InnocenceForSale.com/ Bree, page 79
Whatever they were talking about outside, it didn’t take much discussion before our car lurched into motion and did a U-turn, then a left turn back in the direction we’d come from yesterday. For some time, with no light but what the brakes provided, I bumped and rocked along with a body that was utterly still when the road was smooth.
I moved as close to him as I possibly could, rested my forehead against his chest and cried the entire time. They took my man. It was even more lonely than before I met him.
When, hours later, I heard him let out a wordless groan I almost laughed with joy. He was alive! They may have caught him off guard this time, but he’d find a way to get us out of this. He was unstoppable!
“Eric! I’m here! Are you OK?”
I heard him suck a big breath in through his teeth and let half of it out in another groan before his breath caught and he spoke. “My fucking head… holy shit.”
“I thought you were dead!”
“I feel like it. How long have we been driving for?”
“I don’t know, three… five hours, maybe? Back in the direction we came from.”
“Hmm. It’s comfy back here, I see why the trunk is your preferred mode of transport.”
“I know, right? Unfortunately, there’s no first aid kit this time. They support local car manufacturers, I guess.”
“Are you alright?” he asked.
“I’m fine, they didn’t hurt me. How are we going to get out of this? What’s the plan?”
Eric was quiet for such a long time, I thought he might have lost consciousness again. No answer came except for the constant drone of the car.
“Eric?”
“Eliana… this could get… bad,” he said.
“How bad?”
He paused for a long time again, but eventually spoke without prompting. “I saw police uniforms, I saw suits. I don’t know where we’re going right now, but your father is almost certainly behind it. Whoever it is… I’m dead.”
“No!” My heart lurched.
“Eliana… listen to me. Eliana! Listen. I’m not trying to scare you, but you need to listen to me if you want to live. There are no plea bargains I can imagine for my life, but if you say I forced you the whole way, you have a chance.”
“No!”
“Eliana… I’m dead, but you can live. Do it to live.”
“No, no, no! I don’t want to go back! Not that! I just want to stay with you!”
“Shhh. Shhh.” He leaned forward and rested his hooded head against mine. “I know. I’m sorry.”
There didn’t seem to be anything more to say. We stayed like that, with my sobs gradually quietening down to silent tears, until a turn and a bump told me we had arrived wherever it was we were going.
The tires crunched on a gritty surface before the car came to a halt. A few moments later, the trunk opened and blinding sunshine streamed in around a familiar silhouette.
“Hello, cunts,” said Keith, President of The Smoke Devils MC.
Eric
Keith and his boys had us tied to chairs in a room somewhere while they worked me over a little in front of Eliana. They were holding back, though, just making a good show for her and hurting me rather than killing me.
Thunk!
Somebody’s fist caught me right in the temple. The punches hurt that much more because of the hood. I couldn’t see them coming, it was hard to brace myself properly when the only warning was maybe a grunt of effort from one of the bikers a split-second before I was hit in some unknown area.
Eliana screamed and begged them to stop. Fat chance of that. I was a little confused by the restraint they were showing, but I wasn’t under any illusions that they were going to teach me a lesson and send me on my merry way.
They were waiting for something, and that delay was pretty much the only glimmer of hope to speak of. Another blow came out of the artificial darkness and I held back a groan, trying to listen out for the next hit while half my mind was on working at my restraints.
It was a pretty fucking hopeless situation, they weren’t taking any chances here. My wrists were bound with a combination of cable ties, duct tape and rope as if they were magicians trying to convince the audience that there was no trickery here, and there were mittens or bags of some kind over my hands.
Aside from the mittens, I had the same combination around my ankles, and the chair didn’t budge when I was hit. All I could do was rub the outer layer of restraints against the not-especially-sharp edge of the seat and hope that I could survive the beating long enough to free myself.
Not only that, I had to do it all effectively blind. All I knew about this place was that it was a Smoke Devils MC chapter somewhere. We hadn’t driven long enough to get all the way back to the Hutchinson HQ, so this was somewhere maybe outside of Laredo or Vikandersville.
I didn’t have the brain power to spare for trying to remember the distribution of biker gangs across America at the moment. A whistling uppercut caught me in the stomach and the wind was knocked right the fuck out of me.
The door opened while I wheezed and tried to untie the knot my stomach had just been twisted in to. The guys around me paused as their attention turned in that direction.
“Keith, he’s here.”
Keith grabbed me by the hood and gave my head a little shake. “See you outside soon, motherfucker. Start thinking of some last words. Let’s get the bikes ready.”
The three of them left the room, leaving Eliana and I alone with our sobbing and wheezing. I started to speak, but had to clear my throat and start again.
“How do I look?” I asked.
“You look like you should have said ‘Fuzzy Duck’,” said Eliana, laughing through her tears.
“I forgot.”
“Rookie error.” She paused. “What do we do, Eric? I don’t want this to happen…”
As if in answer, a lone set of footsteps in hard-soled shoes started coming in our direction from the other side of the door. Their unhurried pace set my teeth on edge.
