by Marla Monroe
He caught her looking at him, obviously realizing he was staring at the scar he could see. She didn’t lower her eyes, just glared before looking back up to the man in front of her.
“Get. The. Fuck. Out. Now! You want to pay my repair bill? Fine. Give me an address where I can mail your money to you, and I’ll accept it.” She propped her hands on her hips and waited.
Hawk hadn’t realized his club brother had offered. No wonder he’d been pissed off since he’d talked to her at the bar. He waited to see what Gunner would say. If he got her out of town, it would end any speculation of her being a plant for the One-Niners. There was no way she would take that offer if she was supposed to spy on them.
“No.” Gunner cocked his head with a wide, dangerous-looking smile. “You should have taken that offer before I gave in. There’s no way I’m letting you get away until I’ve had my fill of you now, Jack.”
The woman’s face paled, and she started to take a step back but the back of her legs hit the chair, and she sat down hard. For a split second, Hawk wondered if she’d pass out. Was she actually as terrified of them as it appeared? Then her expression changed. Her mouth drooped, and her eyes shuttered as she stared down at her hands resting on her knees.
“I’m not interested in any kind of relationship with you. Not a short term, not a hookup for sex, or anything else. I’m just not interested. I don’t think you are either. So what is that you want from me?”
Hawk slid off the table and walked over to kneel next to the chair. “Honey, we just want some time with you to get to know you. Things didn’t start out on the right foot before, but that’s because you shocked Gunner, here.”
He felt Gunner stiffen then heard him release a harsh breath. He knelt in front of her, as well. Hawk could feel the turmoil in his friend and hated that they had to do this. It wasn’t fair to Gunner or even to the woman, especially if she didn’t have any part of the issue with the One-Niners.
“Look. I had a woman years ago who committed suicide. I didn’t understand then, and I still don’t understand now why. I did everything I knew to do to make her happy, but it wasn’t enough. If she wasn’t happy, why didn’t she just leave? Why did she have to do that?” He shook his head and looked up at her. “Why did you?”
A slow, full minute passed in complete silence. Finally, she sighed and pulled the numerous bracelets and support bands off. The scars on both wrists were numerous and thick. To Hawk, it looked as if she’d tried more than a couple of times to end it all. That didn’t sit well with him either. He had to swallow back the bile that rushed up his throat.
“You don’t know anything about me or my past. You just make assumptions and treat me based on those assumptions. Do you really care why? Does it matter that much?” she asked in a quiet voice.
Gunner stood and paced. Hawk didn’t move. He wanted to know why, but Gunner was fighting that need. Knowing more about her past and those scars would make her more than a job to them, and he knew it. Not knowing would eat him up inside.
Finally, he stopped pacing, stopping in front of her. He didn’t bend down to answer her. Instead, he stood there for a few seconds staring up at the ceiling. When he looked over at Hawk, he could see the pain and resignation in his friend’s eyes.
“Yeah. I want to know why. What was so horrible that you didn’t think you could do anything except put an end to your life? Tell us.”
Chapter Eight
Jackie swallowed around the knot in her throat. She’d hoped he would say no, he didn’t give a damn what her reasons were. Instead, he’d said yes, and she wasn’t prepared to bare her life’s sins to them. They were bikers, they’d probably killed before. Nothing should shock them.
And nothing will seem terrible enough to warrant what they believed about me. To them, life is crap and you made it yours.
They didn’t know that nothing had been hers in a long time. Now, she was all she had.
Jackie closed her eyes and started talking. If she didn’t see their faces while she gave them what they wanted, maybe it wouldn’t be as hard. Maybe.
“I’m not going to bore you with the details of what life was like as a kid. My father was a worthless drunk. Mom nearly worked herself to death to keep food on the table. That left us with him all day and sometimes later at night. He was abusive and loud. One day he went on a shooting spree and killed everyone but me. I didn’t escape unharmed, but I survived when no one else did. Not even him.” She shifted on the chair.
“Fast forward past the hospital, the foster homes, and the struggle to get through school while I worked. When I turned nineteen, I had two years of community college behind me. I’d managed to graduate high school early and aged out of the system, so I was on my own. I applied to several colleges close by but only qualified for partial scholarships. I couldn’t work and make enough money to live and pay the balance of my education, so I decided to try again later.”
Jackie drew in a soft breath, trying to force herself to relax again so that she could get through this. Baring her life to someone she didn’t know was harder than she’d thought it would be. Once she’d paid for her truck’s repairs, she would leave this place and never see these men again. It shouldn’t be this hard.
“One of the men on the scholarship committee offered to pay the balance for me, and I could pay him back once I had settled into a good job after graduation. I couldn’t believe that my luck was finally turning around. I believed it was my time and never once worried that I was making a mistake.
“The first few months of college were exciting for me. I loved learning and enjoyed the interaction with the other teenagers and young adults I made friends with. I’d never had a friend before. With my father, it had been impossible. Foster homes meant the only people who would come around you were the kids you lived with and the many social workers. Parents wouldn’t allow their children to play with us or even befriend us. We were the lowest of society’s dregs. To them, we came from drug homes and worthless parents. It didn’t matter that some of the kids had lost their parents in accidents and had lived in nice homes until then.”
