INDIE

Black.

That’s all I see.

Darkness.

There’s no white light, no pearly gates, no redemption. Just blackness and spinning and shouting, screaming. And then there’s his voice above me, around me, behind me. I turn but can’t escape it. I scream; I cry out and fall to my knees, covering my ears with my hands pressed firmly against the soft cartilage.

There’s a sting in my arm and the world snaps into place like a rubber band from a slingshot.

I’m back in the warehouse. I’m not with the biker at all. I’m back in that warehouse, and the Dentist is pushing the needle through my vein like a hot knife through butter. I struggle. Scream. Fight. And then it’s the biker’s voice in my ear. “Shh, I have you, little spitfire.”

“No!” I scream. I sob, but all I feel as I slip back under are his arms banding around me, holding me down. Holding me captive.

“Same shit, different day,” I mutter, but I don’t know if the words come out right or if I just think I said them. I don’t know anything anymore except that I want to die. With every fibre of my being, with everything I am, I know that much is true.

I just want to die, but he won’t let me.

***

I wake to a cool, dimly lit room, looking much the way it was before he drugged me with the morphine, which makes me wonder if it was all a dream. I guess the fact that it didn’t work makes it a nightmare, now, doesn’t it?

His long body is folded in the chair. I squint into the darkness, expecting to find him asleep but though his face and posture are relaxed, his eyes are not. They study me too keenly. I close my eyes and shift, wincing when my hand sears with pain from the cannula. My eyes fly open, and my gaze narrows in on the needle in my hand. Panic seizes my chest. I follow the line of plastic tubing to the IV bag hanging by the bed, and instantly I begin trying to free the apparatus from my skin.

“It’s just fluids,” he says, leaning forward in his seat. The blanket falls away from his body, revealing a heavily tattooed naked torso. His arms are decorated with pictures of skulls and mechanical parts; his chest, too. It’s painted with old-school style tats: anchors, pin-up girls … I squint at the image decorating the right side of his abdomen. The lighting is dim, and I could be seeing things on account of the drugs I’ve had coursing through my system, but she looks just like a 1950s, Victoria’s Secret version of me. Weird.

The biker’s blond hair falls over those hard blue eyes. He looks every bit as frightening as he did when he held me underneath the shower yesterday. “Doc says you’re severely dehydrated. Been back twice to change that thing over.”

Twice? How long have I been out? Days? A week?

My tongue and teeth are furry, and despite the residual tang of drugs and vomit in my mouth, my stomach growls. I want a shower. I want to scrub away every trace of their hands on my skin, but then I remember the biker touching me, sliding his calloused fingers against my arse, over my clit. Heat claws at my neck and cheeks, and I see flashes of his beautiful and terrible face twisted into rage as I tried to fight him, the smirk that played on his lips as I aimed his gun at him, the tight band of his arms around me as he cooed in my ear before the doctor knocked me out. The sound of my sobs accompanies the memories. It’s a soundtrack I’ve become very familiar with in the last few weeks. That and the piercing sound of my screams.

The Priest was fond of the screaming. I knew it, and so I would clamp my mouth shut against the pain. I tried not to give him the satisfaction of hearing my agony made vocal, but the more I resisted, the more he pushed. The more he punished. The other two liked to watch his sessions as if they were taking notes, learning from his depravity.

“You thought the Dentist was fucked up? Baby, you haven’t seen anything until you’ve lived inside my fantasies for a day.” The biker’s words play on repeat, twisting my gut with fear. Despite the aching in my body, instinct urges me to move, to fight—to run. But what’s the point? He’d trap me at every turn, and I’d wind up a little more bruised and beaten up than I am already. And what would I run to? I can’t outrun the last three weeks of my life, and the other two animals that did this to me are still out there. They’ll be watching my family, and they’ll come for me. Maybe not right away, but eventually, and I would rather spend an eternity in purgatory than fall victim to those men again.

“You should have let me die,” I croak. My throat is scratchy as hell; it hurts just sucking in breath. I guess downing a half bottle of pills and throwing them back up again will do that to you. I’m surprised to find my mouth doesn’t feel as bruised, and my body—while certainly stiff from misuse—doesn’t ache as much.

“Why are you so keen to check out?” he whispers. His voice puts my teeth on edge.

“I traded three monsters for one with a prettier face, and a heart blacker than any of the rapists I’ve spent the last couple of weeks with. I didn’t try to kill myself for kicks.”

“What happened to you?”

“What happened to you?” I counter, narrowing my gaze as I study his face.

“You like playing games, darlin’? Is that it?”

