Page 10

Ten

unforgivable

chapter-seperator

F orty minutes. That’s how long it takes to cross the Mississippi-Louisiana state line from the clubhouse on the outskirts of that backwater bayou Mayhem called home. Forty minutes to leave one hell for another.

A myriad of other terrible things could be accomplished in that same amount of time, two-thirds of an hour. I would give percentages but I was always better at fractions than those decimal points. Maybe if I had finished school. Maybe if I hadn’t been sold to monsters.

Maybe if so many things were different, I wouldn’t be on my way to try to mete out some long-overdue justice to some men who were long overdue to receive it. It felt like déjà vu, like I was running in circles chasing my tail. Now pointing my finger at more of the guilty. The monsters who made me what I am.

I couldn’t hurt Jace; I thought I could, but I was wrong. But whatever fate had in store for him, it was probably exactly what he’d earned. Some sins couldn’t be washed away.

His club’s—no, his daddy’s club, the one he’d been in charge of for over a decade—had been infiltrated by law enforcement right under his nose. There was only one reason why they would be doing that with a club as small as Mayhem. They were ragtag compared to other MCs, even their own founding charter to the north. The feds were still looking for all that money Jace and his friends stole all those years ago. If the president of the southernmost Mayhem charter hadn’t sobered up, maybe they would have found it too.

Jace was way more reckless back then in his youth. Before he learned how to hide his darkness better.

I broke our deal; I didn’t kiss him goodbye before kissing that shithole goodbye. Some goodbyes were better left unsaid.

He had a lot to be angry at me for: coming back, not wanting to fuck him or explain where I’d been all this time. Who could blame me for that though? Not even saying goodbye or fuck off, not informing him that the apparent source he went to for information inside the club was likely a federal agent, kidnapping his old lady because the bitch pissed me off.

She was in the trunk.

Hard-learned lessons were rarely forgotten. I’d probably let her out in one of these coastal towns before I got to Biloxi. Hitchhiking back to Louisiana should give her some time to contemplate where she fucked up. Where she made the mistake of threatening a monster.

I looked like I’d been in a fight, but I’d looked far worse than this before while nobody noticed I was dying by inches, fractions of six feet each day over the course of years. I took over the digging when my sadistic torturers were gone. It was familiar, and even the most fucked familiar was better than nothing at all, than uncertainty with no direction. Sometimes the devil you know is better than the one you don’t.

Returning to the men who hurt me so badly might be me at my most masochistic or my bravest. I wasn’t that for fifteen years, but it took a measure of bravery to face the music, accept the things that couldn’t be changed and finally change the one thing you could. To face the monsters who made you one.

I was going to hurt those motherfuckers. I was going to kill them or die trying.

Who was I kidding?

Jace said he would bleed out for me, before he ever hurt me again. Would I be a woman worthy of that type of devotion if I weren’t willing to do the same for all those victims? The ones not as lucky as I, who weren’t willing to do anything to survive, then escape. The ones who died screaming.

If I could prevent them from hurting anyone else, it would be worth it.

Jace was lucky to forget what happened, to have a clean past, even if it was a lie. I hoped he never remembered that night and what he did. I was glad his last memory of me wouldn’t be my walking away. Some memories should stay buried.

It was like reading the book of my fucked up life in reverse chronology as more and more horrific memories surfaced, flashing by faster than the mile markers. My brain was splitting open and all its secrets were spilling out ugly and revolting. I stepped on the accelerator so that I could arrive at my final destination before my final lost memory did and with it what little was left of my sanity.

It was like peeling a rotten banana getting deep inside the vast horror of my mind. How could a person suppress so much and not even realize they’d done it? Not to the extent I had done. Was it only all the drugs I’d taken and had forced into me to blame? Or was it the mind protecting itself from horrors too dark to face?

The asylum had indeed been closed down, but that was just a front. A place to keep bodies until they were too broken to be useful or profitable anymore. After all, it was the ideal scenario, the perfect set-up; if anyone talked who would believe them? They were a bunch of psychos, mentally incompetent women unable to care for themselves, needing strong psychiatric drugs and shock therapies. The kind of care they got from the Jackals filled that bill and broke it too. Broke us all.

Not everyone was a noted patient of the facility and they didn’t do the most heinous shit in the institution. There was a converted small warehouse/loft nearby that they turned into their ideal torture chambers and movie studio. Where they made their monsters.

That’s where I was and just laying eyes on it again had me opening the car door and emptying my stomach onto the shitty, broken and cracked asphalt. This street, the entire area had been long forgotten long before the new business tenants squatted here. A perfect place for nightmares to breed.

