Kick

by Carmen Jenner

  Prez shoots me a hard glare and steps out around me, heading for the girl. She shakes her head and yanks on the restraints binding her arms behind her back. Prez pulls his blade from the sheath on his buckle as he approaches her. The girl whimpers.

  “Your daddy’s been fuckin’ shit up for me for a long time, sweetheart. Think it’s time I pay back the favour.”

  “Prez,” I venture. “She’s got nothin’ to do with it.”

  “But she does, Kick. See, Slayer’s been fuckin’ my shit up for too long.”

  “She’s innocent.”

  Prez stands and whirls around to face me. “This is why I wanted you here, boy, because you’re too fuckin’ innocent. You wanna be worthy of that patch I gave you, then you gotta be willin’ to do whatever it takes to prove you’re an Angel. And Angels don’t let the scourge of the fuckin’ earth dictate what deals they can and can’t make. Angels rise above all those other fuckers.” He smiles at me, and dread creeps its way up my spine. “It’s time to spread your wings, kid. Time to show Slayer what happens when you fuck with Angels. This pretty little bitch is gonna be my plaything, and you and Tank here are gonna watch her for me. Make sure she doesn’t fly the fuckin’ coop.”

  Prez hooks two fingers in around her gag and yanks it out of her mouth. She screams, and the bitch has to have the biggest set of lungs on her I’ve ever heard, but it won’t do her any good, not down here.

  “Scream all you want, little darlin’. Ain’t no one gonna hear you down here. Except Kick and Tank, that is. Hell, if he’s a good dog, I might even let little lover boy over there have a piece of this fine, sweet arse.” Prez shoves his hand under her arse and squeezes hard. She tries jerking free, but he’s not letting her go far.

  “My father’s going to find me and then he’s going to come fuck you up,” she says, and fuck me if I’m not fucking rock-hard by the determined look in her eyes already.

  “Hear that, boys? Slayer’s gonna fuck our shit up for hurtin’ his little girl.” Prez grins, and then turns back to the woman. “I’m counting on it, sweet girl.”

  He leans in, getting up in her face. I can’t hear what he’s whispering, but I know it’s not good. The girl rears back and head-butts the president of the Angels. The blow makes them both sway. Her eyes gleam with tears. Prez reels back, shaking his head free of the pain, I imagine. For a half-second he just blinks at her, eyes wide, mouth slackened with surprise, and then the tension in the room explodes as he comes up on his knees and backhands her across the cheek. Her head rocks back into the wall so hard that the sound of her skull hitting the brick is audible.

  I don’t think; just act.

  I lurch forward, but I’m stopped by a wall of muscle. Tank. Tank is standing between me and my prez, between him and the blade in my hand that I have no recollection of pulling. Beyond him I hear her. The sound of a struggle, muffled grunts, the sick sound of flesh pounding flesh, and the terrified shrieks that follow as he lays into her with his fists. The scuffle as she fights to get away from him, and the sobbing that bores through my head like a fucking drill.

  Tank eyes the knife in my hand. “You gonna use that thing, brother?” He doesn’t bother to whisper. Prez is otherwise occupied, and her cries prove it.

  “Get out of the way,” I whisper, trying to sum up in my head all the ways I could take down the man in front of me. Truth is, if it were anyone else I probably could, but not Tank. No one takes down Tank.

  “Think about this, man,” he whispers. “You gonna go up against the prez over some bitch you don’t know?”

  I don’t answer, I lunge instead, but Tank is a better fighter than me—he always has been. He’s bigger and better in every way, and I’m caught up in his huge arms as he holds me back and forces me to watch my prez, the man who is supposed to lead us, the man who has been a better father to me than my own, shoving himself inside an innocent girl. A girl I wanted, a girl I had—no, a girl I have to have.

  Struggling in Tank’s hold, I scream, and I fight, but I’m as useless as tits on a fucking bull, just like my father told me I was all these years.

  I can’t see her face. Her cheek is shoved against the filthy concrete, facing the wall as Prez holds her down and fucks her from behind. I’ve fucked plenty of women this way before, hog-tied them and ignored their pleas when they begged me to stop, but it wasn’t real. Their cries were met with harder thrusts, and their bodies betrayed their protests by cuming harder and faster than they had with anyone else. Those bitches left with breathy thanks and promises on their lips to return.

