by Nicole Fox
It was then that I realized, with a cold yet bracing clarity that if saving her meant sacrificing my life–so be it.
At last, I saw the Crooked Jaw compound looming in the distance. It was a grotesque, hideous building surrounding by derelict factories, crouching on a river like a crusty old crustacean among the detritus of its meals. I suppose it was perfect for what the Crooked Jaws wanted: easy clean up, and no one to hear the screams.
The Broken Spires though? We had more class than that.
Before I rode to where my enemies could see me, I paused and turned around, double checking that a team of my allies had not secretly followed in the hopes of rescuing me. I would not have put it past them, so I had been checking the whole time. Fortunately, other than hearing the roar of random motorcycles in the distance, I had not seen a thing.
I took a deep breath. “All of the pain and fear you’re walking into,” I told myself, “is for Erica and Thunder. Just keep thinking of them. Erica and Thunder.”
My face a mask of fearlessness, I rode right up to the Crooked Jaw door, parked my bike, and entered.
# # #
As I expected, they were on me immediately. Crooked Jaws, fully armed with shotguns, handguns, and even a rifle that I saw in the back of the dingy, industrial looking room, poured down from all sides and grabbed me. Two held my shoulders while two more swept behind me and bound my wrists. The only thing with that jangle and coldness was handcuffs.
“Wow,” I sneered, hiding the discomfort as the metal bit into my skin. “I’m impressed. What does it take? Ten of you guys for little-old me?”
They ignored me, and then, after making sure I was safely cuffed, they commenced searching my whole body for weapons.
The leather of my outfit squeaked and groaned as they tore at it, lifting up my pant-legs, padding their hands down the length of my thighs.
“Oh, I always thought you Crooked Jaws were a little too touchy-feely for your own good,” I commented, as they probed beneath my legs. I knew it was stupid to prod them. I was helpless in their grasp, and I could see little benefit to making them angry.
Except, of course, the gleeful sense of satisfaction I got when I saw them scowl, and when they realized I was not afraid.
Sure that I wasn’t armed, they now pushed me further into the room, knocking aside chairs and tables as they went. The motorcycle president in me couldn’t help but notice the papers spewed out all over these surfaces: maps, banks lists, things they were planning.
“If I get out of this alive,” I thought, “I’ll be able to fuck them over as completely as a twenty-dollar whore.”
This made me smile. My retirement was coming, sure, but I could still send the Broken Spires in the right direction.
On, on, on. They half-carried, half-shoved me. Through winding, dimly lit halls, sweating coldness and stink. Down a flight of stairs, so fast that I had to struggle to stay on my feet.
At last, I came to a place that every single motorcycle club has–a necessary room that reveals a great deal about the club itself.
A dungeon.
The ”dungeon” of the Broken Spires is considered a finished basement room, with a lumpy old couch, a table across which an interrogator could sit, a toilet, and a sink. On that table, every time, without fail, would be a packet of cigarettes and a bottle of whiskey–in plastic, of course, to be safe. The goal of this setup is to convince the enemies we capture there is that our interest is in information and cooperation–not causing pain. Many bikers, deep, deep down, are actually cowards, who bend at the first sign of a threat, and switch sides for nothing more than that pack of cigs and a swig of whiskey.
For tougher cases, we let time and pressure work them over. Like water wearing away at rock.
The Crooked Jaw’s dungeon, however, indicated no such subtlety.
It was a bare, lightless, chilly cement room, well below ground level and close enough to the river for its slimy green fingers to be inching their way through and down the eastern wall. There was no furniture, be it bed, table, or chair. The only furnishings were strange hooks of metal, scattered around the room so that they hung from the ceilings, walls, and the floor in what would seem a random manner to the naïve.
I knew better. Each of those metal hooks was set in pairs, and reflected the approximate distance between a pair of arms, or a pair of legs. The floor sloped downward towards the middle, where a rusty drain waited like the mouth of some sewer-dwelling animal. Through it, I could hear the dull rumble of the river.
“This is not a dungeon,” I thought to myself. “This is a torture chamber. Marco really has gone mad.”
The Crooked Jaws dragged me in there, immune or used to its macabre chill. For a fleeting second, my handcuffs were unlocked. I felt my wrists thrust violently upward, and the clink of the cuffs reattaching. My arms were now banded, up above my head. With hooked claws, they dug into my sides and hoisted me straight off the ground.
Clink.
The chain of my handcuffed slipped over one of the metal hoops. I was now suspended, several feet in the air, dangling from wrists that were already throbbing from the agonizing bite of the handcuffs.
I watched all of this with morbid curiosity. I was not afraid. Every man they wasted trying to torment me was a man they couldn’t spare to harm Erica. If they wanted to hoist me up, that was fine with me. So fine, actually, that I wanted to laugh.
Until, that is, I felt them undressing me.
