O Come, All Ye Sinners Read online

  I wanted to help them almost more than I wanted to help myself. They didn’t stand a chance of getting out of this situation without me, but I was no superhero and I’d spent the last twenty years of my life happily centered in myself and my own priorities.

  I felt the weight of uncharacteristic responsibility weigh on my shoulders as I surveyed the room for some kind of escape or source of help.

  We noticed each other at the same time.

  It started with a feeling at the base of my spine, like the tightening before an orgasm or the spasm before a hard shiver rips up your back. I knew instinctively where the source came from, to the left of the booth some distance across the room as if the person was giving off some kind of radar location.

  I wanted to look up and find him, and I knew it was a him because I could feel his gaze in my pussy and his intent pressing on my brain like a brand.

  He wanted me.

  And without even knowing who he was, what he looked like, or if he was a serial killer, I wanted him to.

  I looked up.

  And everything fell away.

  The sting of pain around my wrists from where they’d torn the duct tape away, the fear emanating from the girls beside me thick as gas fumes, and the worry that in a few hours I’d wear semen on my skin just like them.

  And there was only him.

  Not beautiful. No, there was no way a man like him so rugged he seemed carved crudely from rough stone by the hands of some primal human, could ever be called something so poetic. He was a statement of masculinity, a bold declaration of strength. It was stamped in his broad palmed hands and the scowl pressed between his heavy brow. It was chiselled out of his hollowed cheeks and thickly bearded, square cut jaw.

  It was imprinted in his eyes, hot and dark as freshly brewed coffee scorching down my skin as his gaze spilled over me. I could feel myself blister and boil under the heat, the way my flesh peeled away to reveal the ugly, charred marrow of who I was, the bones I was built on.

  And then I was ash, mute and wasted by his scrutiny.

  I couldn’t even put a name to the man, but I knew by the way he’d razed me, that only he could build me back up.

  Maybe even build me better.

  Before I could consciously decide against it, I was standing.

  “Sit the fuck down,” Greg snapped, leaning over to shove me down.

  The man, a biker if his leather jacket and tattooed arms were anything to go by, stood up as I sat down, his scowled brow pulled tighter. There was a threat in his eyes that was a promise, not an insinuation.

  He wanted to rip off the hand that touched me like that.

  So did I.

  I turned my attention to Greg, forcing my features into some semblance of a pretty smile. I was small, delicate like a blown glass figurine on some grandma’s shelf. There was no way Greg wouldn’t underestimate me, no way he could know that I had two knives on my person and a way with martial arts thanks to Fernando’s penchant for Capoeira.

  “I have to pee,” I told him.

  Greg glared at me then looked at his partner as he stalked back over to our table. He was clearly the one who called the shots.

  “Dude’s down to the girls off our hands. He’s got a man sells ’em to whore houses on East Hastings Street down in Vancouver,” he said as he stopped at the table. “Just stepped outside to talk numbers with his guy.”

  “Sick,” Greg nodded, then gestured to me. “Bitch needs to pee.”

  He sighed and waved a hand, “Take ’er. We don’t want the smell of piss ruinin’ a good sale.”

  “What am I gonna do, Harry? Follow her into the john?” Greg demanded. “The guy’ll be back any minute, I should stay for negotiations.”

  “Like you’d even know what to say to the guy,” Harry barked back. “Take the girl and be lucky I even set this shit up and let you in on it.”

  Greg cursed under his breath, but stood up, grabbed me by the arm and yanked me out of the booth. I could feel my mystery man’s eyes on me as I was dragged down the hall into the bathrooms, but I didn’t turn around.

  I hoped he would follow, find some way to get me out of this clearly desperate situation, but I’d never based my actions on anyone else before and it wasn’t the time to start.

  So, I was relieved when Greg ushered me into the separate handicap washroom and locked the door behind us.

  “Do your business and be fuckin’ quick. I don’t wanna miss out on the meetin’,” Greg mumbled, folding his arms over his chest as he faced the door, giving me a modicum of privacy that was slightly ironic given what he was trying to sell me into.

  Still, I took advantage of it.

  There wasn’t much in the way of makeshift weapons, and I didn’t know if I could get close enough to use one of my short, slim knives on him. If I fumbled this opportunity, I wasn’t sure if I was going to get another.

  It had to be now.

  I turned to flush the toilet and saw it.

  The heavy porcelain toilet tank cover.

  “Hurry the fuck up,” Greg rumbled, shifting side to side on his feet.

