King

  With just a little fall, all my baser instincts screamed at me to go help her, protect her. But I was surrounded, and I couldn’t do shit.

  I’d never felt so weak in my entire life.

  Isaac’s man yanked Doe up by her arm and threw her forward. She landed with a smack, her cheek against the door. I growled. He opened the door and pushed her inside. Isaac followed her in and turned back to where I stood surrounded by guns aimed at my fucking head.

  “Fuck,” Preppy swore. We were utterly helpless.

  “Like I said, KING. You fuck me. I fuck you. And since I’m not into cock, your girl here is going to have to do.”

  He shut the door.

  * * *

  Doe

  A man came up behind me and grabbed me by the arm, shoving me forward into a dark room, slamming the door shut behind me.

  A small cot sat in the middle of high walls lined with empty shelving. I peered around Isaac, who entered the room after me and spotted King who mouthed IM SORRY as the door slammed shut.

  Then, we were alone.

  Dark and alone was my worst fear.

  This was worse.

  My only family in the world stood in the other room with guns pointed at them.

  How fucking ironic was that? Because on the way to the party both Preppy and King were so concerned with my safety, they made me recite their rules to them several times over.

  #1 Don’t go off on my own.

  #2 Make sure one of them was with me at all times.

  #3 Don’t take drinks from anyone but them.

  We hadn’t even been there an hour, and what they thought was the worst thing that could happen to me was in no way as bad as what was really happening.

  They were worried about me being drugged and date raped.

  What happened was so much worse.

  Isaac wanted revenge on King, and it was obvious he’d planned it all out before we’d showed up at the party with the help of someone in Bear’s MC.

  King and Preppy could be killed.

  They could’ve already been dead.

  I couldn’t feel my limbs, but I could hear the blood rushing to my head.

  Maybe, it was all for show. I silently hoped that Isaac just wanted to prove a point and that his intentions weren’t as bad as he’d let on.

  No. They weren’t as bad. They were worse.

  Much worse.

  Because the second the door closed behind me, the reality set in. I looked around for a weapon, something I could use to ward him off, but it was too late. I was on my back on the cot with Isaac’s hand wrapped around my neck, silencing the guttural scream I didn’t even know was coming from deep within my throat.

  With one hand trapping my wrists, he straddled me, his thighs caging me in. He released my throat to roughly tug down my dress, exposing my breasts. I let out another scream, which was rewarded with his fist cocking back then landing square on my jaw. My brain rattled around in my head. I saw stars and my vision blurred. My insides were in full defense mode.

  Every bit of adrenaline I had was being used to fight him off. But being dazed from the blow to the face, my efforts weren’t enough because he released one hand from my wrists and fumbled with his pants, his fat, little limp cock rested on my thigh as I tried to buck him off with all I had.

  He wasn’t as big as King, but he was big enough to do whatever it was he had planned for me without much trouble. Fighting back with all my strength was nothing more to him than a slight amusement and minor annoyance.

  I wasn’t about to give up. There was no way King would be able to rescue me, this time. I was on my own and was going to survive this, even if that meant I had to rip his dick off with my fucking teeth.

  In the meantime, I bit at any body part of his that came near me, my mouth landing on his wrist bone, rattling my teeth and barely piercing his tanned and tough skin. Immediately, I felt something cold against my forehead.

  “I will fucking blow your brains all over this room if you don’t stop biting me, bitch. Then, I’m going to have my men shoot your boys out there in the head and dump them in the fucking swamp. Is that what you fucking want?” he breathed, pushing the gun harder against my head.

  “No,” I gasped.

  “That’s what I thought. King needs to learn his place. He needs to know that when he gets in bed with me I’m the one who calls the fucking shots, and what’s his is mine. These are my streets, my product. This is my fucking clubhouse. These are my fucking tits.” He snaked his cold, wet tongue around one of my nipples, and I had to swallow down the bile rising in my throat. “That’s why I’m going to fuck you right now. I’m going to fuck you without a rubber and send you back out there with my cum dripping down your leg so he can learn that he is the King of nothing.”

  He slid his hand up my leg and grabbed a hold of my panties. When I screamed, he again he covered my mouth and straddled me with a knee on each side of my rib cage, squeezing his legs together so tightly I heard my rib crack at the same time I felt the explosion of pain in my chest. With his free hand, Isaac reached into his boot and produced a long hunting knife. He raised it into the air, and then brought it down into my thigh until I felt it hit bone.

  Twice.

