Текст книги "Tank"
Автор книги: Carmen Jenner
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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 16 страниц)
My father is not a small man. He may not be as strong as Tank, but he’s a worthy enough opponent, and the second the axe falls to the floor with a thud—somehow missing both their feet—he begins struggling. It’s too dark for him to see Tank’s broken hands, but he’s already figured out the chink in his armour. Instead of clutching at the belt that’s cutting off his air supply, he slams his hands down on top of Tank’s, sinking his fingers into raw, exposed meat, causing him to roar wildly. He doesn’t let go, though. If anything Tank pulls harder, shoving his knee against my father’s back in order to gain more leverage.
I can see how hard it is for him, how much agony he’s in, how tired. I cast my eyes around for something, anything—a piece of glass, my father’s pocket knife—and then my gaze falls on the glinting silver at their feet. I drop to my knees, ignoring the sharp bite of glass embedded in my legs, I reach for it. I scrabble for purchase, and it slips out of my hands twice before I can snatch it up. With a battle cry I thought myself incapable of, I heft the axe and swing, burying it in his chest, cleaving him right down the middle. His gaze widens as blood bubbles up out of the cavern I created in his torso. I don’t flinch; I don’t blink. I don’t even breathe as he falls towards me, reaching for me as the long handle protrudes from his chest and hits me in the arm. I barely notice that pain. He slumps forward, and on shaking legs I dart out of the way. The axe handle wedges itself between the mattress and the bedsprings so that his weight falls on top of it and his body is suspended off the bed, like a scarecrow blown over in a strong wind.
I shut my eyes against the image of my father impaled, suspended as his blood slowly pools on the floor beneath him. I half expect him to get up and fight back, pulling the axe from his chest and swinging it down on us, but he doesn’t, because despite the fact that my life has felt a lot like a horror movie at times, it isn’t one. It’s been a nightmare up until this point, but the shadows didn’t win.
I did.
We did.
Behind me, Tank’s ragged breath draws my attention. I whirl around. He stumbles back into the dresser, clutching his side with his broken hands, and then my entire world comes to a screeching halt as all 115kg of his hard, muscled frame hits the floor.
“Tank?” I say, and I run to him. I can’t see how bad the wound is in this light, but I feel the gaping mass of flesh and meat at his side, and I feel the blood that spurts out over my fingers. For a heartbeat, I just kneel beside him, unable to comprehend why there’s so much blood, why his side is gaping open. I lay out all the pieces in my mind, but I can’t make them fit. When I grabbed the axe my hands slipped on the hilt before I could grasp it. The axe hadn’t landed on their feet because it’d bounced off of Tank’s side as it fell to the ground. But it had hit something so much worse.
“Oh God, you’re hurt,” I say, cupping his face with my blood-slicked hand. I can just make out his expression, and he smiles as he reaches up his grotesquely gnarled hand to my face.
“You should have run,” he says through pained, gasping breaths. I shake my head. “Proud of you, Warrior … Princess.”
“Stick around,” I say, through a voice choked with tears. “I’m gonna make Xena look like a fucking Smurf. You just stay with me. Stay here. You hear me?”
He struggles to keep his eyes open. “Gettin’ dark … babe.”
“No. It’s not. You fucking stay with me, Tank.” I turn away to find a tourniquet of some kind. There’s only the sheet from the bed, which is old and ruined with my blood and now my father’s, and then I feel around among bits of broken glass and lamp and come across Tank’s belt. “Okay, big guy. I’m not gonna lie—this is going to hurt like a motherfucker.”
He doesn’t respond, but when I slide the belt beneath him, shimmying it and lifting him, he grimaces, and then when I cinch it tight around the wound in order to staunch the blood and hold him together, he screams and closes his eyes. Frantically, I feel for a pulse. It beats beneath my fingertips, and I let out an anguished cry of relief.
I can’t wait for him to wake. There isn’t time for that. I need to move his arse up those stairs and call Jett. I can’t call an ambulance on account of the man in the basement with an axe through his chest. But if there’s one thing being at the clubhouse has taught me, it’s that family take care of family.
