Copyright © 2015 by Sarah Sorana
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Published in the United States of America
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Okay, first of all, I’m on Facebook now to talk to y’all. Please don’t hesitate to add me or send me a message – I’m busy, but I WANT to talk to you. I WANT your feedback. That’s what this is all about, and I love each and every one of you for reading my work!
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ALLIE
The girl sat down on her bed with a thump.
"Fuck me," she muttered.
She slid her hand between her mattress and box spring, pulling out her sketchbook. It didn't have to be well-hidden to escape her father, fortunately, it just had to be not-obvious when he glanced in the room.
Old bastard's too lazy to go looking for it, she thought.
She picked up a number two pencil from her bedside table and tapped it against the cover of the sketchbook, running her other hand through her long red hair and sighing.
Sitting tailor-style on the bed, she propped her sketchbook in her lap and opened it, flipping lazily through it. She made a mental note to fix up a strand of hair in one drawing, the curve of a bottle in another. She trailed her fingers just over the pages, careful not to touch and smear her drawings.
There were no blank pages, but there were spots that weren't full yet, and she chose one of those, filling it with a sketch of an eye, one line at a time. Once she'd blocked in the rough shape, she started to add details, larger-than-life.
She knew she needed to practice eyes, they were the hardest part of a drawing for her, yet, the first place most people - most critics, especially - looked. It wouldn't matter if she had a gift for making hair look so real that it could come off the page, if her eyes were just a little wrongly proportioned.
Her sketchbook was filled with eyes, each one a little better than the last.
She filled the space, she finished the eye, and she sighed. She needed to practice hands next, and she wasn't good enough at them yet to justify the space in those pages.
The real sketchbook was returned to the spot of safety under her bed, and she picked up a fifty-cent notebook and started sketching in the rough proportions of a hand.
"What the fuck are you doing?" her father sneered from the doorway. "Wasting your time with that bullshit? Still?"
She glanced away quickly before looking at him, careful not to meet his eyes. Careful not to challenge him.
"Drawing hands," she muttered.
He walked over and yanked the book out of her hands, flipping through it with all of the care and grace of a pig.
He slowed, and grinned.
“What’s this shit?” he asked, holding up a picture of a naked man.
Allie blushed, even though she hadn’t actually drawn his penis, his groin was hidden decorously in shadow.
“Figure drawing class,” she said. “Everyone drew him.”
“Little whore, just like your momma,” the big man said, not unaffectionately.
“Momma wasn’t a whore,” she said.
His eyes narrowed, and she regretted her words. He reached out to her and grabbed her by the hair, stepping in front of her and twisting her head painfully so she had to look up at him.
“Your mother,” he said, punctuating his words by shaking her, “Was a cheap crack whore, whether you like it or not. She sucked cock for money, she sucked cock for crack, and she sucked cock out of habit, because she was so goddamn used to sucking cock.”
He dropped her onto the bed.
“Face facts, bitch,” he said, and walked out, slamming the door behind her.
She swallowed her tears and took a deep breath, rescuing her notebook and smoothing the pages carefully. Crumpled, but not too bad to draw on. She’d practiced with worse.
Looking at the clock, she gave up trying to practice - it was time to go to work, anyways. She slipped her wallet into her back pocket and her feet into a pair of old flip-flops, leaving her father’s apartment and heading down the street to the neon haven of her job.
The sign just said TATTOOS, but that was all it needed to say. No one called it anything but “Jan’s Place,” anyways, after the owner.
Jan himself was sitting behind the counter, counting bills absentmindedly.
“Hey, take the front chair,” he said, jerking his head towards the seat in the window, where Snake usually sat.
“Are… are you sure?” Allie asked. “Snake won’t mind?”
“Fuck Snake,” Jan said. “He’s too hungover to work, came in with shaking hands. I told him if he did it again, you’d get his chair ‘til he sobered up.”
Allie nodded, taking a deep breath so her own hands didn’t shake with excitement.
It was set to be a busy day, and she was set to make a fuckload more money if she got to sit in the window. Hell, the novelty alone of a girl in the window would make more men stop by, she expected.
