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  And now here we were, at the gates, with a camera staring directly at us. After Remy pressed a button and stared directly into the lens, the gates opened. We hadn’t said a word in forever, and the ride had been forty five minutes of tense silence. I’d looked at him often, seeking some kind of reassurance that everything would be alright. He offered none, and my dependency for him scarily continued to rise. What was my goddamn problem?

  He parked the car in a parking lot beside the entrance of the clubhouse. Motorcycles were lined up in a neat row beside us along with a few high-end cars. We stepped out of the car and Remy took me by the hand, directing us to the entrance. The physical contact was the first since the bunker, and I felt myself pushing against his side for more of his touch. I had grown incredibly attached to him.

  In the morning light, he looked worse than I realized. The bruises were massive, decorating his torso in shades of red. One had begun to form beneath his right eye, swelling it noticeably.

  The entrance required a key card. He must have left it behind because he ended up banging harshly against the door with his fist. It took a few minutes of waiting before it opened. A tall, fat man with long grey-black hair and an equally long grey-black beard appeared, groggy eyed and irritated. The second his eyes fell on Remy, the frown he wore washed away.

  “The fuck happened to you, Reap?” His voice was unique; the kind of creakiness that reminded me of rusty hinges. “Saw you pressin’ the button on the gate and now you’re standing here looking like a beaten hobo.”

  “Shit went down bad, Barge. Get the men together now.” Remy’s words brooked no argument. The man immediately hurried away, and we followed inside.

  I took in the large room as Remy steered me through. There was a massive bar in the corner, stools pushed away – some on their sides – and then a huge lounge area where several large couches sat in front of a massive television screen. There were two men passed out on one couch and a half naked woman asleep on the plush rug on the floor beside them. Classy. Alcohol bottles littered the area around them.

  A pool table and several other round tables sat on the other side. Gambling chips and cards were crowded on the tables along with empty beer bottles and left-over foods. This entire room seemed to be the entertainment area, and it stunk badly of cigarettes and alcohol.

  Once we were out of the room and into a wide corridor, we passed offices and closed rooms. Remy took me up a long staircase to a second level where more endless closed doors sat. I distinctly heard the muffled sounds of moaning and the creaking of a bed spring from a room. I looked at Remy from the corner of my eye. The sounds didn’t seem to faze him at all.

  He opened the last door and took me in. The smell of his cologne hit me hard. We were in his bedroom and it was huge. There was nothing interesting about it, mind you, just the essentials of a man who went to his bedroom solely to sleep and change clothes.

  “Get in bed, Birdy,” he said, nudging me to his king sized bed. “You need to get some rest after this morning.”

  He went to let go of my hand but I held it tighter. I looked at him with fretful eyes and said, “You’re leaving me here, aren’t you?”

  He stared back, taking in my anxiety with bunched brows and flattened lips. “Sit down, Sara.”

  I noticed that he only ever said my name in serious moments. The rest of the time it was Birdy. I did as I was told and sat down on the edge of his bed. He kneeled down in front of me until we were face to face. There was conflict in those eyes.

  “I let you down,” he started, eyeing my throat as he spoke. “I was meant to keep you safe in that bunker, not have you in the hands of a man that was going to strangle you to death.”

  “But you stopped it. You saved me.”

  “And had I not gotten out of that shower, I wouldn’t have. I don’t even fuckin’ know why I did either.” He shook his head bitterly. “If I’d even been a minute late—”

  “But you weren’t,” I interrupted. “So what’s the point of ‘ifs’?”

  “Point is there should never be ‘ifs’, Sara. I should have taken you here instead. At least here you’re under the protection of all the Jackals and not just me. I was being selfish. I wanted you for myself and I shouldn’t have. Really fuckin’ stupid of me.”

  “The attack wasn’t your fault. Stop making it out to be. You weren’t responsible for what happened.”

