by Callie Hart
“So that’s it? You just wanted someone to come fuck you? I’m sure any of the boys would have obliged you if only you’d have told them.”
I react without thinking. I’m lunging at him, my hand flying out to strike him across the face before I can stop myself. My palm makes contact with his cheek, a loud cracking sound filling the room. “Don’t you fucking dare,” I grind out. “Don’t you dare do that. You fucking buy me like I’m nothing but a lump of meat, like I’m goddamn property, and then you make me care about you. You make me think you care about me. You trick me, make me look like an absolute idiot, and then you try and make me out to be some sort of slut, too. Don’t you fucking dare.”
My whole body is vibrating with anger. I’ve heard the saying ‘seeing red’ before and I’ve thought nothing of it, but now I know it’s actually a very literal term—it’s almost as though I’m seeing him through a red haze.
Rebel runs his tongue over his teeth, slowly lifting his hand to touch his fingers to the red welt on his face where I struck him. He speaks carefully, very slowly. “Sophia, please know, you’re just about the only person on the face of the planet who could get away with that right now.”
“Yeah? Well, if you don’t get the hell away from me, I’m gonna do it again, asshole,” I spit.
“I went out with the intention of killing a man tonight. You think I’ll have any moral objection to tying up a misbehaving woman?”
I lean forward even further so that our faces are no less than an inch apart. “Try me.”
Rebel’s calm, overly controlled behavior should have clued me into the fact that he’s been on the verge of snapping this whole time. He rockets forward, hands grabbing me by the tops of my arms, pinning me to the sofa. “You really don’t want to do this with me, Soph,” he breathes.
I do, though. I want to gouge his eyes out. I want to smash my fist into his face so hard that he loses teeth. I want to break his bones and watch him bleed. I think maybe he expected me to back down as soon as he grabbed hold of me, but I don’t. I twist underneath him, slamming my knee into his side. He doubles over, huffing out a deep, pained breath. Wrenching my arms out of his grasp, I slip out from underneath him and drive my clenched fist into his side as hard as I possibly can. Rebel grits his teeth, snarling between them, jumping to his feet.
“You’re fucking crazy!”
“I guess that’s what happens to a person when you lock them away for ten days on their own, and then show up accusing them of being a whore.”
“I didn’t accuse you of being a whore.”
“You may as well have done. You think just because I slept with you, I’d want to sleep with any of your gross, Neanderthal groupies? I’m not some club hooker to be passed around like a damn party favor!”
He comes at me again, reaching for me, and that’s when I notice the blood on his hands. My mind instantly rewinds to what he just said about setting out to kill someone tonight, and I reel back. Oh my god. No, he couldn’t have. Did…did he actually do it? Rebel sees my anger change to horror and swiftly stops in his tracks.
“What?”
“Your hands, Rebel. What the fuck is all over your hands?”
He looks down at them, a small frown creasing his forehead, eyebrows banking together. The expression he’s wearing screams innocent confusion, however the wet blood on his hands screams something else entirely. His face is ashen.
“I don’t…”
I scream when he staggers sideways and crashes into the couch, dropping to one knee. “What the hell? Rebel? Rebel!” He looks like he’s on death door. “Oh, god, please…what’s wrong?” I touch his side, the side I rammed with my knee, my hand comes away covered in blood. His t-shirt is drenched with it. I didn’t notice before since the material is black, but now that I’m looking closer I can see the dark, wet stain spreading across his stomach.
“Is this…is this you?”
Rebel nods, holding one hand to his side. “Go and get Cade.”
“What happened?”
“Go and get Cade, Soph.”
“Rebel!”
“Jesus, I was stabbed earlier. You just kneed me right on top of the wound. Now, please, fuck…go and get Cade.”
I’m not going anywhere. I drop to my knees beside him, tearing at his shirt. “Show me. Show me for god’s sake.” The bastard deserves to be in pain after everything he’s put me through since we returned to New Mexico, but now that he’s potentially bleeding out on the floor of his cabin, I’m suddenly not so sure that I want him to die.
