He looked at me like I was a whore.
No, he didn’t even look at me like that. At least a whore might be expected to provide a happy end when all was said and done.
Rock just saw me as matter in front of him, a soul to be disposed of at some point.
And nothing more.
And, what’s more, that’s all you’ll ever be!
“You a whore or not?”
I’m not even…
Only his absolute rule for silence, regardless of what most people would have expected, prevented me from cowering and saying, “Yes, Master.”
Crystal, bless her soul, squeezed my hand as softly as she could while still making sure I knew she was doing it. I appreciated the gesture, even if it meant little in the face of this fucking scum. But at least it was something, which was more than I could say I would be able to give myself.
Finally, Rock spoke.
“We’re hosting a fund-raiser tomorrow night, and we need…”
He seemed to choke on the next word and started to clear his throat, the sound coming out as a confusing hybrid of a cough and a laugh.
“Pleasant displays to saunter around. There will be lots of potential business partners, clients, recruits…”
He trailed off and rolled his hand on his wrist in a “and so on and so forth” gesture, his eyes rolling in a matching-yet-contradicting “who gives a shit”-fashion. I didn’t feel anything.
Perhaps I should have taken offense at his deliberately mocking tone with the word pleasant, but all I felt was just emptiness inside, as I did on all but the rarest of perfect days.
“It’s all more high-brow than I like and much more than you’re fit for, but the gears of business must be greased all the same. Normally I have a set of girls trained specifically for events like these—the sort who can suck a dick while wearing diamonds, rubies, and thousand-dollar dresses without ever posing a risk to the valuables—but they’re unavailable and I’m in something of a pinch for time.”
“Unavailable?” Crystal said, breaking the sacred silence with a worried tone. “You mean Gal and Megan, don’t you? How are they unavailable?”
Oh, no.
Crystal…
You know what he means…
And that she hasn’t implied the girl from yesterday wasn’t one of them means…
“You’d better not be implying that you’re unwilling to take the job, whore!” Rock said with a snarl, turning on her with all the intent to strike her save for the raising of his hand.
That was the problem with Rock. He sounded… well, certainly not nice, but he sounded even-keeled. But he had an unquenchable rage about something that just meant he could snap at literally a wrong look.
I knew from personal experience many times over.
“N-no, sir. Not at all. I’m just… I worry for the other girls—look out for them, you know?—since we’re all working together and such.”
I had never known Crystal to crack, but now I felt horrified at what she was doing.
Rock, in response, laughed in the same way an adult laughs at a child’s joke—not really finding any humor in it but knowing they wouldn’t understand why it wasn’t funny in the first place.
He slapped her, but it was a close, patting sort of slap—still painful from the looks of things, but nothing that an onlooker would truly see as a violent act. I saw in those slaps a calculated effort to put a sting in her cheeks without bruising her or making her jaw too sore to stretch around a John. Protecting his assets, but making sure we know our place.
So… fucking… typical.
I didn’t think the words with any malice. I didn’t have the energy today. I was too beaten down by this unexpected and unwelcome cameo, to say nothing of hearing a murder right outside my own door and deciding locking the door and pretending it wasn’t happening was better than helping her.
“Do you think I got this far by being so stupid as to believe that you cunts care a thing for one another? Or that you care what sort of money you earn for the greater good? You are dogs, mongrels—the lot of you—who are hungry, starving, and willing to bite anybody if it means you might actually get something to eat out of it. And that includes each other.”
His eyes stared daggers at us, and in time, I would probably become insane enough that I would literally have the sensation of having daggers driven through my chest whenever Rock stared at us.
“I am the one that holds the chain around your necks. I hold it tight and I hold it high, so that all of you know that you’ll never be free from me and so that all of you know who stands where. Do not try to tell me you care for those girls, and do not try to tell me that you care about me. I’ll believe neither and, moreover, I’ll be inclined to not believe anything else you may try to tell me henceforth. Not that I believe anything you say anyways.”
He laughed at his own joke, a sick, depraved laugh that left me wanting to punch him in the balls. But to so much as curl my fingers—to hint at the small possibility the thought was coming into my mind—would result in his fingers curling into a violent fist a whole lot faster.
“The other girls—whatever their names were—saw fit to steal from me, and they paid for that effort.”
Crystal gasped, proving then—to me, at least—that she had cared for the two girls.
I’m not sure what was worse, that I had to fight so hard not to show the same reaction or that I thought more about the consequences for us than I did the certain death of the other two girls.
“Y-you killed them?” she stammered.
Rock rolled his eyes and shook his head. Always condescending.
Which I would take over just about any other mood of his.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t have to. They helped themselves to a shipment of product that I hadn’t had a chance to cut down. I would have liked to handle them myself before they had a chance to waste it, but…”
He shrugged and sighed, as if a businessman who had no choice but to wipe off defective product from their sales.
“It’s a great inconvenience—it really was a good batch of stuff that they offed themselves over; it cost a small fortune that I’ll never see a return on—but they’re replaceable. Just like you are.”
Crystal stared at him, horrified.
