the force of the turn shoves me up against the glass.
“Could you slow down?” I ask, trying to keep my voice steady.
“Don’t you want to get to Logan?”
They could be Demon Riders, I tell myself. I’m sure lots of weird guys join biker gangs. You’d have to be less than normal to spend your life riding and shooting and possibly dying for a leather jacket. I try to convince myself of this, but the more I look at them, the more I doubt it. I grip my knees and try not to panic, but the tide is rising inside of me, a tide which grips me just as firmly as Logan’s lust grips me, but now in the other direction. Fear penetrates every part of me.
“What did Logan say?”
“What?” the driver grunts.
“Logan, what did he say? When he said he wanted to see me.”
“He said he wanted to see you.” He sounds annoyed. “What else do you want to know? You’ll be with him soon enough. You don’t have to worry.”
“So he just said he wanted to see me.” I nod. “He didn’t say anything about bringing the money, then.”
“What?” The driver pulls to a stop at the side of the road and then turns and faces me. There’s something unsettling about his eyes, the way he squints as though looking through me. “What are you talking about?”
“I thought he wanted me to guard the money. Wasn’t that the whole point of going to work, so we could hide it there?”
“What money?” Crusher barks. “What’re you talking about?”
“I thought you guys knew. All the Demon Riders know, don’t they?”
Tension fills the car until it is almost physical, something that shrouds me, fills me, suffocates me. The driver stares at me as though he’d like nothing more than to reach down my throat and tug out my child. There’s death in his stare, and hunger, too. He wants to hurt me. It’s now, staring into this lethal face, that I know these men are not Demon Riders. I have to get away. I have to stay calm, play the silly ignorant girl. Men will always see the silly ignorant girl if we play it well enough.
“I just thought … I’m so, so sorry if I’ve gotten it wrong. I just thought everyone in the MC knew about it. I just … so I wasn’t supposed to leave the money in the dentist’s office. Silly me!”
“How much money are we talking?” Crusher says.
The driver just watches.
“Well, are you sure it’s okay to tell you? Shouldn’t we be driving? What about Logan?”
“He’s fine,” Crusher says. “He’s in the hospital.”
Their story is falling apart now. How does he know that Logan is fine when before we were rushing to him because he might be in mortal danger?
“How much money?” the driver mutters.
“Two million,” I say in my most innocent voice. “I thought it was common knowledge. I’m so, so sorry. I didn’t know! What shall we do?”
“Go back,” Crusher says. “Come on, boss. We’ve gotta turn this around. You heard the bitch! Two million!”
Boss, bitch … a Demon Rider wouldn’t call the driver boss, and he wouldn’t call Logan’s woman a bitch. If I needed further proof that these men aren’t Demon Riders, I have it. But I don’t say anything. I pretend to ignore it. Right now my only desire is to bait the driver into returning to the dentist’s office so that I can get the hell out of here. I keep my face composed, calm, and innocent, a real idiot’s face.
“Go back,” the driver says, squinting at me. “Is that what you want to do, Melissa?”
Melissa. My throat seizes. I fight vomit back down into my belly. “I think we should go back,” I whisper. “Logan needs that money.”
“Go back … with your man bleeding to death. That doesn’t seem like something you’d want to do.” He sighs, and then leans all the way across the car so that he’s half hanging out of his seat, his face sneering inches away from me. “That was a clever trick. I’ll give you that. That was a really clever trick. If it’d been this dumb fuck in the driver’s seat, you would’ve had him, and had him cold. But I’m just a tad smarter than these gorillas.” The driver turns to Crusher. “Make sure she doesn’t try anything funny. She knows the score. She might get feisty.”
I press my face against the glass and take a deep breath, defeated. “I’m not going to fight,” I mutter, and it’s the truth. At least, I’m not going to fight right this second, where it’d be the easiest thing in the world for Crusher to grab me, crush me, kill me and kill my baby as well.
The driver starts the car. “My name is Moretti, by the way,” he says. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you, Melissa Collins.”
“A pleasure,” I repeat, praying for Thor, Odin, Frey, but most of all praying for Logan.