Twisted Rose: Motorcycle Dark Romance 3 (The Darkness Trilogy) (2 page)

“Want some coffee?” she said.

“Sure.”

She went over to the stove and put two scoops of ground coffee from a can into the pot and poured the boiling water on it.

“Where’s Jac?” she said.

“He’ll be here in a few minutes. He’s just going to see a girl.”

“Girls live here?”

“A few. Not many.”

Rose was surprised any women lived up there at all. The place looked like photos she’d seen of logging camps from the last century. The settlement didn’t have any streets, just muddy tracks that people drove along. The cabins didn’t seem to be set out in any order at all, just sprinkled through the clearing. It was all surrounded by dense forest.

Rose poured two cups of coffee, one for herself and one for Josh.

“Is there any milk?” he said.

She looked around the kitchen for a refrigerator. There was a small one under the counter and she opened it. She took out a glass milk bottle. Josh poured himself some milk and then offered her the bottle.

“No thanks,” she said. “I take it black.”

She felt awkward. She was a little shy. She felt that maybe they both were. She looked at Josh and smiled.

“Thanks for last night,” he said.

She felt her cheeks turn bright red. She took a sip of her coffee. She looked down at the cup.

“Are you alright?” he said.

She nodded her head. She wasn’t looking at him. She was too embarrassed.

“Rose,” he said.

“I’m alright, Josh.”

“I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

“It’s alright, it’s just, I’m being silly.”

There was something about the way he was looking at her that made her feel uncomfortable. She realized she was afraid. She was afraid of what he might be thinking. What if he thought she was silly for being embarrassed? What if she’d given up her right to be embarrassed. Why would someone who’d been a whore and a stripper be embarrassed about having consensual sex with a man she loved? She knew she was projecting. Josh hadn’t said anything to her that implied anything like that, but she couldn’t help it. She was scared and that was what was going through her head.

She had a huge mess of emotions but they all came down to one simple fear: she was afraid she wasn’t good enough for Josh.

III

R
OSE POURED HERSELF SOME MORE
coffee. She knew she should say something. The silence in the room was awkward. Josh was sipping his coffee and trying not to make her uncomfortable.

“This coffee’s delicious,” he said.

She smiled. This was terrible. It was her first morning with Josh. It was finally her chance to be with him, to relax, to spend time with a nice man who’d been good to her, and she was messing it up. She was making it awkward and uncomfortable.

She looked up at him. He was so handsome that it was almost difficult to face him sometimes. She wished he wasn’t quite so charming, quite so good-looking. That would have made this a little easier for her.

What did he see in her, she wondered. As far as she was concerned, she was damaged goods. She’d been with too many men. She’d been rode too hard. What could he see in her? Most girls her age would have only been with a few men in their lives. They’d have had a boyfriend or two, maybe a couple of one-night stands if they were into that. But Rose, she was completely different. When the DRMC had captured her two years ago, she’d never been in a serious relationship. There weren’t many girls in their early twenties who’d never been in love but Rose had been one of them. She’d just never met the right guy. A lot of guys had been interested in her, they’d pursued her, but she hadn’t been ready. She didn’t want to feel rushed. After losing her father at such a young age she knew that she was vulnerable. She was emotionally on shaky ground. And so, she’d passed up all the guys who’d shown an interest in her. She hadn’t been trying to be a
good
girl, she hadn’t been saving herself because of her beliefs, she just hadn’t been ready.

But all that changed very quickly after she was captured. On her first night, she’d been raped by Fat Boy. A few days later Serge had forced Patrice to rape her as a way of proving his commitment to the MC. Being raped by Patrice had hurt her more deeply than anything Fat Boy had done to her. And that was saying a lot because Fat Boy had humiliated and demeaned her in ways she could hardly stand to think about.

But with Patrice it had been different. She’d liked Patrice. She’d been forming a friendship with him. And Serge had seen what was happening and decided to use it against her. She was one of the few girls in the world who’d been forced to experience the difference between being raped by a man she hated and a man she liked. And she could say with absolute certainty, it cut deeper with the man she’d liked.

