Page 32 of Kick

“SHUT UP!” Prez bellows, and the room falls into silence. “Kid’s got somethin’ to say. Let’s hear it, lover boy.”

“She’s mine. I’m laying claim to her. Want her for my old lady.”

Prez chuckles. It’s a dark and foreboding sound. “You can’t take a fucking club whore as your old lady, kid.”

“She’s not a club whore, and you know it.”

“Well, if it walks like a club whore, and talks like a club whore …”

“She’s Sons’ property. Slayer’s gonna tear this club apart when he finds her.”

“Exactly; she’s Sons’ property, and she serves a purpose you can’t even comprehend.” He turns back to my father. “Take her to fuckin’ town, Juke. Show the boy how it’s done.”

Ijolt awake. My heart pounds in my chest, and my body is slick with sweat from yet another nightmare. I’m still in the biker’s room, one arm is still cuffed to the bed, and the other is still hooked up to the IV that prevents it from falling forward. I attempt to move within my restraints, but what the hell is the fucking point? My limbs prickle with pins and needles. My arse cheeks are numb, my bladder full to bursting. I blink my tired eyes and adjust to the dimness that is my hell without windows. At least in the warehouse I knew what time of day it was. Three days could have passed here and I wouldn’t know if it was midnight or morning.

I know my cookie’s still there, though. I can smell it.

If the biker ever comes back it’s gonna be a tough decision between peeing and stuffing my face with enough trans-fats to kill off a village full of African children. I sag against my restraints. If the biker ever comes back, feeding my face is probably the least of my worries. I already know I need his help to find those bastards that raped and maimed me, both physically and psychologically, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to trust him. How can I, when he’s every bit as dangerous as them? I know it’s not an act. He wasn’t playing good cop, bad cop with me—I know a monster when I see one. I’ve spent enough time with monsters to know, to feel the wrongness that seeps from every single pore on his body. What I don’t understand is my reaction to him. He may have saved me, but for what purpose? He can play nice guy now and pretend that we need each other to bring those bastards down, and maybe we do need each other for that, but why did he take me in the first place if it wasn’t just to use me the way they did? To wring every last bit of humiliation and pain and dread from my psyche?

Jesus. All these questions are giving me a headache. Or maybe that’s just the copious amount of drugs I’ve had pumping through my system for days. No, not days, weeks apparently.

I wonder what my parents are doing now. Are they trying to find me? Are they out walking the streets, seeing my face in every brunette they pass? Did they have any leads? Would they have ever found me if the biker hadn’t found me first?

A rustling has my adrenaline spiking again. I dart my gaze all around the room but despite how my vision has adjusted to the lack of windows, I can’t see a damn thing but junk, empty trays of take-out, and unwashed coffee cups. Every freaking surface is covered with filth. Biker’s a pig, but it’s not just that. Apart from a couple of pieces of beaten up furniture and the plasma on the wall that’s probably stolen, there’s nothing here to tell me anything about the man who has me chained to his bed.

The rustling is closer now, and the scurry of tiny feet along hard surfaces has icy fingers creeping down my spine. My eyes roam the room, falling on the table where the biker left the wadded up paper from his sub. The paper moves, falling off the edge of the table onto the floor, revealing a tiny grey mouse with his nose in the air. His little mouth twitches and then he practically pounces on the cookie.

My cookie.

I lurch forward, but my restraints hold me back. I buck and shout, “That’s my fucking cookie!”

The mouse scurries down the table leg and under the armchair the biker had been sleeping in hours earlier, but it isn’t the mouse moving around that catches my eye now—it’s the biker. I was so worked up over that fucking cookie that I didn’t hear or see him come in. But he moves through the room like the angel of death, all darkness and unleashed fury. He pulls the knife from his belt, crouches down and then spears the mouse on the end of the blade.

He holds it up. Blood and innards stain its short grey fur. A single droplet slides down the mouse’s tail, and falls onto the carpet. Biker carries it across the room and slams his foot down on the pedal of the stainless steel bin, jiggling the knife over the rubbish until the tiny body slides off the blade and lands in the garbage. Something about his brutality, about his ruthlessness and complete disregard for life enrages me.

“You didn’t have to kill it,” I shout.

He glares at me. “You’d rather me let it eat your cookie?”

“You’re disgusting,” I hiss.

Rounding the tiny bench he stands in front of the sink, his back to me. The giant winged skull on his cut mocks me. Savage Saints MC, the patch reads. Savage is right. Biker runs the water and rinses off the blade, pulling a tea towel that’s seen better days from a rail above the sink and wiping the knife clean. He slides the blade back in its sheath on his belt and turns to face me. “I can promise you that was a much quicker, and more humane death than setting traps.”

“Maybe if you cleaned up this shitty room, you wouldn’t have mice you had to kill.”

“Gotta sink my blade into something, Little Spitfire.” He smiles as he sits down in the armchair opposite me and leans his elbows on his knees. “Can’t afford to get rusty with a priest and a cop to kill.”

He’s baiting me. I know it, and yet I can’t help but rise to it. “What do you get out of helping me? Besides your tape back?”

“So you’re going to tell us what you know?”

“If I do this, we take down those fuckers, and I walk away. You let me walk away.”

He nods his acquiescence. His dark blue eyes glint with hunger; he’s like a wolf with a prize that he knows is within his reach. I don’t trust him, but what choice do I have? I tell them what I know, or I keep my mouth shut and die anyway. I’m dead if the Priest finds me, so what do I have left to lose?

“Where do we start?”

“You tell me what you know, and we go from there.”

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