Cash (The Henchmen MC Book 2) (21 page)

But he didn't lead me to the trunk, watching at a house across the street like he had somehow made someone watching though I couldn't see anyone. He pushed me into the passenger seat and belted me. I didn't even see the cuffs that were draped around the seatbelt until I felt one of the bracelets snap around my wrist.

“What's the matter, Damian? You afraid I might hurt you while you're driving?”

“Shut the fuck up or I'll knock your ass out, Wills,” he said, closing the other bracelet and slamming the door.

All I could think as we drove and then pulled in and stopped at our destination was- it was supposed to be mine. The city I had been calling home since I ran far the hell away from Damian thirteen years before, it was supposed to be mine. It wasn't supposed to be tainted by him. But with the deft, comfortable way he drove the streets and the fact that he obviously owned the building he was taking me too, well, it suggested I had been sharing Navesink Bank with him for a good, long while. How long had he been watching me? Weeks? Months? God... years? That thought had a sick feeling coating my tongue as I watched him hop out of his side of the car in front of a building I had driven by almost every day of my life since I moved- an old, what I thought was abandoned, carpet store.

Maybe I should have known better. The windows were intact; the small patch of lawn out front was mowed; there were no broken bottles or used condoms littering the parking lot. I just never had any reason to notice those things before.

Thirteen years with no word, well, it would give anyone a false sense of security.

“You're going to really like what I have been working on here,” Damian said, a smirk on his face that I suddenly wondered how I never recognized as evil when we were young. Maybe, though, it hadn't been there then. Maybe he had been teasing and sweet as I remembered. Maybe the shit he had gone through overseas, maybe it did something to him, warped him. I had seen countless cases of that with the men and women who showed up at Hailstorm over the years, ready to offer their skills only to have to be expelled because of uncontrollable outbursts or a purely sadistic nature.

I took in plenty of people with their own issues- PTSD nightmares, an inability to connect with 'normal' people, men too scared to go home and taint their families with their dark souls.

I'd seen it.

But Damian, well, he was the worst of the worst.

I couldn't imagine how the government released these men and women onto the general populous. There's no way he could have passed an in-depth psych evaluation.

Hell, I always made sure the people I booted got put away and got care. I guess I fucking cared more than the government did.

“I'm sure I'll be just tickled,” I said, rolling my eyes, one that was unmistakably swollen yet again as he unlocked one of my wrists and slid off my belt. The cuff stayed hanging off my left arm as he used it to drag me around the back of the building where he stopped at a door to punch in a pass code.

Inside was simply an abandoned storefront. There was a service desk and racks that the carpets stood in on the sides of the room. The floor was littered with dust and dirt. The unbroken windows were grimy with years of filth.

Damian tugged the cuff and led me into the back storage room, then to a door, and down. Of course... the basement. How stereotypically cliché. The temperature dropped a good ten degrees once we hit the bottom that was still blanketed in darkness. He wanted to be able to watch my reaction. God, he was such a sick fuck. I felt my cuff go slack for a second before he wrapped it around the railing and I heard him shuffling away from me in the dark.

I was determined to show nothing, no shock, no fear, nothing.

The light clicked on and I found myself in a genuine, indescribable awe.

Because it wasn't the torture chamber I had been expecting with chains on the walls and a display of weapons on a table or whatever the hell sick fucks with a screw loose came up with to hurt someone.

No, this was an entirely different kind of torture chamber.

It was an exact fucking replica of our old apartment. He had it down to the same tiles on the backsplash in the kitchen. He had the same fucking comforter on the bed, sans the blood stains from the last time I had seen it. There was even the tub I had sat in and contemplated taking my own life.

Jesus Christ.

“Welcome home, Willow,” he said, giving me a white-toothed smile that I wanted to scratch off his face.

“You're fucking crazier than I thought,” I said, shaking my head at the array of perfume bottles on the dresser beside the bed. It had been thirteen years, but I knew that every last one of them was exactly where I had left them.

“That language has got to go,” he said casually, walking toward the center of the room. “Women shouldn't talk that way.”

“Don't like hearing my language then maybe you shouldn't have fucking kidnapped me.”

“You're my wife,” he said, rolling his eyes as he reached down for something in the center of the floor, something I had missed before, literally the only thing in the whole space that was out of place: a U-shaped metal bar attached to the cement floor with a very long, very heavy looking chain with an ankle cuff.

Oh, mother fucker.

“I divorced you ten years ago, Damian,” I reminded him. It was a day I celebrated alone each year, eating a ton of cookie dough ice cream and going to the shooting range, like I did the day I was finally free of him.

“I never agreed to that.”

That was true. He never did. But, then again, that really didn't matter. Contested divorces were granted all the time. No matter what your spouse wanted, you had a right to get shot of their sorry asses. “And yet somehow, I still don't belong to you.”

His eyes lowered, hating being wrong, hating having his property taken from him. “You belonged to me from the second I got into that pussy of yours for the first time,” he growled, stalking over to me and slamming me backward so I fell back onto the steps, cursing as the edge of one caught me in my lower back, and making the cuff bite into the skin of my wrist as it pulled tight. He was on me before I could try to kick out a leg, grabbing my ankle and slapping the cuff on. The weight immediately made my leg slam down onto the step. “And I got all the time in the world to remind you of that again,” he said, kneeling down next to me, grabbing my chin and forcing it up. “It won't be a pleasant process for you.”

“What else is new? From the second I accepted your ring, you brought me nothing but fucking misery you useless piece of shit.”