  Though he didn’t believe my words, he nodded. “Yeah, well, now it’s my responsibility to find out who did this to you. This means I need you in here. I need you to rest so I can go and talk with the boys. I gotta figure this shit out with ‘em. Understand?”

  I didn’t respond. He took my hand and squeezed it tightly. “Birdy, I gotta go do this.”

  “Then let me go, too. I don’t want to be alone.”

  “You can’t. This shit’s club business. You gotta respect that now that you’re here.”

  With a heavy heart and a burdened gulp, I eventually nodded. “Fine.”

  “Okay. I’ll be back soon. That’s a promise.”

  When he let go of my hand, he stood up straight and motioned me up the bed. I obliged, moving up to rest my head on the pillows. He grabbed the covers and threw them over me.

  “Get some rest, Birdy.”

  I watched him leave, thinking, Why do I feel like I’m made of glass? I was so damn scared. I stared about the room and tried my hardest to hear sounds from anywhere. Hell, I’d gladly listen to the people down the hall having sex if it meant escaping silence. Because silence meant being alone, and I couldn’t handle being alone anymore.

  *****

  Miraculously, I’d fallen asleep. No tears shed, either. Still numbed out by what happened, I was pleased to escape the shock of it. Only my chest was evoking emotions I was helpless against. I found I couldn’t stand the stillness around me. Couldn’t stand to hear myself breathe. It was like being in the bunker again. I needed Remy’s warmth because the repetitive images of blood in my head made me cold to the bone.

  It was screams that woke me up. My palms were sweaty, my heart was racing… What the fuck was I going to wake up to this time? Fear gripped me as the door slammed open. I sat up, taken off guard by the bronze skinned brunette storming into the room with an anger that would put the Hulk to shame.

  “You’re a fucking mistake!” she screeched, pointing her finger at me. “Everywhere you fucking go, you make a mess of shit! Now it’s my brother?! Do us a fucking favour and just die already! If you think you’re going to take another brother away from me, you fucking bitch, you’ve got another thing coming!”

  “RITA!” The vehemence Remy’s voice startled me. He hurried into the room with the look of wrath on his face and went to grab her. She dodged him and took a few steps back, continuing to point at me while she turned and faced him.

  “You didn’t bury our fucking brother because of her?! This bitch right here?! Why do you always put her first? Always! This fucking obsession has to stop! She’s bad for you, Remy! Joanne said it herself. She’s nothing but a horrible little bitch. Why do you think she wanted nothing to do with her?!”

  “Shut the fuck up, Rita,” Remy retorted.

  “No! If her own mother didn’t want her, why the fuck do you?! She’s going to ruin you, Remy—”

  “SHUT THE FUCK UP, RITA!” He grabbed her by the arm and dragged her roughly out of the room. Her screams were heard even long after she was out.

  “She never wanted you, even when she got better! You were never going to be let back in!”

  Remy slammed the door shut. Chaos continued to unfold out in the hallway for a few more minutes. Then other voices, of men telling her to “shut the fuck up” or they’d do it for her. I could tell she was being dragged away because the screams grew more distant with each passing second.

  Remy had his back to me, facing the door still, taking in absurdly long breaths of air. He was no longer bare-chested and was wearing a white plain shirt that emphasized his tanned skin. When he fi
nally turned to look at me, I saw remorse in those eyes.

  “I’m sorry ‘bout my sister,” he apologized.

  I shrugged passively. “Can’t be helped. I take it she found out about…”

  He nodded. “Yeah, she was being the nosy bitch that she is.”

  “Then she was obviously caring for you.”

  He walked over and took a seat beside me. “She overreacts all the time, says things she doesn’t mean. Don’t take it to heart.”

  I didn’t try to hide the scepticism in my face. I lifted a brow at him. “Come on, Remy. Stop bullshitting me. I trust you and want you to be honest with me. Without honesty, there’s nothing.”

  He licked his lips red, and for a split second I was reminded of the one other man who did the same.

  “What do you wanna know?” he carefully asked.

