KICK

I paced the room while the butcher checked her over and then I stood ramrod straight behind him, ready to pound his fucking head in if he so much as looked at a blade while he opened her legs and examined her internally.

The butcher leaned back when he was done, stripping the gloves from his hand. He tried giving me the technical terms for what was wrong with her. I’d lost my cool and had almost pulled my piece on him to encourage the use of plain fucking English when Tank had stepped in front of me and said, “Doc, you’re gonna need to use simple words, so Kick here understands. He never made it outta high school.”

“She’s fine. Without an X-ray, I can’t determine whether she has multiple fractures or whether she’s just badly bruised. The point is you’re not taking her to a hospital, so we will likely never know. Treatment is the same for both: rest and a good doping up to the eyeballs should do it. Her second and third molars are all gone from the top and bottom of her mouth, and she has some minor vaginal and anal tears. I felt a substantial amount of scarring inside both orifices. Either she’s always liked to play extremely rough, or the past few weeks have been absolute hell on her.

“She needs rest, and a shit tonne of therapy, but I guess both of those will be in short supply while she’s held hostage. I’ll leave a little morphine for pain management, but I’ll need payment now.” He pulls a bottle from his bag and doles out four little blue pills into his palm, setting them down on the bedside table.

Jesus. “Don’t do it out of the kindness of your heart, Doc.”

He turns his weasel-like grin on me. It’s unsettling. “What heart?”

I head over to the wall safe and stand in front of it, sure to block what I’m doing from the others before I punch in the combination and pull out the standard five large for his consultation.

“By the way, my fee increased to seven last month.”

“Of course it did,” I mutter.

“Times are tough for everyone, Mr Kick.”

“Yeah, especially serial mutilators.”

He gives a lazy shrug of one shoulder. “It’s hard to find good help when the company you keep is with criminals and thieves.”

I shake my head. “Yeah, and I’m starin’ at the motherfuckin’ pirate king.”

“Arrrgh,” he says in a disdainful voice, and god help me, it takes everything I have not to riddle his brain with bullets. I glance at Tank who shakes his head, reading my thoughts as closely as if they were his own.

“Morphine is one hundred extra,” the Butcher states quickly, before I can close the safe.

“A hundred fucking bucks for four lousy blue pills? I could walk out on the street right now and hit up some dealer selling them for ten bucks a pop.”

“You’re certainly welcome to try that, but then your captive would be unattended, and I’m quite sure her trying to execute an escape plan would hinder any healing she might do unless otherwise suitably sedated.”

In the end, I paid the money, and the Butcher left seven thousand and five hundred dollars richer. I’d cleaned him out of the entire bottle of pills.

Now, I watch Indie sleep from the arm chair I pulled up beside the bed. She’s fitful; her lashes flutter against her cheeks and her mouth is turned down in a grimace as she tosses and turns.

“No,” she murmurs. “Stop.” She begs, tears stream down her cheeks, and I shift forward in my seat, mesmerised. She startles awake, and swipes at the tears staining her cheeks. Slowly her head turns towards me, picking me out easily from the shadows in the half-light created by the bathroom door that I left ajar. She stares me down and rolls her head against the pillow, my pillow, glaring now at the stained, watermarked ceiling.

“What do you dream about?”

“What do you think?” she whispers through a cracked, raspy voice.

A beat passes, and if I couldn’t see her face, see her eyes staring at the ceiling as her lashes bat away the tears, I might think she’d fallen asleep.

“The Priest—that’s what they called him—he is what I see. He had a handsome face, stereotypically good looking: light brown hair, blue eyes, and gleaming white teeth. He didn’t look like a priest; more like a fitness model, like he chewed steroids for breakfast. He had a giant Roman cross, tattooed on his back—” She shakes her head. Her eyes are on me, but her gaze is soft and unfocused. “No, not tattooed … it was branded into his skin, like a cattle brand. He liked to make me run my fingers over it before he’d rape me. Then he’d shove himself inside me, and he’d whisper, ‘I know your pain. Jesus knows your pain. But it’s time to atone for our sins’.”

“Christ.”

“The cop liked to film it. He liked everything they did on film. I never understood that.”

FUCK!

There was a video camera in that warehouse. The dentist had knocked it off the pedestal when he went down. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. If Prez finds out we left that tape behind, he’s gonna put us to ground.

We gotta go back.

I rise and stalk towards the door, but before I can walk through it, I remember Indie. I can’t take her out of the room. I can’t risk her running, or worse her skitzing out at the sight of the warehouse she was locked up in.

“Where are you going?” she whispers.

I lean forward, pushing my forehead into the door. “Out.”

Walking over to the nightstand, I pull the bottle of morphine from the drawer, shaking one out into my hand. She shakes her head, but I’m on her before she has a chance to move. I straddle her waist and endure the blows she lays on my face and torso.

“No,” she screams, bucking her hips beneath mine and turning her face into the pillow so I can’t gain access to her mouth. “No. Stop.”

It’s the easiest thing in the world to overpower her. I hate how that excites me. Hate how it makes me just like the men that took her, that the darkest part of me relishes it too. My cock is hard as fucking stone right now; it would be nothing to tear away the sheet between us and slide inside of her. Instead, I lean down, smothering her with my weight as I use two hands to pry her mouth open and pop the pill in. I clamp her jaw shut and hold it tight until she has no choice but to swallow.

She gags. Her eyes well with unshed tears, and the horror in them rouses more than just my dick. It awakens the animal within me, that predatory instinct that a better man would push down and ignore. I close my eyes and breathe in the scent of her: fear, sweat, soap. What I wouldn’t give to own her body the way her fear is owning her mind. Instead, I continue to hold her jaw closed until she’s forced to swallow, and I know the pill is gone.