Zip. Zip. Ziiiiippppp. One by one the different components of my clothing–my jacket, my pants, even my boots and socks–were stripped away until I was dangling naked before them. The cold air raised goosebumps on my flesh. My testicles, now exposed, clung tightly against my skin, trying to make themselves a lesser target. I wondered where they would hit me first.
But the Crooked Jaws didn’t do a thing. They merely tossed my clothes into a corner, and then, leering and cackling, retreated from the room.
For a long time, I was left in silence, save for the steady drip of the leaking wall, and the rumble of the river beneath me.
And then, at last, the door cracked open. It was dark beyond, and barely open, so I could not see who was standing there, but I could hear his laugh leaking into the room like the cold air that follows a blizzard. His laugh grew, building to a tumultuous wind, until, at last, the cracked doorway blasted wide and I saw the man I knew was coming since the moment we found Thunder missing:
Marco. La Gancho. The Hook.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Erica
After Thunder and I discussed our plan–dissecting it and re-dissecting until I was worried our over-planning might, in fact, kill the thing entirely–we fell into a restless doze, haunted both by the success or failure of the plan alongside the natural fears that would plague anyone in a situation like ours.
Like a gentleman, Thunder insisted on giving me the cot. I argued that that was ridiculous, for he was far more injured than me, and had been here longer, but eventually, I got the sense that allowing him to give it to me would make him feel far better than sleeping on the cot would have. It was a scratchy, horrid thing anyway.
While I dozed, I daydreamed of Dominic. So often, women concoct elaborate fantasies where they get themselves into a dangerous situation and their man suddenly turns up and rescues them. Hell, I was guilty of that myself. When I was feeling particularly low about some behavior of Brian’s, I’d paint him the hero–flawed, yes, ultimately brave and true and strong.
Ha. Ha. And also ha.
This time, though, as I envisioned Dominic bursting in to save the day–bloodied and embattled, to be sure, but glowing with triumph–I realized that this could actually happen. He was brave and true and clever enough to actually rescue me.
And so, I lost myself in the fantasies. Him, bursting through the door, the bodies of Blade and The Hook crumpling behind him. In some of my daydreams, they were already dead, bleeding out like punctured water balloons all over the floor. In others, the
y were bound and gagged, quivering in terror. I imagined Dominic, after sweeping me into a kiss, handing me his gun and saying, “You do the honors.”
Then, with savage glee, I dispatch the two men.
These violent fantasies did not worry me. In fact, I felt they made me stronger. Just like Dominic. He was violent, sure, but it was a tempered violence. A mature violence, unlike Blade and the Hook.
This is what I planned to use against them. They might have had the muscles and minds of adult men, but they had the egos and the pride of toddlers. And if my extended relationship with Brian had taught me anything, it was that the immature are easily manipulated.
In my fantasy, Dominic congratulated me on my cunning and my brilliance in enacting my plan, which of course had worked out perfectly. He could not have rescued me so smoothly without it, and would, in fact, have probably earned another major scar if not for me.
These fantasies filled me with such satisfaction that I actually found myself grinning, toying with the collar of my shirt and casual confidence. Then, it occurred to me that if Blade came in with that look on my face, my whole plan would be ruined. And so I regained my focus, forced my face into a grimace of resigned terror, and burrowed into the cot, allowing some of my discomfort to come over me.
It was in this pose then, with me curled pathetically and clutching at my clothing for warmth, and Thunder prone on the ground, stemming his own quakes, that Blade found us again.
“Hungry?” He sneered, coming in with what looked like two piece of moldy bread–what, did they keep it around just for the occasion of tormenting prisoners?–and a jug of water so brown I could guess they scooped it right from the river outside. He threw the meager pickings our way on the floor–spilling at least half of it–then leered at me.
“Hello, Erica my sweet,” he simpered, sitting down on the cot beside me.
Deliberately, I hide my face from him and curled up into a ball, like a terrified child. I was nervous, yes, but not afraid. My crouching demeanor was an act. I wanted him to believe me senseless.
“You poor, poor thing.” He reached out and stroked my bare shoulder, while I did my best not to recoil from the contact. He continued speaking, his voice oily and yellowed as grease. “To be stuck in a place like this…” He looked around the room pityingly. “It is your fault you know. Getting mixed up with a man like Dominic Molina. What could you expect? You better hope that the ransom The Hook is demanding from him doesn’t prove too much–Molina is not exactly known as a generous man.”
I screwed up my fists over my eyes and made short, lurching croaks. He thought I was crying. Actually, I was trying very, very hard not to laugh. He purred at me, stroking my skin and my hair, whispering in a voice as ugly as a toad’s, “There, there. There, there.”
At this point, Thunder smelt his opportunity, for he stirred.
“You ask me,” he slurred through a bruised and battered jaw, “I’d say The Hook is the one you have to worry about being generous. What did he promise you, huh? Ten minutes of his sloppy seconds?”
He leered, and winked at me like a lecher.
“What do you think, buddy?” He said to Blade. “Think he’ll let get a piece of that ass, too? Sloppy thirds, we’ll call it, eh?”
