Chapter 40
Chapter Forty
Drew
“Drew,” he shouted. “Drew!”
My body was floating. I was weightless, traveling on a road I had never been down before. The sound of his voice made me want to smile, but it was too much like hard work for my sleepy muscles. So I smiled in my mind instead, hoping he could see it somehow.
“Drew!” Pete’s voice grew louder, more desperate for my attention.
Not even my lips would part.
“You need to wake up. You need to fucking wake up and deal with your shit. You’ve never quit before now, so don’t fucking quit on her or I swear to God, I will come back there and I will kill you myself.”
The anger in his voice hit me the same time a hand curled around my jaw.
For a moment, I thought I saw a flash of light, but the twist of my mouth caused so much pain, I sunk back onto the road again, choosing to enjoy the lack of gravity over the agony that I somehow knew was waiting for me on the other side.
Then it all happened quickly. She screamed. Pete roared. I gasped for air in a world that suddenly felt like it held no oxygen.
“Ay—”
It wasn’t even a word, a croak, or a grumble.
I tried to push past the grit and the agony that lined my throat.
The points of pain didn’t register all at once.
That would have been too fucking easy. Instead, they started to poke at me in different places.
Lightly at first, teasing me into thinking I had enough strength to even attempt to lift my head.
They were soon followed by a jolt of electricity down my spine, before the flames that were burning one side of my face seemed to multiply.
Random pinpricks of torture started to spread across my skin like some flesh-eating disease that just grew and grew and fucking grew until all that was left was misery.
I almost gave into it. I almost let my eyes close and my chin drop to my chest again, but when her painful whimper floated across to me one more time, I forced my eyes open and tried to find a way to see through the crippling, blinding light.
Ayda. Ayda. My Ayda. Where is she?
I was blinking and squinting forever into nothing but white and yellow. Each flash of color that tried to disturb it had my head rolling from side to side in an attempt to escape the intensity.
“Drew,” she tried to say through an obvious sob.
Fire burned up my arms and metal chains cut into my wrists as I leaned farther forward in some feeble fucking attempt to get closer to the sound of her.
My feet slid as the low roar of hatred began to bubble away in the pit of my stomach. As I stretched my mouth to try and speak, a wave of water was thrown over my face, followed by a heavy-handed slap across my burning cheek, sending my head snapping back to the side.
Blood pooled in one corner of my mouth and I hung there limply until I could gather it up and spit it out, the effort proving too much as it dripped from my lips. One small cough made my body tense, and the damage to my ribs soon became obvious as I curled in on myself and winced.
“There he is,” a voice sang out beside me. “Our little fighter has returned to the ring once more.”
As soon as Cortez spoke, my eyes closed again.
I was fucked.
He walked full circle around me, the noise his boots created against the floor sounding like a small atomic bomb going off in my mind with every slow, calculated step he took.
“Look at me, Mr. Tucker,” Cortez said calmly.
I kept my pose, eyes down, body hanging, letting all the pain fall forward as small droplets of my own blood fell at his feet.
“I said look at me!”
Fuck you. I would have spat if I could have. I would have said it if I had known she wasn’t close by. But instead, I glanced up to the side through narrowed eyes and met his smug little face.
He reached out to grab me, pulling me up in his grip and forcing my body to fall back as the weight of the chains swayed me to and fro in his hands. I was like a fucking puppet to him and this was his finest show.
“So, she is your weakness,” he said in a whisper, pulling my face impossibly closer to his.
“I thought you weren’t human enough to ever fall into that trap, Tucker.
All those fights you won, all those games you played, all those people you killed without thought or feeling or fear, yet here we are, the two of us surrounded by this weird energy again.
Just like the good old days when we stepped into the ring and only one man could survive—the man who was willing to lose the most.”
I tried to register what he was saying, but the side of my head that had taken the hit was drowning him out as the buzz of the aftershocks started to ring around in my mind, causing me to blink slowly. As if the world wasn’t spinning enough.
Cortez’s fingers squeezed me tighter until the small smirk on his face turned into a toothy grin, and the gold trophy in his mouth shone out like some kind of sick, twisted joke. One day, I was going to hang that on my wall, along with the fucker’s balls, whether that was in this life or the next.
