by K. A. Ware
Heroin.
“Fuck,” I hissed, throwing the bag to the side. But since it was nearly empty, it just floated to the floor, doing little to ease my anger. Rage built inside my chest and I wrapped my hand around the chunky outdated lamp that sat on the scuffed nightstand, launching it across the room. A satisfying thud sounded as it collided with the wall.
How had I let it get this bad? Why hadn’t she said something?
But even as I asked myself the questions, the answers rang clear. I hadn’t seen it because I didn’t want to see it. She hadn’t come out and said anything, but I’d noticed her gradually deteriorating, I’d just chosen to ignore it. Unconscious or not, it was a decision I made, and I had to live with the ramifications, whatever they might be.
I was done burying my head in the sand. Nat was coming with me, I didn’t know how I was going to manage getting her clean with work and school, but I’d figure it out. I didn’t have any other choice. If I left her here, there was no telling what would happen.
“Ahhhhmmmm,” Nat moaned again, catching my attention and pulling me from my thoughts.
Her head lolled to the other side, but she was still out of it. She was thin. So unbelievably thin. The tiny cutoff shorts she was wearing could’ve been made for a child. My eyes snagged on the purple, green, and yellow bruises covering her thighs. A piece of my splintered heart broke off, disintegrating into the dark abyss that was closing in on what was left of the battered organ. My entire body locked up, the implication of those bruises a gut shot that nearly took me to my knees. Those weren’t I-tripped-and-fell bruises; those were fingerprints, dozens of them in various stages of healing.
A sudden wave of nausea washed over me, and I had to scramble over the bed to get to the toilet in time. I hadn’t eaten anything since that morning, so there wasn’t much in my stomach for my body to eject. The bile and acid burned as my body convulsed and I choked and sputtered between every heave. Tears ran freely down my face, from being sick, or sad, I didn’t know.
When I finally calmed, I reached out for some toilet paper to wipe my mouth but found the roll empty. Raising my head, I looked around the small closet of a bathroom for something to clean up with, finding only a slightly damp towel on the floor. Grimacing, I fought to maintain control over my gag reflex as I wiped my mouth and dried my face, the smell of mildew clinging to my skin.
Standing on shaky legs, I inspected the squalor my sister had been forced to live in. Dirty clothes were tossed in every corner, the trashcan overturned, and everything was covered in a fine sheen of filth. I watched a cockroach scurry across the floor and behind the toilet as I stood there, taking it all in.
With a renewed sense of disgust, I marched back into the room, my eyes seeing and smelling what I hadn’t before with the filter of worry clouding my senses.
The stench of stale sweat and sex hit me square in the face as I scanned the room, overflowing ashtrays and garbage littered every available surface. Nicotine stained the floral wallpaper a sickening yellow, and the glue had come loose from age causing the seams to curl outward on almost every panel. The green carpet I’d noticed when I first saw Nat was stained and matted down, so many cigarette burns dotted the floor they looked like they were part of the original pattern.
“Nor…Norah?” a groggy and slightly slurred voice called out.
My head whipped up to see Nat had regained consciousness enough to push herself into a slumped position against one of the beds. She rolled her head up, tilting it back and to the side against the mattress as if she wasn’t able to hold it up of her own accord. I felt my throat restrict and the telltale tingling in my sinuses, warning me of the tears to come, but my body’s reaction was too late because when I raised my hand to cover my mouth in shock, it came away wet.
The bruises I’d seen on her thighs were nothing compared to the thick red and purple welts that circled her neck. I’d been so focused on her face I hadn’t seen them before. I didn’t even look down when I felt for her pulse.
Rushing to her side, I gently tucked a few greasy strands of blonde hair that had fallen in her eyes, behind her ear. “Nat, sweetheart, what happened to you?”
It took effort, but she blinked, eyelids heavy as she tried to focus on my face. “Norah?”
I forced a smile through the tears for her sake. “Yeah, it’s me, I’m here.”
There was no telling what kind of pain she was trying to snub out, but it was obvious she was running away from her reality and that killed. It hurt all the way down to my soul.
“Why?” she asked, her voice flat and devoid of any emotion.
I stared at her face, her waxy complexion a sickening gray hue, and her once brilliant blue eyes were flat and filled with dark secrets I couldn’t even begin to imagine.
Shifting on my knees, I sat next to her and linked our fingers, feeling the first glimmer of hope as she rested her head on my shoulder. “You needed me, so I came.”
Nat sighed and gave my fingers a small squeeze. “You shouldn’t be here,” she whispered. Her voice was a bit stronger than it had been a few moments before but still slow as if it took effort she didn’t have to push the words past her lips.
“I’m exactly where I need to be.”
She groaned and shook her head. “You don’t understand…”
“I understand that you’re my sister and you need me, so I’m here. I’m going to take you back with me. We’ll get you healthy and back to your old self in no time.” My voice lacked conviction, but I hoped the words were true.
She snorted, and it was anything but humorous. It was hollow, like an echo in an empty room. I prayed that the real Nat was still buried inside the shell of a person that sat beside me.
“He’ll never let me go,” she whispered, her voice so faint I almost missed it.
