Page 6 of Angel’s Doll

He reaches into the saddlebag and hands me a flannel shirt, soft and dry.

“You’re shaking,” he says. “Arms through, then hold on again.”

I get it on under my wet coat, and love the warmth of it. He watches me in the wing mirror while I do the buttons. He asks nothing.

“You don’t want to know what happened?” My voice comes out smaller than I plan.

“You’ll tell it once, inside, to everybody who needs to hear it at the same time.” He says it like policy. “Nobody’s going to make you tell it twice.”

I don’t have a word for the ache behind my ribs. In my uncle’s world, information is currency, and I’ve watched people mined for it my whole life. This man has a witness from inside Victor Hale’s office shivering on his passenger seat and all he cares about is me being warm.

“What do I call you?” I ask.

“Angel.”

Of course. I lived my whole life with the devil I know, and the day the devil finally sells me, an angel pulls me out of the trash. My dad would have laughed until he had to sit down.

“Sloane,” I say, which is stupid, because he knows, but I need to be the one who gives it to him.

“I know.” He kicks the stand up, and I catch the shape of a smile under the split lip. “Hold on, Doll.”

Doll. He said it in the alley too, corporate doll, and it should upset me. He sees me like an object that was kept on a shelf by my uncle. It doesn’t. I don’t have time to work out why before the engine takes the question away.

The city thins into industrial blocks, warehouses and razor wire and dark rail spurs, and he slows at a fence line topped with floodlights. A kid in a leather vest hauls a rolling gate open, and we come through into a yard full of motorcycles parked in a row like cavalry. I look up at the front of the building and everything in me goes still.

The sign is painted.

THUNDER BASTARDS MC. SEATTLE.

I know this name. I know it from board meetings where Victor’s voice went a register too high. The word he uses for them with investors, spitting it like a pit: terrorists. The saboteurs. The thugs bleeding Halcyon at every corner. The enemy my uncle blames for everything, including, as of this afternoon, the death of his empire.

Some of what killed it was us, Angel said, back in the alley, and I got on his bike anyway.

Men are coming off the porch. Big men, unhurried, and every one of them is looking at me like I’m a lit match somebody carried into the powder room. One of them turns and goes inside fast. I don’t need to know how this place runs to get it. Somebody is being warned that Angel brought someone home.

The gate rolls shut behind us.

A fence is a fence. I’m behind one after all, same as Durey wanted, same as Victor arranged. But nobody carried me in. I climbed on this bike myself, and I held on the whole way here.

It isn’t freedom.

It’s the closest I’ve ever been.

4

ANGEL

The walk from the bike to the clubhouse door is forty feet, and I spend all of it working a problem I already know the answer to.

The driver saw my cut. Up close, in the clinch, eyes crawling over the patches while we traded. Thunder Bastards. Seattle. VP. He’s awake by now, and men like him report before they see a doctor. Whoever owns the fat man in the suit is going to hear that a Thunder Bastard put his boy down and rode off with Hale’s girl, and that news travels one direction. Toward us.

So I’m not walking into church to ask permission. I’m walking in to report a war I already started.

Doll keeps pace beside me through a yard full of staring men, garbage in her hair, my flannel swallowing her whole.

Phoenix meets us at the door. I put Doll’s hand in hers.

“Get her warm. Feed her.” Then, louder, for the porch and everyone on it. “Nobody asks her anything until I’m back. Not one question.”