Monster (31 page)

“Chris, I think
you better take Joshua to his room then get yourself cleaned up. Greg
can stay in here with us.”

Greg was the guy who
had led me through the house and toward the basement earlier.

Greg was probably the
only one out of the three who actually could restrain me.

Great.

And then he did.

And everyone else was
gone.

Leaving just me being
held down by Greg. And Alex across the room being approached by Lex.

Fuck.

No.

I knew where this was
going.

And

Fuck

No
.

I saw the realization
hit Alex's face at the same time I felt the knowledge spread through
me. She moved fast, reaching into her boot. For the heroin, I
realized. She was going to end it. I was going to have to watch her
OD and die.

Jesus fuckin' Christ.

But she wasn't fast
enough and Lex had her by the throat, pulling the heels of her feet
off the ground and slamming her up against the wall. Her arms swung
out, trying to hit him, then trying to pull his hands off her neck as
her air supply started to make her head fuzzy.

Then one of his hands
moved away. But only to curl on itself, then plunge forward. Hitting
her jaw much like he had made me do. But he wasn't holding back like
I was. I heard the crack. I saw her head slam in the other direction.
His hand dropped from her throat and then there was just the sound of
his fists in her face. Her center. And her muted grunts as she tried
not to show weakness.

“Stupid bitch
thought you could take me down? Stupid fucking cunt. You are no one.
No one!” he yelled. Alex's body fell forward, her palms
slapping the ground in front of her to brace her fall. She was facing
me, but her head was down, blood dripping onto the concrete below
her.

I fought.

Against the hold.
Trying to get to her.

Then Lex got down on
the ground behind her, kneeling, grabbing for the waistband of her
pants.

And the swirling in my
stomach rose up my throat.

At the same moment,
Alex's head rose to mine. For the barest of seconds, she was there.
And then the mask came down and I knew she was gone. She was
accepting her fate. She was going to be raped and killed by Lex
Keith.

Just like her mother.

It was then, watching
her shut down, watching Lex's sick face twist in desire as he pulled
down her pants. It was then that I realized I still had a card to
play.

It was something that
came back to me the night before when I was laying in bed not
sleeping and thinking over my conversations with Alex.

Like when she told me
about her mom. Told me about what her mom went through at Lex's
hands. For years. Before she got away. And when I thought about it
hard enough, it made sense. There was even a similarity.

“You're gonna
watch me fuck the woman you love as she screams for you to save her
and you know damn well you can't,” Lex's eyes bore into mine as
his hands went to the front of his pants.

My eyes begged her to
snap out of it.

To tell him herself.

Why wouldn't she? It
could save her. Was it worse, somehow, for her to admit it?
Did
she even admit it to herself? It wouldn't exactly be out of character
for her to bury that and pretend it didn't exist.

But it did.

And if she wasn't going
to use it, well, I sure as fuck was.

“Knew you were a
sick fuck, Lex,” I said, feeling Greg's arm tighten around me,
seeing Lex pause and look at me. “Didn't think you'd be as
twisted as to rape your own fuckin' daughter.”

The look of shock over
his face would have been priceless in any other situation. His eyes
bugged. His shoulders slumped.

I was vaguely aware of
Alex's eyes snapping to mine.

“What?” Lex
growled.

“Yeah. You stupid
shit. Got all these men, got all these hackers, looking all into your
shit and somehow you missed that little gem.”

“No,” he
said, moving away from Alex, zipping his pants.

“Yep. Know who
her mom is? Think hard. Hell, just take a fuckin' look at her,”
I spat. “I've seen a picture. She's the fuckin' spittin' image
of her mother. Shouldn't be too hard for you to draw up the memory.
Since you kept her in your house, beating and raping her for years
before she finally got shot of you.”

Lex moved around toward
Alex, grabbing her face. And I got to watch as his own face paled
until he was practically see-through. Then he dropped her like she
burned him, moving away.

“Allison,”
he whispered, shaking his head.

I didn't know her name.
Alex never said it. But Lex was clearly seeing a ghost from his past.

“Yeah. One of the
many women you've broken in your time. She just so happened to be
lucky enough to get some help along the way. Got a life. Raised her
daughter. Killed herself though when Alex was sixteen. Know anything
about that?” One look was all I needed to know he did. That he
had, like Alex guessed, seen her that day. Leading her to kill
herself to save them both. “Yeah. I bet you do. Killed herself
that day, ya know. That's when your daughter decided to dedicate her
life to taking you down.”

“Daughter...”
he repeated, looking down at Alex who had pushed herself back onto
her knees and pulled her pants back up.

“Yeah you...”

My voice trailed off.
Or, rather, it was drowned out, by the sounds of gunfire. And then,
incredibly, almost unbelievably, explosions. Enough that the ground
shook. Enough that Greg got startled and I got my window. And I
fucking took it.

I wasn't aware of Alex
or Lex while my anger drained into bashing Greg's face fuckin'
unrecognizable.

