Page 9

Nine

hollow

chapter-seperator

T he keys that were pitched at my face gave me a scratch across my cheek that could have mirrored the scar I gave Jace years ago. Blood for blood, mark for mark.

He hadn’t returned, but I was given clothes and cash like he promised. They both fit like they were someone else’s. My guess would be the cunt shooting more than keys in my face, her eyes furious daggers of hate. Another woman he’d broken trying to get to me.

Misty. Odds were she wouldn’t be the last woman scorned by Jason French, just a tally mark on the scoreboard. If she hadn’t realized that yet, then that was her dumbass problem. Some women never learn that monsters don’t love—they consume.

Maybe Jace truly had changed, because she appeared unharmed visibly, just very pissed off. She must like the feeling, to still be here, trying to get rid of a woman who was already gone a long time ago. The ghost he’d created when he sold me to the devil.

I knew how she felt, but Jace never cheated on me with another girl; it was always the drugs. Her reward for nothing other than being here when I wasn’t was an apparently clean and sober Jace who had grown something that resembled a conscience. I wondered if he apologized for tying her up and making her watch him fuck me in the most sacred of outlaw biker places. If she knew what other sins he was capable of.

The location of that debauchery was as telling as the circumstances of the act itself.

“I know who you are,” she declared as she stepped inside the room like she didn’t want the conversation to be overheard by any other souls. “If you come back here again, I will kill you. Jace is mine.”

She was so wrong, about so many things. Jace didn’t belong to anyone; he wasn’t the type of person who could be owned. I guessed that’s why he was so appealing. Misty was afraid, cornered dogs growl and snap at the one who backs them into that position. But she had no idea what real fear was. What real monsters looked like.

I looked at her. She was pretty enough; she tried too hard to look tough. That was something you could paint on and style yourself into being.

“That’s the most traumatic experience a person can have,” I said quietly. “More traumatic than a severed limb or being the one forced to cut things off of someone else. In the abstract, killing is simple; people throw that phrase around like it doesn’t happen everyday, just because if they’re lucky they’ll never feel it for themselves. They will never have to do it, kill someone, never be forced to choose between their own life and another’s. Words are easier, it’s the deeds that are hard.” Each word carried the weight of memories I’d rather forget.

Misty blinked in shock and took a step back as I approached. It would have been comforting to see she had some self-preservation instinct, if I cared at all. If I hadn’t already learned what real monsters looked like.

She needn’t worry; I was damn sure leaving and not looking back. There was no such thing as justice, not for anyone. Only survival and revenge.

The clubhouse appeared vacant except for the talking coming from the church room. The fool in me was going to make good on the bargain Jace and I had struck on the conditions of my leaving, the goodbye kiss. But I should have just fucking left. Some doors should stay closed.

Through the gap in the double doors, I viewed two shadows, one very large moving around inside the room. I couldn’t actually see the owners; I wished I couldn’t have heard them as well. Too late now. Some truths can’t be unheard.

“You’re wrong, your facts are dead wrong, that’s impossible,” Jace’s voice shook with emotion I could feel through the wood panel doors.

The sound of feet shuffled. “I’m not,” the deep voice responded. “Naomi Weston up until a couple years ago was a patient at the Jackson A. Lee mental asylum in Mississippi. You remember the one the feds busted and shut down for its involvement in a human trafficking ring led by the fucking Dixie mafia! If you’re saying she ain’t talking and isn’t acting like herself, that would be my best guess as to why. If she wasn’t a fucking psycho before she went in there, she is now. You don’t want to know the kind of shit they were doing to the girls they ran through there.”

“That’s not fucking possible!” Jace roared. Hands beat down onto the hard surface of the table, causing whatever was on it to jump and clatter. The sound echoed like gunshots in my skull.

“The feds found snuff films and the type of porn you and I would never fucking watch, man. The kind that would make anyone but the cruelest sadist fucking vomit.”

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” Jace bellowed. Footsteps, almost like stomping, sounded in the room, something crashed. Each word bringing back flashes of memories I’d tried to bury.

“What do you want to do?” the other man asked.

“Bitch! Again with the fucking questions!” Jace snarled. “You ask more than an interrogator! Get the fuck out of my club, you big nasty son of a bitch! Get the fuck out! NOW!”

It felt like my skull would split open, as a flood of memories poisoned what little sanity my brain possessed. I hunched over and vomited in the gravel and dirt parking lot that ran alongside the clubhouse. Then I was back at the running again. Running from the truth, from the memories, from what they’d made me become.