  This is nothing like that, and still as I stand, rendered immobile by Tank, and unable to free myself, I can’t look away, because I’m rock-fucking-hard inside my jeans, and a part of me wishes more than anything that I could trade places with Prez. I wish that I was the one filling her, and tearing her up from the inside. That’s the really sick thing about it; that I’m just as hard as he is right now, watching this woman get raped.

  Guilt consumes me, twisting my guts like a slab of rotten meat full of hungry maggots. I close my eyes, but I see the two of them burned into the inside of my lids: Prez on top of her, holding her down, his dick slick with blood and spit as he thrusts inside her, again and again while the woman kicks and bucks her hips, trying to unseat him.

  I’ve seen violence. I’ve lived and breathed it since I was a baby. I’ve been shrouded in hurt, and pain, and other people’s anguish for the longest time that I dared to think I was immune.

  I’d thought I was safe from it. But no one in the club is ever safe; no one ever would be. Because the second you let your guard down, some motherfucker’s gonna seize the opportunity to fuck you over. Especially those closest to you. Especially those you trusted.

  Prez gives one final thrust, groaning as he rides out his orgasm, and sags on top of her. Beneath his bulky frame, the girl trembles. Her breathing is too shallow, too stunted. Prez rolls off of her and stands, zipping up his leathers. He pulls a pack of smokes from his pocket and lights up. The acrid stench of tar and nicotine burns my nostrils. The contents of my stomach threaten to make a reappearance.

  Prez takes the few short steps towards me and glances down at my unsheathed knife that had fallen on the floor during the scuffle with Tank. He bends down and scoops it up, turning it over in his palm, testing its weight. He thrusts it towards me, just missing my arm. I don’t flinch; of course I don’t. Flinching would make me a pussy, and I am a lot of things, but a pussy isn’t one of them.

  “You got some geriatric condition I don’t know about, kid?” he asks.

  I don’t respond because I know there’s more coming, and truth be told I don’t know if I can speak without losing my shit altogether.

  “’Cause I can’t figure how your knife came to be on the floor, at my back.”

  He holds the blade out and I gingerly take it from his outstretched hand. It would be so easy just to flip it around in my hand and drive it into his stomach, but with Tank here I’d be dead within seconds, because you don’t betray your brotherhood, and you sure as shit don’t fucking drive a knife through the belly of your prez for a bitch you hardly know. I sheath the knife and glare at him. He pulls the cigarette from his lips, and a long cylinder of ash falls away to nothing, dispersing into the air around us. Prez grabs hold of my arm, yanking me towards him and pinning my elbow in a lock that could see him breaking it if I were to try and twist free. He watches my face, grinning like a madman as he pushes the lit cigarette into my flesh at the crook of my elbow and drags it upward. White-hot pain sluices up my arm. I grit my teeth, my rage rising, building inside me like a tsunami tide, begging to be unleashed on this motherfucker. I suck in a deep breath through my nostrils, my hands clenched tightly into fists and my skin on fire as Prez draws the lit cigarette up my arm, leaving perfect circular little weals of burnt skin behind before finally stubbing it out in the centre of my bicep, destroying the thick black shading of my eight-ball tat.

  Prez releases me. I’m f
illed with fury and hate and hot, searing pain. Inside, there’s a beast raging in its cage, beating its fists against my meat and bones, demanding to be unleashed, but I stand stock-still, arms fisted loosely at my sides.

  “Pull a knife on me again and I will fuck up every inch of that pretty-boy face of yours,” Prez says. “I won’t leave so much as a centimetre unscarred, you got me, kid?”

  “Yeah,” I say through gritted teeth.

  “Yeah fuckin’ what?”

  “Yeah, Prez. I fuckin’ got you.”

  “Good boy.” He slaps my arm in a brotherly gesture, applying pressure over the burning flesh he just mutilated. It hurts like a motherfucker, but I won’t give him the satisfaction of seeing that pain reflected on my face. “Now get this bitch cleaned up for round fuckin’ two. It’s time you showed me where your loyalties lie.”

