Owned: An Alpha Anthology (18 page)

REBEL BY CALLIE HART

4 - Rebel

"I called it. I didn’t have any other choice." Cade closes the door to my den behind him, shutting out the steely looks of the Widow Maker crew—there are twenty-three men gathered out in the bar, because they all knew before I did: we are at war with Los Oscuros. Cade saw my dead uncle’s body lying in the snow, and he handed over that bullet, just like I would have done. Except I would have given it to Raphael straight between the fucking eyes. "You okay?" Cade asks, as I slump into the seat at my desk.

No other member of the club would ask me if I was okay right now. They’re hard men, who deal with their issues the hard way: silently. Cade, on the other hand, has known me since I was eight years old. He knew me before all of the goodness got torn out of me. He knows I’m
not
okay.

I just shake my head, staring down at the gun I’ve drawn from my belt without realizing and am now holding in my hands. "How did he die?"

"I don’t know." Cade’s ominously silent for a moment. "But there was a lot of blood."

I close my eyes, trying to fill my lungs with some air. It’s not working. "Okay." I inhale. Exhale. Nod my head. "Okay." The second time I say it, I’m closing a door. Ryan Conahue is dead. There’s nothing I can do to bring him back now, but there are a number of things I can do
about
his death. My first instinct is go take this fucking gun, climb onto my bike, ride all the way from New Mexico to Seattle, and torture that motherfucker until he begs to die. "Do you know where they’re staying?" I ask. "Hector and the others?" It’s not just Raphael that needs to die. His boss is the one who ordered Ryan’s death. He is as guilty, if not more so.

"They’ve left Seattle," Cade says. He places his hands on the back of the chair he should be sitting in, leaning forward. "They’re back in L.A."

Back in L.A. That means Raphael’s hightailed it straight to his boss to tell him the good news. Hector’s been pushing for bloodshed ever since he moved up into the States. He wants our business. Well, that’s not strictly true. He wants our gun and drug business. He’s done everything in his power to take that business from us, but our clientele is loyal. And paranoid. They don’t trust new faces. Now we’ve drawn swords, as it were, Hector must think he’s going to wipe us out. Give the gang lords we deal with no other choice but to deal with them instead. This whole clusterfuck of a situation is political, mixed in with the fact Ryan was in a position to send Hector down the line for a very long time.

"You know this isn’t your fault," Cade says softly.

I somehow manage to tear my gaze away from the gun, so I can look up at him. "And how the hell have you come to that conclusion? I told him to stand his ground. I told him we’d fucking protect him!"

Thankfully Cade doesn’t say another word on the subject. He knows the dangerous glint in my eye. He knows when I’m on the very brink of a total meltdown, and he knows better than to give me the final push. This
is
my fault. No two ways about it.

My friend drops his head between his braced arms for a second, sighing. "This might be nothing to concern ourselves with, but Raphael had a girl with him."

"What do you mean, a girl?"

"Just some young thing off the street by the looks of things. Nice clothes. Had that moneyed look about her."

"She wasn’t one of his crew?"

Cade shakes his head. "She was terrified. I told her to say she was a virgin."

That’s potentially one of the only things that will save a girl once Hector’s guys get their hooks in them. Hector may want my guns and coke, but his main area of interest lays in human trafficking. A beautiful virgin is worth more than a whole shipment worth of AKs if you sell to the right buyer. "I wanna see this girl. You got footage?"

"I got something. Not a very clear picture, though." Cade pulls a thumb drive out of his pocket and tosses it to me. I slot it into my computer, opening the file as soon as the device registers. Cade is right—the picture is for shit, but it’s good enough to make out the shape of a woman, walking down a darkened street.

The woman stops, turns, watches something farther down the street.

"That was us," Cade tells me. "We knew Ryan was in the area. We were looking for him." His face creases into a look of remorse. A look that worsens as Ryan’s figure appears on the screen, a meter from the girl. He frightens her. She staggers back, and he falls to his knees in the snow.