“You say that like it didn’t matter how they treated you, it was the ones who’d had good homes that mattered.” She felt Hawk’s hand brush her hair back from her face.
“I mattered, but it was wrong that they lumped us all together without giving anyone a chance. One of the kids I met in one of the homes had lived in a mansion before his parents were killed in a plane crash. He didn’t have any other family alive to take him. His inheritance was placed in a trust for when he got out, but he didn’t make it out.” She swallowed back the tears for the poor little boy he’d been.
“What happened?” It was Gunner who asked this time.
“The home we were living in at the time was in a bad part of the city. We couldn’t go anywhere alone. There were gangs and pimps and all sorts of people there. One morning we were standing at the bus stop to go to school, and a car drove by spraying bullets all over the area. Two of my fellow foster kids were killed, and one ended up in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.”
“What about you?” Hawk asked.
“I only had a couple of cuts where the bullets shaved my arm and my hip. I was treated and released back into the same foster home.”
Nothing was said for a few minutes as Jackie readjusted her position on the chair. There was one spring that poked her left hip a little bit. She’d forgotten and hadn’t paid attention how she’d sat after giving Gunner a piece of her mind. Now she was paying for it.
“Nothing changed? You still walked to the same bus stop and waited for the school bus?” Hawk asked her.
“Oh things changed. They moved three new kids in two days later. We stayed until the husband got sick and the woman had to take care of him instead of us. Honestly, we could have stayed. She never did anything. We cooked and cleaned and took care of the younger ones. But the system didn’t allow it.”
“Why didn’t you tell the social wo
rkers that you were running the house by yourself anyway? That should have woken them up to move you out.” Gunner’s voice sounded off to her. She wasn’t sure why, but she refused to look at him. If she did, Jackie was sure she’d lose the ability to continue.
“We weren’t about to complain about a little work that made life easier for us. Most of us had been in really horrible homes in the past and didn’t want to end up in another one. It was safer to keep our mouths shut.”
“That’s all kinds of wrong. You know that, don’t you?” Gunner asked.
Jackie just shrugged. “It is what it is. We survived. At least everyone did while were in the same foster homes. I counted that as a win.”
“Get her something to drink, Gunner.” Hawk moved until he sat right in front of her and scrubbed his hands over his face.
“Here.” Gunner had opened one of her Diet Cokes and shoved it in her hands.
It tasted wonderful and was cold going down. She hadn’t realized how dry her mouth had been. She did notice how tired she was, though. A quick look over at the clock on the table next to the bed told her it was after three in the morning.
“Anyway, to make all of this shorter, I ended up moving in to the apartment over the garage at this man’s house when someone broke into my little apartment one night while I was there. He insisted that I needed to find a safer place. I couldn’t find anything I could afford, so he told me I could live in the apartment he had. I didn’t see anything wrong with it. He hadn’t tried to move me in right away after he offered to pay for the balance of my college tuition.
“When the first year had ended, I’d planned to continue on in summer school, but he talked me into working instead and not pushing myself by trying to finish all at once. I should have realized then that something was up, but it made sense to me then, too. So I found a second job and started saving money to pay him back and have a little nest egg for when I graduated. I thought my life was going to be different now. I’d be able to get a good job after school and eventually have a normal relationship with people. But that changed when I got off late one night and started to unlock the door to the little apartment. He caught me by surprise, so I never saw his hand when it covered my mouth and nose with the cloth covered in ether. I woke up in what I later learned was his basement in a five-by-five-foot cage.”
* * * *
Gunner stared at the woman. What the hell? That only happened in third world countries or in books and horror pictures. Did she really think they’d believe her? He started to say as much, but Hawk knew what he was thinking and stopped him with a squeeze to his shoulder. The other man had gotten up and was leaning against the wall next to him now.
“What happened when you woke up, Jackie?” Hawk asked.
The fact that she still wouldn’t look at them grated on Gunner’s nerves. He figured she was hiding the fact that she was spinning them a tale. He was sure it would be obvious if he could see her eyes.
“I was violently ill off and on for several hours. I found out later that he’d put the bucket in there because he knew that. He’d done this several times before. I hadn’t been the first one who’d fallen for the tricks hidden by an altruistic mask. I was just the one who put an end to it.” She hesitated then continued. “Three years later.”
“He kept you in his basement for three fucking years?” Hawk pushed off the wall with one booted foot and walked the width of the room back and forth for several minutes before he returned to sit on the floor in front of her. “Why? What did he want with you?”
Gunner was stunned that Hawk was falling for her story. He started to leave, but something about the way she cleared her throat and shrugged made him stay. He sat on the edge of the bed and waited to hear what she’d say.
“I don’t know. I mean he.” She stuttered for a second. “Did things to me and hurt me, but I don’t know what he got out of it. He didn’t physically rape me or anything. He didn’t even jack off after he’d finished with me for the night. I can’t even imagine what he got out of it, but I honestly didn’t care. I just wanted out. The pain and constant uncertainty about what was coming next was too much for me to deal with.”