Only one car fit the type of key I was given as I hauled ass over to it. Horrific flashes assaulted me mentally as I struggled to get a grip, but it felt like I was slipping too far down to ever climb back up again. Back into that darkness they’d created.

“Bitch! You think you’re scary?” Misty screamed. “You can come here and fuck my man and then get away without me kicking your ass!”

A blow to my head knocked me face first into the car door. Then the gravel and sharp little rocks cut into my back as I tried to regain a focus on the expanding twilight of the sky as hands clenched around my throat. The weight of a pissed off female body pressed me into the dirt. Teased out hair didn’t move much and she grimaced in exertion and smiled in triumph at me.

But I had been choked enough to understand something she didn’t. She was doing it all wrong. I didn’t reach for the hands choking me; instead, I gouged at her eyes, grabbed that over-hairsprayed hair and pulled down. My teeth sunk into the flesh of her nose in an attempt to remove it from her face. Years of survival had taught me there were no rules in fighting monsters.

Her blind panic afforded me the upper hand and the freedom I longed for as we continued to fight in the dirt. She wasn’t as tough as she thought she was. It was like I told her before, words and deeds. Make sure you can follow through on your threats. Some lessons are learned the hard way.

Unconscious and bleeding, she didn’t look nearly as dumb as she was in reality. Her blood, on my hands smeared, refusing to fade. Good. I didn’t deserve clean hands anyway.

“Come with me, Naomi,” that gruff baritone belonging to the one they called Griz sounded behind me. “I can help you, get you the help you need. I know what you’ve been through, I saw some of the tapes. I can help you, but you have to come with me.”

I turned to look at the behemoth of a man who embodied his road name. It suited him, but not his eyes. Eyes are the windows to the soul; they tell you everything the person they belong to won’t. His held secrets I recognized too well.

Griz’s were kind and decent, too decent to belong to an outlaw biker the likes of which would hang out with Jace French. The kind of eyes that didn’t belong in this world of monsters.

He saw what they did to me? What those men made me do?

Flashes erupted behind my eyes—the chaos of the federal raid, gunfire shredding the dark, men screaming, girls crying. I remembered pulling two of them by their frail wrists, dragging them over broken bodies and shattered glass, shoving them toward freedom even as my own legs trembled. I waited to run. I had to. I needed more than freedom. I needed sobriety, needed the strength to face it all without the haze, without the crutch. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have survived long enough for it to matter.

He wanted to save me?

He was fifteen years too late! The girl who needed saving was already dead.

If he saw those things, he was either one of those men—or a fucking cop. And Griz didn’t have the stink of a monster on him. His eyes weren’t dead inside like theirs. No, his guilt was too clean, too sharp, like it came from watching bad things, not doing them. I’d never forget a single one of their faces—or their cocks. He wasn’t one of them.

But he saw them.

It wasn’t the type of material you could just stumble upon, like some cursed VHS at a garage sale. No, the feds confiscated all of it during the raid—while I escaped. But I didn’t need tapes to remember. Each memory was burned into my brain like a brand.

I went with the hunch in my gut, the one that kept me alive for years. “Why don’t you arrest me, officer?” I challenged. “I just assaulted this woman.” The words tasted like poison on my tongue.

His mouth worked, a sigh emitted harshly. “It was self-defense. I saw her attack you.”

He didn’t deny my accusation. Another man with secrets.

“Was it?” I asked as I stood up slowly. “If you really saw those tapes, then you know what I’m capable of doing to another human being. That makes this situation decidedly less fair, doesn’t it? Don’t answer that, a better question is this: Why aren’t you running yet?” My voice carried the edge of the monster they’d created.

“Don’t threaten me, Miss Weston,” he warned. “I’m trying to help you. I’m trying to give you a way out of this.”

“You should be more concerned with your own longevity, officer… Um, what is your real name?” I asked, terribly curious if he would tell me the truth. If he’d admit to being another wolf in sheep’s clothing.

He turned as if to leave me there; I couldn’t help myself. To ask more questions from the supposed biker who had so many of his own, according to Jace. You know who asks a lot of questions? Cops.

“Hey, which is stronger?” I called after him. “Your desire to be a do-gooder and take down the big bad bikers or your deathwish?” I flirted my lashes at him as I waited for some action from him. Playing the broken doll they’d made me into.

“You’re a psycho,” he admonished, looking at me like it was the first time he ever saw me. Maybe it was; I couldn’t get the chance to ask him before he sped off on his huge Harley fatboy.

I didn’t need to see the probable undercover agent leaving to know I should split too. Griz headed west, but I was heading east…to Mississippi to finish some unfinished business with some evil men who made these outlaw bikers look like boy scouts.

Time to show them what kind of monster they’d created.