Part 1. The Raid

Slick, milky cum oozed from Bella’s lips, accompanied by a shudder and a gasp from the man standing above her. Under her nails, Danny’s granite butt cheeks shrunk into flaccid orbs. Stabbing pain shot through her knees. She sighed inwardly and shifted her weight.

“Nobody move!” A gravel voice boomed through the groan of splintering wood and the crash that followed. Metal flew. A piece stung Bella’s shoulder. Twisted hinges hung from the door jamb. Through the gaping entrance, light and air whooshed into the room. “Bounty hunter!”

“Shit!” Danny’s cock ripped from her mouth. His hands pushed down on Bella’s head, propelling her backward onto her ass. Instinctively, she drew up her knees to her chest and crossed her ankles to shield her naked bottom.

“Let’s go, pardner, you’re coming with me.”

She looked up in time to see a huge man hit the floor just as a dagger flew from Danny’s flicked wrist. It stuck in the door slab with a dull thwack. But the big man already had his gun aimed and cocked. Terrified, Bella scooted backward to the corner where she’d tossed her clothes, while Danny scooped up the waistband of his pants and jumped over the intruder on his way out. He sped through an alcove into the cavernous clubhouse beyond, propelling himself across three rows of pool tables, scattering cues and balls among the surprised club members. The bleached blonde heads of the club bitches all turned at the odd sight of their club president escaping the clutches of a bounty hunter.

Undeterred, the big man wheeled around and aimed his .44 Magnum in the direction of the escaping fugitive. Slung across his back was an AK-47. Danny’s pale back made a perfect target. Bella kept one eye on the bounty hunter while she got dressed. As the warehouse erupted in chaos, she threw her somber pea coat over her body-hugging spandex top and wiggled into her jeans and boots.

Fear and indecision clouded Bella’s brain. Nothing good would come of this. She was the lowest of the low, and female, in a place where females had no status beyond the men they could attract and keep. She had no standing like the women who belonged to the Desert Rats Motorcycle Club’s high-ranking males, and thus enjoyed none of their protection. She worked as a club whore for whatever tips and baubles the guys tossed her way as they zipped up their pants.

With this new episode, Bella knew her night was over. Self-interest kicked in - she needed to get out of here, and quick. The price of this kind of trouble was higher than Bella could afford. All of her past she’d worked so hard to erase, the gains she’d made over four years of struggle to climb out of her crummy life’s hole, flared up before her then vanished in a single moment. Danny was a fugitive and everybody in the place knew it. If the cops came, and she was caught harboring, she’d be expelled from dental hygienist school, her loan cancelled and called due. Her dream of living a life of honor, raising her daughter with pride and dignity, sending Kayla to college – gone, all gone. Kayla, all she could think of was Kayla. Her reason for living, for trying, taken away.

Danny had been her last blow tonight – cheating on Julie, his old lady – using Bella for a little variety. On the nights he would visit her Bella saved up her best sexual energy for him. They’d cuddle together afterward - he’d stroke her hair and her body softly; make love to her easy and slow; soothe her hurts and aches. After he fell asleep, she’d steal away and call her mother to come pick her up from work, bringing Kayla with her. Together they’d wait for her outside the compound. Kayla would shower her mother with kisses, reviving Bella’s flagging spirits. But Danny was gone, and to who knows where. Probably fled to Julie’s house, or one of the bars he was known to haunt. Julie was forbidden to hang at the clubhouse. She’d take him in though, when he knocked at her door. Julie had no choice if she wanted to stay at the top of the Desert Rats heap of bitches.

Bella needed to get to Kayla. But how? Calling her mother in the midst of tonight’s chaos was out of the question. Then she looked up and saw her ride. Standing in front of her still aiming through the door, his huge frame making that .44 Magnum look more like a Sig .238, was her way out of this shitty hellhole. Her way home, back to Kayla. But she had to act. Now. She darted lightly toward him, her panic increasing with each step. Just as she reached him, his head whipped in her direction, his eyes crazed and unseeing. He moved slightly and suddenly a black hole loomed in her vision, framed by the barrel of that .44. He hesitated, and in that moment, she dove at him, a full-on, flying tackle and with one hand shoved the barrel up to the sky.

The force was just enough that he fell back a step, propelled off balance. She used it as a chance to carry her momentum forward. “This way! Now!” Her fuchsia nails drew blood as she grabbed for his wrist. She ignored his curse, yanking them into the alcove and then pulling them down a hallway to the back door that opened to the rear of the club’s compound. He stopped at the door, making her draw up short. He shook himself free then snarled into her face, “bitch, my mark!” His sight was still trained backward in the direction of his now-vanished fugitive.