  My heart throbbed in my throat as I gingerly lifted the weighty cover in my hands. I balanced it against my thigh as I flushed the toilet to cover the sound of my movements, and then I tip toed behind Greg’s big body.

  “’Bout fuckin’ time––” he said as he began to turn towards me.

  I grunted as I hefted the cover into the air with both hands like I was yielding a baseball bat and threw it with all my weight against Greg’s turning head.

  The sound of crunching bone and then his warbled, shocked scream echoed off the tiled walls of the bathroom. I watched him fall to his side on the dirty bathroom floor and brought the toilet lid down again on the same side of his bleeding, crushed face before he could even process what had happened to him.

  I could feel the bones in his cheek give way as the porcelain made contact.

  He was out.

  Not dead––his breath still feathered wetly through his bloody lips––but out cold.

  One guy down.

  One to go.

  I took a deep breath to overcome the fizz of adrenaline popping through my veins like soda pop and pushed out of the bathroom, making a beeline down the hall straight to the bar. There were no thoughts in my overwhelmed brain, instead I was running on instinct, that animal urge in my gut that propelled me to survive at all costs.

  A huge man who looked more than a lumberjack than a bartender stood dead center behind the wood bar cleaning pint glasses, but his eyes were already on me as I approached, his thick brown furrowed as he saw the blood splatter on my pale blue ski jacket.

  “There’s a man on the floor of the handicap washroom. He and another guy probably sitting at a booth in the far corner over my shoulder are trying to sell me and three other women into prostitution,” I said, surprised by the lack of tremble in my voice, it’s matter-of-factness as if I was reciting the weather forecast. “I need you to call the cops.”

  The bartender stared at me for what felt like an eternal moment, then nodded curtly and turned to call down the bar to another employee, “Rita, call the cops. Try to get Danner junior down here insteada senior.”

  “Ignore her.” It was a voice I’d only heard a dozen times in the last two hours yet it was already as familiar to me as my own because it represented my doom. “She’s been tryin’ to get me in trouble since I told ’er I was done with ’er games and dumped ’er ass.”

  His arm slid around my hip as he stepped up to the bar with a winning smile, as if we were a feuding couple and not a cowboy with his condemned cattle.

  The bartender’s eyes snapped between us and then from somewhere beneath the bar the hand previously holding his dish rag slapped onto the counter now holding the thick barrel of a shotgun.

  “Thinkin’ you’d be a dumbass to drop such a fine woman,” he growled in a voice like a bear’s roar.

  I ducked out from under Harry’s arm and shoved him
in the side just as Greg appeared behind him, face a bloody, caved in mess yet somehow still twisted with comprehensible anger. He reached for me but the bartender hopped with one hand over the width of the bar and planted his gun in his chest. He froze.

  Harry didn’t. He lunged at me, his fist poised to land a hammer strike to my cheek and I was caught against the counter and a stool at my back so I had no choice but to take it.

  Then he was there, the mysterious biker man from across the room. He stepped in front of me and caught Harry’s descending fist in his own broad palm before twisting it savagely.

  Harry’s knees buckled as he let out a sharp yelp of pain.

  “Stay down, motherfucker,” he growled, leaning down into his face as he twisted that arm until there was an audible pop even above the music.

  I caught a of glimpse of the female bartender, Rita, on the phone to the cops and relaxed slightly as the fight hit a stalemate before it even broke out.

  I should’ve known better, but I think we’ve established, I’m a slow learner.

  Greg and Harry were there to meet a man, a man who sold women like Walmart salesmen sold vacuum cleaners, as if we were objects to use and put back on the shelf. I should have known he’d have no compunction about getting involved and that when he did, he would do it ruthlessly.

  I didn’t realize any of this, of course, until it was too late and the crash and tinkle of a breaking bottle sounded just behind me.

  A second later, the sharp circular edge of ragged glass pressed against my jugular.

  “Think I’ll take this pretty one off your hands for you boys,” a reedy voice said against my hair as he pulled me closer toward the door. “Y’all stay there real still while I get outta here.”

  There was stillness across the entire bar for one crystal clear moment, even the band suspended mid-note in Bob Seger’s rendition of “Sock It To Santa.”

  Then the mysterious biker man moved and he did it by launching himself at my attacker. I fell into a stool as the two men tumbled to the floor and the whole room burst into chaos.

  People started fighting everywhere, even ones who weren’t involved in our skirmish, but also Eugene and Greg, who were grappling over the shot gun. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the three girls I’d been captured with slink out the front door holding hands, terror warring with hope in their faces.

