Chapter 23
Leena
Breathe. In and out. In. Out.
Breath. It seems like the most mundane thing in the world. Each of us take it for granted every single day, the ability to wake up, to take another breath, to keep themselves alive.
I listen to my sister’s soft inhales and gentle exhales. Somehow, she’s found a semblance of peace in our misery, or maybe it’s exhaustion that’s finally won out. Either way, she’s managed to lean in just enough to the wall to find escape.
I don’t know if I’m jealous or not.
I want to escape. I want to be far, far away from here. I want to run and never stop, but that would mean that I could never go back. That I’d be tearing out my heart in a mess of blood and gory agony and leaving it in the past.
There’s never going to be a happy ending for me.
Ever.
I might be nineteen, I might be na?ve and innocent of most things and how the world works, but I do know one thing, and that’s that Wraith was it for me.
Wraith.
A man I was forced to ruin and break apart so very viciously with my words.
I close my eyes against the pain, wishing I could reach up and pinch the bridge of my nose, but my hands are bound at the wrists with thick, rough lengths of rope that chafe unmercifully whenever I move even an inch. The ones at my ankles are no better.
He took me wearing a pair of old cotton gym shorts and a tank top. I hadn’t even changed out of my sleepwear.
I was in the kitchen. Baking. I wasn’t a very good cook, and I sucked even worse at baking, but I did know how to make banana bread.
I’d wanted to make something for Wraith, not that I was going to turn into a trad wife, but after he opened his heart to me I wanted to give him a piece of home.
Something comforting. But instead, I’d been forced to destroy him.
Lulled by Steph’s deep, even breaths, I close my own eyes.
I see him. Our captor. A man who strolled boldly into my own house and put a gun to my temple before I even knew he was there. His voice, so dark and cold, was almost more terrifying than the cold metal pressed against my skull, just above the shell of my ear.
I have your sister. If you want her to keep her pretty brains where they belong, in her head, you’ll come with me.
First, you’ll leave a note. You need to make him believe you left him of your own free will.
You need to make it clear you don’t want to be looked for.
That this was a mistake and it’s over. Your sister has already seen sense and done the same.
So I’d done it. I’d traced the words out in a shaking hand, all while he watched over my shoulder.
When I was done, he ripped the gun away and turned at a noise in the kitchen.
I already knew it was Abby, scooting around, looking for her bed or a drink.
I’d diapered her, but noticed that she had a sore spot on her shoulder where a strap from her chair rubbed in, so I’d left her out of it.
She seemed happy to alternate between laying at my feet and going to the living room to sprawl out in a beam of sunshine drifting through the windows.
He was distracted for a split second, and I did it without thinking of the danger to my life, to Steph’s, or to Wraith’s.
I flipped the paper over, and I wrote what was in my heart.
A code of sorts, between us, one that the bastard with the gun wouldn’t understand, even if he chanced at reading it.
Even if Wraith never came after me, I needed him to know.
I was instructed to leave the house as I was.
I turned off the oven I’d been preheating, and did as he asked.
I believed him when he said he had my sister.
He had no reason to lie and even if he wasn’t telling me the truth, he was still holding a gun in his hand and I had nothing to defend myself with but a wooden baking spoon or a loaf pan.
There was a van parked outside. Not one of those creepy industrial ones, but a new van, with the windows tinted black all around. In Florida, tinting windows isn’t at all suspicious.
He instructed me to get inside and when I did, he jumped in behind and slammed the sliding door shut.
I spotted Steph, her blonde hair splayed out on the floor like a golden halo, her eyes wide and terrified.
Her hands were tied roughly in front of her, her ankles knotted with the same brutal ropes.
When the bastard instructed me to get on the floor, I did. I let him tie me up, chest heaving with fear and nostrils flaring with rage.
After I was trussed up like an animal, the bastard’s brutal, rough hands laid me flat on the floor, face to face with Steph, probably so we could look into each other’s eyes, feed and drink and breathe each other’s fear.
