That's the funny thing about a false sense of security... I thought getting past the Third Street guys was the worst part of my walk home. When I crossed from the slums into the more suburban area, I thought I was home free. What was to fear? There were working streetlights, nicely maintained houses, white picket fences for fuck's sake. There was nothing to be afraid of there except having someone call the cops because some teenage girl all decked out in gothic rebellion was on their streets.
So when a car slowed and someone called to me, I turned easily, expecting to need to give someone directions.
They created the phrase 'young and stupid' for a reason.
It didn't even phase me that the car had two men in the front seat and that I was alone and defenseless. That danger didn't even register.
So when the car fully stopped and the door flew open and I realized my mistake, it was too late. I was thrown in the backseat with the man who had been riding passenger, using everything in my very small, very soft and untrained body to fight, to try to get free- nails, fists, teeth, feet. I tried everything until a fist collided to the side of my head and everything went black.
I woke up a while later, shoulders screaming and colder than I had ever been in my life. My eyes opened slowly, consciousness coming back to me in pieces. First, I realized my shoulders hurt because I was hanging by my wrists. Second, I realized I was cold because my clothes were gone. All of them. I was naked. I was also in a basement, all cinder block walls, cement floors, and no windows. Third, I had the blinding, crippling understanding of what was going to happen to me.
I was naked in a basement hanging from my wrists after two men abducted me off the street. I might have been dauntless and a bit dense about my own mortality, but I wasn't dumb. They weren't holding me in their basement chained up and naked to teach me how to play canasta and talk about how much better things were before technology started tearing us apart.
No.
I was going to be tortured.
I was going to be, I swallowed hard at even having to think the word, raped.
And there was nothing, not a damn thing I could do about it.
At the time, I had no idea who Lex Keith was. He was still young, still paying his dues, working his way up in the criminal underbelly. His name wasn't even on my radar. As such, I had no idea that he wasn't just a rapist. He was a sadist. He got off on pain and he was very, very good at finding new and inventive ways to create it. Some days I was sliced open, little superficial cuts all up and down my arms, cuts designed to sting and scare me, but not cause any permanent damage- just little white scars I would learn I could cover with tattoos.
But there were other days where he would open a cabinet and he would bring out his 'toys'. I guessed that, in the non-kidnapping-torturing world that those types of sex toys had some kind of audience that got off on using them- things with spikes, things with sharp edges, things too big to ever put inside a body but designed to do so.
Those days were bad.
Those days I prayed for unconsciousness.
But then there were the other days. Those days when Lex would invite his men into the basement as well.
Those days I prayed, loudly and without restraint, for death.
I wanted to die.
I wanted it so badly.
But it didn't come.
I learned to judge the days passing by the clothes Lex wore though I knew there were some days when he didn't visit. Toward the end, I started to feel my body finally starting to give up, deciding it couldn't take anymore. It was a weird thing to experience your own death, a slow, dragged out affair of never ending pain, weakness, hunger, dehydration, and fear. When my arms were released from the chain around the sixteenth day after I was taken, my entire body crumpled like a rag doll to the floor, boneless, useless.
"Time to put this one to pasture, boss," one of the men said, kicking me in the ribs like a dead dog on the back porch. I didn't even have enough left in me to cry out.
I was done.
It was done.
I was going to be free finally.
My body was hauled out of the basement covered in my blood and thrown in a trunk. Then I was hauled back out of said trunk and dumped in an alley, left there to die.
And I would have.
My entire body was convulsing, covered in a sweat but too cold, way too cold.
"Jesus Christ," a female voice called. I had just enough energy to force one swollen eye open. And that's when I saw her: a woman in Army green khakis and a tan tank top, kneeling before me, her long blond hair tucked behind her ears, her brown eyes kind and horrified. "Hey honey," she said, brushing hair out of my face. "I'm Lo. I'm gonna get you out of here and all fixed up, okay?" Her voice was fake chipper. Even mostly-dead, I knew that tone. It was the tone you used on a dog that was run over by a car and you knew would never make it to the vet- falsely reassuring.
"Wanna die," I objected, my voice weak, tears somehow streaming down my face despite the way all my insides felt dry as sandpaper.
Her eyes closed on an exhale and she took a long minute before she spoke again. "I understand that. But I'm not going to let that happen. One day you will look back on this and be glad I didn't just walk away."
I was taken to Hailstorm and spent weeks in a bed in a makeshift hospital wing, attended only by Lo or other women. I was patched up. I was hooked up to IV antibiotics and fluids. I was force fed some awful smelling concoction which forced an early period.
I raged those first few weeks, when I was well enough. I hit and spat and lashed out at Lo with everything in my weak body. I had wanted to die! I told her. I cried to her. I wanted it to end. I didn't want to wake up and face what I had been through. I didn't want the memories to turn into nightmares that would never let me sleep. I didn't want to be a god damn victim anymore.
"You choose to be a victim," Lo said, swatting the book out of the air before it hit her. "You can be a lot of things right now. You can be a woman who went through some shit and came out of it. You can be a survivor. Or you can curl up and cradle your pain to your chest and choose to keep being a victim. But make no mistake my little Jstorm, that is a choice you make."