I stared at him, neutrally. I didn’t want to bring on more pain tonight or in the future than I had to.
Rock didn’t seem to notice. Shrugging again, he gave her another condescending smile.
“As it were, if you care so much for the collective earnings that your lot brings in, I suppose you’d do well to work that much harder to fill their quota. Maybe get your feet involved with those ever-popular group jobs. In the meantime, however…”
And just like that, the maliciously evil Rock, the one who had alternated between callous shrugs and wicked grins, disappeared in favor of the hard, stoned face CEO of the Black Falcons.
He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out two envelopes. We each grabbed one, taking a great deal of caution not to accidentally brush Rock’s hand, and gazed inside.
I saw so many hundred dollar bills in there I about fainted. Is this…
What kind of fucking joke…
What are you setting us up for…
“There’s two-grand in there,” he informed us. “In each of those.”
He paused, once again oscillating his leer between us, to let that information seep in. I had absolutely zero illusions that this was in any way a summer bonus, a surprise gift, or anything other than money we would likely use to make Rock richer, but I still held out a faint glimmer of hope this money might, in some twisted way, make us better.
Of course, that was a small percentage of the tiniest fraction of my thought process. Far more likely, this was a setup and Crystal and I were set to wind up six feet under.
“Tomorrow night at nine-o’clock sharp, you will arrive at this address on the envelope wearing gowns and jewelry priced at absolutely no less than the contents of
those envelopes. If you do not arrive, if you arrive late, or if you arrive wearing anything that I feel is remotely less than the value of those envelopes, then I will do to you what I would have liked to have done to the bitches who should have been there in the first place.”
He squared himself, stretching his shoulders back and making a generally gorilla-like display with his tall, lanky frame. It was completely unnecessary, as we would have feared him if he was taking a shit on the toilet, but it foretold that we were about to get “the talk” if we dared to disobey him.
The first time I had heard “the talk” I wondered if death row inmates were as evil as this man.
Now? I could all but recite it in my head—not that I would ever dare to do so out loud.
“I will cut you in ways that will make you useless to your profession—useless, in fact, to any man—and I will burn you until none who ever knew you would recognize you. Simply put, I will hurt you as much as I can, and I will do so for a very, very long time until I have grown tired of hurting you. Then, and only then, will I kill you.”
I didn’t dare let myself think sarcastic thoughts, lest Rock that that as some kind of sign that I was thinking the thoughts I would be thinking. I didn’t trust myself to not wear my heart on my sleeve—my non-existent, whore-showcasing sleeve.
“If all of that is not enough to convince you not to take my words lightly, if you are so dense as to believe that that will not happen, then maybe you will listen to this. This will be the fate that befalls both of you,” he said, locking his gaze on Crystal for a long moment before glancing back at me.
The message was clear. “You care for each other? Prove it.”
“Just something to consider in case there’s any sincerity behind your claims of ‘worrying about the other girls.’”
Once more, he embraced a moment of silence between the tight triangle of our bodies, letting the unknowing din of the city hum around us. Then, smiling like an old friend, he reached out, patted our shoulders with the same stinging, condescending non-violence as he had with Crystal’s cheek.
“When you’re sucking and fucking tonight, I want you two to imagine you’re wearing all sorts of pretty-pretties—because, soon enough, you will be—and training yourselves not to get the mess on any of it. Because all those pretty-pretties—two-grand worth of gown and glitter on each of you—will be making repeat performances, and you’ll be disappointed if you think we’ll be paying to handle any mistakes. Well, we will be paying for mistakes, but you will be the one footing the bill. Do I make myself clear?”
“What’s the point in buying expensive clothes and jewelry if our purpose there in the long run is just to take it off or risk messing it up? Why not just let us make the rounds at this event dressed like we normally dress? At least that way all those ‘prospective’s will know what we’re there for.”
What. The. Fuck.
Why did you just do that, you idiot.
You want to get killed tonight?
I had no intentions of blurting out those words, but they had come out. Perhaps Rock had discovered a breaking point in me, at least a verbal one. Perhaps I did not understand myself at all—all this time, thinking I was being expressionless and quiet, when in reality a deep part of my mind—most notably the intelligent part, as dying as it was—could not handle the stupidity of Rock’s plan. The illogic of it all.
Well, logic didn’t save me from Rock’s hand tightening its grip into my shoulder, causing me to whimper in pain.
“Everyone knows a cheap gift when they see it,” Rock said, digging his fingertips further into the meat of my shoulder until my flinching escalated to an all-out cry, at which point Rock removed his hand, only to slap me to the ground.
“But that doesn’t mean, when you’re taking the present to a rich man’s home, that you don’t wrap it in pricey paper. Otherwise it looks out of place among all the expensive, fancy gifts.”
He spat at my feet like he had a bad taste in his mouth from just talking to me. I didn’t doubt the sincerity of what he did.
“If you want to present yourself as a cheap and tawdry trinket once you’re taken to whatever private room you’re dragged off to, then that’s your decision. If it works, I don’t give a shit if you talk to the clients for an hour. But until that moment, you’d better be able to convince everyone that you’re worth something beyond the concrete you two walk on. Got it?”