I don’t know how bad the wound is, but I can’t leave him down here. I can’t spend another second down in this basement with the horrors that are etched so firmly within its walls they’ve become a carving in the meat and bones of it. It becomes more than just a house, and the years of abuse it’s seen, the secrets it kept hidden within. It’s dense and heavy, and it feels as though if we don’t escape we’ll be swallowed by it, buried down here forever with my father, and with the fear that I felt so often it’s practically become its own entity.
I hurriedly pick as much glass and debris out of the way as I can, wincing when a few tiny shards get stuck in my foot, and then I crouch behind Tank’s head and lift his shoulders, hooking my arms beneath him. He weighs a tonne, and for the longest time my muscles protest, and I think I’m getting nowhere until my foot hits the threshold, and I have to drag him out of the shadows and into the light of the stairwell. The stairs are another beast entirely. And I wince every time his legs hit each step with the ominous thunk, thunk of dead weight.
“Christ, when we get home I am taking you off the fucking protein shakes,” I say breathlessly, as I heft him up several more stairs.
When I reach the landing, I set him down as gently as I can, but my muscles are burning and the wound on my lower abdomen has opened up and is steadily streaming blood. Long red rivulets trail my thighs, and I fight back a wave of nausea. I leave Tank on the landing, because dragging him farther isn’t going to do either of us any good, and I run for the phone, dialling the clubhouse.
Raine answers and somehow interprets my manic screaming. It sounds as if she’s running as she chants, “Just hold on, Ivy. Just hold on.” And then the phone is handed to Jett and his brusque, authoritarian voice barks questions down the line. I tell him Tank’s side is split open, and he needs an ambulance, but I also blurt out that there’s someone in the basement. He swears and orders me not to say any more, but he does ask where I am. I give him the address, and I hang up before he’s finished telling me that I shouldn’t call an ambulance under any circumstances.
I run to the front door and unlock it, and then I wait for what feels like an eternity. I don’t even think about finding clothes and putting them on. I don’t care about me, and I don’t want to take anything more from this house of horrors as a souvenir. I have other souvenirs. Physical and mental scars that I’ll never be able to erase.
When I return to Tank’s side, his breath is shallow and his pulse is barely even there. I thump my fist in the centre of his chest and scream at him, “You stay the hell with me, you big-arse freak. You got that? I didn’t lug you up those damn stairs just to lose you.” It’s meant as a threat, but it comes out whiny and muffled by the stupid fat tears spilling onto his chest. The belt is still holding him together, but it doesn’t look good. In the light, his wound is so much worse than I first thought it was.
He opens his eyes; his gaze zeros in on me. His broken, twisted hand covers mine and he gives me a faint smile, but it’s tinged with blood that trickles out the side of his mouth. And then he starts vomiting blood, choking on it as it boils up his throat and spews out of him. I roll his head to the side and pray like hell that they get here soon.
“Jonah,” I plead, “Don’t leave me.”
But the stubborn bastard doesn’t listen.
He never did.
The wind picks up as I place white roses beneath the headstone. It’s not a real headstone, of course. Just a cross crudely fashioned from two large sticks and twine, and shoved into the ground in a clearing where Tank’s yard meets the scrub.
I press a kiss to my fingertips and lay it against the cross while tears spill from my eyes and slide down my cheeks unchecked.
It’s funny what you get used to, and what time will do to the grieving heart. I’ve never had a place in which to grieve my mother; I never even had time to mourn before moving on. I was told the night he murdered her to forget she ever existed. He bred the fear into me from the second I saw her head roll across the concrete floor of our garage. When he could no longer trust me to be silent about his secrets, he transformed that garage into a prison cell, called it a room, and locked me in it. The MC had burned that house of horrors to the ground, with my father and his axe inside, and though the bones of my mother were never recovered and likely never would be, at least now I had a place to mourn her.
I watch the sun dip below the clouds and turn on my heel, wiping away the last of my tears, and something in the window catches my eye. Tank. He stands with his forehead pressed against the pane of glass. Below his hand is splayed against it too—or as splayed as he can make it when his thumbs are still in casts.
He hates not being able to follow me down here, but the wound in his side is still far too fragile, and so is the gash in his leg. It was such a small thing I hadn’t even noticed it when I’d pulled him up the stairs. The wound in his abdomen was so much bigger and far more frightening. Despite the hospital staff sluicing it every day with saline and pumping him full of drugs, the cut on his leg got infected. He ended up with septicaemia and we nearly lost him, not from the gaping hole in his side that the surgeons had expertly sewn back together, or from the skinned hand that’d needed some kind of micro surgery to reattach his blood vessels and flesh, but to the five-inch gash in his right thigh.
