Page 2 of Contracted to the Bikers

My eyes flick automatically around the parking lot. There’s a minivan, a pickup truck, and a silver sedan. Nothing unusual. Still—

Jessy is taking longer than usual. My stomach tightens. I take a few steps closer toward the school, deciding to look for her. That’s when I hear it. So quiet it’s almost imperceptible, I would have missed it if I wasn’t on high alert all the time—the sound of a faint metallic click. At first, I think that it’s just a car cooling in the sun, but then the sound changes into a sharp electronic chirp.

My brain registers it a half-second before my instincts and training take over.

“Bomb. Get down!” I yell, praying no one is close enough to the blast.

The explosion tears the world apart. Light detonates in front of me, white, blinding, and violent. Heat slams into my face like a furnace door thrown open. The sound isn’t a bang so much as a ripping roar that swallows everything. The force throws me backward. Gravel tears at my skin as I hit the ground hard enough to knock the air from my lungs. For a moment, there’s nothing but ringing, a high, shrill scream inside my skull.

The world spins through smoke and fire. My car is a twisted, burning skeleton of metal. Flames claw upward around its husk, black smoke pouring into the sky. Someone is screaming. It takes me a second to realize it’s me.

“Jessy!”

I scramble up, my legs are shaking, my lungs burning from the smoke. Parents are shouting, children are crying, and teachers are herding the remaining kids back inside the building with the practiced terror of teachers who have been prepared for the worst but never thought it would happen. Not here, not to them. The sounds of shouts overlap each other as people process what’s just happened.

“Call 911!”

“Oh my God—”

“Stay back!”

“Are you alright, Miss?”

My ears are still ringing, but one thought cuts through the chaos like a blade. Jessy. Where is my daughter? I pray she’s still inside where it’s safe. I realize with a sickening shudder that Jessy was supposed to be in that car. If it hadn’t been for her stupid plushie, we’d have been in it driving home…

My heart slams against my ribs so hard it hurts. I run toward the school doors. “Jessy!” I shout. “Jessy!”

A teacher bursts out of the front entrance just as I reach it. I let out a cry of anguished relief when I see the small figure with a green dinosaur clutched to her chest behind her.

“Mommy!” Jessy launches herself into my arms.

I drop to my knees and squeeze her so tightly she squeaks. “You’re okay,” I whisper into her hair, my whole body shaking. “You’re okay, you’re okay—” I repeat the words like a mantra, trying to convince myself more than her.

She pulls back just enough to look at me. “Mommy, the car exploded.”

“I know.”

Sirens wail in the distance now. The smell of burning metal and gasoline fills the air. I look over Jessy’s head toward the flaming wreckage of what used to be my car. Thirty seconds, that’s all it took, all it would have taken for us to be inside when the bomb went off. If she hadn’t forgotten her toy—

The thought makes my stomach twist. I know with complete certainty that my car wasn’t picked at random, this wasn’t an accident. The police will have to believe me now, I think bitterly, angry at myself for not pushing more, for dismissing my instincts that something was wrong, that they were preparing to retaliate.

I press Jessy against my chest, feeling her small heartbeat against mine. I thought I was fighting injustice as a lawyer. I was just doing my job when I took down Valentin Escar, but now the war I thought ended in that courtroom just followed me to my daughter’s school.

The war is far from over, and this time, it’s personal.

Chapter 2

Sloane

It’s been three days since the explosion, and I swear I can still smell the smoke lingering in my hair. Jessy has been out of school since then. I can’t face the thought of sending her back, not yet. The day after the attack, she was so scared that she pretended she was too sick to go to school. I gladly bought the lie, spoiling her with love and treats. She’ll have to go back soon, I can’t put it off forever, but right now it’s not safe.

The police did take it seriously and we’ve been assigned two US marshals for protection. Having them around makes me feel a little safer, but it’s like our lives have been put on hold.

To take my mind off of everything, I’ve buried myself in research. Legal documents are spread across the coffee table in neat stacks—federal statutes, Department of Justice reports, case studies, and information on the Witness Security Program. WITSEC, the federal government’s polite term for disappearing people and their tidy little solution to my current predicament. They want us to disappear and start a new life, to pretend this never happened, we were never these people, to give up everything and run away. They want us to hide.

I scroll through another page of statistics. I can feel a headache emerging, a throbbing at my temple.

Across the room, Jessy sits cross-legged on the rug surrounded by plastic dinosaurs. A Stegosaurus and a Triceratops are locked in a dramatic argument as she crashes them together. “Actually,” she informs them, “you both eat plants not other animals.”