He tries to pull shirt back down, but ironically I’m stronger than him right now. A jolt of surprise hits me when I see what’s underneath—a seven-inch long gash runs down his ribcage, onto his stomach. And it’s seriously deep. “Are you insane? Why the hell didn’t you go straight to the hospital?” Yelling at him probably isn’t the most constructive thing I could be doing, but it’s about all I can think of. Rebel grimaces, slumping back so that he’s sitting on his ass on the floor.
“It wasn’t bleeding that much before you belted me,” he says. Unbelievably, he winks at me, like he finds that highly amusing.
“Shit. I’m sorry. I am so sorry. God, I need to find a towel.” I start pacing, tearing through drawers and cupboards, searching but not finding what I’m looking for.
“It’s okay, it’s all right. I don’t need a towel. Soph. Sophia!”
I stop pacing.
“Go and get Cade, okay? He’ll be up in the bar, in the biggest building. Go and get him and tell him to bring a suture kit.” Rebel reaches up and hands me a key, and it takes me a second to understand what it’s for: the door to the cabin. The door to my freedom. I take it from him.
There’s an actual pool of blood spreading out around him on the floorboards now, growing bigger by the second. I did that to him. Well, I didn’t do it to him, but I sure as hell made it worse. Fuck. I run to the door and unlock it, my hands shaking like crazy., and then I’m running some more, running to the left toward a building I’ve only ever seen from a distance as I’ve been brought to and from the cabin. Tall, dead grass whips at my bare legs as I barrel head on down the steep hill that leads to the rest of the compound. The night air feels cool in my lungs, pulling at my clothes as I sprint for help.
It occurs to me that I could veer to the right, towards the banks of motorcycles and cars parked off the side. I have no idea how to hot wire a car but I could give it a damn good go. A part of my brain is screaming at me to do it, to let Rebel bleed out on the floor, steal a car and head for the closest police station, but I can’t. I just can’t make myself do it. Rebel was a major asshole when he came back to the cabin just now, but I saw something in him in Alabama. Something that made me drop my defences and trust him. I can’t just let him die.
When I slam though the doors of the main building, I see it must be the Widow Makers’ clubhouse. Inside, at least fifteen people stop their conversations, glasses and beer bottles held halfway to their mouths, and they all turn to stare at me. A tall woman, maybe in her late forties cocks her head to one side and blinks like she can’t believe what she’s seeing. Cade’s on the other side of the room, paused mid-hand shake with another, shorter guy with neck tattoos. His eyes nearly pop out of his head when he sees me.
“What in Sam Hell?” Cade drops his friend’s hand and storms across the clubhouse bar, murder in his eyes. “You trying to get yourself killed?” he hisses, grabbing hold of my arm. I’ve had enough of people manhandling me for one day. Ripping my arm free, I step back, ready to knee him somewhere a little more intimate if I have to.
“Rebel needs you. He said for you to bring a suture kit,” I tell him. If I were my sister, I could have sewn Rebel up myself. I’m not though, so this is the best I can do. I shove Cade in the chest, trying to transfer some sense of urgency to him. “He’s bleeding everywhere,” I snap. “When he sent me to fetch you, I don’t think he had a huge amount of time for you to decide if you were gonna come or not.”
Cade scrubs his hand with his face, rolling his eyes. “Jesus, I told him he should go see the doc.” He ducks quickly behind the bar, where an overweight guy in an ACDC t-shirt is staring at me with eyes like saucers. It takes me a moment to realize why: I’m half freaking naked. It may be winter, but you wouldn’t know it by the temperature in New Mexico. I’ve been sweltering in Rebel’s airless, AC-less cabin. Shorts and tank tops have been my recent staple.
The fact that my shirt is covered in blood really isn’t helping matters, either. I try to shrink inside my own skin as Cade grabs a small green case from somewhere underneath the counter, and then he’s vaulting over it and leading me out of the bar. I glance over my shoulder just in time to catch the hateful look being sent my way by a beautiful pink haired woman with tattoos. Her eyes narrow at me, and then she’s gone as I’m dragged out of the clubhouse and across the compound in the direction of the cabin.
