I don’t know what the fuck his deal is; perhaps the geriatric giant has a fuckin’ heart after all. Either way, I can’t be Ivy’s keeper anymore. It’s not doing either one of us any bit of good. Ivy never belonged to me; maybe she did in her mind, but it wasn’t like that for me. And the more I try to show her that, that I’m sick, that I’m fucked in the head and full of this dark desire to hurt people, the deeper she falls. It’s time that changed.
I stare down at the girl in my arms and wonder whether history isn’t just on fuckin’ repeat. Not just with Ivy, but Indie, too. Losing Lauren destroyed me, and yet here I am in the same goddamned situation: protecting another stupid bitch from my club and myself.
“Don’t fucking touch me,” Ivy screams between sobs. “Don’t touch me.”
The sounds of her losing her shit and lashing out at Tank filters in through the open door. He grunts, no doubt warding off each of her blows about as patiently as a bear with a thorn in its foot, and then lets out an almighty roar, “Stop. Fuckin’. Struggling. Bitch!”
The shrieking goes silent, the door beside mine opens, then slams, and the room and the hallway are swallowed by silence. I glance at Prez, who’d been close enough to the door to watch the entire scene. He shakes his head and turns his attention back to me.
“You wanna get her in the shower? I can get one of the girls to clean this shit up.”
“I don’t wanna move her until the Butcher gets here.”
“What the fuck happened, kid?”
“It’s my fault. I drugged her before I left; I thought she’d be out to it for hours. I didn’t put the pills away.”
“You know for someone who’s as determined to die as she is, you’re awfully fixated on keepin’ her breathin’.”
I smile, but it’s full of remorse. Prez steps further into the room and closes the door behind him, taking a seat in the armchair opposite the bed.
“You and I have never really talked about the past.”
“No, we haven’t.”
“You came to the club, and Tank stood for you. He said if it didn’t work out he’d hand over his patch and yours, and we’d never see either of you again.”
“Is this the part where you take my cut and kick me out?”
“No, this is the part where you tell me what you’ve been hiding all this time, and why the hell some bitch you found in a warehouse is suddenly your top priority.” Prez gives an amused laugh. “And then I decide whether or not to take your cut and boot you and this hot mess out on your arses.”
“Let’s just say there was a girl—”
“Isn’t there always?”
“Yeah. Guess so.” I shake my head and lean back against the side of the bed, careful not to disturb Indie, who’s still sleeping peacefully on the rug, surrounded by her vomit. I place my fingers over the pulse in her neck and leave it there, focusing on the slow but steady beat. “It ended badly.”
“Let me guess—with a bullet between her eyes?”
“Somethin’ like that.”
“What club did you belong to?”
“I didn’t—”
Prez holds up a hand and the denial I have always at the ready falls away from my lips. “Don’t fucking bullshit me now, kid. I know an MC brat when I see one, and you had club runnin’ in your veins since you was a boy. I knew it the second I first saw you.”
I stare at my prez, the man I pledged loyalty to, the man I agreed to die for if push came to shove. I meant that pledge when I took it. If I had to take it again today, I’d still mean it. I take a deep, slow inhalation and let my answer rush out with my breath, as if that could somehow lessen the betrayal I’m about to admit to. “Angels. Hells Angels.”
“Sydney chapter?”
I nod.
Prez whistles low, quietly. It forces my head to snap up and glare at him. “Then you know there’s still a pretty price on your head from the other chapters.”
“I know it,” I agree, still uncertain about my next move. In the time that’s passed since I showed up on Tank’s doorstep begging him to kill me, I haven’t told a single living soul that I gunned down my entire club.
He grins. “You’re just full of surprises aren’t ya, kid?”
I shrug.
“You gonna tell me how your whole club wound up dead inside a little farm house in the country? ’Cause I know the Angels and the Banditos have been waging war on one another for several years, but from the look on your face, I’m guessing club rivalry had nothing to do with it.”
