Kick Read online

  The naked woman beyond him had gone completely still when she watched the dentist fall, but now her screams start up again.

  “What the fuck? You still fuckin’ high, motherfucker?” Tank says, shaking his head. “Prez is gonna bust your balls in a fuckin’ vice, brother.”

  He raises his gun and aims it at the brunette’s head.

  “No!” I shout and throw myself in front of her, knocking over a tripod with a video camera attached. The camera comes lose and slides across the floor. The brunette continues to scream like a fucking banshee.

  “Jesus Christ, what the hell is wrong with you?” Tank lowers the gun. I turn and face the woman, who begins thrashing against her restraints.

  “I’m not gonna hurt you.” I whisper, but I guess the fact that I just shot a man in cold blood three inches from her face might sort of imply otherwise—she is covered in his brain matter, after all. A gob of something white and globular slides over her collarbone and off her nipple, landing in her lap. Her body quakes with fear, her tits jiggle with the jagged, panic-filled rush of air into her lungs. I close my eyes, trying to get my cock to sit the fuck down. I’m all kinds of fucked up; I know this, but there’s a scent to a woman’s fear, and my dick is all too keenly aware of and enamoured with it. It’s fucked up, but it is what it is.

  “Snuff it out, Kick,” Tank says behind me. The motherfucker sounds bored shitless, as if he can’t wait to be done here so he can go and grab a fucking Big Mac. “She’s seen too much.”

  “I got it. Shut up, man,” I say. “Do something useful and wrap that sick fucker in that plastic tarp.”

  “Do I look like your bitch, Kick?”

  “Just fuckin’ do it.”

  He holsters his piece and pulls the tarp closer. I turn back to the girl. Her face is a fucking mess, and she’s yanking on her restraints and staring at me with wide, terrified eyes. Her cheeks are swollen and bloody.

  “I’m gonna untie you. Okay? I’m just here to help you. I’m not gonna hurt you.” She thrashes against the stirrups, trying to free herself. “If you scream, I’ll be forced to put a bullet between your eyes. You don’t want that. I don’t want that.”

  She shakes her head.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Tank moans. “Don’t fucking untie the bitch.”

  I lean over and unfasten the buckle strapping her head to the chair. She lets me, and then she lurches as far forward as her restraints will allow, and head-butts me.

  “Fucking bitch,” I shout. Backing away, I press a hand to my bleeding lip.

  “Oh, I like this one.” Tank chuckles. “Shame we gotta put her out of her misery.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” I say, and then press my gun against her temple. “Do that again and I will put a bullet in you. Understand?”

  She nods, carefully. Not so fucking brave now that she has a gun aimed at her brain, though I have to admit, her fight has me rock-fucking-hard in my jeans.

  “Kick,” Tank warns. “Put her down, or I will.”

  “You think she’s gonna talk? That fucker was ripping her teeth out. Bitch ain’t gonna talk.”

  I close my eyes and remember a scene only a few short years ago in a cane field in the arsehole of nowhere town. The dude I’d loved my whole life like a brother, standing before a bitch that’d seen too much, begging him to spare her life.

  How the mighty have fallen and become fucking pussies.

  I can’t believe I’m begging to save her life the way Ethan did with that whore. “We’re taking her with us.”

  “The hell we are.” Tank says. “Prez is gonna grind your balls for his bread over this shit.” He waves his gun at the plastic-wrapped body of the dentist. “You can’t bring a civilian into the club.”

  The woman takes that opportunity to scream. I clamp my hand down over her mouth, wincing when I touch the cracked and swollen flesh beneath my fingers. She bites down. I yank my fist away, the pain in my hand acute and searing. “Fuck me, bitch! I’m trying to save your goddamned life here and you’re doing a hell of a job trying to fuck that shit up.”

  “Kill me,” she growls. “I’d rather die than be passed around between filthy fucking bikers.”

  “Oh, that can be very easily arranged, sweetheart,” Tank says, lifting his gun and aiming it at her head. I hold up my arms and ease in front of the rabid bitch, protecting her. Who the fuck knows why? Certainly not me, that’s for sure. I just can’t walk away. I can’t look at her face, all beaten and bruised, and put her down like a dog.

  “Do it,” she screeches. “Fucking do it! Do it! Do it!”

