Tank, page 21
“We gotta do this now, Ivy. Promise me you’ll run, no matter what you hear. You run and you keep runnin’.”
“I promise,” I say through my tears, but I’ve broken promises to him before. What’s another one? No way am I going to leave him down here at the mercy of my father.
“Thatta girl,” Tank says, and he kisses me before gritting his teeth and wrapping the ends of the belt tightly around his hands. His arms shake as he does this, and his face twists with pain, but then his eyes meet mine, and his determination spurs on my own.
I nod, and then I wait until he moves back into the shadows on the other side of the room before I yank the lamp from the wall. I hurl it at the ceiling. The light bulb shatters, the lamp splinters into what sounds like several pieces on the floor and glass rains down all around us, littering the ground. The room is pitch black, save for the light that creeps in through the tiny gap around the door.
Above, I hear footsteps through the living room, and then on the stairs. My heart races, and I wish I could see him in the dark. When my father slides the locks free and opens the door I get a glimpse of Tank’s outline, a warrior, a gladiator veiled in shadow, just waiting for the right time to strike. And then I have to avert my gaze so I don’t give everything away.
My father stands in the doorway, the dim glow from the stairwell burning my eyes after the long seconds of darkness. He’s silhouetted by light, and it isn’t until he moves that I realise he’s holding the axe in his hands. My blood turns to ice in my veins, and all of the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. A small cry escapes my throat as he moves into the room.
“You’ve been a very naughty little girl, Ivy,” he says, and I don’t disagree. Breaking the light was stupid; this whole thing was stupid. We can’t escape. The best I can hope for is that he kills Tank quickly, but I am never getting out of this room, and I am never going to forget the sounds, the rush of wind as he swings the axe, and the way Tank’s head will hit the floor. After all, I’ve never forgotten those things about my mother’s death. I’ve never forgotten the metallic tang of blood in the air, or the taste of it on my tongue as it misted into my open mouth.
His boots crunch on the broken glass as he crosses the floor towards me. He glances at the wall where Tank should be, but without the overhead light he’s as blind as I am to that corner of the room. My breath cycles hard and fast through my lungs, and I scream when I see him heft the axe over his shoulder but he doesn’t swing it, only rests it there so that even in the dimness I can see the glinting silver blade, and practically feel the metal against my flesh.
My father turns to me. He doesn’t understand my outburst, or maybe he does and he’s just toying with me, dangling a knife over my head and threatening to drop it.
“My sweet girl,” he says, reaching out to touch my face. I draw back, but he grabs my arm and yanks me to him. “I’ve missed your temper tantrums.”
Tank looms behind my father. The pop and splinter of glass under his boot echoes throughout the room and fear splits my heart in two as my father’s eyes grow wide with realisation. He’s too late though. The belt whips around my father’s head and Tank yanks him back against his huge body, suffocating him.
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.”
