“NO! You’re the best! Seriously, I’m gonna make you a mug or something withTorture Daddywritten on it.” Bobdamnit, now he was turning magenta, and I was worried he was going to have a stroke, and it’d be all my fault. “I just didn’t want you to feel bad, is all!” I blurted. “I’m a tough nut to crack, and while I think you have done an excellent job so far, maybe someone with a few more notches on their torment belt will be required to break me. So it’s not you, it’sme.”
Bob save me from fragile masculinity. Here I was, having to reassure my captor that he was good at his job. To be honest, if this was how Priest got his information from his marks, I was surprised he’d held his job for this long. Or maybe bikers just weren’t as tough as I thought, and this was all it took to get information in a small operation like this. The Callahan family held the northern Eastern Seaboard in a chokehold, rivaling the five families in New York for brutality. Was it really fair for me to judge Priest by Uncle Roark’s standards?
Priest took a deep breath and turned away from me to face the table. Maybe he was going to his happy place for a second to pet his emotional support imaginary pet and calm down. I did that sometimes. My imaginary support pet was a penguin named Cornelius, and he was a delight. I idly wondered what kind of animal Priest’s pet would be.
As he came back to the here and now, Priest raised a hand and ran it over the tools he’d laid across the metal table. He cleared his throat.
“Have you ever been flayed? You aren’t bothered by the taser. You say you’ve been waterboarded, and I can see you’ve been lashed, burned, and cut up. Have you ever had the skin flayed from your body?” He turns to face me, eyes arctic and hand grasping a scalpel.
I swallow roughly and answer honestly. “No, but I’ve seen it done.”
Uncle Roark knew there was more than one way to skin a cat, and one day, he taught me how he came about that particular knowledge with my little gray kitten as the object lesson. A few weeks prior, he had surprised me with the kitten, saying that I had been such a good girl and therefore deserved a reward. The kitten, whom I named Shade, was that reward. He waited until I fell in love with Shade, until Shade was my best friend who played with me and snuggled me and made me laugh.
Then he murdered Shade. He flayed the cat alive while he made me watch. He continued long after Shade’s mewls for mercy died, long after the river of tears I cried had carved tracks of despair into my cheeks that I could still feel there sometimes. Uncle Roark liked to do that—give me a gift, get me to love it, wait for me to relax, and then take it away in the cruelest and most ruthless of ways. My eyes teared up with Shade’s memory and the horror of watching my only friend skinned alive and then thrown away like trash. Shade’s loss caused a major shift in a fault line in my soul, and the resulting cracks were almost impossible for my little child self to glue back together.
Suddenly, I remembered that I was in a different basement with a very different man, and I definitely did not want him to know anything about Uncle Roark. I tried to school my expression while I mentally reinforced my broken bits and jagged edges with duct tape and old chewing gum. I shouldn’t have bothered because Priest saw it all.
“Who?” he gently asked. Priest was still standing by the table, scalpel in his hand, but his expression wasn’t quite as ragey as it had been. It almost looked like he felt bad for me.
I swallowed before I replied, “A friend.”
“Who flayed your friend?”
I whispered, “A very, very bad man.”
Impatience replaced the almost not-hate Priest previously had in his eyes for me. “Give me a name! Why would you protect someone who hurt your friend?”
Sighing, I resisted the urge to yell the obvious, and instead, I clenched my jaw and gritted out, “I’m not protecting him. I’m protectingyou.”
Priest narrowed his eyes. “Keeping information from me isn’t protecting me. I can’t fight an enemy if I don’t know who they are. I can’t keep my club safe if you bring threats to our door.”
I nodded. “That makes sense. If I had a family, I’d do anything I could to protect them.”
“Then give me a name.” Priest almost sounded desperate now, like he yearned for nothing more than my words, and they were all he needed to attain his heart's desire. He sounded like a Disney princess before she broke out in an angst-ridden song about the one thing they think they want or need… if the Disney princess in question had a five o’clock shadow, murdery urges, and a healthy disrespect for authority. “Who hurt you? Who hurt your friend?” If this were an actual animated fairy tale, this would be the point in which I begrudgingly agreed to help the hunky princess along with my noble steed, Sheila.
I groaned in frustration and irritation at having to miss out on my dream to be in a Disney movie. “Ican’ttell you. These people…they’re dangerous, and their reach and influence are huge. Los Cuervos is small time. They could annihilate you without batting an eyelash. You’re safer not knowing.”
In a few short strides, Priest was back in my face, scalpel in hand. “I fucking knew it! Iknewyou were nothing but trouble. You’re a plant for the bratva, aren’t you? Petrov thinks he’s so goddamn smart, so much better than us, that we wouldn’t see you for what you are. A damn spy!”
Okie-dokie, now I was pissed.
“I never asked to be here, wank stain! If you remember correctly, I wanted to ride off into the sunset with Sheila, andyouandyour friendsstopped me. I’ve stayed on the move, and that’s what kept me alive so far, but I…” I bit my lip and continued in a slightly smaller voice, “I liked it here. I thought maybe…”
Priest sneered, looking beautiful and cruel, his blue eyes frosty. “What? You thought you’d get some more free food and clothes and mechanical work before you slithered back to The Goldfinch?”
My eyes filled with tears, the injustice of his words stinging across my skin like fire ant bites. “No! I haven’t asked for anything! I was given the clothes, and the food and work were offered, not asked for. I was going to say that for the first time…” My throat felt thick in my effort not to let the tears welling in my eyes roll down my cheeks. I loathed feeling this vulnerable in front of someone I inexplicably wanted to like me. “I was going to say that for the first time in my life, I felt like I’d made real human friends. Tonight made me realize that I do care about the people here, and that’s why I have to leave.” Though valiantly fought, my battle with the shame-filled tears blurring my vision was doomed to failure.
Priest studied me as I silently cried for the roots I’d unknowingly planted here in Sagebrush, knowing I’d be ripping them up as soon as I could. I had to keep them off Uncle Roark’s radar. If he knew how much I loved Lennon’s laugh, how Cricket was my conscious, how Prospect blushed every time I blew him a kiss, or how much Bones loved pampering Sheila…he’d destroy them all, and he’d make me watch.
I heard his voice, harsh and deep and filled with some kind of feeling I knew but couldn’t name. It wrapped around me like a tether and pulled me out of the tight grip of my doom spiral.
“You’d leave, hoping to protect your friends from the family that hurt you?”
I sniffled and pinned him with a hard stare. “Of course I would. Wouldn’t you? I don’t want him to hurt anyone else.”
A calculated look entered Priest’s eyes. “And thisfamilythat you’re so afraid of, what would they do to get you back?”
“A lot. I was…useful, I guess.” Uncle Roark raised me to be his perfect victim first and foremost, a tool for the family second. Even then, when I worked for the family, it was just another way to torture me. To force me to do things in order to survive that would haunt me forever.