  “She’s telling the truth, isn’t she? About my mother not wanting me.”

  After a few painstaking seconds, he nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Did she ever say why?”

  He nodded again. “She… she said you reminded her of the bad in her life. That even after she got cleaned up, she still looked at you the same.”

  I could no longer afford any more heartbreak. I didn’t want to feel anything at all. This was all business to me. Find out the answers and deal with it.

  “Why?” He knew why. He was skirting around this very masterfully.

  Without looking me in the eyes, he sighed and said, “You were the product of a rape, Birdy. The club put the man that did it to her in the ground, but… she never coped. She had some post-natal depression after your premature delivery, and everyone figured she’d get better with time. She didn’t. Her father tried his hardest with you, tried to get her to see that she was placin’ blame on someone innocent. Rita thinks she turned to Norman because he liked how unfeeling he was to you. It made her feel like she had every right to hate you because he did too.”

  Scratch what I just said about lacking the space for heart break. Because my heart broke. Hard. Into jagged pieces in my chest. I bit down hard on my lip, but a tear emerged from my eye and fell gracelessly down my cheek. I quickly removed it, unaccepting of these sudden tears. I’d faced a near death experience and yet I was emotional over this? I had some serious psychological issues.

  “Keep going,” I demanded quietly.

  He exhaled hesitantly. “Sara –”

  “Keep going, Remy.”

  “When she got clean, she knew she’d treated you wrong. Like I said, what Rita just said was an overreaction. Still, Joanne wanted nothin’ to do with you. Wanted only memories of when you were a baby, back before you remembered her. Your mother was very fucked up, Sara. She was very volatile.”

  “Why did she want you to look after me then?”

  “She owed it to you. Wanted you never to have to struggle. There was love there, I’m sure. She just… She just couldn’t look at you the way a mother looked at her child. That’s the fuckin’ truth for you.”

  “And what was the real reason you never contacted me after she died?”

  He tensed. Maybe he was surprised I’d caught on to his lie. “She… She removed you from her emergency contacts. Left everything for… for Rita. I didn’t want you to have to know that at the time. Didn’t think it was fair of her to do that to you. Thought that would break you more than her death.”

  “Oh.” My fears had been confirmed. She’d grown attached to Rita and wanted nothing to do with me. Left everything to her. And me? I was left with nothing. How does one take that kind of news?

  In my heart of hearts I always knew she never loved me the way a mother loved their child. I tried so hard to convince myself that it was her alcoholism that distorted her emotions and made her cold and unfeeling. It wasn’t. Now I knew why. She’d been raped and left with me. The trauma would have been extensive if she’d never been able to look at me like I was half of her. It explained so much now that I reflected on my childhood.

  “I’d like to be left alone,” I whispered.

  Time for me crash and burn. To see how strong I really am. To stop this weird dependency thing I’d developed for Remy. Running away from emotions never worked. They had to catch up sometime, and if it was going to change me forever then… well, what the fuck did I have to lose anyway?

  Jaxon

  The text message was a godsend. He was losing his mind in the unknown. He needed to be back in the loop. Perched on the step of his mother’s house, he read the text over and over again until his mind could bear it no more.

  There was an attack on her. Explicit direction carried out for her kill. She’s back at the clubhouse and safe. R won’t let her out of his sight. She won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. Afraid you have little chance of seeing her. She’s clung onto him like she’s been on her own for some time. Wish I could tell you more but everyone’s in the dark.

  An attack? Jaxon gripped the phone so tight, the corner of the screen cracked. He inhaled sharply, trying to calm every raging cell in his body. If Damien hadn’t been able to find out where Remy had hidden her, how the hell did this assigned killer do it? Something wasn’t right and he needed to find out what.

  He raked both hands through his hair and then he hastily replied.

  I need you to do something.

  *****

  Jaxon rested his back flat on his two inch thick bed, staring up at the cement degraded ceiling. “Fish” they’d called him; a derogative word that was passed around to new prisoners. They sized him up and he’d never felt so alone in his life.

