The door burst open. Priest barrelled in with his mates—all three of them. New faces to me, but maybe not to Viktor. I hadn’t got around to asking him.
Either way, the two lackeys went to Viktor while one stood guard with the same fuckin’ gun he’d pointed at Embry way back when.
I got Priest. He sidled to a stop in front of me, bad teeth a beacon of yuck in a fugly face I’d never erase from my brain. “Here he is. My favourite smug cunt. Bet you thought you had it all figured out, didn’t you?”
A blank stare was my only answer. Back in the day, I used to get angry, imagining how I’d end this fucker, ripping him apart, piece by piece, destroying him like he’d destroyed me.
Then a thousand years went by and nothing changed, and the hate in my heart became another distant thing I’d never finished. Rage became despair. And right now, I was still plagued by apathy. Like, I didn’t want to die. Icaredif Priest killed me. But it was so hard tofeelit. The only shit that riled me up was the boots the other goons were putting to Viktor.
Don’t. He’s already broken.
Physically.
My malnourished brain knew the distinction was important.
Priest was still talking. He got in my face, waving his stupid knife. It wasn’t the same one Mateo had taken from him a few years back, but he seemed as attached to it. More so than the strap he had jammed in his belt.
That’s new.For him, at least. I leaned against the wall behind me, trying to keep my gaze off the weapon. Then I stopped fighting it and fixated on it instead.Guns, guns, guns. It meant something, but what? The Crows had never been much into firearms. Too much of a shitshow to procure them. Only Butch ever had one, and he’d brought it down from up north... right?
Fuck, I couldn’t remember, and it bothered me more than the pipe Priest was slowly drawing from his front pocket.
I almost didn’t notice when he hit me with it. Then I did, and my ears rang with the blow, my injured shoulder taking most of the impact.
And so it rained. I dealt with it like I always had, blocking it out in fits and starts. Suffering the pain when I failed. The only good thing about Priest was, despite his commitment to making my life miserable, he was easily bored.
He wandered off before he broke me.
Viktor wasn’t so lucky, and it was a harder fight to stay pressed against the concrete wall while they kicked seven bells of shit out of him.
Even harder when they ran out of steam and stooped over him, inflicting a weapon far worse than any fuckin’ gun.
A needle.
A syringe.
Fuck me running, they were drugging him.
Was I next?
6
NASH
If I ate one more plate of eggs and potatoes, I was going to kill someone. Probably Cam. Or Rubi. Every time I glanced up, one of those fuckers was bearing down on me with variations of the same four demands.
Eat.
Sleep.
Stop smoking so much.
And the worst one:talk to me, brother.
The first two came easier as my body rebelled against the purgatory I’d tried to force on it. The rest were impossible and my days and nights blurred by in a bleary haze of autopilot. Routine. Habit. Familiarity. I did things without thinking about why. I lived moments without noticing they’d passed. But the potatoes, man. It was getting on my tits, gifting me anger that I clung to just to feel something, even though I’d fought so hard to feel nothing.
Shoving those plates across the table became the highlight of my day. A short burst of satisfaction that faded so fast I had to walk away before I did something horrendous to get that feeling back. Like yesterday. Likenow, as the chapel door slammed shut behind me, and I lit a smoke without considering if I wanted it and trudged across the yard with no real destination in mind, save the fact I wanted to be alone.
I wound up in the garage, staring at Orla’s crocked bike. I’d taken the wheels off before I’d known Locke was the target of the road attacks. Life—and fixing his smashed-up Dyna—had kept me from putting them back.