“Is he conscious?” Cade asks.
“Was when I left him,” I pant. “There was blood on the floor, though. A lot of blood.”
Cade just grunts. He lets me go and takes off without a backward glance to make sure I’m following. Again, I’m presented with the opportunity to escape. Rebel is about to get help. Cade will either stitch him up or take him to get further medical attention. My usefulness in this situation is at an end. I should be ducking into the shadows and vanishing, even if I can’t get one of the cars to work and I have to walk to the next town.
I take a deep breath, watching Cade growing smaller and smaller as he runs up the hill to Rebel’s place, and then I’m looking over my shoulder, out over the endless, scrubby desert between me and civilization…and I’m shaking my head.
I could die out there. That’s not what stops me from running, though. It’s the fact that Rebel could die right here, right now and I would never know it.
My head is swimming as I run up the hill behind Cade. I’ve lost my mind. I must be completely insane to be doing this. My father’s face flashes through my head as I summit the hill, running directly back into the place I’ve been desperate to escape from the past ten days. In my head, for some weird reason, my father is smiling.
THREE
REBEL
I can’t remember the last time I threw up. Certainly not for any reason other than being blind fucking drunk, anyway. I mean, yes, I suppose I do feel really drunk, but that’s because I’m losing copious amounts of blood and I can’t seem to stem the flow. I’m retching, head spinning, vision blurred when I see a dark shape coming toward me. Coming toward me fast.
“Fuck me, man, what the hell?” It’s Cade. His voice reaches me, though it sounds muffled, like I’ve got cotton wool stuffed inside my ears. “Well, aren’t you in a state.”
I weakly lift my right hand from the ground and flip him off. Cade laughs. “See why you sent for me now, jackass,” he says. “Guy gives you a couple of pints of blood in a foreign country and the next thing you know it’s five years later an’ he wants the damn stuff back. Indian giver.” He laughs under his breath, and my brain works sluggishly, trying to decipher what he’s talking about .
Ah, yeah. That’s right. Afghanistan. We were in Afghanistan and he was shot. He’d lost a lot of blood. I gave him some of mine. The doctors performed a transfusion because we were the same blood type, and Cade was my brother and I wouldn’t just sit by and watch him die while we waited around for the bagged stuff to arrive.
I’ve been fighting to stay upright, to stay awake, but now that he’s here, I feel like I can stop fighting so hard. The bastard won’t let me die, I know it. I fall back, my head bouncing off the floor, and then Cade’s hands are on my torso, spinning me over slowly so that I’m on my side.
Pain washes through me, like I’m being stabbed all over again. It’s weird, though, the ghost of what pain should really feel like. Everything’s going numb. That’s how it starts…dying. Your nerve endings start playing tricks on you, cutting your brain off from your limbs or making you think you’re really cold. At this particular point in time, I feel like I’m half frozen.
“Better…hurry your…ass up,” I stutter. It’s shock. I know it is. My whole body is starting to shake.
Another voice speaks, catching at my focus for a second. Sophia. My hands involuntarily twitch, my fingers curling inwards, as though reaching for the idea of her. “What…what should I do?” she asks.
I can’t see her, but I can sense her close. “Hold this,” Cade tells her. I can’t see what he hands her. She’s standing behind me, breathing quickly, like she’s hyperventilating. Pain bites through me, a sudden, sharp reminder of how shitty it is when your nerve endings actually decide to work in situations like this. Carefully, slowly, I look down, struggling to focus my eyes on what’s happening to my chest. Cade is quickly, efficiently stitching me back together, my skin tugging and pulling as he forcefully shoves the needle in and out of my skin.
“Any…internal…?” I manage.
“No. No, your insides are just fine, you lucky son of a bitch, now hold still.”
I hold still, grinding my teeth together as I’m put back together. I manage to stay awake until the very final stitch is tied off, and then I pass the fuck out.
I could be out for hours, but I get the feeling it’s more like fifteen minutes. When I regain consciousness, Cade is standing over me, glaring grimly at me while he wipes his hands on one of my bathroom towels, and Sophia is sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing next to nothing. If I had any blood left in my body, I’m sure it would be headed straight for my dick right now. As it goes, I roll over slowly and throw up over the side of the bed.