“No, it didn’t. But they made a good scape goat.” I don’t bother telling him that I wasn’t the only one to survive. Or that the shit that went down with the Banditos was done and dusted long before I gunned down my club. Word was the cops had tried to cover everything up to save the big bad Bs and the Angels from an all-out war, and I wasn’t about to correct anyone on that front. I’d done enough damage to Ethan and his Ana. And though I knew in my gut that the president of the Savage Saints was a good man—as good a man as any criminal can be—that was a chapter of my life I wanted to remain closed. I’d made my peace with it, and one day, if I ever crossed paths with Ethan again, how that meeting would go would depend on him. If he wanted me dead, I wouldn’t stop him. It was what I deserved. It was my debt to pay for what I had done to them.
“I’ll bet,” Prez says, locking his hands together and cracking his knuckles. “You know how much that pretty head of yours is worth?”
“Nope.”
“Fifty large. Word was that they knew someone had survived, and that the Angels were on their way to that hospital to conduct a little investigation of their own.”
“I thought as much. I checked myself out early and went to Tank, hoping to check out entirely.”
“And he saved your life?”
“Still can’t get a straight answer out of him as to why the hell he’d do something like that.”
“The Angels didn’t take their change of presidency well. Tank knew that. Why do you think he turned nomad? He knew the club was on a different path, and it wasn’t the one he wanted to be on. Way I see it, you did him a favour, and he brought you to me.”
“What are you gonna do, Prez?”
“What else you got to tell me, kid?”
“Nothing.”
He chuckles. “I believe that about as much as I believe that you’re trying to rescue that girl there because of the goodness in your heart.”
I glance down at Indie. I’m covered in her vomit, sitting here, chatting with my prez as though she were my drunken girlfriend who lost her guts before submitting to an alcoholic coma. I don’t know what it is about her that makes me so fiercely protective and yet so completely fucking at a loss when it comes to what to do with her. It would be so easy just to wrap my hands around her slim throat and squeeze, but I don’t want to, and judging by the way Prez is staring at me, he knows this as well as I do.
Prez nods toward Indie. He gives me another of his wry smiles, and I kinda wanna shoot him the nut-sack for being such a cocky fuck, ’cause I’m sure I’m not gonna like what he’s about to say. “That’s a lot to take on, kid.”
“So is a brother who shot down his prior club members.”
“But here we are.”
“You gonna turn me into the Angels? Collect a big wad of cash?”
“You got some issues with trust, huh?” Prez frowns. “Guess I’m not surprised. I knew your old man, and that fucker was meaner than a hornet without a nest.”
“And how do you know who my old man is?”
“Because you look exactly like him. Didn’t think I’d ever figure out who the hell you reminded me of; if I didn’t know you were an Angel—”
“I was never an Angel, but I make a perfect Saint.”
He laughs; this time it’s not the carefully controlled chuckle from before, it’s an all-out belly laugh.
“Yeah, you do,” he says when he recovers. “But if you fuck up like this again, I’m gonna have your balls in a vic
e for all eternity. You got that, Newbie?”
I smile at the use of his nickname for me. “Yeah, I got it.”
“You stay with her until she wakes up, and then you find out what she knows. I need that tape, and then I need those two fuckers taken out.”
“One question. Who gets to be the one delivering the bullet?”
“You do, kid. Get me my tape and they’re all yours.”
He opens the door and walks through it, and I spend the next few minutes wondering what the hell just happened. I just admitted to killing not one, but several of my former club brothers, an offense normally punishable by death, and my prez didn’t even bat an eyelid. Either he has way more faith in me than he should, or he’s dumber than I thought he was. Because if it’s the only means I have of self-preservation, for Indie or myself, then I’ll betray this club too.
The strange part is I’m just prolonging the inevitable. Neither one of us are particularly fond of living, it seems, though it looks like we’re both stuck here for a while longer.