My heart rises up into my throat. I understand why Cade looks so fucking guilty now. They missed my uncle by mere seconds.

My eyes feel dry; I don’t think I’ve blinked since the footage started playing. Ryan holds one hand up to the girl—a plea for help if ever I’ve seen one. The stance of the girl, the way she’s holding her own hands to her chest, makes me think she’s going to run from him. But she doesn’t. She surprises me and takes a step forward. More dark shapes appear on the screen—Raphael and his friends. I watch the girl getting grabbed. I watch those fuckers dragging Ryan back into the alleyway. And then there’s nothing.

"She was going to help him." I hear myself say the words, but they don’t really register. Not until I find myself saying them again. "She was going to help him." I take a deep breath. "So now we need to help
her
."

REBEL BY CALLIE HART

5 - Alexis

Ramona is a tall, slender woman with the traces of what might once have been a hair lip. If it was, her surgeon was very talented. Raphael hands me over to her with a clipped and considerably angry burst of Spanish, and then I’m whisked away. The woman has to be in her late twenties, though the tired look in her eyes gives her the look of someone much older.

"What you done to piss him off?" she asks, though she doesn’t really sound like she’s interested. A good job, really, since I have no intention of making small talk with her. The sugary sweet smell I caught outside is even thicker inside the house. We walk down a long, narrow corridor, and Ramona stops at the end, opening a door on the right. Inside, a confusion of pastel tulle awaits—dresses upon dresses, hanging on rack after rack. An entire room full of forgotten prom dreams.

"What size are you, girl?" Ramona asks. She smacks some gum. I don’t answer. She rolls her eyes and storms into the room, yanking a yellow dress off the closest rack and thrusting it out at me. I can see the label—size six. My size. I take it from her, because I sense she’ll only go get Raphael if I don’t and I do
not
want that.

"How long have you been here?" I ask.

"Five years," she replies. "Five loooong, boring-ass years. Come with me."

She takes me upstairs and down another long, corridor, right to the end again. She opens the door to the room that must be directly over the prom room. Most worryingly, she opens it with a key. "Go on. Inside."

Inside, I go.

"Get washed up. I’ll be back in an hour to do your hair and shit. Don’t go trying to jump from the fuckin’ window or nothin’. Had a girl do that one time and her damn legs exploded." With that very cheerful parting word of warning, Ramona closes the door, locking it behind her.

I am alone.

Despite what I was just told, the first thing I do is dump the hideous dress on the bed, and run to the window, checking to see if it’s open. My jaw nearly hits the floor when I find that it is. Why the hell would they leave the windows open if they were planning on kidnapping people and holding them hostage?

Because you’re in the middle of nowhere,
a small voice in the back of my head reminds me
. And how would you get down, anyway? That’s a big drop. A really big drop.
It could be my eyes playing tricks on me, but I think I can actually see a patch of rust-colored dirt directly under the window. Do people’s legs actually explode when they hit the ground after a fall? I have no idea, but my stomach is balking at the prospect of giving it a shot. There’s no handily placed downpipe to shimmy down like in the movies. Nothing to gain any purchase on at all. Fuck.

I give up the jumping from the window idea, and decide on searching for another means of escape. The room is markedly bare, though. There’s a double bed, freshly made by the looks of things. A dresser against the far wall, though when I open the drawers, they’re all empty. A sink complete with dripping tap stands in the corner—the kind the Victorians used to put in every bedroom back before the introduction of the en-suite bathroom. My heart leaps in my chest when I see the mirror mounted on the wall above it. I could smash it and use one of the shards as a weapon. But I’m not even halfway across the room when I realize the mirror isn’t actually a mirror at all. Instead, it’s a highly polished piece of metal, screwed tightly into the wall. I try to pry the screws out, but I only succeed in making my fingers bleed. The screws don’t budge an inch.