“There isn’t time.” She tugged at him, trying to get his attention. Her voice climbed somewhere between whimper and pleading. “I need to get out of here. Now. He’s gone, but I can get you your mark. I can help you with that. But first I need you to help me. I need to get to my little girl.” It worked. After a hesitation that felt like forever, his inertia slowly loosened, a leg, a step at a time, until his motions smoothed and he allowed himself to be propelled in her direction. “I’ll get you your mark,” she kept saying. “Just get me out of here. Now.”

He whipped her around, pulling her into him.

“Wait a minute. You weren’t supposed to be in there!”

The gravel voice, familiar, seemed to fill up something hollow inside of her. It also pissed her off. She stood on her tiptoes and pressed her nose into his.

“Well, how ‘bout we go back for a do-over?”

He started off again in the direction Danny had fled. Again, she tugged at him until he stopped. “I told you,” she said. “I can get him for you. But first, we have to get out of here.”

She kept pulling at him with all her strength, willing the big man into coming along. He didn’t move. Bella tugged harder. “There isn’t time to argue. If the police come, I’m screwed. Let’s go!”

He came back to her, face to face again. “You know your boyfriend’s a wanted man? Murder one?”

“Do you know you have an overbite?”

For a second he went almost cute, rubbing the back of his hand across his mouth, self-conscious like. He’d been teased about it, she could tell, and it still bothered him.

“Never mind,” he said with a growl. “Talk like that around me, bitch, and you’ll find your jaw wired shut.”

“Call me bitch again and you might earn yourself a good tongue lashing.” She stuck it out for emphasis and wagged it at him with a leering grin. She was only half-joking. She’d do whatever it took to get out of here.

“Okay…darlin’.”

Bella started forward again, but then realized she had no idea where to go. Behind them, coming from the warehouse, she could hear yelling, moving in their direction. She stopped and faced him again, sheepishly.

“Where’d you park? You do have a truck, right?”

“Uh, yeah. It’s in the handicapped spot.” He shook off her grip and then clamped his fingers onto her arm. “Figured nobody’d mind. I was just planning a quick in and out trip.”

Did the dolt have a sense of humor? She shot back, “for milk and bread, right?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he stared grimly ahead and held on tighter, steering her from behind, firmly in control now, picking up his pace, and pushing her roughly forward. “Just run until I say stop, okay?”

Bella was helpless to do more than heed his direction. She ran as fast as she could, careful not to trip on the ground, shagged up with tree roots and strewn with broken concrete.

They reached the truck. He opened the back door. “You ride back here.”

Inside she saw bars and a grate. There were no handles for doors or windows. “But…this is a cage!”

“That’s right, it’s the bounty cage. This is your ride, like it or not. Out here, darlin’, we do things my way. Now, do you want to get out of here or should I leave you behind?”

Her full weight came to bear as she stretched her arms across the opening and pinned her shins against the lower frame of the door. “Not before you tell me where you’re taking us.”

“I thought you were all hot and bothered to leave.” Behind her came the press of his body blocking her escape. There was no way but forward, into the back of the truck. She went slack at the realization. He softened against her.

“I am, but…” she hesitated, “but what about Kayla?”

“What about…huh?”

“My daughter.”

He went silent. She continued. “I should be calling home now, for my ride. She’s used to coming here to pick me up. After work. With my mother.” She could feel his stare, hot on her back. She went on. It mattered to her at that moment to explain herself; to let him know she was more than just a whore for the Desert Rats. That she was a mother. “She doesn’t know what I do. She just knows that mommy leaves before suppertime on the back of a motorcycle and then she gets to come pick me up.” He stood there, unmoving. “Please…”

She softened her body against him. He was a man. A bounty hunter. If she acted this way to Danny, he’d call her a hysterical bitch. But this man, he seemed different. He’d come here to bring Danny to justice. She had to take a chance. She had to trust him now even though she had no idea where he would be taking her. She steeled herself and lowered her voice. “Please. She’s just six. She’s all I have. And I’m all she has. If you can’t take me to her, at least bring her to me, okay?”
She turned around to see him. The look in his eyes was unreadable. Terrible, dark. For a moment she thought he might pick her up and toss her away like so much rubbish. Then, he seemed to consider her words and he shrugged ever so slightly. A tiny bit of hope touched her. She waited for that gravel voice as he cleared his throat.

“No,” he said, then picked her up and shoved her in. The steel bars formed a metal grid separating front from back compartments. On either side came the sharp click of doors locking from the outside. She was his captive now. In the bounty cage. He shrugged out of the sling holding his AK and threw it in the front cab before climbing in and starting the engine.

“Hey, wait.” She pleaded with him.

“You heard me.” He turned and grimaced into the bars. “Darlin’, I’ll say this just once. You stay with me until I get my mark. Until then, no daughter.” Chuckling, he flipped the truck into gear and sped away.