Black.
That’s all I see.
Darkness.
There’s no white light, no pearly gates, no redemption. Just blackness and spinning and shouting, screaming. And then there’s his voice above me, around me, behind me. I turn but can’t escape it. I scream; I cry out and fall to my knees, covering my ears with my hands pressed firmly against the soft cartilage.
There’s a sting in my arm and the world snaps into place like a rubber band from a slingshot.
I’m back in the warehouse. I’m not with the biker at all. I’m back in that warehouse, and the Dentist is pushing the needle through my vein like a hot knife through butter. I struggle. Scream. Fight. And then it’s the biker’s voice in my ear. “Shh, I have you, Little Spitfire.”
“No!” I scream. I sob, but all I feel as I slip back under are his arms banding around me, holding me down. Holding me captive.
“Same shit, different day,” I mutter, but I don’t know if the words come out right or if I just think I said them. I don’t know anything anymore except that I want to die. With every fibre of my being, with everything I am, I know that much is true.
I just want to die, but he won’t let me.
I wake to a cool, dimly lit room, looking much the way it was before he drugged me with the morphine, which makes me wonder if it was all a dream. I guess the fact that it didn’t work makes it a nightmare, now, doesn’t it?
His long body is folded in the chair. I squint into the darkness, expecting to find him asleep but though his face and posture are relaxed, his eyes are not. They study me too keenly. I close my eyes and shift, wincing when my hand sears with pain from the catheter. My eyes fly open and my gaze narrows in on the needle in my hand. Panic seizes my chest. I follow the line of plastic tubing to the IV bag hanging by the bed and instantly I begin trying to free the apparatus from my skin.
“It’s just fluids,” he says, leaning forward in his seat. The blanket falls away from his body, revealing a heavily tattooed naked torso. His arms are decorated with pictures of skulls and mechanical parts; his chest, too. It’s painted with old-school style tats: anchors, pin-up girls … I squint at the image decorating the right side of his abdomen. The lighting is dim, and I could be seeing things on account of the drugs I’ve had coursing through my system, but she looks just like a 1950s, Victoria’s Secret version of me. Weird.
The biker’s blond hair falls over those hard blue eyes. He looks every bit as frightening as he did when he held me underneath the shower yesterday. “Doc says you’re severely dehydrated. Been back twice to change that thing over.”
Twice? How long have I been out? Days? A week?
My tongue and teeth are furry, and despite the residual tang of drugs and vomit in my mouth, my stomach growls. I want a shower. I want to scrub away every trace of their hands on my skin, but then I remember the biker touching me, sliding his calloused fingers against my arse, over my clit. Heat claws at my neck and cheeks, and I see flashes of his beautiful and terrible face twisted into rage as I tried to fight him, the smirk that played on his lips as I aimed his gun at him, the tight band of his arms around me as he cooed in my ear before the doctor knocked me out—all of these things slide through my mind. The sound of my sobs accompanies the memories. It’s a soundtrack I’ve become very familiar with in the last few weeks. That and the piercing sound of my screams.
The Priest was fond of the screaming. I knew it, and so I would clamp my mouth shut against the pain. I tried not to give him the satisfaction of hearing my agony made vocal, but the more I resisted, the more he pushed. The more he punished. The other two liked to watch his sessions as if they were taking notes, learning from his depravity.
“You thought the Dentist was fucked up? Baby, you haven’t seen anything until you’ve lived inside my fantasies for a day.” The biker’s words play on repeat, twisting my gut with fear. Despite the aching in my body, instinct urges me to move, to fight—to run. But what’s the point? He’d trap me at every turn, and I’d wind up a little more bruised and beaten up than I am already. And what would I run to? I can’t outrun the last three weeks of my life and the other two animals that did this to me are still out there. They’ll be watching my family, and they’ll come for me. Maybe not right away, but eventually, and I would rather spend an eternity in purgatory than fall victim to those men again.