A weak desperation sets in after that. I stalk the perimeter of the room, eyes scanning for something I may have missed. Something, anything, I can use to get the hell out of here. There isn’t anything. Once that really hits home, I curl myself into a ball in the corner of the room and I cry. I cry so hard I make myself sick, my stomach muscles trembling from the second round of purging. I’m rinsing out my mouth, my legs trembling underneath me like two frail stalks of corn, when the door opens and Ramona walks in. She doesn’t seem impressed that I’m not decked out in the yellow dress yet.

"Fuck’s sake," she hisses. I move away from her so that my back’s pressed up against the wall, but she doesn’t seem to care. This whole thing feels a little rote on her part. With quick, rough hands, she takes hold of my soiled T-shirt and forcefully removes it from my body. I’m too stunned to struggle. She unbuttons my jeans next, and drags them down. My legs get a good hard slap when I refuse to lift my feet at first. I relent after the third strike, miserably raising them one at a time so she can bully my dirty, wadded-up jeans free from my body.

She leaves me in my underwear while she fills the sink with water. I’m made to remove those too when she’s done, though—
if you don’t do it, I will.
I cover my breasts with my hands, awkwardly trying to make myself smaller as Ramona uses a clean, white face cloth to scrub at my body. The water’s warm, but it might as well be freezing cold. Every time she touches me, I nearly jump out of my skin. My humiliation is complete when she thrusts the cloth between my legs, forcing my hand out of the way.

"You want to make him unhappy?" she snaps.
Him
being Raphael, no doubt. I do not want to make him unhappy—the bastard is unhinged—but I don’t particularly like the way my lady parts are being prepped for some unknown event, either. Ramona tuts as she plucks with her fingers at my pubic hair. I’m not a particularly hairy person, but she seems revolted by what I’ve got going on downstairs.

"This needs to go," she informs me. "You look like a fucking virgin with that fuzz going on."

I’m hit with a sudden memory—the mystery biker’s words to me as he gripped hold of my wrist.
Tell them you’re a virgin. Whatever happens, make sure Hector knows that.
Even the firm look he gave me as he walked away was reaffirming what he’d said to me. I haven’t even considered what it might mean for my situation right now, but he seemed so insistent. And he hated Raphael; I could see that in his eyes, too. I open my mouth and tell Ramona what he told me to say, choking on the words. "I
am
a virgin."

Ramona rockets to her feet, taking a step back. "What?" She looks like I’ve just slapped her.

I contort my arms around my body again, trying and failing to cover too many parts of myself. "I’m a virgin. I’ve never been with anyone before," I say in a small voice. This is a flagrant lie. I lost my virginity when I was eighteen to the first guy I ever loved, Joshua. We’d been dating for two years through the final years of high school. We’d finally committed ourselves to each other the week before he left for college in Oklahoma. We’d known it was over but we still loved each other. It was a final, gentle moment, one last gift that was shared between us before we said goodbye. Since then I’ve only had one sexual partner, Matt, but we’ve hardly been shy about what we’ve wanted from each other.

Ramona casts a doubtful eye over me. She doesn’t believe me. "How old are you?"

"Twenty-one."

"Ain’t no white college girls virgins at twenty-one," she tells me, as though she’s an authority on the matter.

"My family’s religious.
I’m
religious. No sex before marriage." My cheeks burn like charred ember when I go to church these days—there’s never been a woman so wanton sitting in the pews of St. Augustus Catholic Church. When I’m feeling particularly penitent, I’ll go to confession and take my Hail Marys on the chin, along with the partially visible scandal that marks Father Richmond’s face.

Ramona stares at me some more. I’m probably blushing—I’ve never been manhandled like a piece of meat before. Hopefully the woman’s taking my rosy glow as embarrassment over my confession to
her
. "You never been touched by a boy? Ever?" she asks.

I shake my head.

Ramona tosses the face cloth back into the sink with a wet splash, tutting under her breath. "Put the dress on anyway. I’ll be back in a moment." She leaves me, naked and shivering, wondering if I’ve done the right thing or if I’ve just made things infinitely worse for myself. I have no clean underwear, so I climb into the pale yellow dress without any. The thing is a frou-frou monstrosity, all ruffles and pleats. There’s even a satin bow that ties just under the bust line. I tie it, all the while wondering if the strand of ribbon is long enough to hang myself with if it comes down to it. I wasn’t joking back in the van; I would rather die than be violated by a bunch of strange men.

