Page 2 of Hawk's Secret
Underneath it, I was drowning.
She hugged me goodbye in the car park. Held on a beat longer than usual, the way she did when she was worried but didn't want to say it. I held on too, pressed my face into her shoulder.
"I'll call Hawk tonight," she said again. "Promise."
"You're the best."
"I know.” She smiled.
She drove away and I sat in my car for three minutes, counting seconds on the dashboard clock, giving myself exactly that long to feel everything I'd been holding back. The guilt. The self-loathing. The specific, nauseating shame of using the one person who trusted you completely as a stepping stone into the life you were about to betray.
Three minutes. Then I drove to the meeting I'd been dreading since six that morning.
The car parkbehind the hardware store was empty at nine-thirty on a Tuesday night. I'd been told to park in the far corner, under the broken streetlight, which I'd done, because I did what I was told now. That was who I'd become. A woman who followed instructions from a man she was terrified of, because the alternative was worse.
He was already there. Straddling his bike, arms folded, engine off, waiting. Young, maybe twenty-five, twenty-six. Lean, wiry, the build of someone who'd been hungry his whole life and had decided the world owed him for it. His jacket was open and I could see the edges of a tattoo crawling up his neck, new ink, the kind you got when you were trying to prove something to someone. He wasn't patched. Not yet. He was a prospect, earning his way in, and I was his audition piece.
His name was Colt. What I cared about was the phone in his back pocket and what was on it.
"You're late," he said.
I was two minutes early. He knew that. He said it anyway, because establishing control was how he started everyconversation, every meeting, every interaction we'd had since the night he'd shown up at my apartment door with a grin on his face and a video on his screen that had turned my blood to ice water.
"It's done," I said. I stayed by my car. Kept the distance. Four car lengths between us, which wasn't enough, would never be enough, but it was all I had. "I talked to Lena. She's calling Hawk tonight. I'll have the job by the end of the week."
"Good girl."
The words scraped across my skin. I kept my face neutral, my body still, my hands in my jacket pockets where he couldn't see them shaking. I'd learned, in the weeks since this started, that Colt fed on reactions. He wanted the flinch, the fear, the visible proof that he had power over me. Giving him nothing was the only small rebellion I had left.
"What do you want me to do when I'm in?" I asked.
"Listen. That's it. For now." He swung off the bike, took two steps toward me, then stopped. Close enough that the light from the neighbouring car park caught his face, the enjoyment there, the satisfaction of a man playing a game he was winning. "The Forsaken Angels run their business out of that bar. Church happens in the back. Brothers talk. You'll hear things. Names, places, schedules, routes. You write it down and you bring it to me."
"And if they don't talk around the new girl?"
"They will. You’ll be good at making sure you fit in.” He smiled. The kind of smile that made the air around him feel thinner. “You’ll be useful and make sure they don’t suspect a thing, and they’ll let their guard down.”
Useful. Another word that had been gutted and refilled with something rotten. I was useful. I was the perfect weapon, and the man who'd crafted me into one was standing six feet away, drunk on the first real power he'd ever held in his miserable life.
Colt wasn't sanctioned. I'd figured that out early, when the questions he asked were too scattered, too ambitious, too obviously the work of someone without a playbook. The Iron Jackals' leadership hadn't ordered this. This was freelance. A prospect trying to earn his patch by delivering intel on a rival club, using information he'd blackmailed out of a woman who'd made the mistake of sleeping with his friend at a party two years ago.
His friend, Tyler. The hang-around. The man who'd taken me home after too many drinks and bad judgement, who'd been fun and forgettable, who I'd woken up next to with a headache and nothing else. Nothing except the video he'd filmed of us having sex without my knowledge, without my consent, while I was too drunk to notice the phone propped on the dresser behind a stack of books.
The video was explicit. My face was visible. My voice was audible. It was everything.
Tyler had shown it around because that was what men like Tyler did. Bragged, shared, passed his phone to other men in bars, saidlook what I gotwith a grin that made him feel bigger than he was. Colt had seen it, recognised me, known about my connection to Lena, to Hawk, to the Forsaken Angels. And the two of them had looked at that footage of my body, of my most intimate, most vulnerable moments, and seen a ladder they could climb.
Tyler had handed it over willingly. He wanted to move up from hang-around to prospect, and I was his offering. Colt wanted his patch, and I was his proof that he could deliver. Two men, two ambitions, my body as currency.
The first time Colt showed me the video on his phone, standing in my doorway with his foot in the gap so I couldn't close the door, I'd thought I was going to be sick. He'd watched me watch myself on that screen, watched the colour drain frommy face, and laid it out simply. Get a job at Angel's Rest. Feed him information. Or the video goes to my family, friends and online, where it lives forever, where it follows you into every job interview, every relationship, every room you walk into for the rest of your life.
I'd said yes. What else could I say?
"Same time next week," Colt said now. He was walking back to his bike, done with me for tonight. "Have something for me by then. Names, faces, routines. Whatever you've got."
"Fine."
He threw a leg over the seat, paused, looked back at me over his shoulder.