I fell back onto the bed, silently seething. But not because she was wrong. Because she was right. I had two things I could do with my life at that point: I could end it or I could move on.
So the next day, I got out of bed. I built up a wall. And I started training to be a woman who could never be made helpless again. I shot guns. I learned martial arts. I learned about pressure points and poison. I figured out how to make bombs.
But I didn't become a 'survivor'. I hated that term. That term was weak, meaningless to me. Plenty of people survived things. That didn't mean anything. You could live through something and crawl up in a ball on the floor and never rise again. "Survivor" meant nothing but breath in your lungs.
I didn't become a survivor.
I became a badass bitch.
That was the choice I made. That was the choice Lo gave to me when she picked me up off that street.
It wasn't for years that I heard the name Lex Keith again, that I knew he had set up his operation in the same town I lived on the outskirts of. I had become insulated at Hailstorm, training and hacking and making plans. I wasn't always in on the action. I had no reason to go back on the streets. I had nothing left out there in the real world.
When I was well enough, I had called home and told my parents I ran away. I told them it had nothing to do with them, that I would keep in touch.
I couldn't face them again. I would never be the daughter they knew. The daughter they knew wasn't covered in scars and living behind walls she was sure no one could break down. The daughter they loved didn't know she could put a bullet in someone's body, end their life, and do so without blinking.
So I sent them Christmas cards and anniversary cards and birthday presents and mother and father's day presents. But I wasn't their
s anymore.
I was mine and mine only.
Until that night I found that forum, I thought I had moved on. As best I could. Not perfectly. There would always be scars. There would always be ghosts and demons. But I had moved on. I hadn't concocted plans of revenge. I did everything in my power to never consciously think about Lex Keith again.
Then I found that post. I connected with Alex. I saw my past staring me right in the face.
I helped Alex escape though she eventually did get caught again and dragged to Lex's. But it was okay. It was okay because I was already prepared. I had the bombs. I had the Molotov cocktails. So when they dragged her in, I started setting the bombs. Her man, Breaker, breezed in sometime later and though he was playing it cool like he didn't care that Lex had Alex, I knew his feelings for her would bide me time as I rushed around his property, setting up things for the most amount of damage possible.
I blew the gate.
I waited, watching everyone start to freak out. I needed to give Alex and Breaker a chance to get free before I risked collapsing the mansion. I saw them running from the side of the property with someone else trailing with them.
That someone else?
Yeah that was the tatted, pierced, post-punk looking, hot as all sin, sweet talking, panty dropper by the name of Shooter.
They caught sight of me by the gate.
My eyes locked with Shooter for a long minute before he got in the truck with his best friend and his best friend's girl and they tore out of there.
They were supposed to get out of town, disappear, get off the grid until things blew over. I was counting on that.
Once they drove away, I pressed the button, and I blew Lex's place to kingdom come.
--
Why was Lo talking to Shooter? I knew she knew of him. Lo knew of every major player in the game. But I didn't think they were on any kind of speaking terms.
"News. Channel five. Right now," Lo barked at me and I reached for the remote and turned it on.
"... Damian Crane, a decorated war hero, was shot dead in the doorway of his car early this morning..."
Well then. That answered that question. Cash must have called in Shooter and had him do the hit for them. Smart. Nothing could trace back to The Henchmen or Hailstorm.
"What?" Lo asked, then listened for a minute, her face looking almost amused and alarmed at once. "You confuse me," she told him. "I think it's impossible not to love you a little bit, Shoot." Love him? "I bet they do. By the balls one day, Shooter. Can't wait to see that." What by the balls? They sounded downright friendly. How close could they have gotten in a couple of days? "Famous last words. Thanks, Shooter. You got me free of him finally. I can't say how..." She trailed off and a laugh escaped her. It was the kind of laugh I never realized I hadn't heard from her before: completely open, beautifully happy. "Oh, I don't know... that might be difficult."
It was a laugh that I hoped like hell I could have some day.
But there was only one way to make that possible.
"One day," I said, my words heavy, "when I'm ready... we need to have a talk. The girly kind... with feelings and shit. There's a lot you need to know. Not just about what happened to me way back then... but about what I have done since then, behind everyone's backs. For the greater good, I think, but still. Not good stuff. Not clean."
"Babe... nothing in our lives is clean. It's dirty and bloody and we have to fight so hard for everything we get, but it's that fight that makes it worth it in the end."
We heard it then. Not her phone, not the call that was promised, but boots outside. We were on our feet in seconds, Lo reaching for a gun she didn't have, me dragging two out of the nightstand, guns I had found in the closet. Yeah, guns. As in he had an unlocked supply of them right there for the taking the whole time I was staying there. I tossed Lo a gun, turning toward the door and taking aim. There was a sudden surge of nostalgia flooding my system at that moment, taking on a potential bad guy side-by-side with Lo. It was nice, familiar, right.
The door burst open and three men stepped into the small space of the cabin.
"You were supposed to fucking call!" Lo snapped at Cash, gun still raised.
"Things got hot. We didn't have time."
"Oh, no? The whole ride back from wherever-the-fuck you were... you couldn't call?"