She sipped her coffee. She’d been letting her mind wander. It was something she knew she had to stop. Josh would think there was something wrong with her. She couldn’t keep going back over old territory, old memories. She had to move forward with her life.

“Josh,” she said.

He looked up at her.

“I want to thank you.”

“You already thanked me, Rose.”

“But I need you to know, I’m really grateful.”

“I only did what any friend of your father would have done.”

“No,” she said, “you did more. You did so much more. You kept that photo of my mother for all those years. No other man would have done that. You kept the memory of my father alive in your heart for all those years. And you came back for me. Ten years had passed, I was a child when you first saw me, and still, you came back for me and you rescued me.”

Josh looked at her shyly. She looked into his eyes but she couldn’t hold his gaze. She looked down at her coffee again. What was wrong with her? Every time she looked at him, looked into those beautiful, caring eyes, all she felt was an overwhelming sense of shame. It was as if the past two years had been tattooed onto her. She felt marked. She’d been innocent when they took her, and now, two years later, she’d been fucked by hundreds of men. She’d literally been a whore, a slave and a plaything for every trucker, logger and miner who pulled in off the highway. So many men had been with her that she couldn’t even remember their faces.

She could go into a bar anywhere in northern Quebec and there might be a man in there she’d fucked. And the worst thing about it was that she wouldn’t even know it. She’d heard how men talked about girls like her. They’d said things to her face that still hurt when she remembered them. She’d been called a cum-bucket, a skank, a whore, a slut.

Why would a guy like Josh want anything to do with her? He seemed interested in her for now, but that would last? Could she count on him? What if he changed his mind? What if he suddenly saw her for the damaged, traumatized slut she was and dumped her? Once he realized just what she’d been through he wouldn’t want to touch her with a pole. How could she even think she had a future with a man like him?

For all she knew she was carrying diseases.

Josh put his hand on her shoulder and she looked up at him. He was painful to look at. All that beauty, all that kindness and compassion and love, and she couldn’t have him. She knew she couldn’t. It would never work out, and if she knew it wasn’t going to work in the longterm, then she wanted to do something about it as soon as possible.

“We need to talk,” she said.

IV

J
OSH LOOKED AT HER QUESTIONINGLY.

“There are things I need to tell you,” Rose said. “Things that aren’t easy for me to talk about.”

“Of course,” Josh said. “Rose, we can talk about anything.”

She took his hand, his strong hand. It reminded her of her father’s hands.

“Follow me,” she said and led him into the bedroom.

She sat on the bed and Josh sat next to her. He put his hand on her lap and she looked down at it. He was so kind, so affectionate. It was going to break her heart to have to tell him the things she was going to say.

“What’s going on?” he said.

She looked into his eyes and tears began to form. She felt them well up in her eyes and then spill down over her cheeks.

“What’s the matter, Rose? Are you alright?”

“Do you know what the DRMC used me for?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know I was a stripper, right? I was their whore.”

“Rose, you don’t have to talk about this. I know what they did to you.”

“Do you know everything?” Rose said. “Have you actually thought about it? About what it all means?”

“Yes,” Josh said.

“No,” Rose said. “You haven’t. You can’t have. If you’d actually thought about everything that I’ve done, everything that they did to me, you wouldn’t want to touch me with a pole.”

“Rose, what are you saying?”

“They
raped
me, Josh.”

“I know they did, Rose. But we can get through it.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “They did really bad things to me, Josh. Things that can never be undone. They didn’t just use me for sex. They wanted to degrade me. They wanted to make sure that I’d never be able to have a future with any man. They
ruined
me.”

“They didn’t
ruin
you, Rose. They could never do that.”

“They did, Josh. I can’t even tell you all the things they did to me. It’s too demeaning. It’s too disgusting.”

“Oh, Rose,” Josh said and took a hold of her.

She let him hold her. She was crying and she could feel that he was fighting back tears of his own. She heard it in his voice. He was emotional.

“I just don’t think I can ever be the kind of girl that you deserve,” she said. “I’m too damaged. Too ruined.”

