“Don't do this, Repo,” I warned, in no mood for his brotherhood shit. I knew the club meant fucking everything to him, but he was overstepping a line.
“Don't put personal shit over your loyalties.”
“Like Reign did?” I exploded, shoving him back.
“Different situation and you know it,” he countered.
“Same fucking thing, man. And I don't have the time to fucking fill you in. So back the fuck off and let me handle my shit.”
“Cash, man...” he said, clearly taking a step back, but not wanting to let it drop.
“Back,” I said, emphasizing with a shove, “off.” With that... I stormed back up the stairs and took off toward my bike.
My phone buzzed in my pocket and I picked it up. “Malc?”
“Got an address. We're on our way but you're closer.”
“Give it to me,” I demanded, already on my bike.
He gave it to me and I sped off, full of a sensation I had never understood before: heart in your throat.
She was okay.
She had to be okay.
Nineteen
Lo
The funny thing about the space of years is, it doesn't exist, not really. When your past comes crashing into your present, it didn't bring with it the foggy haze of time. The kind of dread I used to feel spreading through my whole body sprang through my system as Damian closed in on me. Suddenly, I wasn't the woman who pulled herself up from her bootstraps, a woman built a career cutting men off at the knees who dared use his power for evil, a woman who never backed down from a fight, a woman who never ever cowered. I was just little Willow Crane, I was just a girl raised to be submissive; I was the young woman who learned to never so much as step a toe out of line out of fear of retribution.
I rubbed my side as I tried to push myself up, as I tried to remember my training, get my wits about me. I still had a chance so long as I was in Cash's house, so long as I wasn't taken to a second location.
“Shoulda known you'd shack yourself up with some man. Trading pussy that belongs to me for protection.”
That was when the anger kicked in, heady, so strong I finally understood the term 'seeing red', because my vision was tinted in it.
“That's where you fucked up, Damian,” I growled, getting to my feet, ignoring the slight shooting pain up my side. In response, I got a brow raise. “I don't need a man to protect me,” I said and flew at him.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew I was screwed. I knew our training was about matched and he had the advantage of six inches in height and a solid hundred pounds of merciless muscle. I also didn't have the flinch factor- the fact that most men who found themselves in a fight against a woman, no matter how big and bad they were, would hesitate, would flinch. It gave me the chance to challenge, to get the better of them. I had five years of proof that Damian didn't flinch.
So, yeah. I was screwed.
But damn if I was going to cower, to let myself get beat by him again.
I was going to put every bit of myself into the fight. I was going to make him hurt.
I got a hook to his ribs and a knee to his groin before he got me, flinging me hard at the wall and I watched in a fascinated kind of horror as my blood dripped down Cash's dining room wall.
“So you gave him my pussy just because you're a slut, is that it?” He growled, grabbing me by the ends of my hair, twirling, and twisting.
I pressed my lips together, refusing to give him the satisfaction of my cries, then, “Newsflash, Damian... it's my pussy and I've been sharing it with any man I want for the past thirteen years. And guess what? They, unlike you, could actually make me come.”
“Stupid cunt!” Then I was slammed against the wall hard enough for my vision to waver in darkness for a second. The crack was accompanied by an immediate and skull-splitting migraine.
Despite it (and quite frankly sure it couldn't possibly hurt any more than it already did), I threw my head back, cracking him in the mouth and swung out from him and made a grab for my bag, rummaging around until I found my gun and pulled it out. I swung around, arm raised, to have my wrist grabbed and twisted until it cracked and he grabbed the gun and tossed it.
Shit.
That was really my only chance.
“I should drag you upstairs to his bed and fuck you there until he gets home.”
I sneered. “He'd kill you,” I said simply, knowing to my marrow that it was the truth.
“Please... some weakass biker...”
“You've obviously never seen him in action. He'd take you.” It was mostly bluster. I honestly had no idea who would win if they were matched up. They both had their strengths. Cash might have the advantage of not letting his rage get to him, of battling cold. But other than that...
“Don't worry. He's gonna get what's coming to him,” he grinned and I felt sick satisfaction seeing the blood staining his teeth.
Fuck.
I didn't consider that. I didn't think I was putting Cash in any kind of danger. There was no way I could let him get hurt because of me. He had been nothing but good to me and I had done my best to be a bitch.
That was what he was going to remember about me.
I had no delusions about my future- it wasn't going to be a very long future. I was going to die, slowly, painfully. And that was going to happen soon.
I would never get another chance to let Cash see a better side of me.
All he would have to remember me by was my snippy-ness and the sex. Hell, he would probably find another chick in an afternoon and forget about the sex too.
There was nothing I could do about that now.
Hopefully he found something decent to remember me by.
“Now you're going to be a good girl and go to my car with me.”
Ha. Fat chance.
“Like hell,” I smirked, charging at him.
From there... it was just blow after blow, the shocking jarring of my fist colliding with his bones, and the almost blinding pain of his fists in my face or busted ribs. It didn't take much for me to get pinned. Two, three minutes tops and I was trapped under his weight, his body pressing so hard into my chest and abdomen that I couldn't draw a proper breath.