“How did you survive that? What did you do?” Hawk asked her, taking her hands into his before looking over at Gunner.
He could see the compassion and maybe even a little censure for him in his friend’s eyes. It didn’t change how he felt, that she was making it all up, but it hurt him all the same.
“I didn’t have much of a choice. One day, I don’t know how long I had been down there, he made the mistake of leaving a glass on the floor near my cage. When he had finished with me, he shoved me in and locked it but forgot the glass. I lay there for hours just trying to get past the pain. I looked at that glass the entire time, knowing he’d finally given me a chance to escape.
“It took several tries to reach it. I could get my hand through the bars, but my arm would only go so far through the bars before there just wasn’t room anymore. I worked on pushing my skin through a little at a time until my arm moved a tiny fraction of an inch. Finally I could touch the glass with my fingertips. I was afraid I would tip it over the wrong way, so I worked more of my arm through the bars until I could get the tip of one finger over the edge and pull it over in my direction.”
“Is that when it broke?” Gunner asked, uncaring that a little sarcasm seeping into his voice.
“No. It didn’t break. I rolled it over toward me and had to work my arm back through the bars again so I could slide it down closer to the ground. Then I picked it up and smashed it against the concrete floor. A piece of it cut the palm of my hand, but really, why did that matter when I was going to cut my wrists anyway.” She sighed before taking a drink from the can then shoving it between her legs again.
Before Hawk could take her hands in his again, Gunner walked over and grabbed her hands to turn them over. Sure enough, there was a scar on the palm of her right hand.
So what? I still don’t believe she isn’t making this up. She could have done that herself without all the bullshit story she’s feeding us.
It caught him by surprise when she jerked her hand from his and buried both of hers under her thighs. She brought her head up for a quick second before she continued looking down again. In that minute second, he’d seen unfathomable pain and anger there. It had been so raw that Gunner wasn’t sure what to believe anymore. Was she telling the truth?
“I grabbed the largest piece I could and wrapped one end in a piece of the sheet he’d given me to sleep under. Since he kept me naked, I didn’t have anything on me to use. I knew if I didn’t have a safe end to hold on to, I wouldn’t be able to cut deep enough because of the pain. It took two tries for me to actually do it. After I got past the first cut, I sliced through it again then did the same to the other one. It was harder to do. Not because I was worried about the pain anymore. It was because that hand was weak and didn’t work right after I’d cut it.
“I thought about cutting my neck, but I wasn’t really sure where to cut, and both of my hands were weak now. I just lay back and prayed God wouldn’t disown me because of what I had done. I confessed my sins, told him I was sorry for being so weak, and a few minutes later, I passed out.”
Gunner realized he’d matched his breathing to hers that was coming in quick breaths as if she were reliving that moment in time. He steadied his then rubbed one hand over his eyes. There was no emotion in her voice, but he had plenty for both of them. Somewhere in all of that, he’d started believing that at least some of it were true.
“What happened that you didn’t bleed out and die?” Hawk asked after a few seconds of quiet.
“He decided to check on me that morning before he left for school. Sometimes he did, but usually he didn’t. He only fed me once a day, so normally I was left alone except for three or four hours each evening after he’d come home and had eaten. This time he found me still alive and sewed up my wrists. I’m glad I wasn’t conscious to have to go throug
h that as well as the anger I’m sure he’d had over what I’d done.” She rolled her shoulders, pulling her hands from beneath her to take a drink from the can again.
“He didn’t take you to an emergency room?” Hawk cursed under his breath. “I guess he couldn’t without you telling someone what was happening to you. Son of a bitch.”
“He probably figured if I lived through it that was good enough. If I didn’t, he’d bury me out back like he had the other women. I remember rousing briefly as he poured water and something like Gatorade into me. Then I was out until sometime later.
“My wrists were bandaged and tied to either side of the cage so I couldn’t dig out the stitches I guess. The thought had crossed my mind. I didn’t have much energy anyway. One of my arms had just enough slack in it that I could reach the open jug of water he’d left and the plastic bowl of cheese and bread. I ate and drank because I didn’t know what else to do. He’d taken my one chance away from me. I think I lost all hope then.” She looked up again, giving them both a glimpse of what she must have felt during that time. Utter and complete hopelessness. Gunner could see an emptiness there that was a little scary.
“I spent more and more time in my own head. It kept me from being aware of what was happening to me for the most part. Sometimes he’d realize what I was doing and jerk me back so that I couldn’t escape the pain and humiliation. I guess he finally wasn’t getting what he wanted or needed out of me and decided it was time to move on to a new woman.”
“What did he do? I know he wasn’t about to let you free to report him. You said he’d buried the other girls in the back yard. How did you know that? Did he tell you about them?” Gunner still couldn’t believe all of her story, but more and more of it seemed real to him now.
“Don’t bombard her with questions, man. Let her get this out her way. I can’t imagine that it’s easy to reveal something like this to strangers.” Hawk stared at him, but this time he seemed almost beaten.