Page 65 of Savage

She smiles up at me, but it’s hardened and doesn’t touch her eyes. She’s not the girl I joked with on the couch yesterday, she’s not the broken woman I held in the shower, and she’s not even the sweet, satiated woman I lay in bed with this morning because revenge is sweet. Until it isn’t.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

INDIE

Istand in front of the sign that reads St Andrew’s Catholic Church. My stomach roils. My hands shake. It’s a little past 7:00 pm. It’s taken two days of waiting, of watching, and planning to get to this point. Biker puts his hand in mine. “It’s not too late to back out.”

“I know.”

“I take it that means you won’t.”

“No. I won’t.” I exhale, and I feel as if I can’t get enough oxygen into my lungs. “I may throw up all over my shoes, though.”

“Try not to. It’s evidence.”

“O–kay.” It frightens me how concerned he is with being invisible, though I guess when you spend your life killing, drugging and abducting people, that’s a given. My head swims a little at that thought. If he’d never left that tape behind, if he hadn’t needed me to find out who these men were, would he have let me go? Or would I still be locked in that room of his at the clubhouse? Would his brothers have killed me? Would he? “Let’s just get this over with.”

He squeezes my hand. My palm is clammy against his. We walk towards the doors, and I let him lead, mostly so my face is covered, but also because I don’t know if I can walk into a room housing that man.

The second I set foot in the church the walls close in on me. I feel the blackness, the horror, the shame, and the weight of what he did choking me. I can’t breathe. I wrench my arm from Kick’s, but he grabs me and shoves me into a pew at the back of the church.

The Priest seems completely unfazed. He continues with his sermon, and his voice presses against my skin like a thousand tiny needles. “It is because we are all sinners, that we must atone,” he says, and though it’s not said with the same intent or malice behind it as it was in that warehouse, I feel so much of what he did to me. My breath comes in raspy gulps, too fast, too much. I’m going to pass out and blow our cover. I’m going to ruin everything we’ve spent the last two days working toward. And I’m never going to have this chance again.

Biker leans closer. “You need to control yourself.”

I snap my head towards him, incredulous that he just said that to me. He takes my hand and squeezes it hard. “Remember why we’re here. Those things he did to you, to the other girls before you—all of that can end here. But you have to keep it together. He might not be able to hear you breathin’ like an emphysema patient, and he may not be able to see your knees knocking together, but that wig you’re wearing is shaking like a fucking leaf in a strong wind. So pull your shit together, and let’s put this bastard to ground.”

An elderly man about three rows ahead turns to shush us. Kick gives him an apologetic nod and straightens, yanking on his tie. If we weren’t here to kill a rapist I might be able to appreciate how incredible he looks, even if they are just basic dress clothes from Target. I’m wearing pants, a conservative button-up shirt, and heels, though I have no idea why I thought the heels were a good idea. I can barely walk as it is, much less try to balance on an extra three inches. Biker shaved his stubble for the occasion, and he looks young, so much younger than he does with it. He’s also incredibly beautiful. I mean, obviously, there was an attraction there, to begin with, but I never noticed before how gorgeous he is, even with the piercings, tattoos, and gauges in his ears. Looking at his face helps me ignore the scene around me; it helps me drown out the voice belonging to the man that tried to destroy me. Kick glances over. His gaze holds mine before turning back to the Priest.

I tear my gaze from biker and look at the Priest. He looks exactly the same, only when he had me locked in that room his eyes were black as the night outside, and now they’re almost jovial. The thing that surprises me most is how animated he is, how normal he seems in front of his congregation. And as I look around at the packed church, I see people of all ages and all walks of life who appear to love this sick, sadistic bastard. They know nothing of my suffering, of the suffering of the girls before me. I know Kick probably would have preferred I didn’t know that, but I heard everything his prez said.

I don’t know what he did to those tapes, or the pictures that I remembered them posing for—when I was out of my mind with grief and pain, they lined up, one after the other and posed with me like I was a fucking trophy, like a hunter would with a deer he’d shot or a large fish wriggling on a hook.

All of these people have no idea what their beloved pastor is capable of, and the worst part is they’ll never know, because exposing myself means exposing the murder I’m about to commit, and I’ll be damned if I spend any more time in captivity. I can’t let that happen. I won’t. So while what I’m about to do to the Priest is justice stripped down to its purest and rawest form, to the people sitting around us, this will be an atrocity. I almost feel bad for them that this charming, good-looking pastor has them so convinced he’s a person worth following.

I stare at him for a long time. He doesn’t look at me once throughout the service. I don’t know why, but a part of me wants them all to know. A part of me wants to stand up and call him out in front of his congregation when he begins talking about sinners again, and that line he used to whisper over and over in my ear as he raped me. I’m weightless. I stand, only to be pulled back down onto the church pew.

“Sit the fuck down, spitfire. You ruin this at the last minute, and you’ll hate yourself forever.”

He’s right. I hate that he’s right. I hate that he’s holding me back from exposing this sick bastard. I snatch my hand from his and remain in my seat, my head down, gaze averted. In my head I try to think of good memories from my past: summers at the beach house, fleeing the water as it swept up the sand after me. I think of my first kiss, the first time I got drunk at a high school party, receiving my acceptance letter to Sydney University, biker teaching me to fight, the power and pride I felt afterwards, Daniel inside me, his arms wrapped tight around my body as he tried to erase everything the Priest had done to me. Before long, though, the Priest’s voice cuts through those happy memories, and rattles around in my skull like my missing teeth in a jar. Rage rips through me from my head down to my toes.

The Priest finishes up his sermon, and a boy in robes carrying a processional cross leads him down the altar. I stare at the object, and I feel a sick sense of recollection. He raped me with it. A gasp leaves my mouth, and I cover it with my hands and suck in air, though I don’t feel it filling my lungs. I can’t do this. I can’t …

The sobs leave my mouth, creating some sort of wounded animal noise. I can feel the congregation’s eyes on me as they file out after the Priest, but I can do nothing to stop the sounds escaping my body. The fear and horror demands to be unleashed.

He didn’t even look at me as hepassed.

“Is she all right, dear?” an elderly lady stops at the end of the pew, resting a hand on Kick’s shoulder.

“She lost her mum today. Needed to feel closer to God.”

“Oh, I am so sorry for your loss,” the woman says, and she’s genuinely upset for me. In some ways, her sympathy hurts worse. I don’t know her. I’ve never seen this woman before in my life, but the fact that she stopped enough to care for a complete stranger guts me, and I fall apart completely. “Did she suffer long?”

“Yes,” I manage through my sobs. “She suffered … in the worst way imaginable.”

The woman doesn’t know I’m referring to myself and not my own mother, though I’m sure as much as my parents led me to believe I was an inconvenience, that there was some part of them that cared I was missing. I’d like to believe that, and they certainly painted a good picture of grieving parents in the media, but that was likely more for show than genuine concern for me.

The woman pats my hand, but I yank it away. I can’t have anyone touch me right now. “God bless,” she says, and I don’t know if she’s talking to Kick or to me because I can’t look at her anymore. My eyes are tightly closed, my fists clenched.

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