Tank, page 20
The creaking on the top of the stairs outside draws both our heads up and the heavy footfalls follow soon after.
Her eyes go wide with fear, and my own mirror the expression.
“Fuck, go,” I whisper and she stumbles to her feet, but she’s not quick enough. The locks slide free, the door opens, and she trips on her leg rope before she can make it back to the bed. That fucker is a black slash across the room. He yanks her head back by her hair, and he slams it into the side of the bed.
Ivy doesn’t even scream, just lets out a small guttural cry as he pulls her to her feet. Her pupils are huge and dazed.
“I’m gonna rip your fuckin’ head off,” I say through clenched teeth, tugging as hard as I can against the iron pipe. Slowly, with his hand wrapped tightly around the back of her neck, he turns to face me.
“Really?”
“Yeah, that’s right, motherfucker. You lay a goddamn finger on her again and I’ll gut you from balls to throat.”
His only response is a harsh barking laugh that makes my hair stand on end. Not because I’m frightened of him, but because I’m frightened of what he’ll do to her. It doesn’t seem to matter that she’s his only daughter. I’m bettin’ she stopped being anythin’ but his plaything a long time ago. He presses the tip of his nose to her throat and inhales, his tongue darting out to lick the creamy white flesh of her neck and the abraded skin where the rope had been choking her.
“I’m glad you’re awake. We can have ourselves a little chat.”
“Leave her the fuck alone and we can chat all you like.”
“I did a little digging on you earlier, Tank.” He spits my name as if it were venom, as he shifts them both forward. “Death. Did you know that’s what everyone calls you?”
I did, though no one had ever said it to my face.
“The executioner for the Savage Saints, and the Angels before them. Ryzhanov was very interested in hearing about how I found you right next door to his Mosman home. It’s a shame I didn’t have the foresight to pick up your friend, though. I hear Lagransky has a beef to settle.”
Crazy. That cunt-fuck got away. Which means if he hasn’t been arrested, there’s still hope that Prez and my brothers might find us.
“You know, there’s a lotta men that would give everything to be in my position right now,” he says, and I smirk, because I know exactly how many men would give their nutsack to get me alone and in a position where I don’t got the upper hand.
“They all sick bastards who rape their daughters, too?” I deadpan. It’s reflex. I didn’t mean to provoke him, but he makes Ivy pay for the slip-up by grasping her delicate throat in his hands and choking her.
I jerk against the cuffs. Later, I’ll likely feel the pain from the gashes caused by the metal burrowing into my flesh, but for now I don’t care. I have to get to her. I have to try.
He releases her and she hunches over, gasping for breath. “So … Death. Wanna know what it really feels like to die?”
“No.” Ivy recovers, and she rears her elbow back into her father’s stomach, winding him momentarily. She feints to the side as he lunges for her, attempting to catch her up by the hair, but she’s faster than him. Not that it does her much good, because just as she’s scrambling away from him the leg rope yanks her back and she lands hard against the concrete, with nothing but her skinny arms and frail body to break her fall.
“Guess you forgot about being tied up, bitch. Next time I’ll leave a little less breathing room.”
She screams as he pins her to the floor with a large hand at her back, and he tugs his pants down.
And then I get a front row fuckin’ seat to him shoving himself inside her, to all of the fucked up shit he did to her. And no amount of screaming, pleading, or yanking on my restraints does either one of us any good.
And he’s right. It really does feel like dying.
She bites her lip until it bleeds, trying to keep it in, trying to keep that shit together, but in the end he wants her screams, and that’s what he gets.
And what do I get in return? The image of her blood and tears decorating the concrete, of her beautiful face twisted in pain, and the suffocating knowledge that I can’t save her. I have two hands, all bloody and ripped to shreds from trying to get out of my cuffs. I’ve gone a good ways to de-gloving my left hand with all the fighting I’ve done, and now I’m in a world of pain.
