Frozen Rain: Royal Bastards MC Anchorage Chapter Read online

  “Shoot it, Rain!” BP ordered from inside the van.

  I raised the shotgun up over my head and pulled the trigger. A deafening blast went up, but the wolves only stopped chewing long enough to look back at me, deliver the warning that I was interrupting something in which I had no business getting involved, and then went back to their feast.

  “Please!” Kyril yelled. “I’ll tell you.”

  Stepping closer to him, I cocked the shotgun, pointed it at the tree above his head, and pulled the trigger again. This time the wolves scattered. They whined and complained about losing their dinner, but they fled the scene in fear. They would be back, but they wouldn’t make a move we couldn’t halt with the firepower we had on hand. Wolves were terrifying, but they couldn’t come close to the rage of the Royal Bastards MC when backed into a corner.

  “Cut him loose,” I said as Pipe and Oosik climbed out of the van and rushed over to him.

  They slung his arms over their necks and carried him to me. He was close to death, closer than I would have liked. His entrails weren’t hanging out, but he had chunks of flesh taken out of his side, his leg, his arm, and his shoulder. One of his feet was barely connected to his body. Kyril, the man who’d been in the fancy blue velvet suit earlier this evening now wore a fleshy one stained scarlet.

  “What do you have to tell me?” I asked him.

  His head hung down. BP grabbed hold of his hair and lifted up his face. He grinned at me, blood staining his teeth, and said, “Even your wolves are pussies. Ours are much bigger in Russia.”

  Fucking piece of shit.

  Kyril wasn’t making this easy. He was a lot tougher than his pansy-ass looked.

  “Bring him,” I said as I turned and headed toward the river.

  The guy could barely hold up his own head, but he still wasn’t willing to give up.

  “That’s close enough,” I told them as we reached the riverbank. They dropped him onto the ground, and I reached out with the tip of my boot to tap against the frozen surface. I knew it wouldn’t break apart on us, but still, anytime I stepped foot on a frozen river, I worried a bit. The ice was thick as fuck. But, under it was a rapidly flowing river. It was one of the reasons BP never caught any fish. That river was a fucking monster below the ice.

  “You will freeze me to death,” Kyril said.

  “Nope,” I replied as I reached down, grabbed him by his hair, and dragged his naked body across the solid but uneven ice. His wounds scraped across it, covering the surface in blood. A nice red trail followed us. It would be covered in snow by the end of the hour, but right now, it was like a red carpet being rolled out for my friends.

  Only BP followed me out to his hole. Kyril screamed the entire way. His ribcage snagged on a rocky patch of ice and he howled in pain. “Okay, okay, please!” he yelled.

  “Fuck you,” I told him, my voice seeping through clenched teeth as I continued to drag him. “You want to play games with my woman’s life. I don’t need your fuckin’ answers. There are plenty of douchebag Russians in the area. You’ll be an example. My boys have been snapping pictures of this. They’ll be posted at every club in the area. Word will get out. Palach will know who did this. But you’ll be long gone since you didn’t want to fuckin’ talk.”

  “I’ll tell you, I fucking swear!” Kyril yelled.

  “You said that before,” I reminded him. “I don’t have time for these fucking games. You’re goin’ in the hole, and what goes in the hole, pops out in the ocean. You’ll fucking drown down there. And a lot of women will be saved because of it.”

  “Please,” he cried.

  We’d reached the hole, so I squatted down. BP held his legs. Still holding him by the hair, I shoved his face into the hole and held him there. Twenty seconds, thirty, forty. His legs thrashed. Blood ran along the ice.

  “You’re getting my fishing hole all dirty, brother,” BP said.

  “You need a new one anyway,” I replied.

  “You’re gonna kill him.”

  He was right. I pulled his head up.

  “Where are they taking the girls?” I asked.

  He sputtered and coughed up water. His face was pale, lips blue, and he was still losing a lot of blood. He would die tonight, even if I decided not to kill him myself.

  “I don’t know,” Kyril replied. “I don’t care that much.”