He stepped back, releasing me from his grip with a shove, forcing my body into a back and forth swinging motion again.
As I hunched over, it gave me time to pull some much needed oxygen into my lungs.
No matter how much pain slashed through all my organs, I sucked that shit in as carefully as I could while my eyes roamed the floor.
“Where—?” I choked on my own word, swallowing as bile rose in my throat. I cleared it as quickly and as roughly as I could before trying again. “Where… is… she?”
“I’m fine,” Ayda said from somewhere in the room, followed by the sound of a slap and a grunted whimper that she was obviously trying, and failing, to hide.
Fine. I remembered that word. I knew what it meant and I was grateful for it in that moment. It meant she was anything but fine and it forced me to dig deep and pull some magic from somewhere dark inside.
Stretching until my feet found some kind of half-assed balance on the tips of their toes, my face set to stone as I used all my strength to ignore the torture going on throughout my body.
I glanced up enough to see the other people in the room, and when their blurred outlines came into view, I knew where she was, and I hated it with every fiber of my fucking soul.
“Cortez,” I ground out.
His boots skimmed over the rubble as he pushed both hands into his pockets and came to me again.
“Did I give you permission to speak?”
“What…” I inhaled sharply, my head rolling forward as I tensed my jaw and glared at him. “What do you want?”
“What do I want? You’re asking me what I want?
” Cortez rocked back on his heels, the heavy shrug of his shoulders only serving to remind me of the weight his punches could carry.
“What do I want? Hmm. Let me think. I want a lot of things, Drew. I want a life filled with motorcycles and women. I want a life filled with riches and gold. I want good fucking sex, served up from the finest pussy around. I want peace in my home and I want safety for my children.” He stopped to take a step closer, the tone of his voice becoming as serious as the new look on his face.
“I want safety for my club. I want revenge for the ones who have fallen. I want my enemies dead, the same way you do. I want enough of their blood to spill so that I can bathe in it for weeks. I want to rip those apart who have tried to rip me apart. I want to watch them cry out in pain and beg for mercy. I want them to see I hold no mercy in my heart at all. I want them to realize that they played with the devil and the devil fought back, and he took no prisoners. He showed nothing but rage when he ripped out the hearts of those that even dared to breathe in his direction.”
The muscles in my face twitched as my body swayed back and forth, but I never looked away from him. I never broke his stare.
“I want to win, and I will win,” he whispered. “But first…” Stepping to the side, Cortez swept an arm out and shouted to his men. “First, I want to play. Isn’t that right, boys?”
The cheers of The Emps filled the room, and it was only when I heard the different tones and the different accents that I began to realize just how fucked we were. There was no hope of getting out alive. They were never going to set me free as long as they had me as their torture toy.
I allowed myself to look over his shoulder and down at the figure behind him.
When Ayda’s face came into focus and the fear cried out to me, I became numb.
For a second, it was just the two of us, each one kept away from the other in their captor’s grip, but we were together and we were there, and we were going to look at each other until we were forced to look away, because right then, we both knew what was happening, and neither one of us could be certain we would ever have that chance to be us again.
“Bring out the girl,” Cortez commanded.
Just like that, our connection was broken and I was forced to look into the shadows, until another female figure stepped out into the dim, murky light.
The swollen eyes of the woman from the forest glared back at me with both fear and anger shining outwards. She looked at me with uncertainty, the memories of that night washing over her face and the images of her dead boyfriend forcing her to shake her head as she tried to stay calm.
She was present in body, but not in mind. The girl was back on the battlefield again.
Only she was the one with the tools in her hand and the wolves at her back, while all I was left to do was stare at her like she was a ghost.
A ghost I should have killed when I’d had the chance.
As we stood there staring at each other, the real war began.
It was time to play the game. Ghosts versus demons.
Savages versus the weak and the woeful. Two wrongs fighting to be right while death hovered over us with a smirk on his face and a one-way ticket to Hell in his hand.
He was watching and waiting with baited breath as each one of us stood silently and prepared ourselves for that inevitable, eternal fire.
Our souls were damned. Now it was only a question of time.