  How the fuck had his life turned to this? His chest felt like it’d been through the fucking crusher. He stared on in the darkness, and all he could see was her face. Why did she do it? Why… Why did she walk away? What did he do that was so wrong? He rubbed his face and shut his burning eyes.

  He shouldn’t have left her that night. He should have stayed and he should have shut his fucking mouth and let her have her raging fit so long as it meant he could hold her. He shouldn’t have pushed her, shouldn’t have demanded her to talk, shouldn’t have goaded her…

  His body shuddered as he fought to suppress the ache. He shouldn’t have left. If he’d stayed… Somehow he knew none of this would have happened if he’d just fucking stayed!

  Now look at him; a pathetic nobody clinging onto a girl that hadn’t bothered to check on him once, and yet he was still using her as a form of strength to get out of this goddamn forsaken dump of a place.

  “Have you heard from her?” he’d asked Lucinda in the visiting room.

  Lucinda shook her head. “No, Jaxon. I haven’t.”

  She watched his fists clench together hard with a troubled look on her face. “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

  Suppressing the ache, he shook his head. “I don’t even know what happened, Mom. I don’t even fucking know. She’d been acting strange the last few months. Was going on and on about being independent and shit. I was suddenly always in her way, and then she’d started accusing me of shit, like she didn’t trust me. I tried, Mom. I really fucking tried.”

  Lucinda didn’t respond for a few moments. She suddenly looked weighed down by something; a memory perhaps.

  “If you hear from her,” Jaxon said, sounding more desperate than he intended, “Please, Mom, let me know. Tell her to come to me. Please.”

  “Of course I will, Jaxon. Of course.”

  But his mother always returned with no word of her and a shake of her head that had his heart scrambling for safety. It was falling into a bottomless pit. He’d never felt so hopeless locked away when he could have been out there searching for her. Had something happened to her? Fuck. That was the worst thought he could think of.

  He had to focus on the now and what needed to be done in these walls. He had to act fast. They were piranhas and they were going to feast on him.

  He was virtually powerless and had tried every single day to keep to himself. Unfortunately, for the good looking fish, be
ing left alone was not something the convicts were interested in. Day one and he had his face smashed so bad he couldn’t see out of his right eye for six days, and the worst part was he didn’t know who had done it. He’d been jumped from behind in the tank room where the densely populated crowd of inmates did nothing but try and start a riot.

  He knew early on that to survive this he needed to be part of a gang. They were everywhere and they stood for something he was desperate for: power and protection.

  But before he could even be looked at, he needed to prove himself. And having had the childhood he did where fights were the norm, he knew the only way to come out alive was to instil the same harsh attitude for violence.

  He had to be a fighter.

  Seven

  I spent two days locked up in Remy’s room sleeping and idly staring at the fascinating ceiling when I wasn’t. Couldn’t eat, either, which drove Remy up the wall. He was constantly placing trays of food on the night table, but I couldn’t for the life of me swallow a bite.

  After my two days of solitude, I emerged like a groundhog out of its hole and into the daylight. The bikers had conglomerated around the bar area chatting up a storm about cars and the “scamming locals” that needed sorting out.

  Remy was in the back, silently observing with a petit blonde by his side. She was saying something to him and he was staring down at her, vaguely looking interested. I knew this look. It was the I-really-don’t-give-a-fuck-about-what-you’re-saying-but-I’m-too-nice-to-say-that-to-your-face look. Remy was a sweet guy when he wasn’t staring bullet holes into your head.

  I liked how quickly he perked up when he noticed me approaching him. I was hesitant at first, not wanting to be intrusive. I didn’t know my boundaries. Was free roaming okay? Judging by the happy surprise in him, I’d say it was. He nodded at me to come to him and I did, stopping right before him. The petit blonde was rattling on about how her car tyres’ treading wasn’t up to par and then stopped abruptly when she noticed me.