He broke me. That was unequivocally true. He just didn’t realize that while I was serving his purposes, I was slowly piecing myself back together in the shape of something new. As soon as I could, I made mygreat escape, and I spent the past two years running and figuring out who I was now that I was free of the basement.
“What did you do for the family?” Priest asked. He ran his thumb over the handle of the scalpel, but he had yet to cut me with it.
“Oh, you know. This and that.” I tried to deflect. There was no way I was going into detail about the scope of my…experiences. One, that shit was heavy and private. Priest hadn’t earned my truth yet. While Lennon, Bones, and Cricket had made some headway at peeling back my oniony layers, Priest avoided me and acted like he hated me, so I didn’t feel like exposing my darkness and brokenness to him. Two, with great power came great bullshit or whatever. I had a niche set of skills that was difficult to explain and awkward on a résumé. What if I told Priest, “Hey, I don’t know how to use Microsoft Word but I can kill a man twice my size with a bicycle chain,” and he tried to control me and use me to do bad things? My life had already been controlled by one cockhead. I simply refused to bow down and accept the same treatment again.
“If I let you go right now, where would you and Sheila be off to?” Priest’s change in subject was meant to catch me off guard, but it wouldn’t work. I didn’t see the harm in answering, so I replied honestly.
“Well, we still have a little farther west we can go before we reach the Pacific Ocean, so I guess we’d do that. I’ve never been to California.”
“Hmm,” Priest hummed like he was mulling something over in his head. He stepped closer to the chair until his feet were between mine, and his knees brushed my thighs. For some reason, I found myself looking down at his feet, feeling uncomfortable at being so close to him physically for the first time since his tantrum over Ellis’s clothes. Well, except for when he was choking me out. His hand snaked into the hair at the nape of my neck, which he grabbed in a firm grip. Priest closed his fist and pulled my head back gently until my green eyes clashed with his blue ones. He brought the scalpel to my lips, pressing the flat of the blade into my lower lip.
“Do you want to know what I think, angel?” He was physically controlling the movement of my head with his fist in my hair so I couldn’t nod, and the scalpel pressed to my lip prevented me from speaking. Nevertheless, he waited like he expected an answer from me, so I raised an eyebrow as if to sayenlighten me, please, jerkface.Thisamused him because a small smirk played upon his lips, and the thought struck me again that it wasn’t fair such an attractive man had to be such an asshole.
“I think you must be trekking west because your demons live in the east. You say you’re running fromthefamily. Not your family, or a family, butthefamily that raised you. Someone has gone through a lot of effort to make sure you were impossible to trace. No fingerprints, no hits on your DNA. Your face isn’t on any form of government ID, so I know you’ve never had a legal driver's license or passport. Unless you were part of a doomsday cult and only recently were allowed out of the bunker, this leads me to believe thatthe familythat raised you was involved in criminal activity. The onlyfamilieslike this that would prioritize anonymity, leave the kinds of scars you’re sporting, and be as scary and powerful as you’ve alluded to would be an organized crime family.”
Priest released my hair and crouched down onto his haunches, putting himself at eye level with me. He dragged the flat of the scalpel blade down my lip, tracing down my chin and to the hollow of my throat. The blade never drew blood, but the cold press of steel reminded me that hecould. This position should have given Priest and I uninterrupted eye contact, but since he slid the scalpel away from my mouth, his eyes hadn’t left my lips. My tongue darted out to moisten my bottom lip, surreptitiously checking to make sure the skin hadn’t been broken. Priest’s pupils dilated in response, nostrils flaring as he inhaled deeply through his nose.
“You sure think a lot of thoughts.” My voice came out husky and nothing like my usual tone. He was dangerously close to connecting a lot of dots, and I needed him to back off more than I needed my next breath.
“You say you’re not a bratva plant, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t in bed with the Italians,” he said, eyes finally meeting mine. He watched my face, a calculated look in the depths of his frosty-blue eyes. “Or perhaps the Irish?” I did my best not to flinch or allow my face to show how close to the edge my panic had shoved me, but even I couldn’t control the galloping beat of my heart. At his words, my pulse thundered in my ears, and I could feel the flat of the scalpel blade jumping where it was pressed near the pulse point in the hollow of my throat.
“Don’t,” I pleaded with him in a whisper. Priest had no idea the danger he’d put himself and his beloved club into if Uncle Roark knew I was here. He’d stop at nothing to get me back in the basement, his toy to torment and abuse and work until my body couldn’t take anymore, and I eventually died.
A look of remorse passed over Priest’s face, but it was there and gone again in a mere moment as determination replaced the remorse that must have been a figment of my imagination. I didn’t know how long Stockholm syndrome took to go into effect, but I almost found myself wishing I could end his agony, and my own, and just tell Priest everything. The urge to unburden myself was strong, and he looked so calm and capable…maybe he could help me if I simply told him about the monsters who hunted me. If I would just confess…
My lips parted, and if anyone asked me later, I’d say that I definitelywasabout to tell Priest to go fuck himself and absolutelynotconsidering blurting out my most guarded secret to an emotionally unavailable alpha hole who tied me to a chair without my consent. Abso-fuckin’-lutely not. Thankfully, he’ll never know how much I wanted to unload my trauma and fears for the future on him because at the exact moment that he lowered the scalpel, the door to the cellar was kicked in, and two extremely angry-looking bikers stomped down the stairs. My eyes widened as Bones strode over to Priest, who dropped the scalpel and let his arms hang loosely by his sides. In a moment, Bones had an unresistant Priest pinned to the wall, his forearm over Priest’s neck. Cricket quickly dropped to his knees behind me, working to untie the ropes that bound me to the chair.