There wasn’t a cash pie in Biloxi that didn’t have the Dixie mafia’s fingers in it, more often than not it was their pie to begin with. But everyone wanted a slice of that kind of money. Blood money.

My scalp burned with a searing flash of pain as someone grabbed my long hair and yanked hard, jerking my neck back. This was starting off just peachy; there went my element of surprise, but if I’d been thinking clearly I would have parked further away. If I hadn’t been lost in memories of blood and screams.

If I had been clear-headed I would have done what I said and let Misty out up the road instead of remembering my failure as my throat choked on bile and gas station burrito.

Stupidity was unforgivable, especially my own.

His face was familiar; he might have had a name in his normal life, that is if he had one of those at all. They were all named sir to me. Each one a face from my nightmares.

He dragged me by the hair inside the building as he laughed at how stupid I was to come back. I had to agree with him, but he didn’t know why I was there. Didn’t know what kind of monster he’d helped create.

As he shoved me to my knees and spit in my face, I pulled the knife from its sheath on his hip. This was the one who liked to cut and carve; they called it blood play, but it wasn’t that at all. It went beyond the pale and most girls didn’t survive a session with him. I kept all the horror of it in my mind as I plunged the blade into his smirking smug face. The blade sliding home like a lover’s kiss.

He didn’t think I would do it, until I did. Until his blood painted my hands red.

Two others came in, alerted by his bellow of pain. It took a long time to die from a knife to the gut; it could take hours, many pain-filled hours. Just like they’d taught us.

“She wants to play?” one of them growled as he looked down at his bleeding accomplice. “Strip that cunt and string her up, we’ll oblige her, the stupid bitch.”

I sprinted across the room, evading them. I wanted to divide them so they couldn’t gang up on me. I knew from past experience they were unstoppable together. Their lessons carved into my flesh.

One finger was just a finger, but put five of them together and you have a fist, decidedly more powerful. I think I read that somewhere. I couldn’t say why the things that were popping into my head were doing so as I scrambled away from my would-be attacker. Maybe they were the final remnants of sanity. Going, going, gone.

I probably would have heard the sound if not for the ambient noise inside the large, cavernous room. But at that moment I was scrambling for a weapon that could hurt this motherfucker since the first one didn’t do shit. He was a tough son of a bitch to walk around with a scalpel sticking out of his foot. It bought me enough time to slide under some tables and get away as the other one approached the door we’d just come through moments earlier.

“We got company,” he hissed. “Grab that bitch and keep her quiet.”

Hands gripped my foot and yanked hard enough to make my hip pop in pain. I kicked with the other and clipped his chin. The familiar dance of predator and prey.

Oh yeah, that pissed him off.

I blinked in horror at what I saw at the door.

Jace.

Then blinked in it even further as I watched what he did to the men I planned on killing. Beating me to the punch. His violence beautiful and terrible to behold.

It was terrifying and thrilling.

Was I numb to the visual of buckets of blood after all the years?

Apparently, because what would disturb any other sane person didn’t affect me at all. They’d burned that part of me away long ago.

There were more clues to catch here than in a dog-eared mystery novel.

I should have noticed Jace’s mood, but I was so grateful he didn’t die. It should have scared me to death to be facing down a man who could do what he did to the sadistic assholes who made my life hell for years, but it didn’t. One monster recognizing another.

I couldn’t have been prepared in a million more years to be asked the question that came from his sultry lips. The very same ones that gave me my first kiss and let’s face it the only ones that ever really mattered at all in my heart. The lips that had promised to protect me before he destroyed me.

“Where the hell is my sister, Naomi?” he demanded with more anger than I ever saw in him before, although many others had, I’m sure. His darkness finally showing its true face.

Did they live to tell?

Would I?

A great dam burst inside me as all the breath left my body like a deflated balloon. But I didn’t fly around the room making inane noise; no, I went down hard.

I hit my knees as the memories of that night, the real memories, replaced the imagined ones that were easier to believe than the horrific truth. The truth I’d buried so deep even I couldn’t find it.

“I loved her so much!” I wailed. The grief was as fresh as that night and all the ones that followed before my mind helped me cope. Before it locked away the truth to keep me breathing.

It was just too much, what went down, the abuse and torture after. I shut it down, but just because you lock that door doesn’t mean nobody will ever have the key to open it again. Jace was my key; that’s why I’d been desperate to get away from him since that hallway at the clubhouse. He was the one thing that could break the walls I’d built.

I couldn’t feel it again, I couldn’t survive it again, I couldn’t breathe.

Jace grabbed my shirt and yanked me close, his nausea scant inches away, so close I could smell his breath and feel its heat. “Tell me goddammit, Naomi!” he roared.

The monster demanding answers from the monster he’d created. The circle complete at last.