  Tank looks as if he’s about to put a bullet through me in order to stop this bitch’s screaming. I’ve had enough. I snap. I lash out and strike her on the temple with the butt of my gun, rendering her unconscious.

  I stare at her face for a long time. Swollen and bloodied as she is, there’s no telling if she’s beautiful, or is she’s as ugly as a hat full of arseholes. Her hair is filthy, her body is covered in crusted blood, and shit, she smells like shit too. How fucking long has she been here? Locked away in an empty warehouse, the plaything for a sick, twisted fuck. Hooked up to an IV that I’m guessing fed her sedatives and other more potent drugs, instead of nutrients. I rip off the tape and yank the needle from her arm, then shove away his tray of torture devices. All gleaming, shiny dentist tools, or they would have been gleaming and shiny, if they weren’t covered in the fucker’s brain tissue and tiny fragments of his skull.

  Lifting a syringe and a tiny vial labelled morphine from the tray—which I’m sure he uses in order to knock her out rather than ease her pain—I push out the air from the needle and tap the crook of her elbow, finding a vein to drive into.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Tank asks, but I ignore him as I place the needle back on the tray, and run my fingertips across her shoulder. I lift a limp strand of matted hair to my nose. It’s sweat and blood, fear, and general human filth. My gaze rolls over her from head to toe. There are bruises everywhere, but it seems as though he only liked to really mess up her face and mouth.

  “She’s not Lauren.”

  I close my eyes. “Don’t say her name. Not here.”

  “End it, Kick.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Tank lifts his gun and aims it at her head. I move on autopilot. I don’t even think about what I’m doing. I just do. Like in all the important decisions I’ve made in life, it’s as if my brain flips a switch and someone else takes over. Someone who isn’t me, but cares as much for self-preservation as I do. Cares for life. Cares for others who can’t muster a shit of care for themselves. I pull on him, gun aimed and at the ready, my finger hovering over the trigger.

  “You fucking pulling on a brother?” Tank demands with seething, narrowed eyes. His jaw ticks.

  “We’re not killing her,” I say, though the words feel as if they’re being pulled from me, wrenched from some alien place in the pit of my gut. “Not today.”

  “What the fuck’s gotten into you, man?” Tank says. He hasn’t lowered his gun yet, so I don’t lower mine either. I can feel the fury radiating off of him. If another brother had pulled on Tank this way, he’d already be laid out on the floor, a bullet between the eyes, blood oozing out from the hole in his skull. I don’t know why he hasn’t put me down already like the rabid dog I am. A part of me wishes he’d quit fuckin’ holdin’ back.

  “She’s not her.”

  “I know,” I whisper. I don’t know why I’m fighting for this. Bitch is probably crazy—not that I’d blame her—and I’m the last person who should be attempting an act of decency. I’m not the hero in this story; I’m the motherfucking villain.

  Tank shakes his head as he lowers his gun and tucks it into the waistband of his jeans. He may have decided not to shoot me today, but there’s venom in his tone when he says, “You pull a piece on a brother again, and I’ll put you to fuckin’ ground.”

  I nod.

  Tank crouches down and hefts the dentist’s body ove
r his shoulder. He might be wrapped in plastic but blood still pours out from the clear tarp and leaves a trail across the floor. Once Tank has cleared the room, I bend and pick up her tooth from the floor. I take a moment to roll it across my palm and then pocket it before I turn back to the woman in the chair, and unbuckle her restraints. I lift her in a groom’s hold and carry her out into the sombre grey Sydney day. I climb into the back of the van and Tank shoots me a questioning look from the driver’s seat.

  “I wanna be close if she wakes up.”

  He glares at me.

  “Can’t have her busting open the doors and streaking around town like a madwoman.”

  “If we’d shot her in the head, we wouldn’t need to worry,” he says without preamble and throws me an “I’m not fucking buying your bullshit excuses” glower over his shoulder as he shifts the van into reverse, forcing me to clench my body tight to keep from toppling onto my ripe-scented new plaything. I glance down at the woman in my arms. She’s sleeping soundly, probably for the first time in a long time. Her body is covered in bruises. Yellow, purple, blue-black, head to toe—there isn’t a single part of her thin frame that hasn’t seen some form of torture. It makes me wonder—if this is what she looks like on the outside, what the fuck kind of damage did he do to her insides?