“Please don’t think that, Rose. Don’t say that.”

“But it’s the truth, Josh. You don’t know the half of what they did to me. You don’t know the horrible details.”

“We’ll get through it all, Rose. Together we’ll get through it.”

She was crying now, openly sobbing. She was touched that he wanted to help her through everything. She knew she needed that. She needed a friend. But she was afraid. She was so scared. She was frightened of losing Josh, but she was also afraid that he might just stay with her out of sympathy and then become disgusted with her when he found out everything that she’d been through.

“Do you know how many men they made me sleep with?”

“Rose, don’t do this. Everything’s going to be alright.”

“Because I don’t. I have no clue. Maybe it was a hundred. Maybe it was a thousand. How the hell would I know the difference? After a few dozen times it all starts to blur.”

“Please, Rose. Calm down. We’ll make it alright.”

“And they didn’t just fuck me, Josh. They didn’t just want to come in my pussy. They came in my mouth, on my face, in my hair, on my body, in my ass.”

“Rose,” Josh said. He just kept saying her name over and over and holding her as tightly as he could.

She was out of control. She’d never before spoken of what had been done to her. She’d never voiced any of the pain that she’d felt. Now that she was here in this safe place it was all just pouring out of her like a dam that had burst.

“And it wasn’t just sex, Josh. It was humiliation too. They fucked me in front of each other. They made me do things on stage in front of an audience. They would form circles around me and all come on me at the same time.”

She was crying. She was hyperventilating. She could hardly catch her breath. But she couldn’t stop talking. Now that she’d started telling him what they’d done, she couldn’t stop.

“They made me piss myself, Josh. Just for fun, just to see what it would be like. They made me lie in my own piss while they raped me.”

“Rose,” Josh said. His voice was soothing but Rose couldn’t calm down. She didn’t care what happened any more. She knew she was in a safe place with a great guy and that she should have been trying to build up a relationship with him, but how could she do that? How could she just forget about everything that had happened to her for the past two years? How could she just move on? The human heart didn’t work like that. Things weren’t that simple. Everything that happened to her left a mark, it left a scar. Those scars couldn’t be erased just be escaping from the DRMC. They would follow her and they would haunt her.

Josh was holding her so tight that she thought he might crush her. She pulled back from him and looked into his face. There were tears in his eyes too. His jaw was clenched. And he was saying something.

“We should have killed them,” he said. “Back at the bar, Serge and the others, we should have slit their throats.”

“No,” Rose said. “If we’d done that the DRMC would have hunted us down for the rest of our lives.”

“They’ll hunt us down anyway, Rose. They won’t let us escape. They’ll be coming after us.”

“But they don’t know where we are.”

“They’ll be searching. And we can’t stay up here forever. This is no place to make a life.”

“It’s not that bad. We could stay here for now,” Rose said.

Now it was Josh who wasn’t listening.

“We left the job unfinished,” he said. “I’m going to have to go back. I’m going to go back and kill those bastards for what they did to you, Rose.”

V

J
OSH SAT THERE AND HELD
Rose and felt his emotions wash over him like great waves. He was so angry he could hardly contain himself. How could he have been so stupid? How could he have let those men live? He hadn’t been thinking straight. Rose was right. He hadn’t thought about what she’d gone through. He hadn’t thought about her and the pain she was feeling. He’d been a fool.

He hadn’t realized the impact that such things had on her. He should have. He knew that. But he hadn’t. He’d thought that if he could just get Rose out of that place, if he could rescue her, that she’d be okay. He thought it would be that simple. Now he saw that the things those beasts had done to her couldn’t be forgotten quite so easily.

As he sat on the bed holding her in his arms a wave of anger washed over him. It wasn’t just anger, but anger mixed with sadness and pity and love. It was as if everything the DRMC had done ten years ago was being done all over again. Josh had thought that he could get back at the DRMC by rescuing Rose. He’d thought that if he could get Rose back, then at least in one small way he’d have shown them that they didn’t control everything, that they hadn’t won completely. He’d wanted to show them that there was still one Sioux Ranger who was willing to fight back.