“Nice,” Cade observes. “Real fucking nice.”
“Fuck you, man.” It sounds like I’ve been eating gravel. My head is splitting apart. I fall back onto the pillows, my stomach rolling again, making empty threats. There can’t be anything left inside me to bring back up by now. Sophia grimaces at the mess I’ve made; she gets to her feet and heads for the kitchen bench, rifling under the counters, presumably looking for cleaning products.
“Don’t. You don’t have to do that,” I say, wincing.
Cade lifts an eyebrow, shaking his head. “Sure she does, man. I’m gonna sit here and let you steal half my plasma. I ain’t gonna clean up your puke, too.”
“Then deal with it,” I growl. “She shouldn’t have to—”
“I don’t mind. I don’t want to sit here looking at it, either.” Soph drops to her knees and starts mopping up my vomit, which makes me feel about three fucking inches tall. While she’s doing that, Cade sets up for the blood transfusion. He must have gone back to the clubhouse and grabbed the tourniquets, lines and needles while I was briefly out for the count.
I lay on my back with my arm thrown up over my eyes while Cade efficiently hooks us up and begins the process. It’s such a strange feeling, having blood traveling into your body instead of out. I can hear Sophia throwing things into the trash. Can smell the disinfectant she’s scrubbing into the floorboards as Cade makes underhanded comments about how fucking stupid I am.
“And by the way,” he tells me. “I smoked a bunch of weed as soon as I walked through the door earlier. Don’t know if that shit affects your blood, but I sure hope it fucking does. It’ll serve you right if you get insanely high and pass out again. You’ve totally ruined my buzz.”
I consider trying to punch him, but just thinking of the effort that would involve exhausts me. I decide on a different tack. “Thanks, man.
“Don’t mention it.”
I lay there, thinking about the ridiculous shit I said to Soph before she went postal and tried to murder me. I should have kept my mouth shut. I’ve been completely thrown since we got back here, though. Ten days I stayed away, because me being around her is a bad idea. Actually, no. Before, back when Ramirez didn’t know exactly who I was and where my fucking family lived, it was a bad idea. Now he does know and he’s shown up on my front door step, it’s a fucking catastrophi
c idea. We should never have gotten involved the way we did back in Alabama. I should never have gone after her like that. What a fucking moronic thing to do.
Thirty minutes pass. I spend the entire time mentally kicking my own ass. Eventually, Cade removes the needle from the crook of my arm. “All right. We’re done. Here, take this,” Cade tells me. I lower my arm, eyeing the four white tablets in the palm of his hand with suspicion.
“What is it?”
“Azithromycin.”
“Where did you get it?”
“Carnie had the clap last month. Said it knocked it right on the head.” Cade grins as he says this, the motherfucker.
“Fantastic. Now I’m taking medication from Carnie’s dick infections.”
“I’ve given you some pretty sweet codeine in there too,” Cade informs me. You’re gonna feel really good in about twenty minutes.”
I take the pills because I don’t really feel like heading down to the local doctor’s surgery and getting my own prescription of antibiotics. At this stage, I couldn’t manage that anyway, even if I really did feel like answering the probing questions that come with a stab wound consultation.
Cade slips out of the cabin, leaving me on my back, staring up the ceiling, wondering what the hell I’m supposed to say to the quiet girl hovering in the corner of the room.
I’m such a complete and utter asshole. I shouldn’t have even come storming back up the hill to the cabin when we got back from Ramirez’s farmhouse. I should have just kept my cool and stayed on track. Stayed the fuck away. But, oh no, I had to be in a shitty mood. I had to fucking see her.
“Does it hurt?” Sophia’s voice is soft, and yet it feels like a slap to the face. One I deserve, and then some. When I open my eyes, she’s sitting on the floor a few feet away from the bed, like she’s afraid I’m about to jump up and backhand her. Seeing the panic in her eyes makes me feel physically sick all over again.
“Not really,” I lie. “Could be worse.” Yeah, I could be fucking dead.