Fifty
Miles
There was no morning light in the basement.
Just darkness.
And when he woke up, it wasn’t to peace and quiet. There was a roar in his ears. The room always felt stuffy and clammy. It brought him back—
Back to a dark place he spent years on the Road trying to forget.
He opened his eyes, listening to the body across the room fidgeting in her sleep.
Skye never slept peacefully. Like him, she was tormented, crying out all the fucking time. It drove him batshit crazy. Sometimes he was tempted to put her in a room upstairs. Let her fucking scream through her nightmares there, but he wouldn’t do it. She was too fucking vulnerable up there, and why the fuck did it concern him so much about it, anyway?
She was a weird bitch.
If she died, who cared?
Hunter could find a million that looked just like her.
And fuck Leo, the cunt deserved to hurt.
Sitting up, Miles rubbed at his eyes and let reality come rushing in. It felt like a violent wave every time. The realization his brothers were dead. That his clubhouse was blown apart. That he had pretty much lost everything he ever worked for in the blink of an eye.
Jesus fucking Christ, what a disaster.
He fisted his hands, fighting back the urge to grab the weapons, to smash the knives into a body—but he needed the body to fight back. He needed him to bleed slowly. He needed that rush, that adrenaline, that fucking fight for survival. Because there was such a fucking rush at the end of a kill. When you stood over a fallen body, when you felt victorious, when you heard that voice loud and clear declare, “Victor!”
He had fought for his freedom once, and it had nearly broken him.
He never expected, however, to actually break after he was let out of that dark pit.
Miles didn’t realize that life outside the Dungeon was another form of prison.
The club kept him in line. It gave him purpose with just enough bloodshed to warrant the demons away.
He stomped out of the room, uncaring if he woke the bitch up. Outside, he stood under the morning sun, and finally—fucking finally, he tore his shirt off, allowing all the ugly out. Too many years he hid under his clothes. It wasn’t that he hated the scars—he couldn’t give a fuck about them. It was the look people gave him when they saw them. He’d made the mistake once—just once. He’d taken a sexy bitch to bed, and he had been so delirious for the fuck, for the touch of human flesh, that he’d stripped naked just to feel her pressed against him. He thought it was too dark, that this bitch was too drunk to notice—
But then she did.
And she’d run her fingers along the marks, looking disturbed and then filled with pity. A Golden Bird never looked pitifully at him. A Golden Bird had always made him feel like the Victor that he fucking was.
And so, he choked the bitch until she was half-alive, and then he banned her from the club, from town, making sure she was gone for good come morning.
After a few minutes of this sunbathing bullshit, he threw his shirt back on. Not a moment later, he heard a twig snap. The hair on the back of his neck rose, and without even turning, he knew she was there—that she had seen his fucked up back. She came to stop beside him, and now they were standing there, next to the picnic table. He risked a look her way. Her eyes were shut, and her head was up, like she, too, was drinking in the sun.
Quickly, he looked her over. She was dressed in that swamp of a shirt, and her hair was a fucking mess, and when she finally opened her eyes to look at him, she didn’t look kind. She still fucking hated him, scars and all. He resisted the urge to smile, shaking his head once to himself when she turned her back to him and walked around the yard, gathering dandelions like she was still fucking four. Why the fuck would he ever have thought she’d feel any sort of pity for him? Bitch had scars of her own. Her leg was ravaged in them when that prissy cunt woman tried to off her all those years ago.
Miles remembered the grizzly look of her leg when they dragged her along the beach. Fucking ouch, he’d thought to himself. For reasons unknown, he had followed them. Maybe it had to do with Skye’s eyes when she peered at him in front of that traffic light. He didn’t fucking know. But he listened to his gut, and then he found himself standing there, watching the scenes unfold, ready to strike at the man if he so much as tried to hurt her.
But then he turned into a blubbering mess.
And what a fucking daytime soap opera it turned out to be.
Skye crawling desperately from him, determined to get away, while he trailed behind her, sobbing on the phone to Leo.
It was a fucking shame he didn’t try to hurt her. That Miles did not gut him like a pig. That he later did not shoot the driver and Leo as they came for her. How differently would things be right now? Miles would have started a war with George Itani, the fucker that loved to visit him in his cell and do all kinds of sordid shit to him and his Golden Bird.