Everleigh…

The hotel I was kept in was so boring. It was me and Detective Stahl, for the most part. A male nurse, Pasquale, came daily to check on my hands and change the bandages. He was kind to me, and a bit of a fashionista who got me. He’d snuck me down into the basement of the hospital to go through big, giant laundry bins of clothing to find some things that suited me.

The clothing I’d arrived in were a mess of blood that would never come out of the white cotton, at least, not completely. Of course, I never saw those clothes again, anyway. Detective Stahl had taken them.

He sat at the little table in the hotel room on his phone and I eyed him from where I sat on the bed. He didn’t look like a ‘Detective Stahl’ to me. He didn’t even look like a ‘Sam’. He looked like a ‘Driller’, the name on his cut. But, I didn’t want to let myself get too familiar with him. He was a cop, after all. Not that I’d ever had anything against the cops. They’d never bothered me and I’d never bothered them.

The Knights of Crescentia, on the other hand? They were into so much illegal shit, it wasn’t any wonder why they had a natural distaste for the cops.

In the beginning, my best friend Mariah and I had both been dying to get out of our small town in Indiana. Neither of us cared how, and when the Steel Wraiths rolled through town and stopped at her bar, going with them seemed like a good idea to her, and where she went, I went. Even though I knew it was, in all probability, a bad idea, anything was better than that town.

Sledge had been not my type – physically, at least. He had been, when it came to almost everything else: philosophy, reading, his views on what the world was and what it could be… There was only one problem. Monogamy wasn’t exactly his thing, and it had hurt. So too had his cruel streak. Not physically, he’d never hit me, but he was mean when he was drunk and he was drunk nearly all the time. He didn’t hesitate to make fun of my mutism to get a laugh out of the rest of the guys, and I hated that.

Mariah had stood up for me, and we’d been okay, but then… Then we’d met the Knights of Crescentia and King had swept me off my feet. She’d begged me to stay with her, to go home, but there was no home for me. I had no roots in that town, and I’d ridden away into the sunset and a new life and had relished the adventure of it – right up until the dream had become a nightmare.

King’s drug use had begun to wear, to become more habit, more need than recreational. He’d been becoming increasingly paranoid, until the night he’d had me crucified to a tree. It broke my heart that he would think I would betray him. I would never betray him – any of them ‒ but now that they had betrayed me, all bets were off. I would figure out how to testify, by god, and the secrets I could tell ‒ I would ruin them all for this.

They said hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and I think nailing a woman to a pair of trees definitely falls under the category of ‘scorned’.

I stared at the white bandages wrapped around my hands. The right one had gotten infected, and I was taking strong antibiotics. It was painful irrigating the wound, so Pasquale was a godsend. He made sure to give me a painkiller when he arrived, and then waited, talking at me, for it to take effect, before we did the deed. It didn’t help much, but it was better than nothing, and things were getting better… except for the extreme, unending boredom.

There was nothing on the hotel’s TV, and if I had to watch another rerun of ‘My 600 lb Life,’ I was going to scream long and loud and wordless into the void that was police custody.

“What’re you thinking about so hard over there?” Driller – I mean, Detective Stahl – asked me. He was looking over at me, and I carefully picked at a stray thread on the thin hotel comforter.

I pointed at the TV and gave it the finger.

He choked on a laugh and said, “Jesus, tell me how you really feel.”

I frowned at him and he smiled.

“Wish you would have said something earlier.”

I glared at him.

“You’re a smart cookie, you would have figured it out.”

I scowled at him again and he just laughed, then he shook his head.

“I’d give you my tablet to watch Netflix, but until you’re deposed and statements are on record, I’m not allowed.”

I cocked my head.

“Why?”

I nodded.

“Because we don’t want you contacting any of your friends who may be attached to the club.”

My shoulders dropped, and I shook my head.

“Not sure what that means, darlin’. It could mean so many things.”

I nodded. It wasn’t like I could get any more detailed.

“You up to gripping a pen yet?”

I shook my head. Bending my hands stretched things, which hurt. A lot. So I didn’t do it if I could avoid it. I sighed heavily, and he sighed too.

“Not sure how they’re going to do that, either,” he said, but that wasn’t what I’d been thinking. Although, he had a point. I didn’t know how they were going to do it. King had made a good choice in charming a mute into being his pussy. Of course, when the charm wore off, it was fear that’d gotten me to stay. Fear, and some semblance of love. As badly as he treated me, up until the night he’d ordered my crucifixion he’d still treated me better than I’d been treated back home.

“You’ve had a rough go of it, haven’t you, Ms. Tate?” he asked softly and I startled.

“Surprised we figured out your last name?”

I nodded.

“Well, that was all Narcos.”

I frowned and shook my head slightly.

“Whiskey.”

My eyebrows shot up. His road name with the cop club was ‘Narcos’? Seriously? What a crap road name.

“You prefer Everleigh or Silence?” he asked.

I shrugged one shoulder halfheartedly. I didn’t suppose it really mattered.

“Was it always Silence?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“What was it before?”

I thought about it, and carefully drew my index finger back-and-forth across the top of my thumb.

He frowned and asked, “Violin?”

I rolled my eyes and shook my head, but had to smile. I tried again and willed him to get the answer, my mind screaming Cricket! Come on! You can do it.

He finally shook his head, laughing.

“Sorry, I suck at Charades.”

I shrugged and heaved a frustrated sigh.

We didn’t talk anymore, but I’d catch him looking at me like he wanted to say something. No, more like he wanted to ask something. The next time he looked my way, I met his eyes and cocked my head to the side.

He kind of laughed and said, “Boy, nothing gets by you, does it?”

I shook my head.

He raked his bottom lip between his teeth, and said, “He’s real broken up about it,” jerking his chin in the direction of my hands.

It wasn’t what I was expecting. Like, at all. I let mouth drop open slightly to express my surprise.

“He went back and got you as fast as he could without drawing suspicion, which was hard as hell. I’ve never seen Narcos come that close to blowing his cover over anything before, but something about this… He could have called me, could have called it in, but he didn’t.” He looked me over, his eyes wandering over my face slowly, scrutinizing me, before he asked, “What makes you so special?”

I blinked at his question, taken aback, and shrugged. I had no idea; none, whatsoever. In my estimation, I was the furthest thing from ‘special’ as anyone could get, a neurotic mess on a good day – I couldn’t tell this man why Whiskey had done what he’d done, but I could tell him, I had known there had been something about him. I should have suspected that what that ‘something’ was, was that he was a cop, but he was good at keeping secrets. I guess you had to be, in order to be undercover narcotics.

I settled back against the headboard with a sigh and just tried to stop thinking for a while. That was easier said than done when I had so much to think about and literally nothing to distract me from it.