“It's gonna take some time to break this spirit of yours,” he grunted , grabbing my hands when I reached up to claw down his face and pinning them over my head. “But, trust me, wife, I am looking forward to it.” He shifted both of my wrists into one of his palms and brought the other hand down to my throat. “Starting now,” he said, pressing down and cutting off what little air supply I had. “We're gonna keep doing this until you agree to get up and walk to my car like the obedient little bitch you used to be.”
If he was going for cooperation, he was going about it the wrong way, reminding me of how powerless I used to be under his control.
As such, he got six times, six times of completely cutting off my air supply until my face went tingly and numb and I felt oblivion start to pull at me, only to have him pull away at the last possible second and force my consciousness back.
“Fine,” I gasped, the sensation of razor blades down my throat with each swallow. What was the point of resisting? Cash hadn't been gone that long; he could be gone for hours more. The chances of him charging in and helping me were slim to none and the way things were going, I'd have been too weak to pitch in in a fight and it would just be Cash and Damian. Both had reason to want to kill each other. Either could win. I couldn't put him in that situation. It was better to do what Damian wanted.
So I did.
“Fucking stubborn little cunt,” he said, getting off my body and reaching down to haul me onto my feet. I wavered and, in absolute horror, had to reach out to Damian's chest to steady myself, making him chuckle. His arm went around my shoulders, hauling my front against his side as he led me awkwardly outside toward his truck.
But he didn't lead me to the trunk, watching at a house across the street
like he had somehow made someone watching though I couldn't see anyone. He pushed me into the passenger seat and belted me. I didn't even see the cuffs that were draped around the seatbelt until I felt one of the bracelets snap around my wrist.
“What's the matter, Damian? You afraid I might hurt you while you're driving?”
“Shut the fuck up or I'll knock your ass out, Wills,” he said, closing the other bracelet and slamming the door.
All I could think as we drove and then pulled in and stopped at our destination was- it was supposed to be mine. The city I had been calling home since I ran far the hell away from Damian thirteen years before, it was supposed to be mine. It wasn't supposed to be tainted by him. But with the deft, comfortable way he drove the streets and the fact that he obviously owned the building he was taking me too, well, it suggested I had been sharing Navesink Bank with him for a good, long while. How long had he been watching me? Weeks? Months? God... years? That thought had a sick feeling coating my tongue as I watched him hop out of his side of the car in front of a building I had driven by almost every day of my life since I moved- an old, what I thought was abandoned, carpet store.
Maybe I should have known better. The windows were intact; the small patch of lawn out front was mowed; there were no broken bottles or used condoms littering the parking lot. I just never had any reason to notice those things before.
Thirteen years with no word, well, it would give anyone a false sense of security.
“You're going to really like what I have been working on here,” Damian said, a smirk on his face that I suddenly wondered how I never recognized as evil when we were young. Maybe, though, it hadn't been there then. Maybe he had been teasing and sweet as I remembered. Maybe the shit he had gone through overseas, maybe it did something to him, warped him. I had seen countless cases of that with the men and women who showed up at Hailstorm over the years, ready to offer their skills only to have to be expelled because of uncontrollable outbursts or a purely sadistic nature.
I took in plenty of people with their own issues- PTSD nightmares, an inability to connect with 'normal' people, men too scared to go home and taint their families with their dark souls.
I'd seen it.
But Damian, well, he was the worst of the worst.
I couldn't imagine how the government released these men and women onto the general populous. There's no way he could have passed an in-depth psych evaluation.
Hell, I always made sure the people I booted got put away and got care. I guess I fucking cared more than the government did.
“I'm sure I'll be just tickled,” I said, rolling my eyes, one that was unmistakably swollen yet again as he unlocked one of my wrists and slid off my belt. The cuff stayed hanging off my left arm as he used it to drag me around the back of the building where he stopped at a door to punch in a pass code.
Inside was simply an abandoned storefront. There was a service desk and racks that the carpets stood in on the sides of the room. The floor was littered with dust and dirt. The unbroken windows were grimy with years of filth.
Damian tugged the cuff and led me into the back storage room, then to a door, and down. Of course... the basement. How stereotypically cliché. The temperature dropped a good ten degrees once we hit the bottom that was still blanketed in darkness. He wanted to be able to watch my reaction. God, he was such a sick fuck. I felt my cuff go slack for a second before he wrapped it around the railing and I heard him shuffling away from me in the dark.
I was determined to show nothing, no shock, no fear, nothing.
The light clicked on and I found myself in a genuine, indescribable awe.
Because it wasn't the torture chamber I had been expecting with chains on the walls and a display of weapons on a table or whatever the hell sick fucks with a screw loose came up with to hurt someone.
No, this was an entirely different kind of torture chamber.
It was an exact fucking replica of our old apartment. He had it down to the same tiles on the backsplash in the kitchen. He had the same fucking comforter on the bed, sans the blood stains from the last time I had seen it. There was even the tub I had sat in and contemplated taking my own life.
