“Get up, lover boy.” The harsh voice abused by smoking too many cigarettes pierces through my dream of a girl with green eyes.
I peer up to see Elvis, who looks like he’s already high on something despite it only being god knows what time of the morning. I look past him to one of his cronies standing by the door. The guy is built like the broad side of a barn. Any ideas that I had of making a break for it immediately disappear. Besides, where exactly would I go? Back to Aimee? No, I can’t be near her. Not for now at least.
“What are you, deaf?” Elvis spits out. “Get up or am I going to have to get Spike to make you?”
The massive guy that looks like an ex WWF wrestler doesn’t speak, but the name Spike is curiously fitting. Especially when I notice he has a sprawling tattoo of a spike on his forearm.
I don’t say anything. I don’t have anything to say, and Elvis is the last person that I want to speak to. Well, maybe not quite the last. That honor belongs to Ryan, but Elvis is way down on the list. I swing my feet out of bed and grab the T-shirt that I’d discarded the night before.
I look around for my jeans and notice Elvis hasn’t taken his eyes off me.
“See something you like?” I ask, unable to help myself. I had always thought Aimee was the one with the “brain to mouth” filter problem, but maybe it was just this little idiot that brought the sarcasm out of me.
“What’d you say to me?” Elvis squares his shoulders and his right hand goes straight to his waistband where I know he’s holding a knife.
I can feel my body tensing up as the fight or flight adrenaline starts rushing through my body. I take a deep breath and do the smart thing. I break eye contact and shrug. “Nothing.” It’s more of a grunt than a word, but it seems to satisfy Elvis that he’s gotten the better of me. I pull my jeans on slowly, taking my time, proving a point. I know it’s immature, but I can’t help it. I want the Angels to know that I’m not just going to dance to their tune. I’m still me, Jake Summers. I still have an identity; I’m not just “theirs.”
“That’s what I thought.” The satisfaction in Elvis’s voice makes me want to wipe off the smile that I know has spread across his face. “You ready to go? Or you need to do your hair?” Elvis snorts at his own joke and I feel the hackles on the back of my neck rise.
“Let’s go,” I grunt, wanting to keep my interaction with this guy to a minimum.
“Ladies first.” Elvis laughs and I’m pretty sure that I even see Spike crack a smile.
I don’t trust myself to say anything, so I keep my mouth shut. Stepping out into the pale morning sun, it takes a little while for my eyes to adjust after leaving the dark box I’ve been in for the past few hours. I try not to think about how this time yesterday, I was lying with Aimee next to me in bed. I was burying my nose in her dark hair and waiting for the moment her incredible green eyes would open and I would see her first smile of the day. I try not to think about how missing her is a physical pain. I try not to think about her at all. But Elvis has other plans.
“Must’ve really cut you up, your woman screwing around on you,” he sighs as he leads me around the Bleeding Angels complex.
I ignore Elvis’s words and instead force myself to concentrate on where we’re going. Seeing it in the light of day makes you appreciate just how massive their base is. Their bar, Wheels, seems to be at the center of the complex with any number of outbuildings spiraling out from there. I figure I’m well on my way to being tatted and then patched. I know that there’ll be an initiation—there always is when you’re patched, I know that much. But what if they want me to hurt someone? I push the thought to the back of my head. The Angels have had so much heat on them since the shit show with the army truck, they’ll want to keep a low profile, I reason to myself.
But Elvis is clearly enjoying pushing my buttons way too much to let my silence stop him. “They’re all whores, man. You can’t trust any of them.” His bitterness makes me wonder how many times he’s been burned. But I don’t care enough to ask. We’re not friends and we never will be.
“Aimee isn’t a whore.” I manage to get the words out through gritted teeth. I know that I should probably just have kept quiet. Elvis will exploit anything that he can.
“You hear that, Spike?” Elvis laughs sarcastically. “His girl fucks around on him, sucks Ryan’s cock, but she’s not a whore! Let me guess, she’s just real friendly?”
Spike makes a strangled noise that I guess is as close to a laugh as the big man is going to get.
“Watch yourself, Elvis. Best not talk about things you don’t know anything about.” My voice is low but there’s no mistaking the threat in it. I may not have figured out yet how I feel about Aimee and what I think about what she’s done, but I’ll be damned if I let a piece of crap like Elvis talk about her like that.
Before I know what’s happened, Elvis has rounded on me and swung at the side of my head. I duck, but not fast enough to avoid his fist completely. He knocks me on the chin. The force of the blow throws me off balance and I fall to the floor, eating dirt. Now I’m mad, but I’m also outnumbered. Spike, probably feeling left out, decides now would be a good time to weigh in and he draws his heavy-booted foot back and, before I can move out of the way, literally kicks me when I’m down.
His boot goes into my stomach and it feels like my insides have been beaten with a baseball bat. The wind is completely knocked out of me and I fight for breath, taking greedy gulps of air as I’m face down in the dirt.
“You don’t get to be the big man anymore, Summers.” Elvis’s face is only inches away from mine. “We own you now. You’re an Angel and you’re at the bottom of the ladder. You’re not even patched yet.” I can feel the spittle landing on my cheek as Elvis gets more and more carried away, his anger mixed with whatever today’s drug of choice is. “So you better learn some manners, son. You get me?”
He doesn’t wait for an answer and I don’t think I’d even be able to give one yet. My stomach feels like it’s on fire and the pain is mixed with the anger that’s boiling up inside of me, getting ready to explode. I refuse to let them get the better of me. I won’t let them believe, even for a second, that they’ve won even the smallest of victories. I drag myself up from the floor and draw myself up to my full height, dusting myself off and doing my best to act like this is just another day, like I’m used to having the crap beaten out of me and I don’t care.
“I get you.” My words come out husky as I shake off the shooting pain in my abdomen. “Now can we get the fuck on with whatever it is that we’re doing?”
Elvis and I lock gazes and I think he may be about to decide to teach me another lesson, but for the first time, Spike speaks.
“Let’s go. Scar’s waiting.” His words sound like they’ve come from the bottom of a well and Elvis is clearly as surprised as I am that this big man has spoken.
Spike doesn’t wait for a response; he just trudges off in the direction we’d been heading in before they’d decided to play football with my stomach. Elvis jerks his head after the big man, indicating that I should walk between them. If he was worried about me making a run for it, he really didn’t need to be concerned—it was all I could do just to keep walking at the moment.