As my bonds loosened around my arms, I raised my hands and brought them to my chest, massaging my wrists. Cricket circled and crouched in front of me to free my legs from the rope affixing them to the chair legs. The session had been a tickle fight compared to what I was used to from Uncle Roark, but I found my knees buckling the moment I tried to stand from the chair. Guess I was out of practice.
“Alright, love, I’ve got you,” Cricket murmured as he gently took my elbow and helped me stand. I hadn’t been paying much attention to the other two men in the room until now. As Cricket steadied me, I shifted my attention from him to where Bones and Priest were pressed againstthe wall. They were having some kind of macho stareoff. Bones’s eyes were so hard and angry that if he’d been a cartoon, they’d be emitting sparks of rage. For his part, Priest looked resigned but unrepentant as he glared back at his friend, his jaw and fists clenched.
“You okay, chica loca?” Bones questioned without looking in my direction.
“Peachy keen, jellybean,” I replied, my voice a little tight. It’d take more than a few zaps and one heavy conversation to hurt me. Though, to be completely honest, the entire experience left me feeling so very tired. Tired of running, tired of hiding parts of myself from the friends I was making, and tired of looking over my shoulder, constantly afraid that the devil was drawing nearer. Heavy footsteps on the stairs leading down from the doors drew the eyes of everyone already in the confessional. Priest, who maintained an unrepentant look in the face of Bones’s fury, paled a bit as Duke slowly made his way into the basement.
Standing in unbuttoned jeans, bare-chested, in a fluffy gray bathrobe with his silver hair mussed, Duke wore a murderous expression. Stopping at the bottom of the steps, Duke surveyed the room and took in that tableau in front of him: Bones pinning Priest to the wall, Priest’s clenched fists and “fuck you” eyes, Cricket’s arm around me supporting me, and then there’s me. I gave him a tired little wave and half a smile, all that I was capable of mustering at the moment. Bones jerked Priest from the wall, shoving him forward until he kneeled at Duke’s feet.
Cricket broke the charged silence. “Prez, Indigo is exhausted. Permission to get her out of here and into bed?”
“Granted.” Duke clenched his jaw, and at that moment, he looked so much like his son—tired, determined, and righteously angry. His eyes shifted to me and scanned me briefly for damage.“Do it.”
I thought at first Duke was speaking to Cricket, but Bones’s fist whipped out at his words. The gleam of fluorescent light on the handgun held in his fist was the first hint I had that he had come for me, armed against one of his own. The gravity of such a thing wasn’t lost on me. Bones brought the butt of his weapon down on Priest’s skull, knocking him out. Confused, I turned my eyes to Duke, who looked grim.
“What’s happening?” I asked the room. I didn’t care who answered me as long as someone did.
Cricket cleared his throat before replying. “Priest went against Duke’s express order. The club has rules, and now Priest will be subjected to club justice.”
“What does that mean?” I looked from Cricket, who wouldn’t meet my eyes, to Bones, who was gathering Priest’s prone form and dragging him to the chair I had just vacated. The muscle in Duke’s jaw was jumping from how hard he was clenching it. The thought that he must be where Priest gets his clench-iness from flutters through my mind before I brought it back to the issue at hand.
“What does thatmean? Duke? Bones?” Bones hadn’t spared me a glance thus far, but Duke answered me, his voice oddly gentle.
“Let’s get you out of here. Once you rest, we can talk about what happened here tonight and what that means for my son.” Bones had tied Priest to the chair, much in the same way I had been. Suddenly, the weight of the evening crashed over me like a wave, and exhaustion threatened to drag me under.
“Yeah, okay.” I allowed Cricket to help me out of the cellar, or the confessional, as I now knew it was called. It would always be the dungeon from Wish.com in my mind, but even I could admit that the confessional was a much cooler name. Once we were out, Duke peeled off to go back to his home, which was one of the single-family homes on the compound. Bones stayed with Cricket and me until we got into the clubhouse, and then he silently headed toward the offices and church. Cricket helped me to my room in silent support and left me alone with my thoughts after I assured him that no lasting damage had been done.
I collapsed on my bed, too tired to draw the curtains against the sunlight beginning to creep over the horizon. Tonight had been so much fun at the start. When Lennon and I had been dancing at the club, I should have known that I couldn’t have something so simple and wonderful without a heaping helping of bullshit afterward. The weird interaction with Spike and his boss at Allure, deciding that it was time for me to leave Sagebrush, and everything that happened with Priest all swirled around in my brain. How could so much fit into just a few short hours? I closed my eyes tight and shook my head, one hand coming up to thread into my hair and the other to smack my temple in an attempt to calm the thoughts crashing around in my skull. I was too tired to thinkabout all of this right now. I needed my thoughts to stop clamoring around like a dog with the zoomies.
Releasing my head, I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them as I collapsed to my side. I made myself as small as I could and ignored the voice in my head that urged me to run as soon as possible. I couldn’t leave here without my best bitch Sheila, and thoughts of her helped quiet the tempest raging in my head. I hummed a song to myself, hugging my knees, self-soothing like I’d done for as long as I could remember. “99 Problems” by Jay-Z came tumbling out of my mouth, and as I sang, I relaxed incrementally. Each verse brought me one step closer to sleep, and as I mumbled out the chorus one final time, I smiled a little as I drifted off. I might have ninety-nine problems, but right now, being conscious wasn’t one of them.