The owner of those footsteps wasn’t scared like a normal person would be coming into a torture-interrogation room. They weren’t excited, like the bikers baying for blood. They were some of the coldest footsteps I’d ever heard.
I lifted my head when the door opened, not knowing whether to expect bullets or a machete. Eliana gasped.
“Dad!”
Vito Mondalo paused but he didn’t immediately answer, until after he’d closed the door behind him. It clicked shut behind him like a hammer being cocked back on a revolver.
“Dad! Please! Look at me! It’s me!”
“I know who the fuck you are.”
“Please, Dad, I’m sorry! You need... I’m begging you… if you ever loved me, please stop this.”
“Do you think I’m fucking stupid?” Vito asked.
“What?”
The sound of a fist hitting Eliana’s stomach made my blood boil. “Don’t you ever fucking touch her again, you cocksucker!”
I strained uselessly at everything holding me back and only took a right-hook to the face for my troubles.
“Shut the fuck up. You two. You fucking two.”
“Dad…” Eliana croaked.
“You...” The disgust was thick in his voice as he tried to find the words. “Love? You? Listen closely, you stupid bitch.” I heard him leaning over Eliana. “All you ever were was a life-support system for a cunt that I could sell. Well, you went and ruined the merchandise for the buyer, didn’t you? Now, you are truly worthless. What would the Capons want with you now? Any real Italian man? Fuckin’ nothing. I’m going to leave you here with these animals as partial payment for their help in tracking you down. You’re more use to my campaign dead. My approval ratings have gone through the roof since they found out you’d been kidnapped. When they hear your corpse has been found with the semen of fifty unknown men in you, they’ll know I’ll never back down on my campaign promises. To me, you’re dead, and soon you’ll wish you were. Hell, if you survive whatever they do to you, maybe I’ll buy you back so you can work in one of my low-end clubs where all the drug-addicts who can’t afford the good stuff go to get laid. You’ll be the slut in the iron mask and I’ll come visit every couple years just to listen to you beg.”
Vito rose to full height, getting out of Eliana’s face, and took a step back. Eliana was so deathly silent that I could even hear Vito adjusting his clothes as he took stock of the situation.
“I just wanted to come see with my own eyes and make sure they got the right bitch. And you?” He directed his voice at me. “I’m gonna enjoy watching the video. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m speaking to a crowd in Greenport this afternoon and I’m going to be interrupted by such terrible news, I need to prepare myself.” He chuckled at his own words.
After a few seconds of silence, those cold footsteps went out the door, closed it behind him and receded back the way they came. Eliana couldn’t have been quieter if she wasn’t even in the room with me anymore, but I could hear her heart breaking as clear as day.
“Eliana-”
“Don’t say anything. Don’t speak.” Her voice was choked almost to the point of being closed off completely.
Eliana
It wasn’t until several of the Smoke Devil bikers untied us from the chairs, shoving me and carrying the still well-restrained Eric into the harsh sunlight, that I even began to pull myself together. Bikers were crowded around the courtyard at ground level and some were sitting on scaffolding that was probably normally used for patrolling, but was now nothing more than a grandstand for whatever grisly end they had in store for us.
The two bloodstained posts driven into the ground about six feet apart from each other looked like something people in front of a firing squad would be attached to. My legs stopped working, and when the nearest biker shoved me, I fell to the ground.
Without missing a beat, they lifted me by my armpits and my feet dragged along the ground as I stared ahead at our impending doom. Apparently they weren’t too fussed that they wouldn’t have a standing target when they set me down on the ground with my back to the post and secured my arms around it.
Two big guys had a hold of Eric’s arms on each side as they secured him to the other post, still with that blood-soaked hood over his head. Instead of simply leaving him like that, they attached metal cables to each of his arms and legs, as well as one looped over his neck like a noose.
To my horror, they unraveled these cables in five different directions, towards five different bikers who were walking their bikes back into position, and attached them. They were going to tear him apart.
“Eric, they’re-”
“I can guess.”
Keith addressed the crowd on all sides, launching into a history of the club and what they’d always done to rivals and anybody who crossed them. He worked them into a frenzy while the finishing touches were put on to the upcoming spectacle.
“I’m sorry,” said Eric. “I’m sorry for bringing you into this. You shouldn’t die here.”
My chest felt like it was being crushed by grief. My teeth clenched up as I tried to get my words out, because he couldn’t see that I was shaking my head.
“No. If it wasn’t for you, I never would have lived at all. Thank you, Eric. Thank you for this week. Thank you for letting me feel what hope was like.”
The bikers eased their motorcycles forward, pulling at the cables until there was little slack left. I could see Eric’s chest rising and falling as he hyperventilated.
“I wish I could see you,” he said.
I stretched out with my foot and touched his. “I’m here.”
My vision blurred and I blinked away tears, hugging his one foot with two of mine as best as I could. This couldn’t be the end. After everything we’d done, this couldn’t be it, but Keith seemed to be winding down to an inevitable conclusion.
“Eric, we’re running out of time.”
“I know.”