But it isn’t just my hand that hurts. It’s my heart. Because I’m not enough. I couldn’t protect her. I’d been careless; I wasn’t paying attention, and I let this arsehole get the jump on me, but more than that, I’ve just watched the woman I love get raped by her own father, and I couldn’t do a fuckin’ thing to stop it. I couldn’t save her, and that shit is gonna haunt me for the rest of my goddamned life.
“Ivy,” I whisper. She’s still lying naked on the ground where he left her. She’s in shock. Her teeth chatter; her body tremors from head to toe. “Ivy. Baby, look at me,” I plead, and she slowly lifts her head from the floor to stare at me.
I rattle the cuffs against the iron bar, and wince as the metal slides over my raw flesh. All the skin has been stripped away right down to the first joint of my thumb. I’m pretty sure my thumb broke too. I should’ve been able to work the cuff over my broken knuckle then and slip free, but the more I pulled, the more the metal embedded itself in my flesh. And now it’s swollen so far there ain’t a goddamn thing I can do about it. That whole arm feels like a live wire. I wrenched it so hard, I probably tore a muscle or two.
“I’m sorry, baby. I’m so fucking sorry,” I whisper. I know she can hear me, because her lip quivers and tears roll down her cheeks. She doesn’t say anything, just lies her head back down on the concrete.
“I need your help. I can’t get my hand out,” I say, and in the stillness of the room I hear my voice, tired and weak, defeated, as if it belonged to another. “I’m gonna need you to work on that rope and then come help me here.”
She shakes her head. It’s a very small movement but it feels larger than life, because it means giving up. And despite the shame and hatred I feel that I couldn’t stop it, I won’t let her give up. I’ve never given up on anything in my entire life. Even with the cuff, I haven’t given up. I’m physically incapable of getting it off my wrist because the fuckin’ thing is embedded, but that doesn’t mean I’d stop tryin’. The choice is clear here. I can’t watch that again; I can’t let her go through that again. So I’ll break every bone in my fist to get free, but if I want hands to be able to kill her father with, I’ll need her help. “Come on, Warrior Princess. I fuckin’ need you, babe.”
“I can’t,” she murmurs. “I can’t. I should never have run. I shouldn’t fight him.”
“Bull-fucking-shit you shouldn’t fight. You get your sweet arse up and you start working on that rope. I don’t care if it takes all fuckin’ day. I don’t care if your fingers bleed and your whole body is so tired you just wanna lay down and die. You work on that shit until you’re free, and then you come over here and help me with these cuffs.”
“I can’t,” she says, and she turns her face away from me and weeps into the floor. I slam my head back against the wall, wondering if she isn’t right. Maybe we’re screwed either way. All I know is that I can’t watch her get raped again.
Much later, when the crying has stopped and she’s had several hours of fitful sleep, I drift into my own state of restless slumber, but I’m woken by scratching, and the frustrated gasps from Ivy attempting to loosen the knots on her leg rope. No sound comes from the TV upstairs, there’s no creak of floorboards above us, just silence.
“That’s it, baby. Just keep going,” I say.
“It’s not budging,” she huffs, and exhales her exasperation loudly.
“You’re doin’ just fine, Warrior Princess.”
“You know I used to have days down here. Some days I didn’t want to escape, because I wasn’t sure what was waiting for me on the outside, and others I just didn’t have the strength. I had nothing to fight for.” She looks at me and frowns. “I still don’t.”
“You got me. I know I’m no fuckin’ prize. I’m a bastard, and I push you to do things you don’t want to, and I’m a cunt when I’m hungry, but you have me,” I say, and I wish more than anything that I could have held her as I said those words, as if it somehow would have given them more weight. “You’ve always had me … for what it’s worth.”
“It’s worth,” she says solemnly, and goes back to working on the rope.
I wish it were true, but the fact is I promised to keep her safe, and I failed. I fucked up, and the two of us—well, we’ll pay for it for the rest of our lives.
Sometime later, after picking at it for hours with bleeding fingers and lifted nails and blisters that are red raw, Ivy finally frees her leg from its tether, and looks at me with wide-eyed wonderment, though I can clearly see her fatigue.
