Chapter 30
CHAPTER THIRTY
V elina…
Chainsaw gave us a ride back to Saint’s, and Saint had to direct him. It was a reminder of how Saint really didn’t let anyone fully into his life, let alone his space, and I didn’t know how, with how… adversarial our beginnings, I had made the cut, but I was grateful.
When we got in, we took a hot shower together, kissed and fooled around, but I had to tap out and confess I was still sore from the last round we’d had together just the day before yesterday. He stopped, just like that. Pulled me close and kissed my forehead and touched me until I whimpered and moaned, and then he slowed down with even that.
He was a soothing presence that made my mind go blissfully silent. When I was like this with him, everything was alright. I felt safe, protected, and loved. It was a wholly new and unique experience for me. One that I craved and wished I could hold on to for as long as possible.
We fell asleep watching a horror flick, and it was nice – but all too soon, my phone was going off with its alarm, and I was going to be late for work if I didn’t hurry .
I was already on thin ice, so I hauled ass to get ready. Saint gave me a ride in his truck – even though it was dangerous as all get out to potentially be seen.
We risked it, and I managed to get through the day, even though Carver was being a total asshole, blowing up my phone and still bitching about how I’d “ditched” him the night before. Which, yes, I had, but Louie was sick – so fuck him.
I sparred with him a while, back and forth, texting between rooms, but eventually it just became this vicious cycle. Louie and I were tired of it, so we just stopped responding.
When I got back to my motel at the end of the long day, I was unnerved enough that I requested to change rooms for safety. They had no problem and moved me right away. The girl at the desk sympathetic.
I told Saint what I was doing via text, and all he asked was if he needed to take care of it. I told him no, not yet. I didn’t feel like my work was done, and he simply came back with an okay .
I moved my stuff to a decent room around the corner. A little more decent than the one that I’d just vacated, which honestly wasn’t saying much.
I showered, settled in, and with a sigh of relief, turned on the television to the nightly news. I pulled my book off the nightstand, but I didn’t open it, not yet.
I woke to the blaring music of my ringtone and the glow of the bedside lamp and television. I didn’t even remember falling asleep. I answered the phone when I saw it was Singer, and she sniffled on the other end of the line and warbled out, “Louie?”
“Hey, yeah, it’s me. What’s wrong?” I asked.
“He hit me, and I don’t know what to do,” she said mournfully. I sat up more fully.
“Okay, where are you at?” I asked gently. “I’ll come help.”
“I’m at home,” she said.
“Okay, can you text me the address?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said and sobbed.
“Okay, do that, I’m going to get dressed, and I’ll be right over. Is he still there?”
“No, he took off,” she answered.
“Okay, okay, I’m on my way. Just hang on,” I said.
“Okay,” she said.
“I’m going to hang up now.”
“Okay.”
I immediately texted Saint with the news and Singer’s address. I knew he was likely to be asleep, but he messaged me back to be careful, and that he would be keeping an eye on me on the tracker app.
I texted back.
Don’t you ever sleep?
When you’re not with me, and I can’t get you off my mind? No.
Oh.
I pushed the thoughts and feelings those words evoked to the side in my panic to get to Singer. I was worried about her. I pulled up on a crowded street in an older, rundown neighborhood in some ward. I didn’t know them all yet. It could have been closer to the Ninth, but I couldn’t be sure. I just didn’t know my way around that intimately yet.
It took me a while to find parking up the way, and I practically ran down the cracked and tree-root-lifted sidewalk to the door marked with her number. I knocked swiftly. She opened up, and my heart broke for her.
“Oh, honey,” I said quietly. “Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.”
She hugged me and wept into my shoulder. I couldn’t help but feel my heart dropping to pieces for her. Her one eye was swollen shut, and she had a cut above it through her eyebrow. Hell, the whole one side of her face was swollen and raw, and I had to imagine he had her down on the floor as he’d pounded his fist into the side of her face mercilessly.
Her tiny little apartment’s living space was a mess of scattered items and broken things, from the coffee table to knickknacks, books from her small bookshelf scattered from where she’d been knocked into it.
“Come on into the kitchen, baby, and let me have a better look. Do you have any first aid stuff?”
“Under the bathroom sink,” she said and sniffed.
“Okay, come on.” I shut the front door to her apartment behind me and let her lean on me as we carefully picked our way through the carnage to her little kitchenette table. I pulled out a chair for her, lowered her into it, and said, “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”
I went in search of her bathroom and found it in the hallway. Under the sink, I found some useful things. A first aid kit, hydrogen peroxide, antiseptic, and the like. The first aid kit looked like it had never been used except for maybe a few Band-Aids, but still, she had a couple of boxes of those, and that was a good supplement.
I’d seen women take beatings the likes of hers before, and I had to wonder if it wasn’t best to get her to a doctor or hospital for imaging. She could have some facial bone fractures, and those were honestly nothing to play with.
I went back out to the kitchen, where she sat in her cream satin nightgown and teal satin robe with cherry blossoms and cranes printed on it. I pulled a chair around to sit across from her.
“This looks bad,” I said, tsking as I gently tucked some of her wild blonde mane behind her ear to get a better look at the damage to her face.
