Page 39 of Torch
Refusing his advances during his recovery had been fun, despite how it might have appeared, and despite how conflicted I’d been about letting him in at all. The verbal bantering had been a very special kind of foreplay, and now I’d experienced what he was capable of, the dark twisted side of him, and the sweet caring side, and I wanted more of it. All of it.
Lissa:Is everything okay with you? Do you need Torch to call you?
What would I do without Lissa? I figured she’d already moved on, what with everything apparently going on in the club, but she was still thinking of me.
Me:Only when it’s safe for him to do so. Hearing his voice would be good.
It’d be more than good. I needed it, just to know he was okay. Wow, I’d gone from needy to borderline obsessive, hadn’t I? I glanced around my impeccably tidy home, and realised if I had something to clean or tidy, I could distract my mind for a bit. I didn’t have it in me to deliberately make a mess, just to clean it up again, but there were always things that needed to be reorganised, right? I headed upstairs to my dresser, pulling open the top drawer. It could always be tidier.
Twenty
IwasgladIwasn’t Stitch, or even Ryder, because I didn’t want to be the poor bastard in charge of resolving this shit. As it approached early evening, Tommy was still nowhere to be found, with a few of the other prospects picking up the slack in the kitchen, and we’d found that the camera on the utility door had been tampered with more than just last night.
See, it wasn’t obvious at first, because it was seamless, but when you actually watched the timer in the corner, and it suddenly jumped ten minutes or more, it was clear to see that this was yet another way this bastard had been coming and going.
“I refuse to believe this is Tommy,” Has said for the fifth time, and hell, none of us wanted to believe it, but he’d been on the list early on for something in his past, and now there was this. That led to a decision that made us all feel dirty. Checking his locker.
The brothers who didn’t bunk here at the clubhouse had large lockers, so they could store the shit they didn’t want to lug back and forth, and we were now on a mission to check his, with the master key that only Reacher had access to. Well, I guess now Stitch had it too. We’d never resorted to checking a fucking locker before, but suddenly, in light of Tommy’s unexplained absence, it seemed necessary. For all we knew, it’d give us a vital clue to finding him, but at worst, it just might show us who our attacker had been this whole time.
“When you think about it, all this stuff has been happening since Tommy joined us,” Ice said quietly, holding up a hand as we all tried to speak. “I know, I know, so have we all. I’m just saying. If it can be anyone, it can just as easily be him. Or Rocket. Or Micro, or any of the other fucking prospects. The only people we’re sure of are us, and Reacher.”
“And our old ladies, unless you’re now suggesting one of them is a psycho rapist,” Has said, freezing when deathly silence hit, and everyone stopped to stare at him.
“Fuck. Ry… sorry, man. I didn’t mean… I know it’s not her. Fuck!” Tori, Ryder’s old lady, met him the first time when she kidnapped and forced him into sex while drugged, so yeah, that one hit a little close to home, didn’t it?
“This is his?” Stitch asked, resting his palm against locker fourteen. We all stared at it for a moment, knowing there was no going back after this. No locker had ever been breached before, and this was something we couldn’t undo later. Hell, it’d be a huge betrayal of trust no matter what, but just in case it could save a life, or more, we had to do it.
“Want me to do it?” I could see Stitch was struggling with it, and hell, I’m an asshole. I’ll fucking take the hit to my soul. He shook his head, taking a deep breath.
“Jesus, I’m sorry, brother, I really hope we’re not betraying you here.”
He slipped the key into the lock and turned it, and we all held our breath as he pulled the door open. At first glance it looked perfectly normal. A few shirts were hanging up, and there was a bag of toiletries and a few books, mostly on cooking. Underneath those though, there was a shoe box, and that’s when things got weird.
“Am I seeing this?” Stitch asked, setting the box down on the bench and keeping hold of the lid. Inside the box were some keepsakes. Pictures, and trinkets, a pair of underwear he’d clearly taken from some lady at some point. A wad of cash, like serious cash. Thousands, maybe more.
And wrapped in a bloody piece of cloth, a knife. The blade was also bloodstained, and that sudden ache in my back was completely erroneous because we had the knife he’d left in me, but this was… this was someone else’s blood. Some other victim.
Has reached into the box and dug out some letters, rolled up with an elastic band between them.
“These are love letters to someone, but they’ve been returned in the mail. They’re open, but yeah, clearly whoever he sent these to, didn’t fucking want his advances.” Lack of consent was a big issue for Has, and his switch had just been flipped.
“So are we saying this is enough evidence to assume Tommy has been behind all of this?”
Ryder ran his hand through his hair, agitation in every fucking inch of his posture.
“And he’s dumb enough to keep just enough shit here to implicate him? Let’s think this through, yeah? This is one of our brothers, and prospect or not, he deserves us to be fair, and not jump to a really fucking obvious conclusion.”
Has was reading one of the letters and glaring at it.
“He was a pretty fucking aggressive ‘admirer’ of this poor woman. If she rejected these, how many did he send before she was pushed to that course of action? Jesus, what things did he do before or after this?”
“It does feel a little like we’re being led to a handy box of clues here, VP. I mean, I like Tommy, and I don’t want to believe this of him, but if this was anyone else, I’d be wondering why the fuck this box just happened to contain the very things that would point to him as our aggressor.”
Ice had a point, just like Ryder had a point, but Has also had a fucking point. What was the actual point here?
“VP, we need to find him, and then we can puzzle all this shit out. If it’s him, I’ll fry his fucking nuts with one of my torches, but I need proof it’s him first.” Nobody seemed to be in disagreement with me, but nobody looked completely convinced of his innocence either.
There was just enough doubt there to make it a really fucking uncomfortable situation. One way or another, we had to find Tommy, but whether we’d be rescuing him or torturing him, hell… the jury’s out on that one right now.
