Twisted Steel: An MC Anthology: Second Edition by Elizabeth Knox (top 5 ebook reader txt) 📕

haul a body, dead or alive. This one was still kicking . . . for now. They took him to a secret room in the basement back at the clubhouse, one rarely used but stained from when it was.

A floor drain and bleach helped, but you couldn’t wait to clean up and expect to get it spotless.

The jackal’s eyes bugged to see the chair with restraints that they slapped him in.

Stone studied him for a long, suspenseful moment. He nodded at Mayhem, who loved his knife nearly as much as his bike.

Mayhem drew his blade from its sheath and waved it in the air, making the sign of the cross before a sinner in need of confession.

“Talk,” Stone ordered. “What do you know about that purple car sitting in a ditch two miles from here? Who has her and where did they take her?”

The jackal looked ready to piss himself. Sweat beaded his forehead. His eyes danced a mad fandango, searching for a plausible lie. “I don’t know nothin’!” he insisted. “I’ve been at The Snake Pit all morning.”

Stone cast a look over his shoulder. “That true?”

Eagle Eye punched up something on his phone. It took a minute before he had the answer. “Nope.”

Turning the screen, Quake saw that he’d tapped into the security camera feed for the bar. The footage showed this son of a bitch and his buddies laughing and patting each other on the back as they went inside.

The timestamp placed it thirty minutes after Magenta had dropped him off.

Mayhem cut off the tip of his nose for lying.

The jackal screamed. He screamed again when Chaos cauterized it.

They were only beginning.

The trouble was, this jackal was more afraid of his President Atilla than of them.

“Bullshit,” Quake ground out. “The Death’s Head ran Magenta down, shot out her tire, and took her. Her goddamn car’s still sitting in the ditch. Maybe you should see how it feels.”

Getting a nod of approval from Stone, he dragged the jackal out back to a drainage ditch on the property behind the clubhouse. Passing him to Ryder, who’d love nothing more than an excuse to use his axe on him, Quake went to the shed and returned with barbed wire and a shovel. With the lightning speed of their kind, he dug a hole nearly six feet deep in the lowest part of the ditch, wrapped their prisoner in barbed wire, dropped him into it, and buried him to the neck with only his head sticking out.

By this time, the jackal was squealing like a stuck pig.

“You ready to talk yet? No? Okay, then. You’re not gonna like what happens next.”

His brothers snickered, curious to see what he planned.

Motioning Wraith to come with him, Quake got a two-hundred-foot water hose, set one end in the ditch, and hooked the other end to a hydrant. Leaving Wraith to open it, he returned to where he’d buried the jackal.

“One last chance,” he warned.

The jackal only sobbed with pain.

Quake motioned for Wraith to open the tap. The jackal had no idea what was happening until the first trickle of water hit him on the back of his neck.

“What the fuck?” he screamed, tears streaming from his eyes.

Quake hummed. “You’ve got maybe half an hour before the water covers your mouth. An hour tops until it covers your nose. Of course, you’ll need to talk before that . . . while you still can . . .”

“Please!” he begged. While shifters had accelerated healing, most of them could be killed by ordinary things. Bullets striking vital organs, knives severing arteries and making them bleed out, poison, smothering . . .

Drowning.

More afraid of what was coming than the wrath of Atilla, he started singing like a canary, telling how they’d recognized Magenta’s car and followed her. He claimed Phantom called for a cage and an extra man, shot her tire, and dragged her from her bug. He loaded her into the cage and took off with her. To where, he didn’t know. One of their prospects had ridden Phantom’s bike back to the Death’s Head clubhouse.

“What kind of van?” Quake demanded. They needed to know what they were looking for.

The jackal gave them the make, model, and color of the cage. He was no help with the license plate but the passenger van was registered to their club. Eagle Eye could pull the plates from the state’s database.

Quake fisted his hair and growled in his ear. “Which way were they headed? You sure the fuck saw that much at least.”

“N-n-north!” he grated, panicked to feel the water lapping his chin.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes!”

“And that’s all you know?”

“I swear!” he bawled.

“Final answer?”

“Yes!”

Quake stood and brushed the imaginary cooties off his hands.

Stone arched a brow. “What do you plan to do with him?”

Quake smiled cruelly. “Exactly what they did to her car. Leave him in a ditch.”

The jackal’s dying howl still echoed in his ears when four of them got on their bikes and rode north.

8

Khan could hold his liquor. Six beers weren’t enough to slur his speech or dim the look of lust in his dark eyes.

He dragged Rory by the hair to his room and threw her onto a rumpled king-sized iron bed, the kind with a headboard built for kink.

She tried to crawl away but he caught her hips and dragged her back. Wrapping her waist-length hair around his palm, he held her in place with one hand and unbuckled his belt with the other. Spitting on his dick, he poked her seam until he found her opening and muscled his way inside.

Rory grunted from the force of it. He wasn’t Quake’s size but he was big enough when he was set on claiming her like the spoils of war.

Closing her eyes, she clenched her jaw and pretended he was just another john. A filthy-talking asshole who’d paid for her time and intended to get the biggest bang for his buck.

Rory slipped into Magenta mode, donning the persona that helped shield her from what was happening. Her