Six Brothers

Nine

The pain is shattering, and I can feel each pulse of my heart as my leg bleeds onto the bed. I lie there for a few minutes; every thought consumed by the red pain that’s tearing my leg apart.

There’s a major artery in my leg—did he get it? Am I going to bleed out here, on these stiff sheets, alone and tied up?

I test the binds around my wrists, trying to see if I could possibly tug my hands free, but it is useless. He has me tied up tight. I squeeze my numb hands into fists, trying to keep some blood circulating in them.

How long will I be here? What if someone finds me, naked and bleeding. Oh, fuck. What if Jase finds me? It’s almost too horrible to comprehend. Because then there is the alternative—what if he doesn’t find me? What if one of the other brothers do? They’ve done it to me once, and that’s when I could put up a fight. Now, lying here, nude, silenced, and completely vulnerable—I just can’t let my mind go there.

I look around me, trying to ignore the horrific pain in my leg, when I realize that’s the answer I’m looking for.

The knife.

I take a deep breath through my nose and set my teeth in anticipation, using my abdominal muscles to curl my legs down to my face. Thank fuck he didn’t tie me at the ankles as well, or I’d be truly out of options.

The pain in my leg intensifies since I’m moving it, and I gasp silently around my makeshift gag as I see my blood pouring from the stab wound, the knife still sunk in to the hilt. Now that my leg is raised, blood starts to slip down my thigh and pools on my bare belly, making me shiver.

Come on. You’ve got a single bind on your hands and a knife in your thigh. This is easy.

It’s not easy, even for someone who was a gymnast in her grade school years. I might be limber but there’s only so far you can twist and contort your body when you’ve been stabbed and tied up with impossibly tight binds. I continue to try various ways of kicking my leg up and toward my face and hands, hoping I might be able to reach my fingers out to grip the knife and pull it out. I quickly tire, needing a break in between each attempt since I’m getting more and more lightheaded and nauseous.

Finally, I realize that I might need to change the way I’m laying so that I’m parallel to the bedhead instead of right in the middle of the bed. I shuffle my body slowly and awkwardly and frown when I see the patch of dark red blood I’ve left behind.

Fucker’ll be buying a new mattress, I think to myself.

I manage to twist my arms enough to get to a sitting position, and immediately pull my panties out of my mouth. I stretch my jaw painfully and take a deep, gulping breath of air. Fucking asshole. I can’t believe he just fucking stabbed me while he was eating me out. It makes me want to find him and put six bullets between his dead black eyes and a seventh in his heart for good measure.

I wiggle my fingers to get some feeling back in them and turn sharply so that I can grip the knife handle sticking out of my bloodied leg. I grimace as I contemplate pulling the knife out.

There’s going to be a lot more blood once I do that.

I grit my teeth, count to three, and yank the knife upward as hard as I can. It comes out with a meaty squelch that turns my stomach and makes the pain throbbing in my thigh about ten times worse than it was.

Blood bubbles up from my leg as I take the knife and maneuver it in my clumsy fingers, sawing at the thin, but incredibly strong silk holding my hands hostage.

I saw for what feels like a lifetime before the knife makes a solid break in the fabric and my arms fall to my lap loosely, free and numbed. I immediately ball a corner of the bed sheet up in my hand and press it to my stab wound to staunch the bleeding.

Of course, it’s my exact luck that Jase chooses that exact moment to knock on the door.

“Go away,” I call out, my breath catching.

“Are you okay?” Jase yells back. “I heard screaming, and it didn’t sound like good screaming. Ohhhhh.”

He opens the door as he’s saying it, peeking his head around the corner, and when his eyes land on me, or more specifically, my blood littering the sheets, he baulks, rushing me.

“What the fuck?” he says. I tug the sheets around my naked body, suddenly embarrassed by how I must look.

“It’s like the red wedding in here,” he breathes. “What the fuck happened? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I say bleakly, tossing the knife on the bed beside me. I’m not fine. My leg hurts like a motherfucker. And I don’t want to look at him.

He just continues to stare, mouth agape.

“Can you pass me my dress?” I ask tiredly, pointing to the black material on the ground by his feet.

“Sure.” He picks the material up between two fingers and gingerly hands it to me. It’s going to get blood all over it, but I don’t care. I just want to be somewhat covered.

Jase turns around and I pull the dress over my head, letting it pool around my hips so that it covers me, but doesn’t touch my stab wound. Not that it matters. I’m drenched in bright red blood, which is turning colder and stickier by the minute.

Jase approaches me cautiously, studying my blank face.

“What happened?” he asks quietly.

I swallow thickly. “Apparently, I remind your father of someone he used to know. Someone he beheaded.”

Jase’s eyes go wide and he does this kind of choking thing with his throat. I curse myself silently, remembering how close he and Mariana were. How she was like a mother to him after his own had been killed.

“So he stabbed you and left you in here?” Jase asks, not surprised at all.

I nod, giggling inappropriately. “He tied me up first.”

Worry flashes in his dark eyes. “You should have run when you had the chance,” he says.

I don’t answer. I won’t run. Not now, that I’ve tasted Dornan’s tears and sorrow, not after I’ve watched as Chad took his last breath. I won’t leave until this is over.

I lift the sheet from my thigh to see that the bleeding has slowed. Jase stares in sick fascination at my mangled leg.

“I’ll get a first aid kit,” he says. He looks around. “Let’s get you the hell out of this room.”

I look at my leg, wondering if I can walk on it, and decide to stand and test it. “Fuck,” I mutter under my breath, my leg buckling underneath me, tears biting at the corners of my eyes.