“No,” I say quickly. Too quickly. A flash of the scars burned into the Priest’s back jolts through my mind and sears the inside of my lids. I gasp, remembering his thick, greedy hands and the deep baritone that used to ask me repeatedly, “if I like to play games” and “if I liked what I’d become”, “if I enjoyed being a whore”.

My throat tightens, and my body tenses with the memory. “No. I don’t like to play games.”

“What do you remember about the others?” he asks, as he pulls a Subway bag from the coffee table beside him. My stomach growls loudly, and I watch on with interest as he unwraps one of the largest subs I’ve ever seen. I can’t remember the last time I ate. Thinking back, it’s possibly been more than five days. They fed me periodically in that room, mostly liquids, protein shakes, to keep up my strength so I wouldn’t pass out while they raped me. Repeatedly. One after the other.

The biker picks up one half of the sub and opens his mouth wide, I’m reminded of a snake unhinging its jaw to devour its prey. He catches me staring and lowers the sandwich. “You hungry?”

I nod slowly, wary of asking him for anything, but the sandwich smells so good and let’s be honest here, right now I’d likely sell my grandmother’s corpse to a necrophiliac for a single bite of food.

“Tell me what you know, and I’ll let you have the entire thing.”

“Forget it,” I croak. I’m not giving him shit until I know for certain he isn’t just keeping me alive to get that tape back. Even if that is the best smelling sandwich on the planet.

He shrugs. “Suit yourself.”

The bastard eats the fucking sandwich. My stomach protests the misuse and I’m forced to watch as he devours every last bite and then licks his long, tattooed fingers clean. I glower at him, searing him with my hatred, though like the others, he remains unaffected. I hate feeling this way. Like a poor, little misguided mouse, staring down a mountain lion. I hate that these arseholes have taken the control, my strength, my will to fight—my right to choose—from me.

 He opens a small paper bag and produces a cookie. I can smell that too from here, and there’s some half-witted response dancing on the tip of my tongue about how hogging the cookies to yourself is a form of torture worse than any other, but then I remember the Dentist’s chair. The sheer delight on the Dentist’s face when he’d pry my mouth open and rip out my teeth, losing himself in the small part of me he’d just extracted. And the Priest’s face, hovering over me. His sweat-soaked hair brushing my forehead as he pounded into my body, again and again, brutalising me. The horrifying grin as he chained me to the St. Andrew's Cross, stroking his cock through the thick fabric of his pants as he schooled the others in how to whip me properly.

And though certainly not innocent, at least the Cop doled out a form of punishment and cruelty that was easy to understand. He liked to pretend I was a bad girl who needed to be chastised and taught a lesson by the big man of the law. He was sick, just as sick as the others, but the depravity of the Priest was the thing that frightened me the most. Every day there was a new fresh hell that awaited me, and each day the punishment was so much worse than the day before.

The biker, though scary as all fucking hell, didn’t really compare to those men. Maybe it was the fact that he’d saved me, not once but several times, or maybe I’d just lost my ever-loving mind, but whatever the case, I knew I was damn well better off with him than in the hands of those animals. Even if he had warned me he was worse, there’s no way he could know that because he’d never met the Priest. 

 “Talk, Indie. Tell me what you know, and I’ll make sure you’re comfortable.”

“That’s not my name,” I snap. I hate that he called me that. I’m not Indie. Indie is a girl born to hippie parents, a girl that leaves home with a couple of hundred bucks and a plane ticket to India, a girl who lives in the fucking Himalayas for a year with no technology. I’m Kayla Kennedy, born to conservative parents, the girl who aced every test she ever took, the girl who was smart enough to run from danger while all the other bimbos flirted with it. The girl who was kidnapped two blocks from her house, the girl who was raped and tortured for weeks. The girl who was taken by bikers and saved by one who was potentially just as fucked up as the monsters he took her from.

The biker lifts his brow, waiting me out, it seems; though I have no idea what it is he’s waiting for. I scrub a bruised hand impatiently over my face. The Morphine has made me itchy. He bites into the cookie, one of those delicious triple chocolate ones that taste exactly the same no matter which Subway store you get them from, and I won’t lie, I know they kill baby orangutans to harvest the palm oil for those cookies, but they’re freaking delicious.

“I’m not going to break just because you dangle a cookie in front of my face,” I spit.

The biker sets the cookie down on the paper bag and stands. He wipes the grease from his hands on the back of his worn jeans as he walks to the dresser and rummages through the open top drawer. Every muscle in my body tenses as I wait to see what his next move will be. I don’t bother to try and run. What would be the point? He can’t do anything to me that hasn’t been done before.