It was the first day of a big rally a few miles outside of town, and the bikers wouldn’t yet be too drunk to come back to town for spur-of-the-moment tattoos.
She went over her supplies, making sure that they were neat and clean. She got to use the better stuff, as the day’s lead artist.
She was a little worried what Snake would say to her when he came back, but he’d know it was on Jan, not on her. It wasn’t like it was her fault he was hungover, and Snake was a bit of an asshole, but not totally unreasonable.
The first customer came in not that long after, and Allie set to work, hunched over a man’s shoulder.
The first few pieces she did were small bits of flash or just meetings to set up more detailed tattoos later on. She worked carefully, never rushing. She was all too aware that what she did would be on someone’s body forever.
Unlike some tattoo artists she’d met, she didn’t try to talk anyone out of a tattoo they asked for. She shrugged and did what they wanted.
Maybe, in a few years, she’d have enough money for ideals like that.
Somehow, she doubted it.
A little after her break, a few men came in. They were large and gruff, and the largest and gruffest seemed to command instant attention from the other men.
Their black leather vests prominently displayed the logo of the local outlaw club, the biker gang who was hosting the rally.
Allie didn’t need Jan’s glare of warning to know to do her very, very best work for these men.
"Looking for some flash?" she asked, giving them a smile. Most of the men so far had been, getting stars or skulls or other work she'd done dozens of times.
The leader shook his head.
"Lookin' for something, maybe the size of a quarter," he said. "Got a pad?"
She quickly gave him a pen and a pad of paper, and he sketched out a simple symbol, taking care with every line.
"Do you all want the same thing?" she asked.
The big man shook his head and rolled up his sleeve, showing her where he already had the symbol underneath a beautifully done tattoo of their cut.
"Can you do this?" he asked, looking her straight in the eyes.
She nodded.
"Can I see that?" she
asked, taking the paper back. She quickly sketched the symbol out a dozen times. The first one or two were slightly off, but the last five were perfect.
"I've got it now," she said.
He took the paper from her and looked it over, giving her a sharp nod.
"You first," he grunted to one of the men, who took his place in the chair.
Allie sped him through the paperwork, which, like most people, he signed without reading. She worked quickly and carefully, but it was a simple tattoo and she was done in a matter of minutes.
The larger man's eyebrows raised, but he directed the next man to the chair.
"Anything else?" she asked.
"Yeah," said the big man. "I'm not happy with this. I want you to touch it up for me, make the lines a little cleaner."
He stripped to the waist and showed her a tattoo on her back.
She gulped.
"Can you do it?" he demanded.
She looked for Jan to tell her what to do, but the other man was in the back.
"I can do it," she said.
She worked even more carefully on this job than the others. The man didn't seem to be in any particular hurry, and she was familiar with the design in question.
Snake had spent weeks designing it, and had bragged about the private sessions with the boss of the local outlaw biker gang.
She'd suspected that that was who she was dealing with.
Now she knew.
With every moment that passed, she feared what would happen if she fucked up, and if she didn’t.
He wasn’t happy with Snake’s work, she kept thinking.
When Jan walked in the room and saw the biker under Allie’s tattoo gun, their eyes met, and neither said a word.
“That’s all I can do today,” she said. “It needs a little more time to heal.”
The big man nodded.
“So, um, aftercare -” she started, and the big man cut her off, not unkindly.
“Girl, I’ve been getting tattoos since before you were born,” he said. “I don’t wanna hear your spiel.”
She nodded.
“No problem,” she said. “That’ll be… uhh..”
It occurred to her that perhaps she wasn’t supposed to charge this man.
He gestured to one of his men.
“Give her five bills,” he said.
Allie didn’t even look at the cash as they headed out, only at them.
“Thanks!” she said. “Thank you!”
They all nodded, heading out the door.
When she looked at the money in her hands, she realized that they’d given her five hundred dollars. An amazing amount of money for her.
She slipped the bills into her pocket, laughing with delight, and looked at Jan.
“Can I head out for the day?” she asked.
Jan rolled his eyes.
“Sure, sure, run away, leave me here to deal with ten thousand drunks wanting cheap flash.”
“You’re the best!” Allie said, and headed out.