Jesus Christ.
“Welcome home, Willow,” he said, giving me a white-toothed smile that I wanted to scratch off his face.
“You're fucking crazier than I thought,” I said, shaking my head at the array of perfume bottles on the dresser beside the bed. It had been thirteen years, but I knew that every last one of them was exactly where I had left them.
“That language has got to go,” he said casually, walking toward the center of the room. “Women shouldn't talk that way.”
“Don't like hearing my language then maybe you shouldn't have fucking kidnapped me.”
“You're my wife,” he said, rolling his eyes as he reached down for something in the center of the floor, something I had missed before, literally the only thing in the whole space that was out of place: a U-shaped metal bar attached to the cement floor with a very long, very heavy looking chain with an ankle cuff.
Oh, mother fucker.
“I divorced you ten years ago, Damian,” I reminded him. It was a day I celebrated alone each year, eating a ton of cookie dough ice cream and going to the shooting range, like I did the day I was finally free of him.
“I never agreed to that.”
That was true. He never did. But, then again, that really didn't matter. Contested divorces were granted all the time. No matter what your spouse wanted, you had a right to get shot of their sorry asses. “And yet somehow, I still don't belong to you.”
His eyes lowered, hating being wrong, hating having his property taken from him. “You belonged to me from the second I got into that pussy of yours for the first time,” he growled, stalking over to me and slamming me backward so I fell back onto the steps, cursing as the edge of one caught me in my lower back, and making the cuff bite into the skin of my wrist as it pulled tight. He was on me before I could try to kick out a leg, grabbing my ankle and slapping the cuff on. The weight immediately made my leg slam down onto the step. “And I got all the time in the world to remind you of that again,” he said, kneeling down next to me, grabbing my chin and forcing it up. “It won't be a pleasant process for you.”
“What else is new? From the second I accepted your ring, you brought me nothing but fucking misery you useless piece of shit.”
He clucked his tongue, letting go of my chin, but only to cock his arm and backhand me across the face. He stood up, releasing my wrist from the cuff, then taking off up the steps. “Oh and don't get up any hopes of escape. That chain will let you get a third the way up the steps and there's no way you'd fit through the windows, not even with the weight you've lost. You're going to be here for a good long time, Wills.”
The door at the landing slammed and I pushed myself up, wincing at the pain in my back, trying to will away the tears I felt stinging my eyes. I could do a lot of things: yell, scream, fight, spit fire. But I would not, under any circumstances, waste any more tears on him.
I looked around, taking deep breaths to calm the hysterical anxiety building inside. Because, I noticed as I looked around, he was right- there was no escape. There was no way I could get away. My only hope was for rescue and given that I hadn't been able to figure out Damian owned the store, no one else was going to be able to either.
Suddenly, I had the memory of my father visiting the apartment one afternoon when Damian was at work. It had been a week since the last time he beat me, but the emotional impact of it had lasted longer than the bruises and seeing my father, a man who had kept me in his own kind of prison my whole life, had somehow seemed like a chance for rescue.
“Dad... he beats me,” I said, my voice a quiver and his head snapped to me, eyes wide.
“What?”
“He... beats me. With his hands. With a belt...”
It was one of the few times in my life I remembered
him looking stricken. His gaze quickly fell to the floor, looking at his boots. “Why?”
“Because he thinks I need to be punished.”
“For?”
It was that moment that I felt hope die. I closed my eyes and shook my head. “Any little thing,” I admitted though I knew it was pointless; he wasn't going to save me.
“Can't say it's not his place. He's your husband. Your behavior is a reflection of him. He needs to find ways to make sure you stay in line. As your father, I don't like hearing that. But you aren't a little girl anymore. You're a married woman and it's your job to follow your husbands rules and deal with the consequences of breaking them.”
“Okay.”
I never asked for help again. Not even from the sheriff who raised a brow at the bruises on my wrists while we were in line at the check-out at the grocery store. Not even when he caught my eye afterward and asked me if I was alright. There was simply no spirit, no fight left in me at that point.
It was pointless, hopeless.
That was exactly the feeling I had in that moment, sitting on the stairs in my new prison, seeing no escape, knowing there was no one coming to save me. I guess thirteen years of freedom was all that I was going to get. I had some good times. I took out some bad guys. I saved some good ones. I'd had sex. I'd drank. I'd made friends. I'd traveled. All in all, it wasn't bad. I fit into thirteen years what most people didn't manage in a lifetime. And thank god, because those memories were going to be the only thing that got me through.
I knew that some day, some time, he would screw up. He would get comfortable. He would think he had succeeded in breaking my spirit. Then I would have a chance. The lock on my ankle, big and ugly as it was, it was absolutely pick-able. I could get it off with enough attempts. And, well, I had nothing but time. Then I just needed to wait for a time he stumbled, he turned his back on me when I was too close. I could take him down if he didn't see me coming. Get him unconscious and then, well, do whatever the hell was necessary to make sure he didn't come after me again.
Cash (The Henchmen MC Book 2) Page 15