The biker moves towards me, and despite my prior thoughts of self-fortification, I shrink back into the pillows when he circles the bed and parks himself down on the mattress. He lunges. I shrink away, but he grabs my wrist and forces it above my head. The white-hot bolt of pain shooting down my side causes me to still, which makes it easier for him to slap one loop of a pair of cuffs around my wrist and the other to the wrought-iron bed rail.

I stare at the shiny silver restraints for a beat, and then fear seizes my chest, my heart. I thrash wildly, despite the pain in my ribs. I scream and kick, but my legs are tangled in the covers. I can’t do this again. I can’t. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Relax, little spitfire,” he says, rising from the mattress. My gaze follows him as he stalks around the bed and slips his leather cut on over a black hoodie. There’s a winged skull insignia stitched onto the back of the vest and patches above and below that read Savage Saints and Sydney. When he turns around to face me, I notice the small patch over his heart: KICK. I store all this information away for later and focus on his face as he says, “I’m not going to rape you. When you submit to me, it will be because you need to.”

“That won’t ever happen,” I say through clenched teeth.

His eyes blaze with smug certainty and his mouth tips up in the corners. “Yes, it will. I can help you, Indie.”

His statement makes me want to laugh, but tears well in my eyes again. A knot forms in my throat as I try to hold them at bay.

He can help? How can he possibly help me? How can he possibly fix this?

“You keep saying that and yet I’m still here, handcuffed to a fucking bed, held captive by another sick, twisted scumbag.”

He smirks. Fucking smug bastard. One day he will let his guard down, and I’ll take his gun and shoot him in the head, and then I’ll walk out of here, and disappear for good. I may not be able to go home to my family, but I will be free.

“The club wants your captors dead just as much as you do. Seems they have a little something that could incriminate Tank and me in your disappearance, and the Dentist’s death.”

I frown, not understanding what he means by that. The MC didn’t have anything to do with my abduction, so how ... “The tape. The Dentist was recording when you shot him. You left the tape behind?” I ask incredulously, because that is possibly the dumbest thing any criminal has ever done.

He sets his jaw and glowers at me. “Yes, I left the fucking tape behind. I might not have done that if you hadn’t resisted my help.”

“You kidnapped me,” I shout. “Excuse the fuck out of me for not helping you execute your plan to abduct me.”

“I didn’t have to fucking save you, I did it because—”

“Let me guess, you did it out of the goodness of your heart?” I scoff. “You should have let the big guy shoot me if you were too gutless to do it yourself.”

“Bitch, you need to fuckin’ stop talking,” he snaps, stalking over to the door, his shoulders tight with anger and his face twisted into a sneer.

“Where are you going?”

“Out. I got business.”

“You can’t leave me here like this. What if I choke? Or I need to pee?”

“You’ll hold it ’til I get back. And if you choke, then I guess you’re checking into the Pearly Gates early.” He pulls a cigarette from the packet and lights up. Thumbing his keys from the table, he shoves them and his wallet in the front pocket of his jeans. I don’t realise his gun is sitting on the coffee table until he picks it up and holsters it in the back of his jeans. “You should think about what I said, Indie. I can’t erase what they did to you, but with a little cooperation on your part, I sure as shit can take down those motherfuckers.”

“And then what? You’re just going to let me go? Your club is going to let me walk out of here knowing what I know?”

“Pretty much,” he agrees as he ashes his cigarette on the carpet. I glance briefly around the room. It’s disgusting. The biker’s a genuine slob. There’s left over food wrappers and empty bottles of beer strewn everywhere. The room reeks of smoke and mildew. I remember coming to, covered in vomit, the biker hovering over me, and I’m both relieved and mortified that someone had cleaned me up while I was comatose—obviously it wasn’t this guy because he is a complete pig.

“You keep your mouth shut, and we don’t have a problem. We can put the bad guys to ground and you can live out your life however the fuck you want to, and you never see any of us again.”

“And if I talk?”

He smiles. “If you talk, you see me again. And I promise you, my face will be the last thing you see.” Biker winks and slips from the room. The key turns in the lock. He deadbolts the door from the outside.

I roar in frustration, yanking on the hand that’s cuffed to the bed, though I know it won’t do me any good. My left arm is pinned in position with the IV bag. I feel the needle beneath my skin and I long to rip it out, but for some reason, I trusted him when he said it was just fluids. I don’t know why, and it’s a feeling that puts me completely at odds with the chills he gives me the other ninety-nine-point-nine per cent of the time. I know I can’t let my guard down with him, but do I trust him enough to let him help me when it comes to finding and destroying the Priest and the Cop as badly as they destroyed me?

I don’t know.

There’s only one thing I’m sure about now: they have to pay. With or without the biker’s help, I will hunt down both men, and I will grin like the devil as the light leaves their eyes.