The doctors had threatened to amputate it if he didn’t quit trying to flee the hospital room. Every time he attempted an escape, he wound up flat on the floor with his arse hanging out of the hospital gown, and it took three male nurses to get him back into bed again.
Bastard never did do what he was told.
Technically he had died on the operating table, and I’m told the team of surgeons worked miracles on him in an effort to save his life. Prez hadn’t let me anywhere near the hospital. Not when Tank was first admitted. I’d been stark naked, dressed only in a gown of blood. I wasn’t even sure whose, but by the time the boys had arrived and piled Tank into the van I’d lost all sense of reality. I’d wigged out in a way I never had when I was coming down, and Raine was the only one who’d been able to calm me once Jett had taken me back to the clubhouse. It’d been Raine who had jumped into the shower with me, fully clothed, who’d cleaned me up and held me when the shock set in and my body shook so hard you could almost hear my bones rattling together. And it had been Raine who had insisted that Prez call the Butcher.
I’d been clothed, had my abdomen stitched, been force-fed both with an IV drip and soup that Raine had made, and had fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion with food still in my mouth. Hours later, I’d woken in a blind panic and marched into Crazy’s room, demanding that he take me to the hospital.
The Russians hadn’t taken him, and the Feds hadn’t found the club van because Crazy had woken up in a pool of his own blood in some rich person’s driveway and had driven himself to hospital while his guts were spilling out. The van had been towed—he’d parked it in an ambulance bay—and it had been three days before Crazy was fit enough to climb out of bed and find a payphone so he could tell Prez what had happened. He’d told me all this on the way to the hospital, as if the whole ordeal had been my fault, and not that of my psychopathic father. It stung, because a part of me knew it was true.
Jett had been at the hospital when we arrived, and Kick too—fresh from his own crisis, reeking of petrol and blood and looking more haunted than I’d ever seen him.
“You okay, darlin’?” he’d asked me, and I hadn’t even bothered to answer. My heart didn’t beat faster for him anymore. I felt nothing for him at all when I looked on him now. It was the man in the ICU who’d just made it through a twelve-hour surgery, and who the nurses said was in a stable but tentative condition, that had my whole heart. And if he’d died, I would never have forgiven him, or myself.
Thankfully, he hadn’t died … again … and two weeks later, he was home, though not that much happier about being an invalid. He couldn’t ride, and wouldn’t be able to for some time. And I felt guilty about that, but I also revelled in it. Being unable to ride or hold a gun meant he couldn’t do his job as the club’s hitman, and though I knew it drove him crazy to have idle hands, every day that he was home meant he wasn’t off risking his life to settle a score. And that suited me just fine. I knew it wouldn’t be a reprieve for long, and that in a few short months he’d be back to old tricks, but for now I’ll take what I can get.
Despite the melancholy I feel, I wink up at him and blow him a kiss, and a serious half-smile forms on his face. I head for the house, and by the time I make it to the side door off the lounge room, Tank is shuffling in from the hallway.
“You should be in bed,” I tease, because nothing gets his back up like me ordering him around.
“Don’t fuckin’ start with me, bitch.”
“Oh come on, you’re so much fun to start with,” I say, and walk the extra few steps so he won’t have to. I throw my arms around his neck and he nuzzles into mine as best he can without hurting himself.
“You okay?” he says.
“I should be asking you that,” I say, and lean back in order to see his face. “You are the invalid, after all.”
“You love to push my buttons don’t ya, Princess?”
“Someone has to keep you on your toes.” I wink. Turning to the fridge, I open the door and bend at the waist to peruse the contents. Because of the things my father told us about the Russian mob boss being interested in Tank, Jett has stationed two men here at all times. There was a score to settle, after all. Tank had raved and rallied like a complete lunatic about it until Jett had mentioned that it was for my protection as well. He’d muttered something about being able to protect me just fine, but he hadn’t pushed the case, because though he would do anything to keep me safe, right now he knew he couldn’t. I was more than happy to go along with Prez’s plan. We’d both seen enough violence these last few weeks to tide us over for a lifetime. Still, extra boys meant extra mouths, and unfortunately they weren’t so good at topping up the contents of the fridge.