Twenty minutes pass. I sit on the edge of the bed, counting my heartbeats. It’s strange that the treacherous organ in my ribcage insists on skipping along so steadily, when it seems as though the intensity of my fear should have stopped it dead by now. I hear voices after a while—loud ones—and then the thunder of boot steps out in the corridor. The door rattles as the key is fumbled, inserted, twisted, opened, and then Hector, Raphael and Ramona storm one by one into the room. Raphael’s face is twisted into a rictus of rage. Hector simply looks like he’s being inconvenienced.

"Lie back on the bed," he says.

I lock my ankles together, my arms clamped firmly around my body. "No."

Hector laughs, looking at Raphael. "You always bring the spirited ones back, huh?"

"She’s not a fucking virgin, Hector. No way. She’s lying."

"And why would she do that?" he asks softly. "I’m presuming you didn’t tell her of our business here?"

The creases in Raphael’s face deepen. "No," he admits.

"Then the girl is probably a virgin." He turns back to me, walks over to the bed, and places a hand on top of my head. I cower from his touch, which seems to displease him. He grabs hold of my chin in one hand, lifting my face so I’m looking up at him. "Lie back on the bed, sweet girl, or I’m going to make you. And I don’t want to have to do that, because I don’t want to hurt you, you see. Do as you’re told and I’ll be quick. I promise."

My tears return, blurring out the world. Maybe that’s a good thing. I don’t want to see their faces as I slowly lie back down onto the bed. Hector throws back the skirts of the yellow dress, and I bite back a cry of shame. His hands are cold. They push my legs apart, and then his strong, thick fingers are investigating, parting the folds of my flesh, demanding entry.

I start to sob. I should have thought of this. Centuries ago, they used to confirm a maiden’s virtue before she could be sold off to a husband. And now Hector is going to find out I’ve lied to him, and I’m going to pay the price. I should have just kept my mouth shut. I cry out as Hector’s finger probes deeper inside me. It hurts. The horror of my situation has my whole body clenched tight, locked up and rigid, which makes what Hector is doing to me pinch and burn even more.

I hold my breath, my fingernails cutting into the skin of my palms as I wait for it to be over. For him to call me liar. For more pain to arrive.

"She’s telling the truth," Hector announces.
What?
I can’t…it takes a moment to register what he’s saying. He
believes
me? He withdraws his finger from inside me, and even that stings. Lifting his hand, he takes his index finger and slowly slides it into his mouth. "She’s sweet, too. She has a sweet pussy."

My stomach roils, making dark threats. If I had absolutely anything left inside me, I would throw it up all over the bed.

Hector gives Raphael a conciliatory slap on the shoulder. "You know the rules, my friend. Virgins belong to me. Maybe next time you should fuck them before you bring them home, huh? That way there would be no doubt." Raphael’s lips are pulled back into an ugly sneer.

"Hector, she is
mine
! I—" Hector snaps his right hand out, backhanding Raphael across the cheek. It probably didn’t hurt all that much, but the action silences Raphael in an instant.

"I don’t repeat myself for anybody, Raphi. You know that. Please, remember yourself." Raphael clenches his jaw. He nods once, staring the older man directly in the eye. Hector ignores him; he faces Ramona, maintaining a cool, effortless calm. "Get some pictures taken. Post them immediately. Make sure she gets sent to one of the cartels. I don’t want her opening her mouth about the judge to any of our other clients. Highest bidder wins out. I want her gone within twenty-four hours." He storms out of the room, wafting a sickly sweet cloud behind him as he goes. I close my legs slowly, pushing down the layers of the dress, crying silently.

I’m to be sold. Like a piece of meat, an object, nameless and unimportant, I am going to be
sold.