Our assailant drove up front. Clearly, he wasn’t worried about having two women tied up and gagged in the back of his van. He wasn’t worried about anyone seeing or hearing. He was in complete and utter control.
He drove for hours. For miles and miles. For what seemed like forever.
All we could do was lay on the floor of that moving van, a van taking us away from everything we’d ever known, our cheeks pressed into the hard industrial carpet, our limbs growing numb and aching with the strain, our minds fracturing and our hearts breaking with every single mile.
The sound of heavy footfalls tears me back to the horrible present. My eyes fly open and I jerk hard away from the wall, into a stiff, upright position. Steph groans at my movement, but she doesn’t say a word. Her breathing changes, growing harsher, raspier, and I know she’s awake.
Our captor, a dark haired man who probably isn’t that much older than thirty-five, a man with a massive stature and cold dark eyes, appears in the doorway to the small empty room.
We’re being held in a tiny white house in the middle of absolutely fucking nowhere.
It looks abandoned, but I’d put my money on him owning it himself.
It’s completely derelict. To anyone else, it looks like a memento of the past, forgotten and unusable. To him, it’s clearly his paradise.
My mind whirls, thinking about how many other women he’s brought here.
How many he’s brutalized, tortured, raped, maybe even killed.
Terror crawls up my throat, and bile splashes into the back of my mouth, bitter and vile, but I force myself to swallow it back.
I won’t give him my fear. I know men like him, evil men, feed on it.
I force my face into a neutral mask, and though I can’t see Steph, as we’re tied back to back, I feel her entire body go rigid.
The monster sweeps into the room with easy grace for a man his size.
He’s well over six feet. Built like a mountain, but with the natural abilities of an athlete.
His face is actually quite pretty, high slashes for cheekbones, even lips, a straight nose, hard brow.
His dark hair is cut short though, giving him that ex-military kind of look.
It’s his eyes that are most terrifying, though, not his size or that frighteningly strange grace he seems to so unfairly possess.
His eyes are dead, dark black pits that betray nothing at all.
“Neither of you know me,” he growls in a gravelly voice that suits him. It’s the voice of evil, that’s for fucking sure, like sandpaper scraped over something equally abrasive, broken glass or something. “But your father does.”
The asshole starts to pace the room, his big boots, so like Wraith’s that the bridge of my nose starts burning again and I have to blink hard to clear the tears. I tear my eyes away from those boots and stare straight ahead at the ugly faded wallpaper.
I look at my surroundings, no one could live there.
The drywall is full of holes, exposed to the wood studs in a bunch of spots.
The room he threw us in has a disgusting beige carpet dotted with dubious stains and growing black mold in the corner I’m facing.
The ceiling is sagging down, like the weight of holding itself up is just too much.
This room, at least, has walls, though the wallpaper lining their surface is dingy and old with strange brown syrupy looking sap running down from the roof nearly to the floor in a disgusting trickle that turns my stomach every single time I stare at it.
“Your father owes me,” the bastard continues, when neither Steph nor I say a thing.
What is there to say? “He owes me a debt and he refused to pay. He used me against my own club. Offered me the fucking world. The Riders were going nowhere. Steel and his stupid ideas of peace. He wants to be some kind of charity instead of a club. It’s ridiculous.
They’re weak. All of them. Their rightful place is in the ground, and I wanted to put them there.
Viking promised me money for secrets. After that, I’d be free to go.
To find some other club that actually valued my skills, or to find my own fucking way. ”
The man stops pacing for a moment as I go over his words. So he used to be a member of Steel Riders? Is that what he’s saying?
He continues, “But you see, your daddy ain’t a man of his word.
After I brought The Riders to their knees, your husband fucked things up by drawing a gun on him, and when he struck his deal, he decided to give me up.
Steel could have ended me there and then, but he’s a fucking pussy and left me for Viking to deal with so he didn’t get his hands dirty. I got away.”
“So you took us,” Stephanie breathes, her voice dry and dusty from hours of disuse. Even though it comes out steady and doesn’t crack, I can feel the pain dripping from every word. It hits me in my chest like a flaming arrow, lighting my entire body ablaze with sorrow.