  He brushes past me, out through the door, followed closely by Tank. The door slams closed, echoing through the small unfurnished room, and I’m left staring at the trembling girl he left broken on the concrete floor, wondering how the hell I’m supposed to pick up the fucking pieces, knowing all the while that I’d prefer her broken down and bleeding before me, because that’s who I am, the harbinger of torment. Just like my president, just like every other worthless piece-of-shit motherfucker in the world. I am no different from them; I’m just better at playing pretend.

  I stare at the woman. She hasn’t moved since we left the en suite. She stares back, still covering her bruised body with her skinny arms.

  “What’s your name?” I ask again, and then pause, giving her a sideways glare. “Your real name?”

  “Kayla.”

  “You got a last name?”

  “Kennedy.”

  Fuck. This bitch has been missing for three weeks straight.

  “Not anymore. From now on, you’re Indie.”

  “My name is Kayla,” she says through gritted teeth.

  “Your name is whatever I say it is, you got that?” I snap. “Kayla is dead; I knew there was a reason you looked familiar.” Besides being the spitting image of Lauren, that is. “Your face has been splashed across every paper in the country. You’ve been missing for three weeks. Your family is looking for you.”

  She sucks in a sharp, sobbing breath and crouches down on the shitty carpet, collapsing into a ball of shaking limbs and more fucking tears than either of us know what to do with. Christ, even Ivy doesn’t cry this fucking much.

  “I just wanna go home, please? I won’t say anything to anyone. I’ll … I’ll pretend I didn’t know where I was. I won’t say a thing about the others. I’ll keep my mouth shut—”

  “What. Others?” I demand, stalking over to her side and yanking her up from the floor. I shake her, hard. “What others?”

  She sobs, twisting and fighting against my grip. Her hands grapple for purchase on my arms, her nails dig into my flesh, but she’s weak, and the pain is as insignificant as her life is to my club brothers.

  “Start fucking talking, bitch,” I demand.

  “There were more.”

  I shake her again. “More what?”

  “More than just the dentist. There were two more men.”

  “Fuck,” I shout and release her. “Who?”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Who?” I demand.

  “A cop …” she sobs, as I shake her again. “A cop, and a priest.”

  A cop, a dentist, and a priest all walk into a bar …

  “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  A loud banging forces both our heads to snap towards the door. Goddamn it. Not now. I let the girl go but I’m surprised when she grabs hold of my shirt sleeve as I turn away from her.

  “Who is that?”

  “That’s the Butcher.” I glance down at her tiny fist, clutching the fabric of my shirt. She looks at her hand too, only it’s as though she has no idea what the hell it’s doing yanking on my sleeve. Quickly, she retracts it.

  “The Butcher?” she whispers.

  “He’s a doctor. He’s coming to look you over.”

  “I don’t need a doctor,” she whimpers. “I just need to go home.” She repeats that last phrase over and over as she backs away from me and presses herself tight against the wall.

  “You were just raped and tortured for a three-week period. You’re seein’ a fucking doctor.”

  I scoop my keys up off the table and head for the door. Ramming the keys into the lock, I pull it back to find the Butcher, Tank and Prez standing in the hall. The butcher is a tiny little man. He wears neatly pressed pants and a blue button-up shirt beneath a fucking white doctor’s coat. In all the time I’ve known him he’s worn that thing, which I totally don’t fucking get. Dude’s not even a real doctor anymore. You’d think he’d be sick to death of wearing that shit for the last forty-something years of his life, but no, he’s still wearing it around like a fucking trophy. And that’s the other thing; with all the backyard surgeries he performs, wouldn’t it just be easier to wear a fucking rubber apron?

  The Butcher made a few friends during his short stint in prison, and now he works freelance. Any and every MC has him on fucking speed dial. He’s the man you call in to fix your shit. He doesn’t give a damn about MC politics; he has no loyalty. He speaks only to money, and I’m about to pay a pretty price for the service he’s about to provide this bitch.

