Chapter 30
Anna
I’d never been so afraid in all my life. The night the two men broke into my apartment will live in my head for the rest of my days. However short or long that may be.
When they’d grabbed me, I’d thought I was having a nightmare. When I saw the smaller one’s teeth coming to bite me, I knew I was. But this wasn’t the kind of nightmare you could wake from. It was the kind you had to endure every second of the day.
It wasn’t until I’d awoken from my unconscious stupor that I realized I recognized one of them.
They were bikers. The blond one, the President of Los Lobos, had been feuding with Ace the night Cat and I had first met the Night Stalkers.
Needless to say, I knew that connection wasn’t promising and that it was most likely the reason the two men had broken into my apartment last night.
I’m not sure how much time had passed since my abduction, but I’d startled awake to a smelly mattress in a pitch dark room.
The absence of light kept me just as fearful as my imprisonment.
Above me, I heard a lot of mechanical noises.
It sounded like some kind of workshop was toiling away up there.
Tools and heavy equipment were being moved around constantly, and no amount of shouting on my part would be able to cut through the raucous noises.
Not that I would have been so bold as to scream. The last thing I wanted to do was call those animals back down here. Wherever here was. All I knew was that whatever hellhole I was being squirreled away in must belong to Los Lobos.
The one positive thing about my captivity was that I wasn’t chained to a wall or radiator.
It was a low bar, but an important one. Instead, I was sitting on a hard mattress in the corner of a room.
There were no windows in this dark space, and I wasn’t even sure if there was a bathroom of any kind.
That was going to prove to be a problem soon.
I already had to pee, and I’d been holding it out of the fear and shock from what had happened to me over the last few hours.
Thinking of the smaller biker’s teeth coming for me played on a loop in my fear-addled brain.
He’d bitten me. That creep had really fucking bitten me!
Like some kind of rabid animal. I wondered what kind of freak had teeth filed to points so that they could attack women with them.
Was that some sort of kink I’d never heard about?
Must be. Men were always inventing new and bizarre ways to hurt women.
I guess filing your teeth or wearing prosthetics was just the newest fad.
My hand went to my neck, and I felt the beginning of a scab forming where the ugly bastard had bitten me before I’d passed out. I didn’t think I was the kind of girl to swoon when things got rough, but apparently I was learning all kinds of things about myself lately.
I let my fingernails scrape over the partially crusted patch on my neck again and was surprised that the wound wasn’t worse.
The way the man had attacked me, and the way I’d fought him, made me think I’d definitely have two gaping holes in my neck.
I guess that was something to be grateful for.
I didn’t want to die of a staph infection before I even had a chance to escape or be rescued.
Gathering my courage to get to my feet, as escape sounded much more likely than rescue at this point, I palmed the walls and circled the room to get an idea of the scope of my surroundings.
I got about halfway around the wall when I came upon the casing of a doorway.
My pulse accelerated when I located the door handle and it was unlocked.
Oh-so-quietly, I turned the handle and found my prison had an unfinished bathroom attached. The toilet was functional, so I swallowed my disappointment that escape wasn’t going to be that easy and quickly relieved my overburdened bladder.
There was a light switch on the wall, and I flicked it on to get a better picture of my surroundings.
The room I was in was empty of everything except that filthy mattress.
Getting a glimpse of it now, with obvious stains that made the navy material darker in some places, I think I was better off without the lights.
Locating the door on the far side of the room, I checked the handle and found it was locked, as expected.
With the lack of windows, I realized they must be keeping me in the basement of some kind of workshop.
Maybe an auto body shop or some kind of warehouse?
What I couldn’t understand was why I’d been taken in the first place?
Sure, Ace was feuding with Los Lobos, but I wasn’t his girlfriend.
I was a friend of a friend. A loose connection at best. So why go to all the trouble of kidnapping the girlfriend’s best friend? It seemed kind of odd.
I tried to remember everything that happened during the attack, but it was all kind of hazy.
Coming to terms with the filthy mattress, I sat on the bed with my back against the wall, closed my eyes, and searched my memory for the details of last night.
As traumatic as it was, I had to relive it to help me figure out the motivation behind my kidnapping.
My strongest memory, beyond the bite, was when the President of Los Lobos clapped a hand over my mouth.
Then there was arguing between him and the smaller man, the one that appeared to be his subordinate.
They each wanted to be the one to bite me, I recalled with a full body shudder.
They wanted to use me for something, but for what?
That’s when the big man’s words popped into my head. “She’s yours, Brother. But be careful and don’t fuck up my plans with Cat.”
The sudden returning memory flooded my senses, and I had to tamp down my disgust so that my stomach wouldn’t empty right there on the mattress.
It would seem the men who’d broken into my apartment wanted Cat but were using me to get to her, for some confusing reason.
That’s when it all began to make sense. The prospects watching Cat at the mall, and in her apartment at all times of the day and night.
She mustn’t have wanted to tell me that Ace was having her guarded to keep her safe from Los Lobos.
She probably didn’t want to worry me, so she fed me some weak story about not wanting to drive to the club alone.
When Los Lobos couldn’t get to her though, they must have decided to kidnap me instead.
And use me for what? Collateral? Bait? Oh God, this was such a twisted mess.
My friend was in terrible danger, and she probably didn’t even know it yet.
I’m not one for tears, but I couldn’t hold back the ones silently rolling down my cheeks.
Wanted or not, they weren’t about to stop any time soon.