“You hungry?” I ask.
“Only for you,” he whispers, and a thrill runs through me, sharper and more electric than a live wire. Tank’s pinkie and ring fingers slide over the seam of my jeans, toying with my arse, and I close the fridge when I see nothing inside that I want more than him.
“Come on, you big broken lug. Let’s get you back to bed.”
“I don’t wanna go to bed. I’m fuckin’ done with sleepin’ and if I have to lay there staring up at that fuckin’ ceiling again, I’m gonna lose my shit and blow my own fuckin’ brains out.”
“Who said anything about sleeping?” I gently take his forearm and lead him into the bedroom. I walk slowly and try my best not to rush him, even though all I want to do is throw him to the ground and ride him like a damn pony. His injuries wouldn’t thank me for that, and he’d certainly be feeling a tad resentful if it caused him to bust open those stitches he keeps pawing at like a wounded puppy.
“Lie back and I’ll make it all better,” I say, and he eases back onto the nest of pillows surrounding the headboard. Carefully, I work his pants down his hips, mindful of his leg wound, and a devilish smile turns my mouth up at the corners when I see how hard he is for me. I remove my own clothes and crawl up the bed towards him.
The two of us have been cooped up in this house since he came home from the hospital, and you’d think that with nothing else to do we would have seen our way to getting lost in one another again, but he’s been so badly injured, and me? Well, I’ve been doing a little healing of my own.
While I haven’t so much as looked at a line, the craving hasn’t exactly gone away. There have been a handful of times since we fled that house that I’ve been tempted to drown out the memories with any sort of drug I could get my hands on, but what would be the point? It won’t take the pain away indefinitely, and in the end it just makes me feel worse. Besides, killing myself with smack after Tank fought so hard to be here, to be with me, just seems kinda rude.
Gingerly, I climb into his lap and slip a hand between us. I stroke his cock, sliding the head back and forth through my wet heat before positioning him at my entrance. Grasping his shoulder for support, I slowly inch my weight down. I’m met with no resistance, just a satisfied grunt, but when I start to rock gently back and forth, Tank winces.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” he says, but his jaw is clenched tight and his eyes are squeezed shut. Unsure, I gently circle my hips. He sucks in a sharp breath that I mistake for pleasure, so I do it again. “Ow. Ow. Fuck, babe, get off.”
“Oh God, I hurt you.” I scramble from his lap, and wind up accidently kneeing him in the balls.
“Jesus, fuck,” he shouts, attempting to cup his hands around them, but he can’t with the casts.
“Maybe we should give it another week.” I laugh, but I’m met with a scowl.
“Maybe you should be fuckin’ careful where you’re steppin’,” he says
I give him a condescending little pat on the shoulder. “Aww poor baby. You need me to kiss it better?
“Yeah,” he snaps. “I’m thinkin’ that’s the best fuckin’ idea you ever had.”
I crawl down the bed, making sure to give him an eyeful of my pink pussy as I go. Before I’ve even laid a hand on him, Tank groans, and I allow myself a secret smile while I’m facing the opposite direction, because it’s nice to be appreciated.
I settle on my knees beside him, and take hold of his cock, sliding my hand up his hard length. He groans, and I feel him relax further into the bed. I lower my head and run my tongue along the slit, collecting a sticky drop of pre-cum and I swallow it down, and then I swallow him down too, all the way to the base of his cock, until I’m gagging on it.
“Fuck,” he groans, and pushes his hips towards me.
This time I do choke. And I release him, my throat burning and eyes watering. “Bastard.”
“You love it.”
“I love you,” I whisper, with a grin. And he sends me this pleading look in an attempt to direct my mouth back to his cock. I narrow my eyes when he doesn’t respond, and he rolls his.
“You need me to do this now?” he asks, exasperated. I just glare at him, which of course means that I do need him to say it now, and he’s an idiot for asking. “Fine. I love you enough to put you on the back of my bike and keep you there for good. I love you enough to be the only woman I bring home to my mother—even if you did steal her drugs—and I love you enough to ask you to stay here with me, permanently.”
