He stops nodding around the same time my hands hit the tattoo gun that’s still plugged in. I give it a test, and it buzzes away satisfactorily. There are already little pots of ink set out everywhere. At least ten black. Right. That will do nicely. If I run out, I can always refill from the bottles of ink lining the shelves.
“Wh-what are you going to do? What’s happening?”
The terror in his voice feeds the monster growling inside of me. It prowls and roams beneath my skin, in my soul, and I let out a low laugh of sheer pleasure at the fear I see written all over his face. When I palm the gun, he pisses himself again.
The stench of his terror is acrid as I lean in and roughly grip his face in one hand while I bring the buzzing machine to his forehead.
“There, there, sweetheart. I’m sure this will only sting for a second. That what you tell them before you do it? Oh right. You don’t tell them a fucking thing, because you drug them and rape them and they’re unconscious when you carve words into their stomachs. Anyway, here we go. Try not to move, or I might slip and take out your fucking eye.”
“No!” The bastard is smart enough to hold relatively still and not thrash around. Seriously. I might take out an eye.
“You should be thanking me,” I croon as the machine hits skin and the needles start bobbing up and down in furious motion. In no time at all, the beginning of a crude, messy, blocky letter forms. I might be shit at this, but there is no way that anyone will mistake the word I’m about to ink into him for anything else.
“I wanted to cut your dick off and stuff it in your mouth, but my brother convinced me that would be too messy. You’dlikely bleed out and then we’d have to dispose of you, and getting rid of bodies isn’t easy nowadays. We save that shit for days when it’s only absolutely necessary. Besides. I don’t want you dead. I want you to live with what you’ve done for the rest of your life. Just like they have to.”
In hindsight, it was a good choice that this group made, choosing that brick building as their shop. Those dense bricks go a long way to drowning out the screams.
Chapter 19
Ami
When I arrived at Gage’s house, out of breath like I’d just run a marathon, my heart glued to my throat, he isn’t home.
I shouldn’t have waited.
I convinced myself that he wouldn’t do anything overnight. That he’d need a few days to plot his revenge or even find the man whose name I buried beneath the layers of shame and self-degradation a long time ago. Instead of driving to his house in the middle of the night, exhausted, with bleary eyes, endangering myself and everyone else on the road, I waited until morning.
I called him at five.
He didn’t pick up.
I called him again at five twenty, then at five thirty, at six, at six thirty, and at seven.
I assumed he was sleeping after a long, hard night.
I should have known better.
Gage isn’t the kind of man who can sleep after what he’d learned. He’s not the kind of man who tucks in for the night and sleeps soundly after finding out that his wife was raped. After seeing the word inked into my flesh, a brand of a sadistic man that Gage couldn’t save me from.
He’ll blame himself, even if it was irrational. I know he did. I know he does. I saw the rage in him, the unholy demons that demand vengeance.
I thought that if I got there in the morning, I could stop him. That I could plead with him, beg him, get him to see reason. I’d even be willing to offer to burn those stupid papers if it meant that he wouldn’t find the man I never wanted to see again and end his life.
Because Gage is a member of The Riders. They don’t mess around.
I thought I could get to him before he rallied his brothers to his side and declared an unholy war.
I was wrong.
I didn’t think he could possibly pull it off in a couple hours.
So either he’s out getting breakfast or going for a morning jog, or he’s gone.
I let my fist fall to my side and I turn slowly. As I stare out at the rain sluicing off the roof, gathering on the sidewalk and pelting the sidewalk and the street beyond, puddles forming along the edges of the pavement, my legs slowly give way. I can’t hold myself upright. I can barely swallow back the bile at the back of my throat. My back scrapes against the abrasive wood of the door as I collapse onto the hard porch. There isn’t so much as a doormat and my ass hits hard.
I stare stupidly at the street, unblinking.
My head feels like a ball of sludge, my brain overheating as it tries to slog through the muck to find a solution. It doesn’t help that all I can do is berate the hell out of myself for being toostupid not to have driven to Helena during the night. Emotional wreck or not. I might be willing to gamble with my life, but I couldn’t take a chance on anyone else’s. The rain mixed with the terrible state I was in after Gage left would have turned into a disaster.
