Shattered & Scarred: The Sacred Hearts MC Read Free Page B

escape from that man but now… right now… with this tiny taste of freedom… I wanted to live. A tiny flicker of hope flared to life inside my chest.
    I helped myself to standing using the edge of the sink and tried to formulate a plan as I stared into the cracked mirror above it. He’d hit my face. He was always so careful to avoid the face before but his control of his temper had been slipping more and more as of late. I stared into spider webbed silvered glass I realized just how far he and I had come. I was no longer a wife to him, I hadn’t been in a very long time. I was simply his piece of property, his plaything to do with what he willed. I didn’t know what was worse, the fact that I had come to this conclusion or the fact that I wasn’t even startled by it.
    I stared at the split in my lips, the spiral pattern of bruises emanating from it, taking up the majority of my chin, travelling along the curve of my jaw and up my cheek. I tongued the teeth in the back where the blow had landed and winced. Some were loose but thankfully none were missing. I sighed. It hurt being up and about but the pain really was there to let me know I was alive so in a weird way I was almost grateful for it. I let my eyes rove my damaged face and decided that I couldn’t go back. I needed to find a way out somehow. A way to disappear.
    I left the tiny bathroom and shuffled back out into the hall, moving wraith like through the sprawling building until I found myself out front, where we’d come in at. There were other people here, behind those closed doors in the back. I could hear the odd cough or grunt, the slap of flesh hitting flesh in the rhythm of sex and the cry of a woman at the height of her climax, but none of these things held answers as to where I was.
    This room did.
    A grotesquely fascinating mural on one cinderblock wall proclaimed this to be the lair of the Sacred Hearts MC. All of the bikes lined up outside the picture window set in the front of the building told me what the MC stood for. The mural depicted a red bleeding human heart veined in blue, wrapped in silver barbed wire. The valves of the heart morphed into tailpipes that spewed fire which hovered above the heart’s image, I took it in and swallowed hard, grimacing, wondering briefly if I may have gone from bad to worse.
    I went behind the bar and found a glass and a tap and poured myself a glass of water, drinking greedily. I looked around the wrecked facility, empty glasses, bottles, cans… and let out a slow breath. I needed to do something. I needed to feel useful and so I cleaned. All the while thinking furiously, wondering how I would convince my savior on his iron horse, to let me stay.
    He found me some time later in the building’s kitchen, fixing breakfast for the masses. Doc, the man who’d come to my aid, and a few others that I didn’t know were lined up at the bar drinking black coffee out of chipped mugs bearing the eerie logo on the back wall. I hadn’t found my voice to speak to any of them, but rather did what would have been expected of me at home, passing out coffee and food silently while doing my best to remain a ghost.
    “You see Ash…” my name died on his lips as his gaze traveled through the kitchen door and landed on me, standing at the industrial cooktop, spatula in my hand. He raked a hand through his shoulder length blonde hair and leveled me with his silvery eyes.
    “What are you doing?” he asked.
    “I cleaned and now I’m cooking breakfast. I didn’t know what else I should do.” My voice was low and quiet, what Chadwick would expect of me in the morning. I closed my eyes and turned back to the frying bacon.
    My savior turned around, surveying the club house and his friends who all looked at him with raised eyebrows. I tried to remember his name, but couldn’t. I wanted to say it was something simple, like John or… the bacon popped and sizzled and I jerked my hand out of danger.
    “You did all this?” he