“Here,” Jase says, and in one swift move he has picked me up in his arms like he is about to carry me over the threshold.

“Now it’s like the red wedding,” I say groggily, my head lolling forward and smacking into his chest.

Jase just shakes his head, and I can see the beginnings of a small smile form at the corners of his mouth. “As if you’ve read A Game of Thrones,” he says, easing me through the open door and carrying me down the deserted hallway.

“I watched the show,” I say, hiding my face in his chest. “Does that count?”

He enters another doorway, maybe ten doors down from Dornan’s room, and deposits me on a bed.

“Is this your room?” I ask, looking around. I fall backward on the bed, dizzy, weak and feeling like I’m drunk. My eyes flutter shut for a moment and Jase shakes me roughly.

“Hey, Samantha?” His tone is one hundred percent serious now.

I crack one eyelid, even though the effort is almost impossible. “I’m tired,” I say, closing my eye again.

“I’m gonna take you to the hospital,” he says, and upon hearing that, my eyes snap open and I sit up. “No. No hospitals. Just a first aid kit.”

He shakes his head. “Samantha, you’re fucking bleeding everywhere! A bandaid is not going to work.”

He goes to scoop me up and I put my hand on his forearm. “No hospitals,” I say adamantly. “Just a needle and thread.” I think about that for a moment. “And a bottle of Jack.”

“Wouldn’t swabbing alcohol be better to disinfect it?” he asks dubiously.

“It’s for me to drink,” I say through gritted teeth.

He disappears, and returns a few minutes later with a small plastic box marked with a white cross over a red square, a fresh, unopened bottle of bourbon, a bottle of cola and a small sewing kit.

I eye the cola as he pushes my dress up my thigh, moving the blood-soaked pillowcase I have been using to staunch the bleeding out of the way. He opens the first aid kit and pulls out a package of sterile wipes, tearing it open with his teeth. That’s probably not sterile, but I’m not complaining.

“Who’s Mariana?” I slur, my head full of cotton wool and my leg a sharp, throbbing pain that won’t dull.

“She was my stepmother, I suppose. She never married my dad, but she was with him for a long time.”

“Jesus!” I swear as he swabs my leg with alcohol. I grab the bottle of bourbon that he tossed on the bed next to me and twist the lid off, taking a long, deep drink that simultaneously burns my throat and soothes my ragged nerves.

“Sorry,” Jase mutters, finishing his wiping. He stands back and surveys my wound. “It really needs stitches.” He prods it gently. “How deep did he put it in there?”

I want to laugh, but I don’t. “Up to the hilt,” I say, swallowing back bile and chasing it with more bourbon.

“We need a doctor,” he says. I grit my teeth and hand him the bourbon, snatching up the calico sewing kit from the bed next to me and unzipping it. I locate a small needle and some black cotton and clumsily try to thread the cotton through the eye.

“Here, let me do that,” he says. He takes the needle and thread from me and produces a lighter out of his back pocket. I lie back on the bed as he busies himself with the needle and thread.

“You ready?” he asks me.

I sit back up, the room spinning. “Not really.”

“On the count of three,” he says, using one hand to push my torn skin together and the other to hold the needle. “One, two…”

On two he presses the needle into my flesh. Pain ricochets through my entire body, every nerve ending alight with sizzling, searing pain.

“Was there a three?” I mutter through my clenched teeth.

He doesn’t answer, just swears and holds the needle up to me. “The thread keeps breaking,” he says.

I roll my eyes. “Fishing line,” I spit. “Fishing line will work.”

“I’ll be right back,” he says, leaving the room and closing the door. He isn’t gone long, maybe five minutes, and when he gets back, he is panting.

“Did you go for a run?” I ask sarcastically.

He holds up a spool of brand new fishing wire in one hand and a small bag of off-white powder in the other.

I immediately look to the bag, intrigued. “Smack?” I ask.

He hands over the bag, nodding. “It’s pretty pure,” he says. “You’ll only need a tiny pinch.”

I take a pinch of the powder from the bag and nestle it in the webbing between my thumb and forefinger. Holding it up to my nose, I close off one nostril and breathe in forcefully.

Almost immediately, a sense of blissful calm settles on my shoulders, even as I swallow the bitter taste of heroin that coats the back of my throat.

“You good?” Jase asks. I nod.

“Yeah. Go for it.”

He digs the needle into my flesh, and though the pain is still apparent, it is now much more bearable.

“I don’t know how to knot this,” he says. I wave my hand dismissively. “Doesn’t matter.”

“It’s going to scar,” he continues.

What’s another scar?

“Doesn’t matter.”

He laughs. “Nothing much matters when you’re high.”

“I am not high,” I say, staring at the weird shapes the ceiling fan is creating on the walls.

“Okay,” he says, standing to admire his handiwork. I crane my neck, trying to get a glimpse of my war wound without sitting up.

“Do you feel okay?” he asks.

I shrug lazily, floating on a cloud of fluffy marshmallows. “As well as I can when I’ve just been stabbed.” A thought enters my fuzzy head and I frown.

“How do you know how to stitch wounds, anyway?”

His face appears directly above mine, a hint of amusement on his slightly upturned mouth.

“I’ll tell you some other time,” he says. “Come on. We’re getting out of here. I’m taking you to my place.”

I sit up and look around the nondescript room. “Isn’t this your place?”

“Samantha,” he says, the hint of a smile tugging at his mouth. “You really think I live in a bikers’ clubhouse?”