There is a long moment of silence, too fucking long and I take a step backward. Dragon reaches out, taking his arm that was draped across his wife’s shoulders and grabs ahold of my bicep. His fingers wrap around me, holding me too tightly as he jerks me toward him, but he doesn’t release me, he holds me steady and firmly.
“Give me a week. Fine,” he bites. “Give me two days.”
He ends the call, his eyes finding mine and his teeth gnash together as he growls. “My office. Wait for me there.”
Before I can ask even one question, he’s stomping away from me. I look behind me as he walks away, then whip my head back around to meet Bellarosa’s. Her eyes are wide and her lips are parted.
“You better go to his office,” she whispers.
“That was bad, wasn’t it?” I ask.
She shakes her head, pressing her lips together in a straight line. “I don’t pretend to know anything about club business, I try to stay out of it, but yeah, that seems bad.”
“Shit,” I hiss.
She nods her head. “Yeah.”
Without another word, I hurry past her and into Dragon’s office. I’m too nervous to sit on his sofa, so I pace. I’m not really looking at anything, just walking back and forth from wall to wall as I wait for Dragon to come in here and put me out of my misery.
The door flies open and not only does Dragon march through, but again, there’s an entourage. Taz, Mountain, Wolfe, Worm, and even Silver make their way inside of the small office. Dragon immediately rounds his desk and sinks down into the chair. Nobody else sits though and that’s far too telling.
“Tell me,” I whisper my demand.
He clears his throat. “Walsh wants you, but in order to let Hawk go, he wants us to supply him with women. He wants us to traffic for his sick and twisted games, for his little club’s kinks.”
“Where we get rid of one, five more fucking appear,” Taz snaps.
“No fuckin’ shit, hombre,” Silver growls.
Biting the inside of my cheek, I would volunteer happily, if it was just me he wanted, but I can’t agree with the rest of his plan. The rest of the men don’t seem so hot to kidnap girls and hand them over, either, which I’m really glad about.
“What’s the plan, Dragon?” Wolfe asks.
There are a few moments of silence, all attention is focused on Dragon and nowhere else, but he doesn’t speak. I don’t know if it’s because he’s not sure what to say or if he knows what he wants to do and he’s just not ready to say it aloud.
Clearing my throat, I take a step forward. “If I can get in, maybe I can try to free Hawk?”
“Live bait?” Silver growls. “No fuckin’ way. Hawk and I ain’t best friends, but you’re his woman.”
“Ain’t branded,” Mountain reminds everyone. “Sorry, but Leighton didn’t get any special fuckin’ shit for being in my bed, she doesn’t either.”
There’s a long moment of silence, again. Squaring my shoulders, my gaze finds Dragon’s and I hold it. “I will get him out. There’s no reason to agree to that. I know your club isn’t about that,” I remind him.
“We ain’t angels, Avah. Done a lot of fucked-up shit,” he grunts.
I can practically see the waves of anger that are rolling off of the other men in the room. They may be lawbreakers, they may be violent, they may be murderers, but they are not this. And I have a feeling this exact topic has come up before and it has not ended well.
“Let me help. I love Hawk, let me do this.”
Dragon shifts his gaze from me to each of the men in the room. They must all give him some kind of silent communication because a few moments later, he nods his head.
“You’ll do this, but you’ll do it after you and Worm have come up with some kind of plan. And you’ll do this with us at your back, Avah. We can’t go inside with you, but we will be surrounding the place and have a plan to extract both of you before shit gets too fucking crazy.”
I don’t tell him that the senator can get fucking insane in a matter of minutes. There’s no need to say that. If he wants to think that he’s going to save both me and Hawk, then that’s fine, I’ll let him believe that.
But I know the truth.
I will not come out of this.
Not free and more than likely, not even alive.
HAWK
It takes everything inside of me to hold back the vomit that’s threatening to come up. Considering all I have in my body is some liquid supplement bullshit, I need to keep that down to keep up my strength.