But then there was a
scream and my head shot up to see Lex's hands covering his face, his
groaning very much like that of a dying animal.

And there was Alex,
hands shaking holding the pocketknife I had slipped her the day we
went to Oscar Street. It was bloody. As were the hands Lex was
holding to his face.

I flew across the room,
taking Lex out with one punch, and grabbing Alex.

“We got to go...
now!” I yelled over the sound of the world ending around us.
“Doll,” I said, hands to her shoulders, shaking her hard
once, until she looked at me and the mask fell. “We gotta go.”

“I stabbed him,”
she said, looking down at his body.

“God damn right
you did,” I agreed, pulling her toward the door, but not before
I snagged a gun off Greg's prone body. “You finally got some
vengeance. Now let's get the fuck outta dodge.”

Twenty

Shooter

Being held captive
wasn't as bad as it sounded. I mean, the no wifi, no TV, no booze, no
sexy as fuck women around to chat up? Yeah, that part sucked. But
just sitting around in a room twiddling my thumbs, listening to the
dipshits guarding me spill all of Lex's secrets? Yeah, that was
almost good enough for prime time entertainment. Partly because their
vocabulary consisted of cusses and the word list a third grader would
need to memorize to pass his state exams. And, seeing as I came from
some backwards hick fucking town in the south with a sorry excuse for
a school system, yeah, me saying their vocab was lacking was saying
something.

But it was also partly
entertaining because they were so busy shooting the shit that I could
have gotten away at least a dozen times if I wanted to.

Not that I didn't want
to.

I was just trying to
play it smart.

I didn't know what kind
of deal Breaker had going on.

Or his chick for that
matter.

And, make no mistake,
that was his chick.

I saw them the day
after he took her and I could already see something there. They were
both oblivious to it aside from maybe some sexual tension. But it was
there.

Not just because Break
didn't want to hit her. That he was willing to sacrifice me for her.
It wasn't that. We both knew that drill. We didn't raise our fucking
hands to women.

No.
It was the way he was looking at her. And also the way he was
pointedly
not
looking
at her.

She
was more than a client.

And she was damn sure
more than some random one night stand.

The
second she opened her mouth and started hollerin'... yeah I got the
appeal. Not that she wasn't great to look at to begin with. Tall and
thin with that shoulder-length dark hair and big dark eyes, the
perfect bone structure. I mean, I generally preferred my women thick,
with some curves to sink my fingers into.
But
she was still a stunner. But, fuck me, when she started going pure
rage
monster at Lex?

Yeah, she had something
going for her.

And she, whether either
of them knew it or not, was just the kind of woman he needed in his
life.

I mean after taking one
of Breaker's fists to the jaw (which I had been on the receiving end
of before and, let me tell ya', it hurt like a mother), she still
managed to have the wits about her to hand me off a knife. That was
what Break needed. A chick who could think on her feet, who took the
hit, who did what needed to be done.

With nothing to do but
sit around and think, I gave their sure-to-be budding romance some
thought. Wondering if Break would keep her at a distance, if she
would let him in. If she could take away the guilt and shame he would
have felt after putting his hands on her.

Breaker was never the
type of man to be seen with a woman on his arm. Sure him and me and
sometimes Paine, we would go out, we would pick up women. But Break's
were smoke by the next morning. In all the years I knew him, I was
pretty sure I had never seen him with a woman in the daylight.

A part of me really
wished I could have been around to watch him fumble through that
first-time experience.

But, no, I was in a
basement. And not the nice side. With the bar and the TV. No I was in
the cold, damp, windowless side with a bathroom and a folding chair.

If there was one thing
I learned I had taken for granted most of my life, it was beds. A
nice, thick, firm mattress. Preferably with a nice, thick, sweet
woman beside me on it.

But I digress.

I knew shit was going
down from what Limp Dick Rick and the new kid Chris were sayin'.
About some chump named Glenn who got himself whacked. Then about some
asshole named Joshua who had traced the leak in Lex's security to
Alex.

Yeah. Their little
honeymoon period was coming to an end and fast.

I also knew it meant my
time on earth was coming to a close.

Men like Limp Dick Rick
and Chris might have been idiots, but they knew better than to talk
shop in front of an outsider if they planned to let him live. There
had never been any such plan for me.

I was trying to play it
by ear. See where things led before I made a decision or not.

The choice was simple:
fight my way out and possibly endanger the only person in the world
who gave a fuck about me or take my death like a man and hope Breaker
had his head in the game enough to get his chick and get away.

Problem was, there was
no way to guess the way that night went.

Earlier, I had pissed
off Limp Dick Rick (possibly simply because that was how I referred
to him, but also possibly because I may or may not have told him that
he was proof that evolution works in reverse. In my defense, I
thought he was too stupid to understand the insult) but anyway... I
pissed him off. He knocked me around a little bit. He took me up to
Lex's study for reasons unknown to me until I was dragged back down
to find that someone else was locked in the bathroom.