“Yeah?” she sniffed.
“You definitely won’t be working for a while, but I’m more afraid there might be fractures under here. I really think that we should get you in for some X-rays.”
“ No ,” she said sharply. “No doctors. A doctor would call the cops, and you don’t call the cops on these guys. I’m not gonna rat. I don’t want to die.” She burst into tears, and I sighed.
I hugged her and soothed her as best I could and finally said, “Let’s not worry about it unless the pain gets too bad or there are changes to your vision. Right now, let’s just focus on getting you cleaned and bandaged up, huh?”
“Okay,” she said weakly. So I did just that, carefully cleaning off the worst of the blood and swabbing the cuts with antiseptic and bandaging them up.
“What happened?” I asked her evenly when she’d finally calmed down, half afraid I would get her worked up all over again when I didn’t want to.
She sniffed and said, “He wanted me to take a hit of MOLL-E before we got busy, you know? I said no, and he got pissed off. Started bitching about how I always had to be such a drag and how I had no sense of adventure or whatever. I told him no, that I did, I just didn’t want to risk my sobriety. I just didn’t want to do any drugs, and he got mad.” Her voice broke. “He hit me. Said no dumb bitch stripper was gonna talk back to him, and he-he…”
“Did he rape you?” I asked quietly, and her broken sobbing was all the answer that I needed. I took a deep breath and hugged her, rubbing over her back and just being a shoulder that she could cry on.
“It’s not so bad,” she said soggily a few minutes later. “I’ve had worse.” She sniffed, and I understood the need to compartmentalize things like that. To minimize them in order to just deal with them in any way that could make the horrors small enough to fit in the boxes and vaults in the darkened recesses of your mind to forget them.
Still, her attempt at rationalizing this just made things exponentially more horrifying for me as her witness.
“He’ll never do this again,” I promised, and she let out a broken and bitter laugh.
“You can’t promise that, Louie. You can’t.”
“I can ,” I said. “What’s more, you’re going to help me.”
“I told you, I’m not going to the cops,” she said. I shook my head.
“No cops. They’re fucking useless around here, anyway,” I said. “I’m going to trust you with something,” I said, making the decision. “Listen carefully…”
I told her.
All of it.
About Louie, my brother, and the Voodoo Bastards. About who I really was and what I was doing, and most importantly why I was doing it.
“You’re crazy,” she said in a horrified whisper, her one blue eye wide and showing so much white.
I nodded.
“So I’ve been told,” I agreed.
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked, a fresh track of tears leaking down her cheeks.
“Because you’ve worked way too hard to get where you are to stay with someone who’s gonna treat you like this,” I said.
“And they don’t?” she asked incredulously.
I stared her in the eyes, my face as solemn as I could make it, and didn’t say a word. I just shook my head slowly and with conviction.
Her face crumpled in confusion.
“If I get them to help you get away from here, all it will cost you is information,” I said.
“I don’t wanna start over again,” she said, and her expression grew stricken. I felt monumentally guilty about putting this on her, but...
“Please help me help you,” I begged. “You’re not trapped, I promise. I know it feels that way right now, but I promise , I’m trying to help you. When I said he will never do this shit to you again, I meant it – but I need your help, too.”
“How?” she asked. “How can you expect me to do this, any of this?”
“Let’s get you in a shower and changed out of these bloody clothes,” I said.
She looked down at herself and said, “Damn, this was my favorite set. It made me feel pretty.”
“Don’t fret,” I said. “I can get the blood out. I’m trusting you, so please, please, please . I’m going to need you to trust me .”
She sniffed, nodded, and said, “O-o-okay.”
I got her into her shower and stood at her bathroom sink, blotting the blood out of her pajamas, pouring hydrogen peroxide on them, and letting the stains foam and foam, blotting, and repeating, until barely a whisper of discoloration remained.
We got Singer into a fresh set of clean clothes following the shower – a pair of leggings and an oversized shirt. Something comfortable and covering for now.
I helped her into bed, tucked her in, and said, “You don’t have to make any big decisions right now, but soon, okay? Let me get this place cleaned up. You rest right now. Try to get a little sleep on it.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
I swallowed hard.
“I’m going to call my man – my real man – and work something out. Don’t you worry,” I said, and vaguely I worried. I worried that Saint was going to be fucking pissed at me for letting the cat out of the bag, but I really wanted to help Singer out. At the same time, I knew she could help us out.
I was looking at a monumental shortcut here – she already knew so much about all of them. Their movements, their hiding places, all of it. It was really just about tapping that fine feminine rage every woman harbored within herself and turning it loose into the ether.
I thought I could get there, but it was iffy. She was scared, like really scared, and I understood that I was too. I was going out on a major limb here, but I was hoping that we could help each other. I really wanted to get her out. Get her somewhere where she could keep moving forward, up, and out – find the life she wanted and leave all this stupid shit behind.
I didn’t know how to connect the dots, but I was hoping like hell that Saint would .
As soon as she was resting and I was alone, standing in the wreckage of her apartment, I made the call… hoping against hope that all the pieces would fit.