“I did it,” she whispers, and I can’t help but grin, because even weakened and exhausted as she is, her eyes are lit with fire. With hope.
“Get over here,” I whisper back, and she scrambles off the bed and gingerly walks over to me. She carefully climbs into my lap and I’ve never regretted the loss of the use of my hands so much, because I can’t hold her right now the way I want to. I pepper her face and hair with kisses and she takes mine in her hands, careful to avoid my black eye, and the laceration at the corner of my mouth.
“I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so, so sorry,” I whisper into her hair. A lump forms in my throat and tears spill out of my eyes and roll down my cheeks. I haven’t cried since I was a boy, but now that the floodgates have opened, I can’t seem to stop them. I don’t much care either. “I couldn’t do anything. I tried, I nearly took the skin off my fuckin’ hand, but I couldn’t protect you.”
“Shh. It’s okay. Shh.” She kisses my forehead, my cheeks, tastes my tears, and then she glances at my hand, and the revulsion and pity on her face almost flattens me. “Oh God, Tank. It looks bad.”
“Yeah, it’s about to get worse,” I say, taking a deep breath. “I hope you haven’t got a weak stomach, darlin’, ’cause I’m gonna need your help.”
I never told another living soul about my mother’s murder. I was too afraid. I was afraid he’d find out, and that he’d kill me too. Some days, I fantasised about it. When I’d spent my childhood locked down in this basement, I’d dreamed of breaking out and telling someone all the horrible things my father had done to me, to my mother, and to the boy across the street. But I never told, because I never had an opportunity to, and when I did finally escape, I was free—if only in the physical sense of the word. I’d never be mentally free. He’d made sure of that.
He made sure that I’d never think of another man again when they fucked me. Even with a clubhouse full of men. Even when it’d just been Tank and me alone in his room, I’d never seen the man in front of me. I’d seen my father, and the years of repression and the pain that he’d taught me to crave. I was sick, and I’d loved every second of it, because it was all I’d ever known. It was what I was bred to know, it was what I’d become accustomed to, and it was safe.
Pain, hurt, anger. They were safe.
Now though? Now pain is my enemy. It’s a bright slash against the night sky. A burn, rendering my flesh useless. It’s fear like I’ve never known, because for the first time ever I have something, someone to fight for. I never cared whether I lived or died. I craved death. I longed for it, but now that is the last thing I want. Now I want to fight, I have a reason to fight, and I’ll be damned if I let him take that reason from me.
I hope you haven’t got a weak stomach, darlin’. I’m gonna need your help, he’d said. But I couldn’t do what he was asking.
“There’s another way,” I say, shaking my head. “There has to be.”
“There isn’t time.”
“Oh God. I can’t.”
“Listen to me—I need you to do this,” he says, with a clear, level voice. “You do this, and you do it now, and you don’t fuckin’ stop until I tell you to and my hand is slapping outta those cuffs, you got me?”
“It’ll hurt you,” I say. I can’t even look at it, much less inflict more pain on him by trying to slide the cuff over his mangled fist.
“Stayin’ down here is gonna hurt me and you a lot more.”
“The sound will bring him running.”
“You give me somethin’ to bite down on then,” he whispers, and I still shake my head. I can’t make my legs move to stand, my arms to take hold of his hand. I can’t do this. I can’t hurt him.
“Ivy,” Tank says in a warning tone, “you do this now. I know you been wantin’ to pay me back for all those times I said no to givin’ you drugs.”
“That’s a little different from breaking both your thumbs, Tank.” I shake my head and admit, “I’m afraid.”
“You ain’t gotta be afraid, darlin’. I’d let you break every bone in my body if I thought it would save you,” he whispers, kissing my mouth. “Now come on. Let’s get this shit over with before he comes back.”
On shaking limbs I climb off his lap, and I kneel on the floor beside him. I lean over and take his belt buckle in my hands, unclasp it, and thread the belt through the loops until it’s free. I fold the leather and place it between his lips. He nods. And then I take hold of his wrist and gently slide the cuff down as far as it will go. It pulls on the metal embedded in his hand and he closes his eyes tightly shut. A strained groan escapes around the belt in his mouth.