Tilting my head, I watched her face as I asked the question I feared most. “Who?”
Nat took a ragged breath and squeezed her eyes closed like she was battling a memory. “Butcher.”
A chill overtook my body despite the summer heat. “How long?”
Her shoulders twitched in what I assumed was her attempt at a shrug in her drug-induced state. “Doesn’t matter.”
The breath I’d been pulling in caught in my throat. My chest ached. Seeing her like this, her body weak and eyes vacant, it was too much. “How long?” I pressed, my voice cracking with emotion.
She opened her mouth, her tongue darting out to wet her lips as she tried to form the words. “Two…years, I think.”
Vision swimming, I fisted the scratchy comforter to steady myself. Nat had just turned seventeen a few months ago, that meant she’d been barely fifteen. Bile burned at the back of my throat, but I forced myself to swallow it back down. I couldn’t fall apart, Nat needed me, and I wasn’t going to fail her this time.
Disentangling our fingers, I got to my feet and plucked a bag from the corner of the room, dumping the contents onto the bed. Riffling through drawers, I stuffed whatever I could find that looked relatively clean into the bag.
“What’re you doing?” Nat mumbled.
I couldn’t look at her for fear of breaking down, so I continued to search the room for anything she might need. “I’m getting you the hell out of here.”
“He’ll kill me,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper
Opening a drawer, my hand stilled over a stack of cards that had been neatly bundled together with a rubber band. Greeting cards for every occasion, Christmas, Easter, Birthdays, and even St. Patrick’s Day.
“I won’t let that happen,” I said, staring at the bundle.
Somehow in the midst of the horror show, her life had become, she’d managed to hold onto something that mattered to her. It gave me hope that she was still in there somewhere. I’d save her from this hell, even if it killed me.
I managed to get Nat out of the apartment and into my car without incident. Tossing the small duffle that held all her worldly possessions into the trunk, I jumped in
to the driver’s seat determined to put as much distance between us and Nat’s nightmares as possible.
She faded in and out as we flew down the highway, waking up long enough to fill in some of the blanks before passing out again. Charese had been desperate for cash, and instead of getting a fucking job like a reasonable person, she’d brokered a deal with Butcher, pimping out her fifteen-year-old daughter for a steady stream of drugs and a few bucks.
There was more to the story, that much I was sure of, but Nat needed rest, and I didn’t want to push her too soon. In time, I’d get the full story. I just hoped I had the stomach for it.
The knowledge that our mother had stood by while my baby sister turned to shooting up smack in order to escape the hell she was living in, a hell our mother had arranged, tore at me like a rabid beast. It mauled my heart, shredding the last thread of compassion, along with any love I’d still harbored for Charese Larkin, and left me bleeding out. She was dead to me, they all were. The club that had once been my safe haven, my family, had morphed into something evil and unrecognizable.
The warm summer evening air whipped through the open windows of my old beater as we flew down the highway and I took comfort in the miles we were putting behind us. By the time we crossed over the state line into Oregon, I’d worked out a plan.
We’d need more than distance to protect us from Butcher and the rest of the Sinners. We’d need a whole new life. I just hoped I’d be able to pull it off.
Five
BAZ
Backing out of Rabbit’s driveway, I decided to take the scenic route home, or to the clubhouse rather. I’d gone straight from my parent’s house to my room at the clubhouse as soon as I got my bottom rocker at nineteen and hadn’t looked back since. Living at the club full-time had its perks. The commute to work was easy, just a quick walk across the forecourt to the garage. Not having to worry about how I was getting home after partying with my brothers was another one, I could just stumble my ass down the hall to my room and pass out. But the real appeal, at least at nineteen, had been the abundance of free and willing pussy whenever I wanted it.
To my surprise, even though I’d grown up in the club, there was a lot of shit about club life that I hadn’t yet learned when I finally earned my patch and moved in. One of them being the strange and convoluted dynamic of my parent’s relationship. To say my parents had a liberal outlook on marriage was putting it lightly.
Some brothers stayed true to their wives and girlfriends, others fucked around every chance they got, and a few, like my parents, had an understanding. I quickly learned that as long as they were together, anything went, and I mean anything. It was totally fucked and I’d been forced to bear witness to their debauchery on more than one occasion since becoming a full member. According to my parents, once I was officially a brother, they didn’t feel the need to hide their proclivities from me anymore. I did not feel the same.
Needless to say, the idea of sticking my dick where my brothers, and maybe even my father had been at one point, lost its shine pretty quickly. Unless they were new, I stayed far away from club ass, opting to take my chances at a bar instead of accidentally fucking one of my parent’s concubines. Just thinking about it made me want to gag.
That was how I’d met Rabbit three years ago. Rooster and I had just gotten back from a run and since his favorite club whore was otherwise preoccupied, I was able to convince him to go out with me. We’d bounced around a few bars before landing at Molly’s, the oldest and most famous strip club in Portland. Everything was going to plan, we had beers in our hands, tits in our face, and a group of co-eds eye fucking us from the bar. Our night looked like it was damn well on its way to being perfect.
Then she came on stage and turned my entire world upside down.
