I didn’t react but he nodded for Victor to undo the tie. When he did, I spat it into my lap.
“I don’t know anything about that, you moron. Old ladies aren’t privy to that kind of information and you know it,” I rasped through my sore, parched throat.
“I know a man’s feeling good after takin’ his bitch, he isn’t afraid to share things with her,” he said.
Fuck, of course he thought that I was with Zeus. Everyone outside of the MC did. What didn’t add up was that Lysander knew for a fact that I was with King and not his father. Why would he keep that from his ‘boss’ or whatever Luis was to him?
My eyes darted his way but he was staring through me as if I wasn’t even there.
Luis stepped closer and another man materialized out of the shadows to join him. The newcomer cracked his knuckles and smiled at me as Luis said, “We’re going to play a game where you tell me what I want to know and Harp here doesn’t beat your pretty face in, si?”
I closed my eyes, wishing I had the gag in my mouth again. I tried to find a safe place to rest inside myself, as I couldn’t answer question after question and Harp’s fists kept coming. There was no such place. But I found that I could let the pain carry me away on dark clouds so that I drifted from ache to ache in mental purgatory. Anything was better than clueing back into reality.
So, it took me a long time to recognize the sound of gunfire even though it ricocheted so close to my head. Through blurry eyes, I watched Harp drop to the ground, half his face blown off by a bullet. Then men were everywhere, wearing the Nightstalkers colors of red, black and green, and some others, others wearing my favorite colors in the whole entire world. Green, black and white.
The Fallen men had arrived.
Through my delirium, I spotted Nova crouched down by one of the doors, covering for King, Zeus and Priest as they ran inside, crouched low and each wielding guns in their hands. Blackness narrowed my vision like a camera filter and I kept dipping in and out of unconsciousness so I saw only flashes. Zeus rugby tackling Luis as he tried to run, his lion roar of fury as he began to pummel the Mexican drug lord’s face. Bat appearing from out of nowhere with a huge sniper rifle strapped to his back. He took down two Nightstalkers with his bare hands without any discernable effort.
King. I tried to track his progress across the warehouse but I was too dazed, too dizzy.
“Babe,” his voice called, his voice peeling through the heavy curtains of darkness shrouding my mind so that I could see the light.
I opened my eyes to see his face in front of me. He had never looked more like a fallen angel than in that moment, his gorgeous face a mask of vengeful fury.
“King,” I breathed but the effort hurt my ribs and I wondered if maybe my tormentor hadn’t just aimed his hits at my face.
“Gettin’ you out of these ropes,” he was saying when I clued in again.
Distinctly, I could feel him loosen them at my chest and ankles. When he got to my hands, he cursed so viciously I jerked and then whimpered as the pain abruptly followed.
“Motherfuckin’ fuckers,” he swore again.
He suddenly had a hammer in his hands, blood speckled over the metal head. I realized they’d probably dropped it to the floor beside me after they’d nailed me in.
I gagged violently again but didn’t throw up.
“This is gonna hurt,” King said over a particularly loud round of gunfire.
He didn’t give me time to brace. With the other side of the hammer wedged painfully under the head of the small spike, he wrenched the metal out of my hand.
I screamed, so hard and loud that I passed out for a few seconds.
Then, I came to just in time for him to pull out the other spike.
I passed out again.
“Shit, she’s bleedin’ so fuckin much,” King was saying when I zoned back in but I didn’t open my eyes.
“Wrap it tight,” someone, Nova I thought, said from my other side as they bound each of my hands with fabric.
The pressure deepened the pain, then my hands felt oddly numb. It was a massive relief. I opened my eyes and mouth to say so and found two Nightstalkers approaching silently from behind King and Nova.
I shouted wordlessly.
They both shifted infinitesimally. Nova evaded his attacker, then threw himself at his torso in a low tackle.
King wasn’t so lucky.
He took the edge of a wicked-looking knife to his shoulder, the same blade that had sliced my throat. His face contorted in pain, but then he was trying to wrest the blade out of the man named Victor’s hand. I watched them fall hard to the ground, neither one on top as they struggled for supremacy.