“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.