  I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.

  This bitch needs a hospital, or a mental institution. Not a fucking bikey.

  I stare at the plastic-wrapped body of the dentist. I wish I’d made him suffer a little more. I wish I’d made him pay, not just for this woman in my arms, but for all of them. I wish it was me wrapped in that tarp, because the things I’ve done, the things I want to do make me no better than him. Just smarter, because I was the one holding the gun instead of a pair of fucking dental pliers.

  “Killer’s bike’s here, but it don’t look like no one else is back yet,” Tank says as he punches the code into the gate. The loud metallic grinding against concrete alerts me to them swinging open, and oddly—even though I’m likely to get my balls handed to me in a brown paper bag for going against the Prez’s wishes—I feel a sense of relief.

  Fat Boy, a huge black pit bull dumber than the shit that comes out its arse, barks as Tank eases the van into the compound.

  “Where’s the fucking dirty bastard that touched my woman?” Raphe’s booming voice filters through the closed van doors. Fuck. They let him out of lock-up sooner than I’d thought they would. My relief is short-lived. “I’m gonna skin his dick and roast it on an open fire, and then feed it to him.”

  Tank shoots out of the front seat and intercepts him before he can open the door and find his dentist dead as a doornail. “There was a complication, Brother.”

  “What fucking complication?” The doors are yanked open and sunlight floods the van, blinding me momentarily. All I see are two massive black shadows looming over us.

  “Who’s in the tarp?”

  “That would be our friendly neighbourhood dentist,” Tank says.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Raphe shouts. “You boys had one fucking task—deliver that little cock-fuck to me and I’d rip his head off. What the fuck happened?”

  “Kick happened.” Tank mutters, folding his huge arms across his broad chest. “Went in there guns blazin’, just like Trigger, and punched a whole in the motherfucker’s head.”

  “I oughtta punch a fuckin’ hole in his head.” Raphe pounds his fist against the roof of the van. It causes the girl in my arms to stir, and I really want to get her locked away in my room before Prez gets home and she starts skitzing out. “Who’s the bitch?”

  “Kick’s new toy,” Tank supplies helpfully with a shit-eating grin. “Pretty, ain’t she?”

  “She smells like shit.”

  Tank threads an arm around Raphe and walks him away from the van. I deposit the girl beside the body of her attacker and ease out of the back. Then I shrug off my hoodie and dress her in it while she lays there unconscious. The hoodie swamps her, but it doesn’t completely cover the length of her body. I take an anxious look at her face, making sure she’s still asleep before I nudge her knees apart with my hands. There are no gashes or even blood, but beneath the filth coating her flesh she’s bruised, pretty badly. I want to know what he did to her. I want to know because a part of me wants to harm her, too. A part of me wants to bruise and mark her flesh, see her writhe and twist and scream beneath me.

  I trace my fingertips over soft flesh, marvelling at how easily it bends to my will, at how goose bumps slowly creep over her exposed skin.

  Standing behind me, Tank clears his throat. “You wanna move this to your bedroom, brother?”

  That’s the thing about Tank; nothing ever fazes him. He gets in, gets the job done. He feels nothing. And he sure as hell doesn’t lose any sleep over it. Tank is an ex-Angels nomad. When that shit went down in Sugartown and our whole chapter was slaughtered in a farmhouse in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere, he didn’t bat an eyelid.

  I went to him because I knew he wouldn’t have any qualms about killing me. He knew the betrayal I had brought upon the club, he knew what they’d done to me months earlier, and he knew what they had done to her. He knew everything, and he wasn’t the least bit surprised when I showed up, bleeding all over his doorstep. He’d just laughed and handed me a beer while my guts were spilling out all over the place, and then he called in the good doctor to patch up the stitches I’d busted open while trying to flee the cops at the hospital and hitch a ride back to Sydney.

  And then he brought me to the Saints. He convinced Prez to take me on as prospect and burned the Angels insignia from my arm with a fucking cattle brand before the Saints could see it. He knows about my fucked-up arrangement with Ivy, knows that after Lauren I can’t get off any other way than by hurting, bruising, or punishing when I fuck. He knows and couldn’t give a shit. He doesn’t feel anger or remorse, fear, pain or torment. He feels nothing. And that’s what makes him truly terrifying. When you have nothing you care about, nothing to lose, you’re indestructible.