I’m disgusted with myself, though I know that I didn’t have much of a choice. I didn’t put her in that position and every time I tried to resist, Walsh delivered her pain. I could say that I don’t understand his obsession with me, but that would be a lie. I understand him perfectly.
Deep down inside, I am him.
He wants control. He needs it like he needs to breathe. I need it too, we just go about it in completely different ways. He uses and abuses women, and I run when I lose any semblance of control in an attempt to take back what I can.
I’d rather be considered weak and a coward for running than an abusive piece of shit. The girl is still across from me, her naked body splayed out on the bed. She doesn’t even attempt to move, her glazed eyes focused straight forward. She’s completely lost in another world, and it’s probably a much better place than this reality.
Walsh makes his way over to my cage, a place he promptly forced me back into after I was finished following his sick demands. His eyes find mine, his lips curve up into a devious evil fucking smile and he lets out a chuckle.
“You had more fun than I expected,” he announces coolly.
“Fuck off,” I grind out.
He shakes his head once. “This was an experiment.”
“Experiment?” I ask.
He snorts. “Yeah, I wanted to see if you’d do everything I wanted you to, on demand, without the use of little blue pills. Seems you’re just as depraved as I am, Orson.”
Choices.
I felt as though my choices were taken from me, but were they? Sure, he hurt the girl when I didn’t perform his demanded task, but my dick still got hard. I still did what he wanted, the way he wanted it.
Maybe I am just as sick as he is?
Fuck.
We both freeze, our heads whipping to the side at the sound of footsteps walking down the concrete steps. One of Walsh’s goons is already standing silently against the wall, an almost frozen fixture to the room.
The second goon appears in the room, clearing his throat. He doesn’t even chance a glance over to the still-frozen naked woman on the middle of the bed.
“We have a visitor, sir,” he announces.
“How? Nobody knows I even own this house,” he growls. “And I haven’t even sent the official invitation to my group. Who the fuck is here?”
The goon’s gaze flicks from Walsh to me, then back to Walsh. “It’s her.”
“Her?” he grunts. “I’m not ready for her. She is not supposed to come to me,” he barks, and I expect him to stomp his foot, but he doesn’t.
His face turns an odd shade of red and then the color starts to shift a deep purple color as his entire body trembles with anger. Knowing exactly who she is, I press my lips in a straight line, and wonder what in the actual fuck she’s doing here.
“Strip her and bring her in here. I want her naked and on her knees at my feet,” he growls.
Chapter Twenty-Three
AVAH
I didn’t expect the house to look so… normal. I expected the place that held evil, to look exactly like it housed some disgusting and vile fucker. Black and bloodred décor and paint on the exterior, a wrought-iron gate, a gargoyle guarding the entrance. It looks nothing like that, in fact, it looks exactly like suburbia.
There is a wrought-iron gate around the property, but there are no gargoyles, and it’s a brown stucco with some decorative rocks on the elevation. Reaching for the intercom, a man grunts into the
speaker.
“I’m here for the senator,” I announce.
There’s a moment of silence, then the gate begins to squeak open. I don’t look around, I don’t have to. I know that the men are somewhere out there, watching me. I also know that they will be able to have eyes on this place. As soon as I put the small device that’s in my hand in the room where Hawk is located.
Squaring my shoulder, I walk through the gate. I will not be nervous, I refuse to show any kind of weakness even though I am completely terrified of what is to come.
I halfway expect a husband, wife, two children, and a dog to come running out of the front door as soon as it opens, that’s just how suburbia this place is. It doesn’t happen though. What does happen is one of Walsh’s men appears. He glances down at me, shakes his head once, then wraps his meaty grip around my bicep and tugs me behind him.
My feet stumble, but I don’t fall, mainly because his grasp is so damn tight. I also don’t say a fucking word to him, absolutely nothing. Biting the inside of my cheek, I grip the device in my hand, hoping that I’ll be able to place it somewhere useful.