The two of us flinched but nodded.
For some stupid reason, the thought of apologizing came to mind, which was just stupid. To apologize now was all but a suicidal move. Rock not only hated talking, he hated weakness, and little seemed as weak as apologizing—it meant you admitted a mistake.
But by the strength of being on the ground and not being able to face him fully, I kept my mouth shut.
And then, just like that—as though he were eager to be as far from us as possible—he was gone.
9
Derek
After my breakdown in front of Roost—and, on top of that, all of the other Savage Saviors in the room—I gave myself off the rest of the day. Roost told me to sleep it off and not to touch a bottle of liquor or, as he said, “I’ll stick one of ‘em gins so far up yer butthole, ya be gettin’ drunk from yer asshole first.”
I hopped on my bike, praying for peace and serenity this time. I didn’t get it, of course—Maggie haunted me at the end of every road, waving at me. Haunted wasn’t the right word, but I wasn’t smart enough to think of the right word, to say nothing of my mental state.
I found myself surprised to be looking for that one girl at the street corner I’d seen before, but it was too early in the day. I would be surprised if it was even 4 p.m. yet, given that I’d left and we still had men at the front of the shop. It was far more likely that their shift wouldn’t start until the early evening.
At one point… as bizarre as it sounded, I swore I saw a man getting out of a black vehicle with blackened windows that looked like Rock. I went by on my bike far too quickly, and he was on a street I wasn’t driving down anyways, making it just as likely he was as much an illusion as…
I didn’t finish the thought. I wouldn’t dare put Maggie and that sociopath in the same thought, no matter how true it was.
But all the same, I couldn’t be sure. Still, the fact that it was a possibility almost got me to rev my bike, wheelie back around, and run his ass over with my bike. It would have almost certainly killed me in the process—if the crash didn’t, Rock’s henchmen with rifles would finish the job—but I’d go to the grave with my last life mission accomplished. I wouldn’t need to live for anything else, especially since my only “child”—the Savage Saviors—would have better leadership with Roost.
Alas, I was too hungover to do it. The notion of getting up was as likely as me getting up before 2 p.m. after a normal evening. I wanted to kill Rock, and some days I wanted to in such a primal state that I would have killed him naked and high on whatever drugs I could get a hold of, but being in a fucked up, depressed state actually worked in my favor that day. It made me more sober and aware that maybe I should take advantage of an actual opportunity instead of running headfirst into machine gun fire.
When I got home, without even thinking about it, I grabbed the bottle of gin, getting the cap off… and pausing just before I tipped the bottle. I sighed.
“Just this one day, Roost,” I said. “You fucking bastard.”
I put the bottle down, feeling the urge to drink some of it stronger. I tore myself away before I could make a mistake of any kind, heading for the bedroom.
It came as little surprise, given the lack of sleep in my body, that I fell asleep almost instantly.
What did come as a surprise, however, was that I woke up before the sunrise.
I checked my phone. It was 3:04 a.m. The sun would be up in a couple of hours, and some of the more productive members of society would be waking up now—those fuckin’ weirdos—but I was in an odd limbo of a state. I would have t
o stay awake much longer than normal tonight to get back on my normal schedule of falling asleep around 5 a.m. and waking up at 2 p.m., but, well, I did feel a hell of a lot better.
I didn’t know what to do, but what first came to mind was a thought I couldn’t believe.
Go see that girl. The one you saw.
For all the shit I had just given Roost about never seeing a hooker and wanting no part of one, I couldn’t help myself. She wasn’t a prostitute—she was way too pretty in the face and just looked way too… well, not like a hooker. Apparently, the morning haze also prevented me from thinking straight.
I headed to the bathroom, took a whizz, and poured myself a glass of water. Also strangely, the sleep had killed my desire to drink. Almost like Roost had a point.
It’s too bad he can’t also be God. Bringing back…
I shook my head and moved around the apartment in a haste, trying to get rid of the thoughts in my head before they ruined this unusually good morning.
Trying to build upon the good feelings that I’d developed up to that point, I threw on some jeans, leaving my shirt behind, and hurried downstairs to my old faithful, my chopper. At this early in the morning, and with as little of a shit as I gave, I didn’t worry about what anyone would say if they saw me shirtless. So long as it’s not the Falcons.
But then again, in this dark, they’re not gonna know.
I keyed the ignition, revved the girl to life, and hurried over to the corner where the girls were. I didn’t know what I would find—I didn’t even know what I would do when the gal would approach me—but I held out hope that…
I don’t know what the fuck I held out hope for. The people I loved died, the things I ran crashed, and the dreams I had got buried by me before someone else could do it for me.
I parked the bike in a secure location, one near some well-guarded Saviors territory, and saw the girl in the distance. She had her head down but wasn’t looking at her phone this time. She looked spooked out of her damn mind, as if someone had threatened to cut her for not giving her satisfying enough pussy.
Savage Mercy (Savage Saviors MC #1) Page 14