  I remove my hand from the woman’s thigh and scoop her up in my arms. She’s still unconscious but it feels as if she’s snuggling into my chest. Or maybe that’s just too many drugs thinking.

  Fat Boy jumps up all around us, licking at the girl’s legs and nipping at mine as we walk around to the front entrance. The clubhouse is quiet with most of the brothers gone. Though maybe quiet is the wrong word, considering the banshee screams of pleasure coming from the whore that Killer has bent over the couch. He shoots me a curious look as we pass, but I quickly avert my eyes and continue on to the hallway. Tank follows. His room sits right beside mine, though it only ever gets used when he can’t be bothered riding back to the mountains. I fish out my keys with one hand and Tank opens the door for me, because I have mine full of crazy.

  Ivy is spread out on the bed. A mirrored plate with three neat little white lines, all running parallel to each other, sits nestled in sheets that I’ve needed to change for far too long. Ivy blinks up at us and runs a finger over her gums. Cocaine dusts her chin and chest.

  “From one fucked up bitch to another.” Tank chuckles and turns to me with a look of disbelief. “What are you, collecting them?”

  “Jesus Christ, Ivy. How many lines have you done today?”

  “Who’s the girl?” she slurs accusingly. She looks like fucking shit, all strung out and shaking with bloodshot eyes and a bad case of bedhead. Ivy knows how it is between us; she knows she ain’t ever gonna be riding on the back of my bike, but she still makes out like it might one day be a possibility.

  “No one.”

  “Why is she in your arms if she’s no one?” Her eyes close and she sighs as she chases her high. A smile only meant for the things inside her head plays on her lips. She comes up on her knees and tugs at my belt. Her hands are weak and fumble twice before she can get it undone. I roll my eyes and edge away from her. “I need to be fucked, Kick.”

  “No, sweetheart, you n
eed a stint in rehab.”

  “I got your rehab right here, baby,” Tank says, clutching the bulge in his jeans. Ivy licks her lips and smiles like the cat that got the fucking cream. Tank throws her over his shoulder, smacking her arse as he carries a shrieking Ivy from the room.

  I lay the woman down on my bed, quickly moving Ivy’s little party treats and setting them on the dresser before covering her with a sheet. I go to my cupboard, where Ivy stores all her shit. Unlike the other brothers, this is my home. I don’t have some fancy fuck-off house in the mountains like Tank or Prez, or even a shitty rundown apartment in the city like Grim. This room contains everything I own. This room contains everything Ivy owns, too. I never thought about that before, but as I rummage through her bags and pull out an unused needle, it hits me. I’ve let her become too familiar with me. Ivy’s gorgeous; not just because of the way she looks outwardly but she’s so beautifully broken that I just gravitate towards her.

  I love the broken ones because for a brief second, in the heat of the moment, I can forget how fucked up I truly am inside. I can forget about the darkness that I crave. I can forget who I am and focus on someone else’s pain, because that has to be infinitely better than wallowing in my own.

  And I have so much of it, seeping from every pore in my body. So much pain, and betrayal, and fucked-up-ness. All of it.

  I am the king of shit, and my throne is built upon the bodies of all I have betrayed; my crown is made of her teeth and tears.

  I wasn’t always this way though. Once upon a time I was happy, content with my swift slide into a life of criminal activity and debauchery. And now? Now I’m just bitter and hollow. Soulless. Fucked up.

  I walk over to the bed, pulling the cap off the needle with my teeth. I wrap my belt around the woman’s arm and cinch it in tight. Grabbing a spoon from the kitchenette that I built into my room, I sprinkle a little of the coke onto it, and then flick my lighter beneath it, waiting until it bubbles and becomes liquid. I pull back the plunger and draw it up through the needle, and then I release the air. The woman’s eyes open drowsily. She glances at the needle in my hand and shrieks, kicking like a wild animal, despite her injuries. She struggles against my hold, screaming. I cop an elbow to the face. Her nails rake the skin over my bare chest, but I lunge onto her and lean my weight against her body. I can’t reach her arm without copping a kick to the face, so I plunge the needle into her neck, instead.