Page 25 of Kick

“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 in order 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 readSavage SaintsandSydney. 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.”

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