by Claire Adams
He rose to the bait. “Excuse me?” he asked. “What is fucking typical?”
I shrugged. “Nothing… it’s just you’re supposed to be this big scary gang leader, and you can’t even torture a defenseless woman without having back up.”
“I don’t need back up,” he snapped.
“Right,” I replied sarcastically. “Hence the entourage.”
“I told you… I like an audience.”
“Is that really it?” I asked. “Or do you just want to humiliate me?”
“Both,” Walter nodded, taking the second bit of bait.
“Of course you do,” I nodded. “Silly of me to ask. I’ll bet it’s stuff like this is that makes you feel like a man, huh? I’m sure your men will be so impressed.”
Walter’s eyes narrowed, and I knew what was coming next. He snapped his head up. “You lot can do whatever. I’m going alone.”
The men exchanged anxious glances, but I noticed a few of them looked relieved. They dispersed almost immediately, and Walter opened the passenger side door of the car in front of us and pushed me inside roughly. Then he got behind the wheel, and we left the house, heading away from town. We drove in silence for almost ten minutes, and during that time, I could only seem to think about all the ways Walter was going to try and make me scream.
I wondered if he could hear my heartbeat, and I decided that he couldn’t; that was just the fear talking.
“So… what was it like living in a house full of men?” Walter asked, breaking the long silence. “Did they pass you around? Did they leave a tip after they were done fucking you?”
“Not all men are animals, Walter,” I replied calmly. “Not all men are like you.”
“Yes, they are,” Walter disagreed. “All men are just different versions of me.”
I turned my attention to the window and refused to look at him, but Walter was not done talking. He was going to insist on making this car ride as awful as possible.
“Did he fuck you?”
I ignored him the first time, but he repeated himself again. When I ignored him the second time, his hand shot out like lightened and made contact with the side of my face. It wasn’t as hard as the first punch I’d received when I’d lost consciousness in the van, but the force of it made me slam into the window, and I saw stars for a second before my vision cleared again.
“When I ask you a question,” Walter said with exaggerated calm. “I expect a fucking answer; do you understand me?”
I pushed back the tears and nodded. “Yes,” I said, in a small voice.
“Good,” Walter nodded, and he sounded satisfied that he’d managed to get his point across. “Now let’s try that again: did he fuck you?”
“Who?” I asked, pretending as though I didn’t know.
“Zack,” Walter replied, and his tone dripped with hatred.
I thought about simply denying it, but a part of me… the newly rebellious part of me that had emerged in the last few months wanted to piss him off. And the only way to do that was to be truthful.
“Yes, he fucked me,” I replied. “And I enjoyed it.”
I saw Walter’s jaw clench dangerously, but the satisfaction I felt was completely worth it.
“Of course you did,” Walter said, but I noticed his tone shook when he spoke. “Because you’re a dirty little slut.”
“I’ll be anything he wants me to be,” I replied calmly.
“You fucked him… and not me?” Walter asked, unable to keep away from that question.
“He’s a real man,” I said. “And you’re just a sorry excuse for one.”
There was a split second of total silence, and I thought he was going to punch me again. “You’re going to regret saying that to me,” he said a moment later.
I had no doubt, but for right now I clung to the belief that perhaps I had a chance to escape this psychopath… especially now that I’d managed to manipulate him into leaving his men behind. I had no doubt that Walter underestimated me. He would find it almost laughable to think that I’d be able to defend myself now.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked, feeling the suddenly strong urge to ask the question.
“Because… it makes life interesting,” Walter replied.
“You must know that this will just start a war with the Angels.”
“Oh, I’m counting on it.”
“Why?”
“Because once Godwin is dead, I’ll be the leader of the Lucifer’s Knights,” Walter explained. “And I want complete control. I won’t stand for a rival MC gang roaming my town.”
“Your town?” I repeated incredulously. “This is not your town.”
“Not just yet,” Walter nodded. “But watch me take it.”
He turned down a lonely country road that narrowed the further down we drove, and then he stopped the car in the middle of a tiny clearing surrounded by trees.
“Get down,” he ordered me.
I got down, but I didn’t bother trying to run. He was taller and stronger than me, and I knew he could outrun me easily. If I ran, that would only give him the satisfaction of catching me, and I wasn’t going to play the coward this time. I wasn’t going to allow myself to become the victim. I was going to take control and fight to free myself. I had been taught well. I had been taught for this very specific purpose, and I wasn’t about to throw all that hard work down the drain.
We stood, staring at each other in front of the car. Walter still had that sinister smile playing across his face.
“What are you going to do to me?” I asked.
“First… I’m going to take what you refused to give me.”
I frowned. “And what is that?”
“Your body,” Walter replied.
I went cold as I realized what he was going to do. He was going to rape me out here in the middle of nowhere. That was probably just act one on his twisted agenda.
I shook my head at him. “What is the point of this?” I asked. “Why force yourself on me?”