“You should have let me die,” I croak. My throat is scratchy as hell; it hurts just sucking in breath. I guess downing a half bottle of pills and throwing them back up again will do that to you. I’m surprised to find my mouth doesn’t feel as bruised, and my body—while certainly stiff from misuse—doesn’t ache as much.
“Why are you so keen to check out?” he whispers. His voice puts my teeth on edge.
“I traded three monsters for one with a prettier face, and a heart blacker than any of the rapists I’ve spent the last couple of weeks with. I didn’t try to kill myself for kicks.”
“What happened to you?”
“What happened to you?” I counter, narrowing my gaze as I study his face.
“You like playing games, darlin’? Is that it?”
“No,” I say quickly. Too quickly. A flash of the scars burned into the Priest’s back jolts through my mind and sears the inside of my lids. I gasp, remembering his thick, greedy hands and the deep baritone that used to ask me repeatedly, “if I like to play games” and “if I liked what I’d become”, “if I enjoyed being a whore”.
My throat tightens, and my body tenses with the memory. “No. I don’t like to play games.”
“What do you remember about the others?” he asks, as he pulls a Subway bag from the coffee table beside him. My stomach growls loudly and I watch on with interest as he unwraps one of the largest subs I’ve ever seen. I can’t remember the last time I ate. Thinking back, it’s possibly been more than five days. They fed me periodically in that room, mostly liquids, protein shakes, to keep up my strength so I wouldn’t pass out while they raped me. Repeatedly. One after the other.
The biker picks up one half of the sub and opens his mouth wide, I’m reminded of a snake unhinging its jaw in order to devour its prey. He catches me staring and lowers the sandwich. “You hungry?”
I nod slowly, wary of asking him for anything, but the sandwich smells so good and let’s be honest here, right now I’d likely sell my grandmother’s corpse to a necrophiliac for a single bite of food.
“Tell me what you know and I’ll let you have the entire thing.”
“Forget it,” I croak. I’m not giving him shit until I know for certain he isn’t just keeping me alive to get that tape back. Even if that is the best smelling sandwich on the planet.
He shrugs. “Suit yourself.”
The bastard eats the fucking sandwich. My stomach protests the misuse and I’m forced to watch as he devours every last bite and then licks his long, tattooed fingers clean. I glower at him, searing him with my hatred, though like the others, he
remains unaffected. I hate feeling this way. Like a poor, little misguided mouse, staring down a mountain lion. I hate that these arseholes have taken the control, my strength, my will to fight—my right to choose—from me.
He opens a small paper bag and produces a cookie. I can smell that too from here, and there’s some half-witted response dancing on the tip of my tongue about how hogging the cookies to yourself is a form of torture worse than any other, but then I remember the Dentist’s chair. The sheer delight on the Dentist’s face when he’d pry my mouth open and rip out my teeth, losing himself in the small part of me he’d just extracted. And the Priest’s face, hovering over me. His sweat-soaked hair brushing my forehead as he pounded into my body again and again, brutalising me. The horrifying grin as he chained me to the St. Andrew’s Cross, stroking his cock through the thick fabric of his pants as he schooled the others in how to whip me properly.
And though certainly not innocent, at least the Cop doled out a form of punishment and cruelty that was easy to understand. He liked to pretend I was a bad girl who needed to be chastised and taught a lesson by the big man of the law. He was sick, just as sick as the others, but the depravity of the Priest was the thing that frightened me the most. Every day there was a new fresh hell that awaited me, and each day the punishment was so much worse than the day before.
The biker, though scary as all fucking hell, didn’t really compare to those men. Maybe it was the fact that he’d saved me, not once but several times, or maybe I’d just lost my ever loving mind, but whatever the case, I knew I was damn well better off with him than in the hands of those animals. Even if he had warned me he was worse, there’s no way he could know that, because he’d never met the Priest.
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