“Could you… say… you d-don’t have to mean it, but if you don’t say it now then I won’t ever hear it. C-could you p-please say you love me?”
“Engines ready!” yelled Keith, and five bikes roared. “Everybody, this is for you. Count this cocksucker’s life down. Ten!”
“I love you, Eliana. You’re easy to love. I mean it.”
All around us the bikers joined in the countdown. “Nine! Eight! Seven!”
“I love you too,” I said.
“Six! Five!”
“That’s my girl.”
“Four!”
“That’s my man.”
“Three! T-”
KA-BOOM!
An explosion akin to the one that had erupted from Eric’s car on the first day I met him incinerated a good number of bikers at the rear of the compound while opening up a similar hole in the wall. Some of them up on the walls near the gates opened fire into the crowd below. I could feel the heat on my face from here.
Masked men with assault rifles poured in through the gates as well as the HQ’s newly-torn asshole. It was chaos, with bullets flying in all directions and so many weapons firing at once that my ears were almost bleeding. The bikers on the other end of the cables were either killed or running for cover and I suddenly realized Eric was screaming something at me.
“Get down! Get down! Play dead!”
He was already getting as low as he could, and I did the same, shuffling on to my stomach with my arms bent uncomfortably to the side behind me. I tried to keep as still as possible while gallons of blood were spilled all around me, watching it in shock through almost-closed eyes.
Just when the firefight seemed to be petering out, another explosion came from somewhere behind me and warm air blasted over us, kicking up dust and sending bikers running in the opposite direction, some of them on fire. One of them ran for the bike attached to the loop around Eric’s neck and heaved it up off the ground.
I took a deep breath, forgetting about playing dead and preparing myself for an involuntary scream when half of the biker’s brains sprayed out the side of his head. My relief didn’t even last a second.
As the biker fell sideways, the bike lurched forwards, pulling the cable tight before tipping over. Eric was yanked away from me, coming to an abrupt stop as his arms were stretched out behind him, still attached to the post.
I could see his veins standing out on his neck as the cable bit into him and he struggled for his fucking life to somehow make the cable go slack. He made awful strangled gurgling sounds that wrenched the most painful scream of my life out of me.
Shrieking so loudly I thought the bloody lining of my throat was going to start flying out, I tried to pull the post out of the ground, break it, anything, so I could get over to him. I’d pull that bike back with my teeth if I had to.
But I couldn’t. The post wasn’t breaking, and neither were my restraints. Instead of watching him get torn apart, I had to watch him get hanged sideways.
Suddenly, I realized the loudest sounds in the courtyard were my screams and Eric’s tortured breaths. One of the masked men strolled casually, and infuriatingly slowly, over to the cable and dragged the bike a couple of feet in our direction, and Eric slumped to the ground, blood seeping out from under the loop on his neck.
With his assault rifle slung back nonchalantly over his shoulder, he walked up to Eric, eased the cable off, and removed the hood. The color of his face was already returning to normal, if slightly beaten up, but even from here I could see a bluish tinge to his lips.
“And who the fuck might you be?” said the man from behind his mask, which I could now see was a bandana.
Eric
When Jace said he was going to fund the Ex-Machina retaliation on The Smoke Devils he meant it. It was always a strange sight to see a motorcycle club with matching Kevlar and assault rifles rather than whatever they managed to steal along the way, but Jace had changed a lot of things since coming into power.
Eliana had insisted on patching me up herself when one of the Ex Machina guys found a first aid kit that hadn’t been blown to hell in the hostile takeover. That was putting it mildly, the more realistic description was that she was ready to rip the hand off anybody who tried to fix me up, including myself.
It was probably for the best. She had an attention to detail that went a long way beyond her experience, which was all second-hand via videos before she met me.
She didn’t say anything about what we’d thought were our last words tied to those posts out there. She was so absorbed in the task at hand that I couldn’t even be completely sure if she remembered them.
I sure did. The whole time I was out there with that hood on, especially when I was almost getting torn apart at the end, all I wanted to do was see her face one last time. I wanted it to be the last thing I ever saw.
By the time she was done, I felt halfway human again. Except for my neck. That was still fucking killing me.
Eliana was packing everything back into the kit when I stood up and buried my hands in the hair on either side of her head, pulling her close and leaning down so our foreheads touched. At this distance I was swimming in those beautiful blue oceans she called eyes.
“I love you,” I said.
Her nose wrinkled happily. “Love you too.”
I kissed her and stood a little taller while she rose up on the tips of her toes to stay with me. When our lips parted, her heels came down again and she rested her forehead against my chest for a second before Charlie, the Ex Machina man in charge of the raid, popped his head in.
“Hey, y’all wanna shoot a fish in a barrel?”
I raised my eyebrow for a second, but the two of us followed him back into the building where we’d been waiting for Eliana’s father to show up. In the very room where we’d awaited our fate, Keith himself was sitting. He looked a little worse for wear.
“You motherfuckin’ cunt, you’re gonna get what’s coming to you, when the rest of the brothers hear what the fuck went down today, you won’t catch us off guard again.”