“Because it’s time you learned who I am,” Walter said, licking his lips and taking a step towards me. “It’s time you learned respect and obedience. It’s time you learned who you really belong to.”
“You really are insane,” I said, looking at him with pity in my eyes.
“You really should think twice about what you say to me, bitch.”
I thought about all the times I had trained with Zack and all the things he had taught me. This was what I had been working towards. This was the moment I proved to myself that I wasn’t the helpless victim that ended up as another headline in the morning papers. I was going to wipe that ugly smile off this fucker’s face.
“You’ve got it wrong, Walter,” I said, standing my ground. “The only bitch here that I can see is you.”
I uttered a silent prayer for strength, and then… I charged at him.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Zack
My phone was vibrating again. I had ignored it the first three times, but this time I picked up. “What?” I demanded.
“Have you found her yet?”
“If I had fucking found her,” I said, unsure whom I was even talking to, “I would have fucking called.”
“He hasn’t found her yet,” he told the others, and I recognized the voice as Red’s.
“Who is with you?” I asked.
“Devon, Lonny, Bones, and Justin,” Red replied. “The others stayed behind to sort out shit with the cops.”
“The cops,” I groaned.
I had completely forgotten about that part of the equation. A part of me almost regretted getting them involved in the first place. Now if we managed to settle this situation, we wouldn’t just be able to slink back to our lives. They would insist on dragging everything out into the open again. Cops took ages to get anything fucking done. And even when things were done, they never knew when it was over.
“Austin is fielding questions from the sheriff,” Red explained. “He wasn’t too happy though. He
wanted to talk to you.”
I had several more questions, but I was on high alert, and Red was just breaking my concentration. I didn’t care what the cops wanted or what they were doing. I just wanted to find Mila. The area was larger than I had expected. There were trees everywhere, and even though there were tiny roads I could ride through, I knew it would take a while to scour the place.
“Where are you guys?”
“Driving towards you,” Red replied. “We should be there in ten minutes—fifteen minutes tops.”
“Don’t try and find me,” I told him. “Just spread out and start looking for Mila.”
“Got it.”
I hung up and parked my bike next to a random tree. I didn’t want the sound of my motorcycle alerting Ghost to my presence. I ran around the area, trying to figure out where Ghost might take her. It had to be further in, away from the main road so that passersby wouldn’t hear anything suspicious. I moved further in following a line of trees.
The whole time I searched for her, my mind was going crazy with worry. I had never experienced this kind of thing before. I had lost my mother to illness and my father in a fight, but I had still never experienced emotions quite like this. It felt like someone had crashed a truck into me and now the truck was on top of me, and I couldn’t quite breathe, but I was still clinging on to life anyhow.
The worst thing about all this was that I had promised Mila I would keep her safe. I had brought her to my home because I had been so confident that cocooned within our walls, no one would be able to get to her. I had been overly confident, and I had been cocky. I had assumed we were dealing with Godwin and I had calculated accordingly.
Godwin may have been power hungry and greedy in his day before his illness seemed to have robbed him of those ambitions, but he was smart. He was not the type of man to initiate a war he had little chance of winning. He had miscalculated once before, and he had lost a son for it. He had become overly cautious since then, and I should have known at that point that he wasn’t involved in this plot.
But I had been so dead set on my own revenge that I had read the situation to my advantage. I had been looking for a fight in all the wrong places, and those mistakes had finally caught up with me now…at Mila’s expense. I had allowed this to happen. I was the reason that Ghost had been able to send his men in after her. I had not prepared for his boldness and his recklessness. I had predicted the situation that best suited me.
I realized how blinded I had been from the very beginning. I realized how foolish and immature I had been. I had been elected leader of the Fallen Angels, but I had fallen short of the mantel. And now Mila was gone, in the hands of a madman with no sense of fear.
I came upon a fork that veered off into two different roads. One was extremely narrow, and the other one was broader. I realized there were tire tracks on the broader road and immediately I started running down the road, following the tracks. He had brought her here in a car. I listened intently as I ran, but I wasn’t sure I would hear anything.
It had been five hours since Ghost and Mila had left that morning. A lot could have happened in that time. I came to a little clearing, and I froze in place. The car had definitely been through here, but there was no sign of it anymore. The car was gone, and that meant Ghost was gone too. I walked in a little further, and I noticed blood dotting the sand and dirt underneath my feet.
My body went cold, and a feeling of dread overtook me. It had been five hours. Mila’s body had probably been cold for four. No, I told myself sternly. I wasn’t going to go there. Until I saw a body, I wasn’t going to let myself think that. She wasn’t dead… this could not be how it ended.
I felt rage thrash around inside me, and if I had happened across Walter Black or any of his henchman now, I knew that I would have murdered them all with my bare hands. As it stood, all I could do was follow the trail of blood. The ground was too hard to reveal any prints, but the blood helped to an extent. I followed the trail to a rock several feet into the trees, and I realized that Mila had stopped here for a few seconds at least to catch her breath before trying to flee from Ghost.