“Yeah, yeah,” she heard Jan say to her back. “That’s what they all say.”
The redhead let herself in to the apartment, tip-toeing, but she was pretty sure that her father would be out. Neither hell nor high water usually stopped him from ingratiating himself into a rally and getting all the free booze he could drink.
She was wrong.
She came out from her room after she’d dropped off a notebook, and almost ran straight into him.
The sharp crack of his hand across her face showed her her mistake immediately.
Before she could say anything, before she could do anything in her own defense, her father had pulled his hand back and doled out a punch to her eye that made her see stars.
Allie hit the ground and stayed put, curling into a ball with her hands over her face.
A savage kick to her back and he walked off.
She didn’t stand up until she heard the door slam behind him as he left the apartment.
Fuck.
He hadn’t hit her like that in years, and she almost couldn’t believe that he did it now. She was so fucking sick of him and his bullshit.
Although… Last time he hit her that hard, she’d been totally broke, and still in high school.
She was eighteen, she had a job, she had five hundred bucks in her pocket. Sleeping on couches for a while couldn’t be worse than that.
A light touch to her face confirmed that she’d have a nasty black eye.
She was done.
She was done, and she was getting the hell out of there.
It didn’t take long to get all of her stuff together. Three sketchbooks, some clothing, and an old shoebox full of mementos - the only things she thought were worth taking after eighteen years.
She walked back into the empty tattoo parlor ten minutes later.
“I’m leaving,” she announced.
“You’d better,” said Jan.
She stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“Getting out of town is the best idea you’ve ever had,” he said.
“I… I was gonna ask if I could crash here for a few days until I found a place,” she said.
He shook his head.
“No way,” he said. “Snake found out that you charmed the boss, and he is fucking pissed. Why do you think everyone cleared out? He’ll have your head.”
“I didn’t mean to,” she whispered.
“Doesn’t matter to Snake. He’ll beat you worse than your daddy ever did, and if you stick around after, he’ll probably kill you,” he said.
“You can’t help?” she asked.
She’d trusted Jan. She thought he was her friend.
“Wish I could, princess, but the only way I’ve survived in this town for twenty years is by staying the hell out of anything involving our biker friends,” he said. “If I take sides now… I’m cooked too, and you’re still fucked.”
Allie just kept staring at him. What the hell was she going to do?
“Get on a bus,” Jan said, patiently. “It doesn’t really matter where. Just… go.”
He opened the cash drawer and pulled out a wad of twenties, flipping through them quickly to count.
When he looked back up at her, his eyes were softer, and she saw the regret shining through.
“Here’s your pay, princess. I’m… I’m sorry it’s gotta be this way,” he said.
Allie took the money and glanced at it. It was more than he owed her, but not by much. Maybe forty bucks.
“Thanks,” she whispered.
She cleared out the locker she’d used to keep certain things away from her father, and Jan handed her a canvas bag.
They didn’t say a word to each other as she left.
Allie got on a bus.
She’d decided that she’d try to go someplace warmer, if she had to leave Ohio. There was a bus leaving in half an hour for somewhere in the South, and that seemed like as good a place to head as any.
The thirty minutes she spent waiting on the platform, clutching her bag and thinking every person she saw was Snake coming to get his revenge were some of the longest of her life.
The bus ride, in comparison, was mercifully boring.
She’d never been further than fifty miles from the city, but the first few hundred miles were pretty much the same as the countryside she’d already seen.
Her hands stayed busy, sketching little scenes that flashed by, over and over, as she focused on improving her speed, until the adrenaline wore off and she fell asleep.
When she woke up, she was in the South.
Her seatmate was shaking her shoulder.
“Hey, girl, didn’t you say you were almost there last stop?” she asked. “You gotta get your ass off the bus or you’ll miss it.”
“Yeah… yeah!” Allie said, waking up in a bit of a daze.
Before she knew it, she was alone in a strange city, watching the bus leave the station.
The flickering lights weren’t exactly comforting. She sa
w a few dark figures moving around, and she knew she had to get out of there.
She walked up to the terminal, but it was closed. Nothing but a few vending machines and a graffiti’d-over map of the city.
Justice: Night Horses MC Page 1