  “Then you’re useless to me,” I said.

  I winked at BP. He loosened his grip on the legs, and I tossed Kyril into the hole. He went waist deep, screaming the whole way, before BP snatched his legs and pulled him out.

  “Nooooo!” Kyril was still screaming. “I’ll tell you.” He spit water on the ground. My hands were fucking freezing. Numb. I could only imagine how his naked body felt. He’d lasted much longer than I would have expected. “They take them to a place called Kalishna.”

  “Kalishna?” I asked. I’d never heard of it.

  “Is…” he stuttered, now barely able to make out words. “Is small town. Northern Alaska. They take all women there. Then they transport to Russia. Once they have enough.”

  “When will they be transporting next?” I asked.

  “Don’t… don’t know. Maybe this week. Maybe next.”

  “I’ll call Carousel,” BP said.

  “Get me a blanket,” I told Pipe.

  He went back to the van while BP was on his phone.

  “Yo, you ever heard of a place called Kalishna?” he asked. After a beat he said, “Well, can you look it up for me real quick. Hell, Wikipedia that shit. Ask Cracker. That crusty bastard knows everything.”

  Pipe handed me the blanket and I wrapped Kyril up in it. He lay there shivering, bleeding all over the place.

  “Thanks,” BP said before ending his call. He looked at me and said, “It’s a real place. Can’t drive in. No roads. It’s a small town. Gets all its supplies from bush pilots. So, it’s either by plane or the sleds.”

  The sleds were our snowmobiles. Our winter Harleys as we often called them.

  “What about him?” Pipe asked, kicking Kyril’s bad foot and causing him to cry out in pain.

  I looked down at the bleeding, suffering Russian who’d been such a pain in my ass. If nothing else, I had to respect his ability to hold out on information. That wolf attack. That was fucking crazy. Even for me.

  “Put him back in his club to set an example?” BP asked.

  “Nah,” I said. “Fuck him.”

  With that, I snatched the blanket off him, grabbed him by the hair, and dumped his sorry ass into the hole. His scream gurgled up for only a second before the river below whisked him away and dragged him off to his watery grave.

  “Burn the blanket,” I said as I stood and handed it to Pipe. “We’re going to Kalishna.”

  19

  Cassie

  Hunger pains stabbed at me. I’d been in the room for only a day, and I couldn’t bring myself to eat whatever they were serving us in metallic bowls. Especially not after watching the woman sitting only an aisle away hack up her lungs into her bowl. She was an older lady, and she was clearly very ill, but she was attractive. All of the women were. Someone would pay top dollar for each and every one of them. Including me.

  What that meant, I wasn’t sure. Nia and I talked about it.

  “I think some rich men want women to be slaves in their house,” she said. “Do the cooking, cleaning, and fucking.”

  “Or just sex slaves,” I said. “I’ve heard of underground BDSM rings where men make women wear collars and call them master. They come to the clubs on the weekends and demand sexual acts from them.”

  Pamela, a nice Latina with her hair still in the braid she’d tied it in two weeks ago when she was taken from her college campus in Mexico City, said, “Or worse.”

  She’d invited us to share her bunk. This meant sleep rotations since all we did was sit around in this room and wait. It was like being in an all-female prison.

  “Worse?” Nia asked. “What’s worse?”

&
nbsp; I had a feeling I knew what Pamela had on her mind. Nia was so young still. So naïve. She wasn’t wise to the wickedness in the world other than what she’d witnessed living in a homeless camp in Alaska.

  “You have heard of the films they make?” Pamela asked. “The sex films?”

  “Porn?” Nia replied. “You think they’ll force us to film porn?”

  “I’m sure some will have that in mind too,” I said. “There’s no way all those live web cam shows are by choice.”

  Whenever I saw those ads pop up on my internet browser advertising women who want to chat live – yes, I occasionally watched porn – I wondered about that. Were these women doing it because they wanted to, and they were making good money? Or were there greedy men in the background forcing them to do it? I could see a warehouse much like the one we sat in now being used to house women. A web cam show in every room. If they didn’t perform or bring in enough money, they would be executed.