  When he pulled the serrated blade out, he took chunks of my flesh with it. “I told you not to fucking scream, you fucking cunt.”

  Pain coursed through my leg and spread to every nerve ending in my body until it felt like my entire leg had been stabbed, not just my thigh. Tears poured out of my eyes as I struggled to see past the pain-induced blurry vision.

  Isaac’s hands were back up my dress, yanking my panties down, the cool air blew over my newly exposed parts, letting me know that Isaac had successfully removed them.

  He settled himself between my legs and reached down to position his cock at my entrance. “You fight me, and they’re fucking dead,” he said, looking me in the eyes.

  There was nothing about his demeanor that would make me believe that he wasn’t the kind of guy who didn’t follow through with his threats. He meant every word. If I screamed, if I fought him off, the only people in the world who I loved would be dead.

  King would be dead.

  “That a girl,” he hissed as I dropped my knees to the sides. With a whole lot of effort, Isaac managed to push himself inside of me. He was struggling. My body was so dry it was like it was fighting its own fight to keep him out. He spit on his hand and reached between us.

  I closed my eyes tight. Maybe, if I didn’t see it, it wasn’t really happening.

  But it was. Because although I couldn’t see it, I could feel it.

  He entered me, fully violating the body I’d finally taken possession over as my own. It wasn’t just a violation of my body. It was an invasion of my soul.

  Pop Pop Pop Pop.

  The sound cracked through the air from the other room.

  “What the fuck?” Isaac roared, lifting off of me just in time to turn his head toward whoever had just opened the door.

  Pop.

  Isaac’s head exploded above me like a sledge hammer to a watermelon. My face became coated in thick, warm, red. The full weight of his limp body fell onto me, knocking the wind from my chest. Shrapnel of flesh and bone that used to be Isaac’s head, landed in my open mouth, and I immediately turned my head and heaved into the floor.

  King suddenly appeared beside me, gun in hand. He rolled Isaac off of me pushing his lifeless body to the floor, finally freeing me from his penetration.

  King had lost his shirt and was only wearing a black wife-beater. Every inch of available skin on his arms and neck was covered with blood as if he just slaughtered a cow.

  Or people.

  King’s eyes went wide when he looked down to my state of undress. Then even wider when he noticed the blood pumping from my leg.

  “Fuck!” King aimed his gun at Isaac and fired twice, his lifeless body jumping when each bullet made contact. “Motherfucker,” King muttered. “I am so sorry, bab
y. I am so fucking sorry.”

  “What the fuck is going on?” I asked. I was losing blood fast and getting more lightheaded by the second. King lifted me up into his arms. “Where’s Preppy? Where’s Bear?”

  “Cover your eyes, Pup,” King ordered.

  “Why?”

  “Because you may think differently of me if you keep them open,” he whispered, carrying me into the other room. “It’s not a pretty sight out here.”

  I knew I should have listened to him, but a part of me, a very stupid part of me, needed to see. But no matter how much I warned myself what was on the other side of the door, it wasn’t nearly enough to fully prepare for the reality of what was in front of me.

  Bodies.

  Bodies. Everywhere.

  Slumped over one another on couches, chairs, the floor. The white linoleum was covered in sludgy, dark red footprints.

  Preppy sat in the doorway looking pale, clutching his side with one hand, blood saturating the area of his shirt his hand was trying to cover. Bear stood over him with his hands on his knees trying to catch his breath. Preppy looked up as we approached and scratched his head with the barrel of his gun. He flashed us a pained smile. That was so Preppy. Smiling while seriously injured in a room full of dead bodies.

  “So…you guys ready to party now?” he asked, his usual loud and chipper voice was raspy, his breathing shallow.

  He turned ghost white in a matter of seconds. The blood draining from his face at al alarming rate. His smiled faded as his eyes rolled back in his head until his pupils were replaced with only the whites of his eyes. Bear lunged to catch him as he fell face forward onto the cement.

  Preppy exhaled on a strangled moan.

  I would have given anything in the world for that smile and that breath, to have not been his very last.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  King

  Fifteen years old

  “Fuck no! I ain’t gonna be nobody’s bitch,” Preppy slurred at Bear. He took another giant swig from the bottle of cheap tequila we were passing around. The three of us sat on overturned milk crates on the floor of the living room of the shitty apartment Preppy and I had just moved into. The crates were the only furniture we had. “That cut is cool as fucking shit, but you ain’t gonna see me announcing to the world that I’m a criminal. I keep my shit on the DL.”