The thought of poor Cat being in danger and not being able to warn her caused a pain so deep inside of me that I had to wrap my arms around my bent legs and draw them up tight to my chest to help soothe myself.
When the sound of a key in the lock outside my door interrupted my crying jag, my blood ran cold. Not knowing what I could do, as there wasn’t even a lamp I could use as a weapon in this vacant room, I inched myself to the farthest corner of the bed and prepared for the worst.
The dim light from the bathroom barely reached this far into the corner of my prison, so most of the space was still bathed in shadows. Despite that, I recognized him as soon as he opened the door and stood boldly upon the threshold.
“Hello, Mouse. I’ve returned, just like I promised I would.” The smaller man from last night spoke gruffly then.
I was too scared to speak. Though I referred to him as the smaller man, he was by no means small.
In fact, he was rather large and far too strong for my liking.
His face was grizzled and scarred, and the ugliness of his mind bled out into his twisted features making him appear more monster than man.
“Are you hiding from me, Mouse?” The man pressed, shutting the door behind him and tucking the key into his vest pocket.
As soon as that monster entered my space, the four walls of the room closed in all around me. I felt terrified and dizzy, the mixture a heady concoction that reminded me of being cruelly bitten all over again.
The man answered his own question when I was silent for too long. “You can’t hide from me, little one. I can see, hear, and smell you wherever you go.” To prove his disgusting point, he sniffed the air and smiled a devious grin. “Delicious. Just like I remembered.”
My voice was thin and reedy when I asked, “Why are you doing this? What the hell did I ever do to you or your club?”
The gnarly-faced man slithered closer. His movements were so smooth they actually appeared snake-like. Upon his chest I could see a patch that told me he was VP of his club, and his road name was, disturbingly, Graveyard.
“Do you know what you taste like to me, Mouse?” He asked, lost in his own thoughts and not giving a fuck about what I’d just asked him.
The bile in my stomach began to bubble anew and I worked hard to keep it down. “What is wrong with you? Why are you doing this to me?”
In a gesture which I could only assume was foreign to the hard man, Graveyard reached out and gently stroked my cheek. “You were the best. The best I’d ever tasted. So sweet. Like her. You kind of smell like her too. Jasmine at night.”
What the fuck was he rambling on about? I didn’t give a shit who this mystery woman was. I didn’t care about some long-lost love of his or the way she smelled or tasted. Why the fuck would I? I wasn’t this asshole’s therapist. I was his god damned captive!
“Please,” I pleaded, hoping that moment of tenderness could be further extended. “I need to get home. I take medicine. It’s very important that I have it or I could get sick.”
I was lying, of course. I was healthy as a horse.
I only hoped he’d buy my ruse so that he’d feel sorry for me.
I wasn’t sure what my made-up illness was yet, as I was kind of winging it here, but I wanted the man to think I was weak and frail.
When men thought you were weak, they treated you accordingly.
Hell, he might slip up and leave my door unlocked or leave me unattended long enough that I could come up with a plan of escape.
I was reaching for sure, but I needed to use every trick at my disposal if I wanted to get out of this cesspit alive and help Cat before they kidnapped her next.
Graveyard dropped his hand and gave me a dead stare. “You’re not sick. I would have tasted it in your blood. You’re lying to get my sympathy, but that’s a mistake. I don’t have any to give.”
I think that was the most honest thing a man had ever said to me.
The biker was a psychopath. All the earmarks were there.
The coldness behind the eyes, the lack of empathy, his cruelty and violence.
Heck, his club name alone summed it up nicely.
Graveyard? Yeah, that was clearly a nod toward his freaky pastime pursuits.
This man was wholly incapable of feeling anything but his own desires.
So, if I wanted to get out of here in one piece, I was going to have to tap into whatever those were.
Clearing my throat, I sat up a little straighter, “Who was she? This woman that I, um, … smell like?” I couldn’t bring myself to say the part about me tasting like her. It was just too icky a statement to repeat.
Graveyard continued to ignore me, like he was having a one-way conversation with his priest at confession. “I shouldn’t be here. He told me not to visit you,” he explained for some bizarre reason.
Damn. That wasn’t good. None of that sounded promising for my long-term survival. Playing along, I inquired, “Who told you that?”
“Kane. He said he has to be present when I visit you. But you’re not going to tell him about my visits, are you, Mouse?”
His tone was so calm and flat it actually unnerved me. “What would I tell him? We’re just talking, right?” Oh God, please tell me we were just talking and nothing more. I couldn’t handle another level of hell. I was barely holding my shit together as it was.
“I need to remember how you taste,” the broken man spoke, before sitting down on the side of my bed. “He can’t keep that from me. I’ve earned it. I need it. I can’t sleep without it.”
I could feel what he was going to do before he even moved a muscle. When he sprang into action, I screamed. As predicted, my voice was swallowed up by the noisy machines overhead.
The sting of the bite was even more painful than the first time he’d attacked me.
My skin parted under his teeth like a hot knife through butter.
Blood poured down my left shoulder and spilled onto the already stained mattress beneath me.
Somehow, in the blink of an eye, Graveyard had shifted my body so that I was underneath him with my neck craned to the side for better access.
Like last night, I only managed to struggle for a few seconds before my limbs grew limp, and I fell unconscious.
When I awoke, he repeated the cycle all over again. I lost count of how many times he bit me, then revived me. At some point, I heard him slip out the door.
The words, “My mother. You smell like my human mother,” were quietly whispered before he locked the door behind him and I passed out from sheer exhaustion and blood loss.