I release her face and stare down into her hate-filled gaze. I have this insane urge to kiss her, to taste her lips, force my tongue down her throat. I move closer, letting my breath wash across her face, daring her to fight or head-butt me again, but her assault comes in a different form than I expect.

“I’m going to kill you,” she whispers, fury robbing the coolness from her words, betraying her little tough-girl act. “The second your back is turned I’m going to take that knife from your belt and drive it right through your kidney.”

“Looking forward to it, little spitfire,” I say, lifting my weight off of her and sliding off the bed. Her eyes are already drifting closed again. A doped up expression comes over her face, and I wonder whether she’s had a single day in the last three weeks where she hasn’t been drugged. I sit on the side of the bed and watch as she gently slides into sleep.

She looks so peaceful as the drugs sweep her under—no fitful dreams, just peace. I watch her a beat longer. Inside me, the beast rages to be freed, it claws and raves as flashes of me straddling her small body and smothering her with the palm of my hand clasped tightly over her mouth run riot through my mind. The images quickly turn worse as I see myself prying her legs apart and shoving my way between them, pumping in and out of her as my need builds until I can’t contain it any longer and my hot cum spurts inside her even hotter cunt.

I shake my head, grabbing my keys and wallet from the table. I deadbolt the door behind me and go in search of Tank. We have unfinished business, and if Prez finds out we left evidence that could pin the dentist’s death and Indie’s disappearance on any of us, we’re all as good as dead.

***

For the second time in as many days, Tank and I sit in the van outside the warehouse, waiting. We’ve been here an hour already, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone moving in or outside the building, but Indie said a cop was involved, and if they’re onto us then shit won’t just hit the fan, it’ll cover the motherfucking ceiling.

“Prez is gonna cut off our cocks and feed them to his pit bull,” I murmur, fiddling with the air vent and pushing my fingers up against the broken slats to warm my cold hands.

“See, now I don’t know whether you’re referring to his old lady or his actual dog?”

“I mean it, man. If he finds out we screwed this up so badly we are six-feet under before we get back to the clubhouse.”

“Hey, I didn’t screw this up. The dentist, the girl, the fucking evidence? That shit is all on your pussy-whipped shoulders.”

I shake my head and glare through the windshield at the building that looms up before us. I don’t know what the fuck we’re waiting for. There isn’t another goddamned soul to be seen.

“How’s she doing?” Tank asks.

“Indie?” I ask and shrug. “She was raped, tortured, and held in a warehouse for three weeks. How the fuck do you think she is?”

Tank shifts in the driver’s seat, staring me down with a smug expression.

“What?”

“You named the bitch.”

“Yeah, considering she’s a missing fucking person, for shit’s sake. I had to name the bitch.”

 “You could always shoot her.” Tank shrugs when I glare at him. “It’s true. If you’d let me put a bullet between her eyes, this little evidence thing wouldn’t have been a problem because you’d be thinking about what to do with the body instead of leaving incriminating shit behind.”

“Eat my dick, fuck-rag. You left that shit behind too.”

“Yeah, but I was busy dealing with the fucking dentist you shot over a bitch you didn’t even know.”

I change the subject. “What the fuck are you doing with Ivy?”

Tank laughs. “Aww, you’re really into this superhero complex, aren’t ya, brother?”

“Fuck you.”

“Nah, I don’t swing that way, but put that hot new bitch of yours between us and I might be up for a double tap.”

I let out an exasperated sigh, shifting in my seat. “This is bullshit. I’m going inside.”

Tank chuckles quietly as I open the door and slide out into the freezing cold night. We carefully cross the road—I don’t know why. There’s no one around to see us at all. When we reach the warehouse entrance in the alley, there’s nothing more to see than a lone plastic bag caught in a drain pipe and shaking with the wind. The door is still busted off its hinges, thanks to Tank’s handiwork, but when we shine our torches across the concrete floor, there’s nothing there—no chair, no blood stains, no video camera, nothing. It’s as though the past three weeks for Indie—for Kayla—didn’t exist.

“What the fuck?” Tank whispers in the darkness, and I know just by his tone that he knows I’m keeping something from him.

“We should go.”

“Start talkin’, brother.”

I shake my head, but even as I do, I know there’s no way out of this. Tank won’t hesitate to beat the shit outta me to get the info he needs. I may as well save myself a few fractured ribs. “Indie was the victim of a rape ring. The dentist wasn’t the only motherfucker needin’ a bullet to the brain. There was a cop, and a priest too.”

“Jesus Christ. You didn’t tell Prez about this?”

“No.”

“You gotta take it to the table, brother. If there’s a cop in on it, and they know we have her, we’re fucked.”

“Prez already wants her dead. I can’t give him that kind of leverage over her.”

“Why the fuck is this bitch so important to you?”

“I don’t know—”

“Bullshit.”

“Because I see something in her.”

“You saw something in Lauren, too, and look how well that shit worked out.”

I pinch the bridge of my nose and take a deep breath. I don’t know why he insists on reminding me of this shit. It’s not like I can forget that I’m the reason there wasn’t enough left of her to bury once the Angels were done with her.

“You gotta take this to the table.”

“I know—”

“You take it to the Prez, or I will,” he says. “I covered for your arse before, but that was a different club and a different time. If this shit brings down the Saints, I’m gonna fuckin’ put a bullet in that girl of yours. We clear, brother?”

“Yeah, we’re fucking clear.”

Tank walks out into the alley, leaving me standing alone in the empty warehouse. I stare down the darkness and feel the hatred, hurt, and betrayal in the room around me, and I can’t help but think this is exactly where I belong. Here, in this dark room of horrors. This feeling, this warehouse, this is my heart’s home, because the atmosphere in here is every bit as fucked up as the emptiness inside of me.