Page 5 of Savage

“End it, Kick.”

“Fuck you.”

Tank lifts his gun and aims it at her head. I move on autopilot. I don’t even think about what I’m doing. I just do. Like in all the important decisions I’ve made in life, it’s as if my brain flips a switch and someone else takes over. Someone who isn’t me, but cares as much for self-preservation as I do. Cares for life. Cares for others who can’t muster a shit of care for themselves. I pull on him, gun aimed and at the ready, my finger hovering over the trigger.

“You fucking pulling on a brother?” Tank demands with seething, narrowed eyes. His jaw ticks.

“We’re not killing her,” I say, though the words feel as if they’re being pulled from me, wrenched from some alien place in the pit of my gut. “Not today.”

“What the fuck’s gotten into you, man?” Tank says. He hasn’t lowered his gun yet, so I don’t lower mine either. I can feel the fury radiating off him. If another brother had pulled on Tank this way, he’d already be laid out on the floor, a bullet between the eyes, blood oozing out from the hole in his skull. I don’t know why he hasn’t put me down already like the rabid dog I am. A part of me wishes he’d quit fucking holding back.

“She’s not her.”

“I know,” I whisper. I don’t know why I’m fighting for this. Bitch is probably crazy—not that I’d blame her—and I’m the last person who should be attempting an act of decency. I’m not the hero in this story; I’m the motherfucking villain.

Tank shakes his head as he lowers his gun and tucks it into the waistband of his jeans. He may have decided not to shoot me today, but there’s venom in his tone when he says, “You pull a piece on a brother again, and I’ll put you to fuckin’ ground.”

I nod.

Tank crouches down and hefts the dentist’s body over his shoulder. He might be wrapped in plastic, but blood still pours out from the tarp and leaves a trail across the floor. Once Tank has cleared the room, I bend and pick up her tooth from the floor. I take a moment to roll it across my palm and then pocket it before I turn back to the woman in the chair and unbuckle her restraints. I lift her in a groom’s hold and carry her out into the sombre grey Sydney day. I climb into the back of the van, and Tank shoots me a questioning look from the driver’s seat.

“I wanna be close if she wakes up.”

He glares at me.

“Can’t have her busting open the doors and streaking around town like a madwoman.”

“If we’d shot her in the head, we wouldn’t need to worry,” he says without preamble and throws me an“I’m not fucking buying your bullshit excuses”glower over his shoulder. He shifts the van into reverse, forcing me to clench my body tight to keep from toppling onto my ripe-scented new plaything. I glance down at the woman in my arms. She’s sleeping soundly, probably for the first time in a long time. Her body is covered in bruises. Yellow, purple, blue-black, head to toe—there isn’t a single part of her thin frame that hasn’t seen some form of torture. It makes me wonder—if this is what she looks like on the outside, what the fuck kind of damage did he do to her insides?

I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.

This bitch needs a hospital or a mental institution. Not a fucking bikey.

I stare at the plastic-wrapped body of the dentist. I wish I’d made him suffer a little more. I wish I’d made him pay, not just for this woman in my arms, but for all of them. I wish it were me wrapped in that tarp, because the things I’ve done, the things I want to do make me no better than him. Just smarter, because I was the one holding the gun instead of a pair of fucking dental pliers.

CHAPTER THREE

KICK

“Killer’s bike’s here, but it don’t look like no one else is back yet,” Tank says as he punches the code into the gate. The loud metallic grinding against concrete alerts me to them swinging open, and oddly—even though I’m likely to get my balls handed to me in a brown paper bag for going against the Prez’s wishes—I feel a sense of relief.

Fat Boy, a huge black pit bull dumber than the shit that comes out its arse, barks as Tank eases the van into the compound.

“Where’s the fucking dirty bastard that touched my woman?” Raphe’s booming voice filters through the closed van doors.Fuck.They let him out of lock-up sooner than I’d thought they would. My relief is short-lived. “I’m gonna skin his dick and roast it on an open fire, and then feed it to him.”

Tank shoots out of the front seat and intercepts him before he can open the door and find his dentist dead as a doornail. “There was a complication, Brother.”

“What fucking complication?” The doors are yanked open and sunlight floods the van, blinding me momentarily. All I see are two massive black shadows looming over us.

“Who’s in the tarp?”

“That would be our friendly neighbourhood dentist,” Tank says.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Raphe shouts. “You boys had one fucking task—deliver that little cock-fuck to me, and I’d rip his head off. What the fuck happened?”

“Kick happened.” Tank mutters, folding his huge arms across his broad chest. “Went in there guns blazin’, just like Trigger, and punched a hole in the motherfucker’s head.”

“I oughtta punch a fuckin’ hole in his head.” Raphe pounds his fist against the roof of the van. It causes the girl in my arms to stir, and I really want to get her locked away in my room before Prez gets home and she starts skitzing out. “Who’s the bitch?”

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