"No."
Cash crossed the room toward Lo as I looked at the other two men.
Reign was opposite to his brother in almost every way. Where Cash was light, Reign was dark. They were both tall and a thin kind of strong. Both were tattooed. But where Cash had blond hair, Reign had dark brown. Cash's eyes were a deep green, Reign's a lighter shade. And where Cash exuded his casual, jocular, laid-back aura, everything about Reign was deadly and dangerous. I guess he had to be, given that he was the leader of a bunch of rough and tough bikers who illegally ran guns.
Seeing him sent a sliver of fear through my belly. Maybe Wolf was right and he didn't hurt women. But maybe I was right too in thinking that was only because a woman never threatened him before. I threatened him. He didn't know that yet, but I still felt paranoid.
To Reign's side was Repo, the guy who Wolf said was the best shot in the club. Looking at him now, I see I was wrong in thinking he was barely pushing twenty. There was a manly build to his body, a wideness of shoulder, a development of muscle that younger men couldn't usually acquire. He had dark hair and deep blue eyes and a scar that ran down the center of one side of his face, cutting off at the very sharp, strong jut of his jaw. There was something about him, a fierceness, a deep kind of wisdom that made him seem even older than twenty-four.
If Reign found out one day, would he send Repo after me? Would I never see it coming? Would I be walking down the street somewhere, alive one minute, dead in a pool of my own blood the next?
"Why the hell not?" Lo exploded.
"Because I was trying to focus on the road and not die on my way back to you."
I could see those words deflate her.
"I'm still mad at you," she grumbled, but I knew she wasn't. And so did Cash.
"I guess I'll have to live with that," he smiled, pressing his front into her front, his hands sliding down her arms then wrapping around her ass before his mouth came down on hers. It wasn't a quick peck either. It was long and wet and deep... with tongue. She was clinging to him, blissfully oblivious to the three other people in the room. I looked away, feeling a bit like I was catching my mom or big sister making out with some guy, creating all kinds of discomfort in my stomach.
"Mind if we get this over with so I can go home and kiss my woman like that and Repo can... go and kiss his cars or whatever the fuck he does?" Reign asked.
I almost laughed, caught off guard. I didn't think Reign had a joking bone in his body.
"Get what over with?" Lo asked, trying to slip into a serious voice, but her tone was still breathless.
"We found Wolf," Reign said, looking at me suddenly, guessing or knowing the situation, giving me the news I needed. Maybe he wasn't so bad after all. "He's... working through some shit," he said, vaguely.
"Are any of us going to have to worry about an FBI raid?" Lo asked.
"Janie, wanna go see him?" Reign asked, his tone soft as he held an arm out to lead me outside.
Repo followed behind.
"That's not an answer!" Lo called at us as we walked away.
THIRTEEN
Janie
"Where are we going?" I asked as they turned me away from the driveway and led me further into the woods.
"Wolf has a shed a way back," Reign said and I could feel his eyes on my profile. "You know anything about Wolf's past?"
I turned slightly to look at him. "He hasn't left much of a paper trail," I hedged. He knew when he visited Hailstorm that we kept tabs on all of them. There was no reason to pretend I didn't know things about them.
"Babe," Reign said, stopping suddenly. His hand grabbed my arm, s
topping me too.
"What?" I asked as he paused, looking like he was trying to figure out how to tell me something. "Reign, I'm not a shrinking violet. I've killed men. I've even killed men at your side. I can take it."
He nodded, taking a deep breath. "Wolf has anger issues," he still felt the need to hedge.
I felt my lips quirk up. "Wolf? We're talking about the same guy here, right? Twenty-feet tall, million pounds of muscle, perpetually underused voice box? The most self-controlled person I've ever met..."
"Yeah, babe," Reign cut me off. "Ninety-eight percent of the time, he's the most even-tempered fuck you'll ever come across."
"But that two percent?" I prompted.
"That two percent shows you why his name is very, very fitting."
"He rages out," Repo broke in, sensing Reign's urge to ease me into things and realizing I didn't need it. "Full-on Hulk shit. He's not the man you know right now. We don't want you going in there and expecting Wolf. He's not Wolf. He's a wild fucking animal."
"Okay," I said, nodding at him in thanks before turning to Reign. "Are you taking me to him or are we going to stand here clucking like a bunch of fucking hens all day while he's locked in a god damn shed?"
To that, I got one of Reign's rare and, therefore practically radiant, smiles. "I like you, kid," he said, moving forward again.
You wouldn't if you knew what I did.
But I fell into step, flanked on both sides by two intimidating bikers as I tried to make sense of what they were telling me. If they were saying he was wild and their general lifestyle was wild by most standards, that was really saying something. It was hard for me to even imagine Wolf not being calm, level, steady.
Then again, up until about a day ago, it was hard for me to imagine I could crumble into tears that I couldn't stop no matter how I tried.
People like us, people with pasts, with scars somewhere deep inside, there was no telling what could happen when we were pushed, when we were forced to confront the dark parts of our psyches. He didn't judge me for breaking. I wasn't going to judge him for doing so either.
Wolf (The Henchmen MC #3) Page 11