He clucked his tongue, letting go of my chin, but only to cock his arm and backhand me across the face. He stood up, releasing my wrist from the cuff, then taking off up the steps. “Oh and don't get up any hopes of escape. That chain will let you get a third the way up the steps and there's no way you'd fit through the windows, not even with the weight you've lost. You're going to be here for a good long time, Wills.”

The door at the landing slammed and I pushed myself up, wincing at the pain in my back, trying to will away the tears I felt stinging my eyes. I could do a lot of things: yell, scream, fight, spit fire. But I would not, under any circumstances, waste any more tears on him.

I looked around, taking deep breaths to calm the hysterical anxiety building inside. Because, I noticed as I looked around, he was right- there was no escape. There was no way I could get away. My only hope was for rescue and given that I hadn't been able to figure out Damian owned the store, no one else was going to be able to either.

Suddenly, I had the memory of my father visiting the apartment one afternoon when Damian was at work. It had been a week since the last time he beat me, but the emotional impact of it had lasted longer than the bruises and seeing my father, a man who had kept me in his own kind of prison my whole life, had somehow seemed like a chance for rescue.

“Dad... he beats me,” I said, my voice a quiver and his head snapped to me, eyes wide.

“What?”

“He... beats me. With his hands. With a belt...”

It was one of the few times in my life I remembered him looking stricken. His gaze quickly fell to the floor, looking at his boots. “Why?”

“Because he thinks I need to be punished.”

“For?”

It was that moment that I felt hope die. I closed my eyes and shook my head. “Any little thing,” I admitted though I knew it was pointless; he wasn't going to save me.

“Can't say it's not his place. He's your husband. Your behavior is a reflection of him. He needs to find ways to make sure you stay in line. As your father, I don't like hearing that. But you aren't a little girl anymore. You're a married woman and it's your job to follow your husbands rules and deal with the consequences of breaking them.”

“Okay.”

I never asked for help again. Not even from the sheriff who raised a brow at the bruises on my wrists while we were in line at the check-out at the grocery store. Not even when he caught my eye afterward and asked me if I was alright. There was simply no spirit, no fight left in me at that point.

It was pointless, hopeless.

That was exactly the feeling I had in that moment, sitting on the stairs in my new prison, seeing no escape, knowing there was no one coming to save me. I guess thirteen years of freedom was all that I was going to get. I had some good times. I took out some bad guys. I saved some good ones. I'd had sex. I'd drank. I'd made friends. I'd traveled. All in all, it wasn't bad. I fit into thirteen years what most people didn't manage in a lifetime. And thank god, because those memories were going to be the only thing that got me through.

I knew that some day, some time, he would screw up. He would get comfortable. He would think he had succeeded in breaking my spirit. Then I would have a chance. The lock on my ankle, big and ugly as it was, it was absolutely pick-able. I could get it off with enough attempts. And, well, I had nothing but time. Then I just needed to wait for a time he stumbled, he turned his back on me when I was too close. I could take him down if he didn't see me coming. Get him unconscious and then, well, do whatever the hell was necessary to make sure he didn't come after me again.

I got up off the stairs and made the rest of the way down, cringing at the weight of the shackle. It was going to rip apart the skin underneath, no matter how thick a layer of clothing I wore. It was going to rub and weigh and make it raw.

Oh, the joys of captivity.

I moved around slowly, trying to drag the shackled leg as much as possible so the cuff didn't move, looking in the cabinets, trying to see what options I had for self-defense or to pick the lock. Only plastic utensils, of course. He wasn't
that
stupid. The cabinets were full of paper plates and bowls, disposable cups. There was one pot and one skillet in a drawer next to the stove. The refrigerator was fully stocked, so at least I wasn't going to slowly starve to death on top of everything else. The water in the kitchen and bathroom worked. There was nothing in the medicine cabinet but gauze, bandages, and triple antibiotic. He didn't even keep the rubbing alcohol in there anymore, I guessed worried I might have seen that as an easy out- though death by rubbing alcohol was practically unheard-of.

Hell, if I wanted to end it, all I needed to do was fill up the tub, or stop drinking for a few days, or wrap my ankle chain around my neck. All much more fool-proof solutions to self-conclusion than drinking some bathroom antiseptic that would probably just make me vomit uncontrollably and maybe have a seizure... then survive. I was pretty sure I was going to be enduring enough torture by Damian's hands... I wasn't going to be inflicting it on myself as well

I walked over to the bed, a bed I was praying like hell I wasn't going to be having to share with Damian, and sat down on the side that used to be mine. I opened the nightstand, finding a necklace that used to belong to my mother and two of the paperback romances I had been reading before I got the hell out of there.

With a shrug and a resigned sigh, I pulled one out and climbed up in bed. If I was going to be physically captive, at least I had a mental escape.

Later, I fell asleep. And I dreamed of Cash saving me.

Twenty

Cash

The son of a bitch owned a carpet store in town. How the fuck that didn't show up on Lo's radar was completely beyond me. I was sure she had been keeping tabs on him. She was too diligent not to. But she missed it. For years.

I pushed my bike way over the speed limit, road safety being the absolute fucking last thing on my mind. All that mattered was getting to her as quickly as possible, before that whackjob husband of hers managed to do any more damage than he had back at my place. If he put his hands on her... if he forced her to...

I forced that thought away as I turned into the industrial part of town, where Shane Mallick had a warehouse he had converted into a huge house for him and his woman, and tried to calm the pounding of my heart.

There was nothing about the carpet store that suggested it could be livable, but no way was I leaving without checking it out. The side door was steel-bar enforced and attached to a security system. On a frustrated sigh, I moved to the front of the building, picking up one of the penny bricks that made up an abandoned front flowerbed and tossed it through one of the front panels of glass, not waiting for it all to fall out before climbing through.