I yank my hand away as if I’ve been burned. “I can’t do this.”
Tank growls and sets me with a look. I swallow hard. He was right about always making me do things I don’t want to. I slide my fingertips along the hard edge of his forearm, over bulging veins and down over his clenched fist.
Not even when I’d hated him mid-detox for withholding drugs from me, not even when he’d dragged me up to his cabin and kept me isolated from everything, and when I’d begged, kicked and screamed for him to give me the poison I was so eager to pump into my veins, had I ever wanted to hurt him like this.
I might have shot Killer for a fix, but it was purely accidental. I was so blinded by adrenalin and the fear that I had the coke in my hands and mightn’t get to taste it before he could snatch it away again. I hadn’t meant to shoot him, and I hadn’t meant to hurt Tank ever. I hated that this was our only option, but I steeled my courage because I’d rather he lived—we lived—than die down here.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and his body stiffens as I grab hold of his good hand and press the pad of my thumb against his joint. I force it down hard until I feel the knuckle give way under my fingers. He screams, but it’s silent, internalised, and made that much worse because of it. I want to be sick, but I keep it together as best as I can while Tank’s whole body tremors. He takes short ragged breaths in and out through his nose as I apologise over and over.
I slide the cuff down his wrist. More trembling. More silent screams swallowed up by the leather belt in his mouth. His hands are too large for the loop, even after I broke his thumb. I feel the bones shifting beneath the cuff the more I work it back and forth. It’s not just the thumb I broke that’s the problem—every tug of the metal pulls on his partially skinned hand and seems to bury it deeper. It’s another few minutes of what I’m sure is agony before I can work the cuff over his thumb and slip it past his fingers. The other, the partially skinned hand looks much worse than it did before, and the empty cuff that isn’t embedded in his flesh dangles like a macabre bracelet. His anger is a living, breathing shroud around him. And though I know it’s not directed at me, he won’t meet my gaze when I crouch down in front of him and remove the belt from his mouth.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry,” I chant over and over, and I press my hand to the side of his face so he’ll look at me. When he opens his eyes, they’re lit with fire and agony and rage. It’s a scary combination, but it gives me the strength I need to steel my resolve. I take his elbow and help him up, but he’s so blinded by pain that he stumbles and I wind up grabbing hold of his arm to keep him upright.
He holds his broken hands aloft as he wraps me in his big arms and squeezes me as tightly as he can with only his biceps to anchor me to his body. “We’re gonna get out of here. I’m gonna get you out, and I’m gonna put a knife through that fucker’s skull.”
“How?” I say, carefully stepping out of his embrace in order to see him better. “How do we get out? Both your hands are broken and I weigh next to nothing. We’re no match for him, Tank.”
“I’ve never met a man I couldn’t kill, babe. Why the hell do you think I’ve been around to annoy you for so fuckin’ long? I’m gonna need your help, though. You’ll distract him while I move in. First, we gotta kill the light.”
I shake my head. “The lamp I can turn on and off, but the switch for the overhead light is outside the room.”
“I need you to smash the light bulb, babe.”
“But the noise will bring him running.”
“Exactly.” Tank leans down and reaches for the belt, and I help him when I realise what he plans to do with it.
“Your hands are broken,” And my voice sounds pitying and small, even to me. “How are you going to hold it tight enough?”
“Don’t you worry about me. Listen, when I wrap this thing around his neck, I need you to promise me you’ll run. Get outta here, flee, and don’t you dare fuckin’ look back. You run as far as you possibly can, and then you call Prez for help.”
I shake my head. “I’m not leaving you. He’ll kill you.”
“He’ll try.”
“You can’t fight him with two broken hands,” I argue.
His eyes placate me. They hold me in an embrace when his arms can’t. “I told you I’d break every bone in my body to keep you safe. I meant it.”
“This is crazy; there has to be another way.”