  In one hand he holds an old-fashioned medical bag, the rich brown leather tended to and cared for, probably more than any of his patients ever would be. He runs his free hand through thick silver hair that’s cropped longer on top with a short back and sides. His hair gel probably costs more than my fucking plasma screen.

  “Patient?” he barks, looking me over as though he’s assessing me for the first time. This contempt he eyes everyone with is getting fuckin’ old. Especially when the bastard has fixed me up more times than I could count—fishing out bullets, resewing stitches … in actual fact, he and Tank are the only reason I’m alive to be able to call on him again. If Tank hadn’t called in the Butcher and laid out the equivalent of a down payment on a bike when I ran from Sugartown with my guts fallin’ out all over the road, I’d be dead. Doesn’t stop the fucker from being an arrogant prick, though.

  I’m just about to answer his douchie question with a douche-baggie response when I’m barrelled into from behind. Indie tries to wipe me clean out on her way through the door. She didn’t count on barrelling into Tank, or me grabbing her from behind and lifting her in my arms the way I did just an hour ago when I dragged her smelly arse to the shower. She screams, flailing and kicking, lashing out at me with her arms and kicking anyone who is crazy enough to get close to her.

  “Let me go!” she wails over and over.

  “Calm. The. Fuck. Down,” I whisper harshly in her ear, biting off each word with the effort of keeping her restrained. I move her toward the bed, shielding her naked body from the others.

  Indie sobs, but her struggling eases off a little as she whispers, “Please don’t let him touch me. Please?”

  I slide my hand from her waist to her throat, allowing her feet to touch the ground. Her body leans heavily against me as I coo in her ear the way I’ve done with Ivy countless times; the way I’d done with her. “I got you, Little Spitfire.”

  I almost have Indie completely subdued when the Butcher appears at my side, syringe in hand, and jabs her in the side of the neck with it. She jerks in my arms and turns to glare accusingly at me, and then she’s falling into me like I’m her lifeline, as though she knows I’ll catch her. And she’s right. I’ve known her all of a few minutes and already I know I’ll catch her, because just like Ivy knew, and Lauren before her, I’m a fucking sucker for the messed up ones, and I ain’t met anyone as screwed up as this girl is right now.

  I breathe out a sigh of relief as my prez and Tank’s footsteps echo up the hall and I slowly cross the room and crouch down beside her. She doesn’t move as I undo the rope binding her arms behind her back
.

  “Are you okay?”

  Fuck. That’s a dumb question. My prez just held her at gunpoint and raped her, and I’m asking if she’s o-fucking-kay. Stupid motherfucker.

  “I gotta get you cleaned up,” I say, stupidly, because what else do you say to someone after you just witnessed their rape?

  I study her. There’s not as much blood as I’d thought there would be. I mean, he wasn’t fucking gentle—every ringing slap of flesh that bounced off the corners of the room as he pounded into her unwilling body told me that—but I’d seen his cock as it entered her again and again, and that fucker was darker than the Red fucking Sea.

  The girl moves, slowly, gingerly. “Touch me and I’ll cut off your balls.” She rolls over and lifts her arse in the air and carefully slides her tight leather pants over her hips, and then she huddles in against the wall, her lip busted, her cheek grazed and bloody. She’s the picture of defeat, and yet strangely … she’s not. There’s a fire in her eyes, the same one I saw at the rally, a fierce determination that screams “do not fuck with me”. And I’m like a dog with a fucking bone, because all I want is to challenge her, beat her down and force her to submit to me, top dog, fucking alpha of the pack. Only I’m not an alpha, I’m a goddamn whelp, improper breeding and all that shit … inferior.

  I move to the other side of the room and sit down, pulling out a packet of cigarettes from inside my cut and lighting one up. I slide the pack forward, across the filthy concrete floor.

  “Why did you try to help me?”

  I shrug and draw in a deep breath of my cancer stick.

  “Why?” she demands in a shaky voice.

  I glare at her. “Doesn’t matter. It didn’t work, and if I know my prez the way I think I do, it’s gonna be so much worse for the both of us.”

  “It gets worse than having that fucker hold me down and shove his filthy cock inside me while the two of you watched on?”

  I lean forward, pinning her with my gaze. “Princess, when it comes to the Angels, it can always get worse.”