“Stay,” he growls as he pushes me inside of a coat closet, like I can go anywhere.
My breathing starts to come out in pants as sweat starts to gather between my breasts and at the small of my back. I don’t know if my vision is blurring, or if the room is just really that dark.
Visions of my past, of my father locking me in closets for hours, sometimes forgetting about me and it being days, come back with vengeance. I thought I was over it, over this. I thought that I had moved on from my past, but clearly, I have not.
I whimper as my legs give out beneath me. I keep repeating a mantra to myself so that I don’t completely lose my shit. Over and over, I remind myself that I am here for a reason. I am here to save possibly dozens, if not more, women. I am here to save Hawk. I am doing this to make a difference, to have my life matter, something that I never truly thought it would ever do.
It feels like a lifetime passes until the door is wrenched open. Lifting my face, I look up into the guard’s eyes. He doesn’t show an ounce of surprise at my deteriorated state. Instead, he grunts and jerks his head.
Standing on shaky legs, I’ve lost all of my bravado. I feel like all of the hard work that I did mentally preparing myself is completely gone, it’s gone out of the window now. I’m fucking broken and all it took was locking me in a closet for probably ten minutes that felt like ten days.
“Strip,” he barks. Tilting my head back, I blink up at him. “Now,” he growls.
He doesn’t have to demand it twice. With my device firmly in my grip, I try to make it look effortless and I strip out of my clothes. He doesn’t say anything as I ball both of my hands into fists and hold them to my sides, my clothes in a messy pile next to my feet.
Lifting my head, I inhale a slow breath and attempt to gather my wits and my strength that I had lost earlier. The guard smirks. Reaching out, he circles my nipple with his index finger, licking his lips, he lets out a small chuckle.
“When he is done with you, I’m going to have my fun,” he rasps. “I’ve been watching you for months, for a couple of years really, and I bet you’ll be exactly what I imagined.”
I don’t react at all whatsoever. I can’t. I need to keep a cool head and he can say whatever he wants, but Walsh won’t let any of what he is saying come true. He’ll kill me first. So it doesn’t matter, his words mean absolutely nothing.
When I don’t give him the reaction that he wants, he grunts, turns around and starts to stomp away. I follow behind him, keeping my breathing calm and even with each step that I take. I cannot panic, I cannot do anything that will put Hawk or his men in jeopardy.
He walks me toward a door and pushes it open as he takes a step down and to the side. “After you,” he murmurs.
Lifting my chin in the air, I grip my hands tighter and prepare to find a place to put this damn device. Completely naked, I walk down the staircase, down into a basement, and I know that this is his dungeon.
It’s everything that I thought it would be. Standing to the side, I put my hands behind my back at the bottom of the stairs, not ready to look around yet, I place the device at the end of the staircase as I wait. Thankful that one of the sides has sticky stuff on it and my sweat hasn’t completely fucked it up.
“Knees,” the senator’s voice rings out, seeming to bounce off of the concrete walls around us.
The guard next to me wraps his hand around my bicep and quickly drags me forward, stopping me abruptly before he places his palms against my shoulders and forces my knees to bend and I slam hard against the concrete flooring.
Tipping my chin, I don’t bother looking anywhere in the room. There is no point to it, I have a feeling that I’ll be well acquainted with this space shortly. There is an animalistic growl to my right and my head jerks, whipping to the side before my breath leaves me in a whoosh.
Hawk is right there.
He’s right here.
He’s in his jeans and T-shirt, his cut somewhere else, his feet bare and his face set hard as he stares at me. He shakes his head once, disappointment crosses his features. I wish that I could tell him why I’m there. I wish that I could say anything, but I can’t.
The senator’s fingers grip the back of my hair and force me to shift my focus from Hawk to him. Tears prick my eyes at the instant pain that slides throughout my entire scalp. Inhaling a sharp breath, I don’t allow those tears to fall. Not now, not ever—not for him.