Rage surged through Blade, like a rippling of flame over leaking gas. He whirled away from me and approached Thunder, lifting back his shoe to kick him in the ribs.
This is where our plan really kicked on.
“Oh, come on!” I interrupted, pushing myself into a sitting position, my eyes puffy with fake tears. “You know it’s never going to get that far! The Hook’s gonna kill me as soon as he’s done!”
After that declaration, I let out a pitiful wail, and dissolved once again into tears. I found it was not hard to cry. All I had to do was tap into the well of terror buried deep inside me, kept sealed by my courage and this thought: “I must help Dominic in any way I can.”
Blade’s shoe passed, like a pendulum held at the top of its arc. I hoped I’d laced my words with enough sincerity to keep him from harming Thunder. Slowly, he lowered his foot, and turned towards me.
“What do you mean?” He demanded.
“You heard him!” I sobbed, hiding as much of my face as possible. “He wants to make Dominic suffer, by r-r-raping me while he watches. I just know he’s going to kill me afterward, and I wouldn’t care except for Dominic. Poor Dominic! The Hook is sure to break him!”
Blade stared at me thoughtfully. Maybe he sensed I was tricking him. Maybe he realized I was laying my fear in a little too thickly. Then, he reached down and seized me by the jaw.
“You were promised to me,” he said. “La Gancho can have his way, but then you’re mine!”
A deep chuckle, like rocks tumbling down a wet chute, echoed behind him. It was Thunder.
“Hehehe, you were promised?” He mocked. “Tell me–how many promises have you seen La Gancho keep?”
Blade turned back to me. He reached out and stroked my breast. “Maybe, then,” he growled, “I should take you now.”
I recoiled from him, and glared in disgust. “If you do, the Hook will kill you. Ha! Perhaps I’m luckier this way. Once The Hook has had his way with me, he’ll never let me get to you. He’ll kill me out of spite!”
Blade blinked. My words seemed to shake him. I shaped my next sentences carefully. Now was the crux. Where my plan would succeed or fail.
“Oh, I wish I could kill you all!” I cried, throwing myself back onto the cot. “While Dominic is distracted! Weakened by lust! Oh, I’d kill him if I could!”
“Hmmm….” Muttered Blade. I could practically hear the gears in his head turning. Distracted…Weakened by lust…
He crouched down, and bared his yellow, mossy teeth at me in a smile.
“Don’t worry, Erica my sweet,” he simpered. “Perhaps you’ll get your wish soon enough.”
He reached down, and padded the gun holstered at his hip. It looked ridiculous on his bony, sagging frame, but it should get the job done just the same.
I forced myself not to smile.
“I’ll see you soon, darling,” he said. With a wink and a smile, he sauntered from the room, thinking himself a cowboy.
Once he was gone, and the door locked behind him, Thunder and I rose to seated positions.
“Well done, Erica!” He whispered. “Where’d you learn to act like that?”
I grinned. “You spend a lifetime dealing with asshole men, you learn how to flatter them. How about you?”
Thunder chuckled. “You spend a lifetime being an asshole, it becomes pretty easy to fake!”
We laughed, and he climbed up onto the cot beside me so I could rest my head on his shoulder.
“Well,” I said at last. “We’ve done everything we could. Now, the rest depends on Dominic.”
“Don’t worry, Erica,” Thunder sighed, giving me a one-armed hug. “We’re in capable hands.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Dominic
My hands, bound by the cuffs and holding the full weight of my body, ached and throbbed. Already, I was losing the feeling in my fingers. And it would have been easier just to sag, to let my head hang, rather than lift my gaze up and look him in the eye.
But Dominic Molina has never been one just to do what’s easy.
“Hello, Marco,” I said, as if greeting a man in a park. “You look crustaceous as ever, I see.”
I expected a scowl, but he was, at least for the time being, above that.
“Dominic, Dominic,” he hissed like a snake. “How delightful it is to see you in such a state.”
“Oh, this?” I wriggled my body so that my manhood flopped about. “Usually it’s the woman who usually enjoys this sort of thing, but I always knew you were into it. Tell me, do you enjoy the front view? Or the back view?” As I taunted him, I flexed my body to spin around, so that both my chest and back were displayed to him. I’m sure many would have thought my actions reckless–and they may have been right.
But if they could see the look of rage building on La Gancho’s face, they would have known that it was worth it.
He seized me by the neck to stop me twirling, then pulled me up, close, so close to his face, so that our noses nearly touched.
“For so long, I have dreamed of bringing you here,” he growled. “Helpless and bound before me.”
“Whooo-hee! You’re dreaming about me, too? Dude, I’m not interested. You really to get out there and play the field. Meet some people. You know, I hear there’s actually some great apps for it–”
Slap!
His hand–his good hand–came so fast that I was barely aware of it before it struck. It connected with the side of my jaw and up to my ear, making it ring like bells on Christmas Eve. Distantly, I felt my lip split at the seam, and blood dribbled down my face.