  The place was a complete shit hole. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a kitchen that consisted of a hot plate and a sink that sat on top of two cabinets in the corner of the square living room. One strip of black and white linoleum squares marked off the ‘kitchen’ area.

  It was dirty. There was an ant mound growing under one of the baseboards, flies stuck to traps hanging from the ceiling. A fan with two broken blades that didn’t turn on hung uselessly from the living room ceiling. The only window in the main living area was nailed shut so it couldn’t be opened.

  It was the greatest fucking place ever.

  “Nah man, it’s totally cool. Cops don’t fuck with us cause they’re scared of us. Besides, the MC parties all the fucking time. Pussy and blow everywhere, as far as the eye can fucking see, man.” Bear swayed to one side and kept himself from falling off his milk crate by straightening one of his legs and anchoring the heel of his boot to the floor. “It’s totally tits, man. You gotta join up. Prospect it out like me. Once I’m in, I’ll vouch for you guys. Then after a year, it’s fucking smooth sailing on the SS Tits and Ass. Besides, you’ll love the clubhouse. It has a pool table and a fucking bar.”

  Bear had first told us he was going to turn Prospect for his dad’s MC, The Beach Bastards, when he started buying weed from us in the eighth grade. He’d known what his future held for him since the day he was born. Since he spent most of his time with either the MC or us, he’d been trying to get us to Prospect with him since the day he decided that we were all going to be friends.

  “Not for us, man. We’re like our own MC of two. We’re like the non MC, MC,” I said. I’d moved on from the tequila and was lighting the two-foot tall purple glass bong that sat in the middle of the living room on yet another overturned milk crate, this one acting as our coffee table.

  “You gotta kill people and shit?” Preppy asked in a lowered voice, like someone was listening in and he didn’t want them to hear. He reached over to take the bottle back from Bear, stretching out his too-long-for-his-body arm.

  Where I was fifteen and taller and more built than most adults, looking several years older than I was, Preppy was smack dab in the middle of an awkward phase that made his arms and legs look like a stretched out Gumby and his face looked as if he’d had a chronic case of the chicken pox.

  “Only people that need killing,” Bear answered like he was reciting something he’d heard a million times before, and no doubt he had. “No women or kids, nothing like that. Just people who know the score and understand the consequences, or people who fuck with the MC and us earning.” Bear looked up at Preppy through his messy white hair and brushed it out of his eyes. “Why? You got someone who needs killing?”

  He sounded very much like his father, President of The Beach Bastards. Bear’s father was a psychopathic killer, who dealt in drugs and women, but Bear still managed to have the most stable upbringing between the three of us.

  “Nah, man,” Preppy said, waving his hand dismissively like the question was ridiculous, but I knew he was lying. I saw it in his eyes. “Just curious is all.”

  I also had a very good idea of who he thought ‘needed killin’.

  Bear looked around and leaned in close, waving for us to lean in bring it in as well. “We got these guys, specially trained. Pops calls them ‘the janitors’. You know what their job is?” he asked pausing dramatically, waiting for Preppy and me to urge him on.

  “What?” Preppy asked, totally enthralled. “What do they do?”

  Bear smiled, elated that Preppy had taken the bait. “When people need killin’, or get killed, they sweep in and make it so it never happened.”

  He made a wiping motion with his hands in the air, extending them out to his sides. He sat back, looking pleased that he could share with us something about the MC. It wasn’t until he turned prospect that he’d finally gotten a glimpse of the inner workings of The Beach Bastards, and he was always excited to tell us more about the club he was raised in but didn’t necessarily know a lot about before he was given a PROSPECT cut.

  The kid was a born biker, but as much as he tried to get us to join, it wasn’t for us.

  Preppy and I never strayed from our plan.

  Ever.

  “You guys ever need a cleaning up, you call me. I can put a word in. Problem is, you’d owe us a favor. That’s how it works. No matter when we call in that favor or no matter what that favor is, you gotta do it.” Bear lit a cigarette and waved the smoke away from his face. “Nuff of that shit, boys. Preppy, you got the goods or what?”

  “Goods?” I asked. I wasn’t aware that we were selling to Bear today, or any other day for that matter. Since he turned Prospect, he bought his weed from the MC.

  Preppy hopped up and walked over to the hall closet. He came back holding something covered with a ripped sheet. “What the fuck is that?” I asked.