“Gentleman, please welcome Hennessey to the stage!” the DJ’s booming voice crackled through the speakers, announcing the next dancer.
I wasn’t paying attention to the stage. Instead, I eyed a blonde by the bar who was wearing a god awful pink sash that declared her the birthday girl. The flashing crown she wore alerted me to the fact that it was her twenty-first, which made sense, considering she didn’t seem like the type to frequent strip clubs.
“Ho-lee shit,” Rooster breathed, elbowing me in the ribs.
I tore my gaze from the hot blonde and glared at him. “What the fuck?”
“I think I’m in love,” he said, eyes transfixed on the stage in front of us.
Snorting at his theatrics, I followed his gaze. And holy shit was right because all thoughts of the blonde at the bar flew out of my head and I was pretty sure I was half in love already.
Prowling around the stage was a leggy redhead in all black. My dick instantly took notice and I had to reach below the rack to adjust myself. The curves on this woman were insane and surprisingly natural. It was easy to tell fake tits from the real thing and this woman’s breasts were most definitely God given. A narrow waist tapered out to a heart-shaped ass that would bring any grown man to his knees.
My eyes tracked her as she moved to the pole, her hips swaying hypnotically with every stomp of her sky-high heels. Her smooth porcelain skin peeked out from behind the straps and sheer panels of her outfit. I had no idea how the fuck she got into the damn thing but I was sure as hell going to enjoy watching her take it off.
She gripped the pole with one hand and swung herself up with a grace I didn’t know was possible. With her leg wrapped around the pole, she flipped upside down, using her momentum to start a lazy spin.
I watched enraptured as she methodically stripped, doing everything she could to tease the audience as she disentangled herself from the complicated straps of her outfit with ease. Heavy tits, tipped with silver barbells, swayed with her movements as she climbed off the pole and started working the rack. My mouth went dry as she crawled around the rack, making her way toward us, three stools away, two, one…
Whiskey colored eyes locked on mine and her movements faltered, one hand hovered above the wooden surface for a split second before she continued. For a moment, I thought she was going to keep on crawling, but she stopped. Rising to her knees in front of me, she braced her hands on my shoulders and arched her back, palming a breast and tweaking her nipple an inch from my mouth. My tongue darted out to wet my lips and I looked up in time to catch her eyes widen slightly at the move. She had freckles, just a handful dotted across her nose, but they were enough to make her look innocent despite the fact that she’d walked on stage looking like a damn dominatrix.
“You work here all the time?” I asked. Rooster snorted beside me and I immediately wanted to kick my own ass for bringing him.
She smiled sweetly but didn’t respond, so I tried again. “When do you get off?” I asked, earning yet another snort from Rooster. Hitting on a stripper was pathetic, I knew that, but something about her eyes had me throwing every last fuck I had right out the damn window.
Her right hand slid from my shoulder, her fingers running over the patches on my cut as she bent her head to my ear. “Take a look around, how many men in this club do you think wanna take me home and fuck me?” she purred.
She pulled away and watched as my eyes scanned the room. Sure as shit, I couldn’t find a single man who didn’t already have tits in his face, that wasn’t watching her every move. When I didn’t answer, her grin grew wicked. “I’ve never taken a single one of them home, not gonna start with you.”
Pulling away, she started to move to Rooster, but I put a hand on the rack, stopping her retreat. Her head snapped to me and I swear to Christ I saw flames dance in her eyes. “Move your fucking hand or I’ll have security throw you on your ass,” she hissed.
“You do lap dances?” I asked, slowly removing my hand.
She rolled her eyes, climbing off the rack and back onto the stage. She bent down gathering her tips and I realized her set was over as a new dancer waited at the steps to the stage.
Oh, hell no.
There was no way I was letti
ng her slip away that easily. Pushing away from the rack, I got to my feet to go after her. Rooster stopped me with a hand on my arm. “The fuck you doin’?”
I smirked at him. “Goin’ for broke,” I said, shaking off his grip and following the redhead to the bar.
“You never answered my question,” I said, leaning against the bar next to her.
“I’m on break,” she sighed, pushing the heavy fall of her long red hair over one shoulder. She’d put on a G-string, but her tits were still bare as she sat at the bar, sipping a beer.
The bartender raised a brow at me and I ordered a beer, settling onto the stool beside the Jessica Rabbit lookalike.
“I’m not going to fuck you,” she said, picking at the label on her bottle.
I watched her profile as she stared straight ahead. “Didn’t ask you to.”
Slowly, she turned her head, a strained smile on her lips. “Then why are you still here?” she gritted out.
She had fire, I liked that. “What’s your name?” I asked.
“You’re not getting anything other than my stage name,” she said, signaling to the bartender for another beer.
“I’m B—”
“Don’t,” she said, raising a hand. “I don’t need to know your name, or your life story, or about how you’re some sort of badass biker come here to take me away on your Harley. I’m working.”
“Thought you said you were on break?” I challenged.
Her back stiffened and she took a deep breath like she was trying to prevent herself from punching me in the face. It was hot as fuck.
“Fuck this,” she said, sliding off the stool.
Way to fucking go, genius.