There was dried blood on the rock and a few dots of blood leading away from it. I tried to follow the trail again, but it dried up soon after, and I was left staring at trees with no idea which direction to head to next.
“Fuck,” I cursed furiously. “Fuck me.”
I picked up my phone and called the sheriff in desperation. “Sheriff?”
“Mr. Robinson!” he sounded angry. “I thought I told you not to do anything stupid.”
“I haven’t.”
“You are not law enforcement,” Sheriff replied hotly. “You do not have the right to conduct searches or set your men on anyone else.”
I frowned. “Who did I set my men on?”
“A Bryan Donavan,” the sheriff replied. “I believe he once belonged to the Lucifer’s Knights. He claims not to be a part of the gang anymore.”
So apparently Red and the others had turned him over to the cops now… I wondered if they’d done so willingly. I didn’t care either way, but I did hope the cops had gotten something out of him. As though in answer to my question, I heard police sirens in the distance, and I paused.
“You’re here?”
“Where’s that?”
“Gordon’s Run.”
“My men should be there by now.”
“Fuck,” I said. “Took you long enough.”
“Mr. Robinson, you need to leave this up to us now,” he said. “After all, you are the one that asked us to get involved.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m leaving everything up to you,” I said. “He’s had Mila out here for five hours now. Anything could have happened.”
“We have his license plate number,” the sheriff told me. “Bryan Donovan was very chatty once he knew that his co-operation would help reduce his time.”
“Have your men fan out and search for her, then—”
“Mr. Robinson,” the sheriff interrupted me again. “This is not up to you anymore. Go home and wait for me to get back to you. If we find your girlfriend, I will inform you immediately.”
He had said ‘if,’ and I didn’t know what to do with that. I knew that I needed to prepare mentally for the possibility that even if we did find Mila, she would be nothing more than a broken body. But I cringed away from that possibility because it made me want to send a bullet through my brain.
I hung up rudely and put my phone away. The cops were here now… my men were probably here now too. Someone would find her, wouldn’t they? I kept walking in a straight line, searching for clues, anything that might help me find her. There were areas that looked disturbed somehow, as though someone large had passed through, but it could have been anyone.
I couldn’t see blood anymore, and I hoped that meant that Mila wasn’t hurt too badly. Maybe she had managed to escape him and hide somewhere. I recalled all the training she had been through in the last several months, and I prayed that it had been enough to make a difference. Still, I knew that fear could cripple you, no matter how prepared you thought you were.
I stumbled into another little clearing where the trees had grown far apart, allowing patches of sunlight to filter in and leave large spotlights on the ground in front of me. I turned and noticed blood by some rocks in the corner, and I knew instinctively that I was getting close. I stepped through the trees where it was cooler and darker and walked through until I heard a noise that made me freeze in place. My instincts were on high alert, and I sensed that I was not alone. Someone was here too, and I balled my hands into fists and prepared myself for a fight.
If Ghost were stupid enough to show his face to me now, I would end him before the cops showed up. I heard the noise again, and I turned. There was definitely someone moving behind the trees. I tried to walk silently, but the crunch of leaves underneath my boots gave me away. Then, I saw a beautiful auburn color that was almost red, and I felt hope blossom inside me instantly.
“Mila?”
There was silence for a second, and then suddenly she emerged, like an angel out of a dream. All I saw were her eyes and her perfect face, and then I saw the rest. Her clothes were partly ripped, she was bruised and bloodied, and she seemed to be leaning against the tree for support. I looked down and saw that her right leg looked broken.
I rushed to her and grabbed her before she fell. I held her as she buried her face in my chest and started sobbing uncontrollably, devastating sobs that were a mixture of pain and relief. She didn’t say anything, and I didn’t either. I just let her sob until silence flooded around us again and Mila was still against my body.
“Mila,” I whispered her name.
“Zack,” she said, and her voice trembled when she spoke. “Is it really you?”
“Of course it’s me,” I assured her. “I’m here… I’m so sorry Mila—”
“I thought I was going to die… I almost—”
She trailed off, and I felt her grip me a little harder.
“You don’t have to worry,” I told her. “The cops are here too… they’ll find the bastard.”
Mila looked up at me. “He’s gone, Zack,” she said shakily.
“Don’t worry,” I assured her. “They have his license plate number… they’ll track him down.”
“No,” Mila said, shaking her head.
I frowned.
“No,” Mila said again. “He’s gone… he’s… he’s dead.”
“Dead?” I repeated.
Mila nodded. “I think I killed him.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Mila
Music helped a lot. I just lay on my bed in my room and listened to different kinds of music. If the music was loud enough, it drowned out my thoughts to an extent, but it didn’t help the memories from flooding me every now and then.
It was strange how memory worked in the first place. Some things came back in spotty recollections that seemed aged somehow. And other moments were so vividly detailed that it amazed me how much I’d managed to retain in such tensely frightening moments.