“You’re mine now, whore. See that bag of flesh behind me?” he growls, then pulls my head to the side.
My eyes flick down and focus on the naked woman in the middle of the bed, her legs spread wide, cum leaking from her ass and her pussy. The flesh of her backside bright red from being struck. Yeah, I fucking see her.
“She’s the blonde to your black. You’ll both be sculpted, shaped, and created to please me. And that man behind bars that you’re so enamored with? He’s going to watch every little thing that I do to you, meanwhile, he’ll be doing whatever I say to the blonde, and you’ll be watching that. It’s going to be such a beautiful thing to watch both of you break. The blonde is already broken, but the two of you still have so much left inside of you. It’s going to be magnificent, Avah.”
Senator Walsh obviously has zero clue of the woman that I am. He has no idea that I was broken a long time ago. He doesn’t realize that my father was the first man to break me, Layne the second, and every other man after that has chipped away at what I had left.
Hawk is the only man that could have brought me back, that started to put me back together without even trying to.
HAWK
Truly, I didn’t think that I had much of a heart left for anything or anyone other than Trista. Apparently, I do and Avah holds the small piece that I have left unoccupied by Trista. That is, if the ache in my chest is any indication.
Walsh picks her up by the grip he has in her hair, and I’m unable to stop the low growl that vibrates deep inside of me. He turns her body toward me, holding her out to me. She’s not crying, my woman is strong as fuck, but she looks terrified and I can’t blame her, not at all.
“Take a good look. Next time you see one another, we’re going to have some fun.”
Before I can respond, he pulls her backward and she lets out the slightest whimper of pain. Otherwise, her face is set firmly, her eyes wide, but not a single tear has fallen. He continues to drag her backward and the two of them disappear.
The goon that brought Avah down here naked follows behind them, but the statuesque one against the wall doesn’t move, at least not right away. Sinking down to the hard floor again, I bury my face in my hands for just long enough to calm my breathing down.
When I’m breathing regularly again, only then do I lift my head and look around the room. The poor girl is still face down and staring blankly in front of her. The goon has his attention focused on the girl and nowhere else. I wonder if h
e’s into her, I wonder if he’d do anything to have her for himself?
He snorts, turning to look at me. “Don’t even think about asking me for help,” he rasps.
“Why is that?” I ask, arching a brow.
He shakes his head once, his brows turning down into a frown, his lips forming a straight line. “Because that is my sister right there. My fucking sister. I made the mistake of asking her to bring me something one day while I was on the job. She walked in, he saw her, and she never left.”
“Why don’t you kill him?” I ask.
He clears his throat, his jaw hard and then he finally looks to his feet before he lifts his gaze up to meet my own. “Because killing him doesn’t change what he’s done, and it doesn’t stop his friends.”
“Why don’t you just turn him in or better yet, expose his ass to the public?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “His reach goes beyond that, and I have a mother and little brother to take care of.”
“Then you’re a pussy. You see what he did to her tonight, what he forced me to do to her. If you think it’s going to get any better, you’re an idiot.”
“I’m saving three lives for one. Taylee is pretty, but she’s never been a saint and I don’t pretend she has ever been.”
“You’re a pussy and a piece of shit, good to know.”
He lets out a rumbling laugh. “If you thought Walsh hired decent people, you thought wrong, man.”
“Your own fucking sister,” I hiss. “Your fucking sister.”
“If he wanted my brother, I’d hand him over, too,” he states.
“You’re a sick and twisted psycho.”
He leans forward, a smile spreading across his face. It’s maniacal and I realize that he’s telling me the truth, he truly would hand anyone over to Walsh. He won’t help me, he’s proving getting his rocks off at what happens around here, his sister being part of it or not means absolutely nothing to him.
UnWreck Me (Savage Beast MC Book 7) Page 17