  “Not that,” Pamela said. “The ones where the girl dies in the end.”

  “Snuff films,” I informed them. “They’re called snuff films. They’re real.”

  “Jesus,” Nia whispered. “No. That can’t be what this is.”

  “If I had to guess, each buyer can do with us what he wants,” I said.

  “Or she,” Pamela corrected me. “Do you think only men are buying women? In my country, some of the worst criminals are women.”

  She was right. Like Ilse Koch, the Bitch of Buchenwald, who liked to make lamp shades and framed pictures from the skin of the Jewish people in the concentration camp where she worked. Evil lived in women too, and I hadn’t even considered it.

  From Pamela’s top bunk, I could see out the grimy window, but the flight line was empty. No plane. No people moving around outside. We really were in a frozen wasteland.

  “What do you think is out there?” I asked. “In the cabins on the other side of the runway?”

  “It is a town I think,” Pamela said. “Like a small village.”

  “Your English is very good,” I told her. She had an accent, but her pronunciation was great.

  “They teach us English in school,” she replied. “It’s good for business.”

  “A village,” I said, thinking about the word.

  What sorts of businesses would need to be in every single village? Maybe a bar, a restaurant, a store, and some kind of post office, I supposed. Were the people in the village in on this? We had to be in northern Alaska, so were they Russians who’d once crossed over to settle here? Were they family and friends of our kidnappers? That was the kind of stuff that always happened in horror movies. People would escape their kidnappers and run into the warm, welcoming arms of the kidnapper’s cannibalistic family.

  You cannot make a run for it.

  The heavy steel door to our chamber burst open and in stepped the giant Russian who’d been guarding the front door when Artur brought me in. He cracked his knuckles and eyed the room suspiciously. He walked up the first row of bunks, licking his lips at some of the girls. He mumbled something in his foreign tongue.

  He grabbed the arm of a dirty blonde woman and brought his nose close to her, sniffing loudly. Wrinkling up his nose, apparently dissatisfied with the scent of a woman who’d gone weeks without a shower, he pushed her back onto her bunk.

  “Mr. Palach says there is a woman here dating a biker,” he announced in broken English.

  Fuck. Don’t say a word. Don’t be afraid to look at him, but don’t stare at him. Be like the other women.

  I studied the rest of them and saw that they were in all sorts of poses. Some glared at the man angrily. Some hid their faces in their blankets. Others looked down at their feet. A few stared off into space like they’d lost all sense of their sanity.

  His boots thudded against the cement floor as he made his way down the next aisle of bunks. With his back to me, I was tempted to slink over to the row he’d already passed so we wouldn’t come face to face. I was afraid I’d give myself away if he looked directly at me. But there was another guard near the door, and if he saw me, my plan would fall apart and would work against me. I would single myself out.

  At the end of the aisle, he turned, and came right down the one in which I sat. Pamela bit her lip and stared at the man with so much venom she could have spit acid. Nia kept her eyes on her feet. I wasn’t sure what to do.

  “This biker’s woman might be getting special attention,” the big guy said. “Special treatment because of who she is with.”

  With that remark, the blonde he’d sniffed in the first aisle shouted out, “I’m dating a biker. You should let me go or his gang will kick your ass!”

  The big Russian smiled and chuckled under his breath. “Really now? Will he?”

  “My boyfriend will be so pissed,” she added.

  She was lying. The Russians wouldn’t know it, but I knew no woman dating a legit MC member would ever refer to him as being in a gang. It was always a club. A motorcycle club. Kinsey taught me that. Only law enforcement and the ignorant public would refer to them as gangs.

  So, this girl was lying. She was hoping to get some special treatment because of her affiliation with a badass MC.

  The guy was looking for me. I knew that, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it. He moved once again to the first aisle and approached the blonde who now stood with her hands at her hips, looking proud.

  “You are lucky,” he said. “Unlike all these other cows.”