  “This—” Preppy waved his hand over the sheet. “—is your birthday gift, you ungrateful fuck.” He set it on the floor and grabbed the sheet in the middle, lifting it off like a magician. “Voila!” He stepped back, and my eyes focused on what was in front of me. It was a cardboard box and inside of it were bits and pieces of something.

  Not just something. It was a tattoo gun.

  “Happy birthday, you fucking fuck! Now, let’s figure out how to put this thing together, because Bear and I already picked out which tattoos we want from your sketchbook.” I stared at the equipment in front of me, not believing my eyes.

  “If you take any longer to get started putting it together, I’m going to request mine be put on my taint,” Bear said, knocking me out of my stunned state.

&n
bsp; “Thanks, boys.” I lifted the box onto my lap and started tinkering with the parts. “And Bear?”

  “Yeah, Man?”

  “There is no fucking way in hell I’m ever going anywhere near your taint.”

  “Noted.”

  That day, I tattooed for the very first time. I didn’t do the ones the boys had picked from my sketchbook. They were too elaborate and although I could draw, I’d never used a tattoo gun before so the full back piece Bear wanted with intertwining snakes, The Beach Bastards logo, would have to wait until I knew what the fuck I was doing.

  Instead, Bear got a small shamrock behind his ear, although I’m not quite sure if he was any sort of Irish. Preppy settled for PREP on his knuckles. The lettering was thin and crooked. They were the worst tattoos in the world. Blown out edges, a bloody fucking mess. But the boys loved them, and I couldn’t wait to practice on them some more.

  “I’m so gangsta.” Preppy said, admiring his newly tatted up knuckles.

  “You’re about as gangsta as my ninety year old Grandma,” Bear said.

  “Bear, doesn’t your grandma have a full chest tattoo and purple hair?” I asked.

  “Sure does,” he replied.

  “Then, I actually think she’s way more gangsta then ole Preppy here,” I said.

  “You guys laugh now, but you’ll see. King here is gonna tattoo my neck next. I’m gonna look real mean.”

  “Are you still gonna still wear button down shirts, bow ties and suspenders?” I asked.

  “Fuck yeah. Always. That’s my style.”

  Bear chuckled. “You may not look tough, or mean, but you might confuse the fuck out of people.”

  “Fuck this shit man,” Preppy said, standing up. “I gotta go get the last of my shit from my stepdad’s. I’ll be back. Feel free to laugh at my fucking expense while I’m gone, shitheads.”

  “You want me to go with you?” I asked.

  “Nah, I got this shit. It’s past nine. Fucker’s either at the bar or passed out on the couch. I’ll be back in an hour.”

  Preppy never talked about it, but I was sure that his stepdad was still beating him up until the day he moved out. He was always slightly limping or clutching his ribs. When I asked him if he was okay, he usually told me he was working out. “Nah man, did chest today, hurts like a bitch when you do it right.” He was a shit liar, but his pride was all he had besides me and Bear. Although we joked around with him, the last thing we wanted was for Preppy to be hurting at the hands of some drunken asshole.

  When I hadn’t heard from Preppy for two hours, I got on my bike and peddled over to the trailer park his stepdad wasted his life away in. As soon as I parked my bike, I heard a commotion inside.

  “Prep?” I called out. No response.

  “FUCK YOU!” I heard Prep roar from inside. His high-pitched voice cracking with his strained scream. With one kick, I knocked in the flimsy door.

  What I saw beyond it would haunt my dreams for years to come.

  His stepdad, Tim, had Prep bent over the end of the old corduroy couch, thrusting furiously into him while holding a pistol to his temple. When I sent the door flying into the room, he turned his attention my way, along with his pistol. Preppy turned and knocked him on his side, the gun slid across the floor. Preppy lunged for it but his jeans, which were still wrapped around his ankles, caused him to trip and fall forward against the wall.

  “Get the fuck out of here, boy. You two think you’re better than this place? Well, you’re fucking wrong. I was teaching Samuel here a lesson. He belongs here. He ain’t no better than me and needs to know it.”

  I kicked over empty beer cans and made my way to the gun. It was the first time in my life I remember seeing red. Seeing red isn’t just a saying, I found out. My vision was tinted the color of the rage boiling inside my veins. I flexed my fingers. My joints itched with the need to release the pressure building within my bones. I wanted to hurt him, but the want was secondary to the need to hurt him.

  “What, are you gonna do? Fucking shoot me?” Tim asked, sitting up against the kitchen cabinets. Pushing off the floor, he went to stand, but before he could, I