I swallow past the lump forming in my throat. Tank’s eyes are fever bright and his brows pinch together like he’s in pain. “I love you so much that the idea of losing you to anyone makes my blood boil in my veins. I love you enough to take down every motherfucker who might try to take you from me.” He reaches the better of his two injured hands toward me, and gently strokes my cheek. “I love you enough to ask you to be my old lady for good.”
I sit up, warily meeting his eyes. “What are you saying, Tank?”
“I’m sayin’ I want you to fuckin’ wear my ring and show every other bastard on the face of the planet who you belong to.”
“Jonah—”
“Shit.” He allows his head to fall back against the headboard, closing his eyes as he says, “I didn’t think this through at all.”
“Oh,” I say, and I try not to sound as dejected as I feel, but … fuck, that hurts. It’s not that I’m dying to get married. Hell, before this conversation I’ve never even thought about it. That was something other women did, not club whores, but I find that it hurts as if I had really wanted it.
“Relax, Warrior Princess, I meant what I said. I’ve thought about it a lot. For a long-arse time. I never wanted to get married. I never wanted anyone dependin’ on me, you know? But I think about you heading back to the clubhouse, or going it alone now that you’re free, and I don’t want that. It isn’t safe with me. I’m always gonna have people gunnin’ for my head, and maybe I’m fuckin’ selfish for even askin’, but I fuckin’ love you, babe.” He shakes his head and gives me a wry smile. “Much as I don’t want to, much as I tried not to feel anything, you had to get under my skin and pitch your fuckin’ flag there, and that’s where you’ve damn well stayed since the day we met.
“So I’m a cunt for asking you with my dick hangin’ out, and I ain’t got a ring, ’cause I’m an arsehole like that, and you know I’m gonna be a pain in your arse more than I’m gonna be the fuckin’ man of your dreams. But I’m askin’ if you’ll make me the happiest man on the fuckin’ planet?”
Tears spill over my cheeks and I think it’s the first time I’ve ever cried from being truly happy, but all I can do is bury my face in my hands and shake my head.
“Well, don’t leave a man hangin’. Is that a no or a fuckin’ yes?” he asks, and the pinched expression, the worried gaze, the look of sheer terror on his face is priceless.
“Yes, Tank. I’ll marry you.”
He smiles. “You will, huh?”
I nod and scramble closer, throwing my arms around him. Tank flinches, his whole body going rigid as a board, and he bares his teeth in a grimace.
“Shit, I’m sorry,” I say, scurrying away from his injured side.
“Come ’ere,” he says, tilting his head in a gesture that implies that I should cuddle up to him. I smile pitifully and climb over his lap, carefully settling in on his opposite side. His arm slides around me, his cast gently resting on the curve of my naked hip. “Love you, babe.”
A contented laugh escapes me. “I know.”
I glance at my hand, wondering what it would look like with a wedding band on it. Alien would be my guess, and I’d likely have to start taking better care of my nails, which kinda sucks.
“We’ll get you a ring,” Tank says.
I shake my head. “I don’t care about that.”
“I care,” he says, and the look he gives me is warning enough not to argue. “It’s gonna be a really fuckin’ big ring that every motherfucker on the planet will see. I’m gonna get one so big that fuckin’ thing will be seen from space.”
I shake my head. I don’t want a big fuck-off diamond. I just want him. But if it’ll make him happy, I’ll wear whatever the hell he wants me to, and I’ll love every second of it. I cuddle into his side and wonder what our wedding will look like, what our life together will look like.
“Now, how about that blow job?” he says.
I sit up and give him an incredulous look. “You’re a pig.”
“Yeah, but I’m your pig,” he says, grinning like a damn fool.
“Yes you are,” I say, and I slip down the bed and show him with my hands and lips and tongue just how happy that makes me.
Tank may not be the perfect man. He may be stubborn, demanding, infuriating, and an outright arsehole when he wants to be, but he’s mine. Just like this crazy fucked up life I’ve led is mine.
And I may make more stupid decisions along the way. I may always battle with my addiction. There may be times when I remember all that my father did, and I may be tempted to check out early. Who can say what the future will hold? It’s certainly been no fairy-tale so far.
I’m not a princess in a castle. There’s no extravagance in my past, nor is there likely to be any in my future. But there is love, and endurance, and the knowledge that I didn’t give up. I fought to be here.
I’m not a hero, I’ve never saved a life, but I saved my own, and that’s enough.
We’re enough.