  A few women murmured their anger. He didn’t care. He took her by the arm and led her out of the room. She followed with her head held high, excited to finally be getting out of here. Only, I knew that wasn’t the case at all, and I felt terrible for not speaking up and protecting her. But she’d done this to herself. She was ready to march right out of here and never look back. She would leave all these women behind in a second.

  As they passed through the door, I heard the big Russian tell her, “Mr. Palach said I can have my way with the biker’s ol’ lady. That I can make you scream.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “He said I can show you what your future will become. I hope you are good.”

  The door slammed shut and her cries sounded off from the other side.

  It was only a matter of time before they realized she was not me. If Palach was out there somewhere, he would know the difference. I would be dead soon if Rain didn’t come for me.

  20

  Rain

  The party was over at the MC. Cracker stood behind me with the rest of my brothers wrapped around the pool table. Everyone not important was sent home. Any woman who slept in one of the brothers’ rooms was sent to that room. This was for club business only. We held church, or our meetings, in a special room, but right now, we needed the width of the pool table to hold the map.

  “There’s a storm brewing, brother,” BP said. “That’s all I’m sayin’. Maybe tomorrow’s better. We can’t leave right now.”

  “There’s always a storm brewin’, Pres,” Frostbite said. “If you want to stay here this time, as VP, I’ll step up and ride with him out there.”

  “Ain’t goin’ without me,” Pipe said.

  “Nor me,” Slitz added.

  It went up around the table. Every single brother in the club was willing to ride with me. That was family.

  “Pres,” I said, biting the inside of my cheek to force myself to calm down and stay respectful and to not sound too desperate. “If we don’t go now, she may be gone by tomorrow. We don’t know how they operate. She could be gone already for all I know. Tomorrow is a lot more likely, and each day after that the chances of getting her back become slimmer and slimmer.”

  “We can’t get a plane out there tonight,” Cracker said. “Nobody’s gonna do it that soon. Tomorrow is possible, but tonight… I’m afraid it ain’t gonna happen, Rain.”

  “I understand,” I said. “I’ll take a sled.”

  Everyone was silent. Our winter Harleys had their home out in a
special area of the garage. Keeping ten snowmobiles along with all our bikes stored at the same time wasn’t easy, but we had plenty of room in the hangar and accompanying buildings. Cracker could have them gassed up and ready in no time. But it was dangerous. Not the machines themselves, but the elements could prove tricky, and we would be going the distance with this run.

  “It’s far,” Cracker said, eyeballing the map. He ran his finger from our location out to Kalishna. “It ain’t gonna be easy, fellas. But it can be done. Better take food, water—”

  “Whiskey,” Beezus said.

  Cracker stopped and turned toward the young man. “You be careful with the sauce out there. You ever heard the story of BJ Halls?”

  Of course, Beezus hadn’t.

  “BJ Halls worked the Alaska pipeline a while back. Like a lot of other gents up there, he worked his fingers to the bone. He was exhausted one night when he went back to his apartment to sleep. Left his bottle of whiskey in the truck. He was a known alcoholic. Of course, the first thing alcoholics do in the morning is take a swig. BJ went out to his truck to start the next day’s shift, reached into the center console, picked up that bottle, and gulped it down. It was so cold it froze his stomach and throat instantly. Killed him on the spot.”

  Everyone was silent. We’d all heard the story before. Cracker loved to tell us cautionary tales. We’d spent many nights arguing over whether this one was true or not. Some believed it was likely, others thought it impossible. It didn’t matter. We all agreed swigging whiskey that’s been out in the cold for a while was a bad idea.

  “We leave in an hour,” I announced. “That’s when I’m leaving anyway. We can take the trucks and travel as far north as we can get. Once the roads don’t make sense anymore, we’ll offload the sleds and travel the rest of the way with those.”

  “If y’all want, I can get a plane out to you sometime tomorrow,” Cracker suggested. “But I have to tell you, no pilot’s gonna want to fly out to a place crawlin’ with Russians ready to shoot ‘em down.”