  I hoped they got away.

  I ducked out of the way as my mystery biker surged to his feet, Harry’s neck in one of his wide hands. He slammed him into the bar and started to pound a fist into his face.

  Harry groaned, but he hadn’t given up.

  I knew this because I watched as his hand dipped behind the bar he was sprawled over to reach for a beer bottle. He shattered it against the bar top and lunged.

  I did too, soaring over the stool to jump on his back as he pushed my mystery man off and slashed that bottle across his heathen handsome face.

  I landed just as the bottle did.

  The roar that ripped through the cacophony of the bar sent shiver down my spine. It was a sound of pure and utter agony.

  I wrapped myself around Harry’s back, pressed the knife dangling from a chain on my neck to his throat and ordered him to stand down just in time to watch the huge, beautiful man who’d tried to save me sway, blood gushing from between his fingers as he held them over his eyes, then crash to the ground.

  A second later, the doors burst open to reveal red and blue lights and a dozen police officer calling for everyone to freeze.

  But I was already frozen, my eyes on a stranger who had stepped in to save me and paid too steep a price for his heroism. A price I should have been willing to pay myself.

  Matt

  I tried to open my eyes.

  When that didn’t work, I thought maybe I was blind.

  And in that small minute, thinking that, I realized everythin’ I was gonna miss lookin’ at.

  The way the road thinned into the horizon and disappeared into the sky as I drove through the bare, long stretches of highway across the prairies. The colour of the leaves as they turn in the fall and the sight’a the stars cast like stolen diamonds across the velvet black sky.

  These were my thoughts, only ever poetic in my head, turned to ash on my tongue ’fore they could be voiced.

  I’d always had a problem translatin’ myself for others, I didn’t need lack of sight to worsen the burden.

  But then somethin’ happened.

  The dull pain in one eye deepened, dug roots deep into the soft tissue of my brain and burst forth like some gnarled tree.

  The other one opened.

  My head swam as I tried to orientate myself, as the room fluxed between flat and three dimensional. Experimentally, I held out one of my gauze wrapped hands and tried to touch it with the other. I missed by inches.

  Fuck.

  I tried to take stock of the rest of my body, noted the soreness in my knuckles, the awful weight of my head and then a deep, numb pressure on my legs.

  Dear fuckin’ God, please tell me I wasn’t half-blind and paraplegic.

  I held my breath as I carefully tipped my painful head off the pillow to look down at my feet.

  A girl lay there, curled up like a dark kitten at the base of the small hospital bed, her face obscured by inky strands of her short, silky hair.

  The girl from Eugene’s.

  I felt her phantom hands in my chest lookin’ at her on my bed the same way I had when I’d first spotted her across the crowded dive bar, as if her little fingers were clutched around the pumping muscle, manipulatin’ its beat.

  It was romantic probably, but it was also disconcerting as fuck.

  Because how could you feel a stranger stake claim to you before you even knew her name, her scent or the sound of her mouth formin’ words?

  All it took was the sight’a her.

  And she wasn’t a bombshell, not a blond stacked queen of a woman or some exotic girl swept in from hotter, foreign lands.

  She was just a girl. Young, slight, and exquisitely, delicately made like some fine China doll complete with the porcelain skin, red bowed mouth and huge dark eyes that swallowed me up even from distance.

  I didn’t have a type, but if I did, I wouldn’ta said it was her.

  But even lookin’ at her curled up at my feet, her sweet face soft in sleep, her hand curled into the blanket over my left thigh, I knew she was it.

  Not my type, more than that.

  My girl.

  I hadn’t had a girl, a friend, or a family in five years. Not since I’d stolen my dad’s ancient Harley and rode out of small-town Newfoundland never to look back. Fuck, even before that my family hardly counted as one.

  Until that moment, I hadn’t thought I’d cared much about the loneliness. I was a nomad in the purest sense’a the word. Everything I owned fit in my saddlebags on the back of my bike and when I left a place, there were few who’d remember my name for long.

  I liked it like that.

  But I wanted this waifish little thing to know my name. To learn it, memorize it and tattoo it on her soul for her to keep for all’a eternity.

  Yeah, I’d tried to save her from the fuckwads trying to abduct her. But she’d tried to save me too.

  The sight of her jumping onto my attackers back a split second after he lashed out with that broken beer bottle to slash across my face was the last sight I would ever see through both eyes.

  It was a good one.

  One I knew I’d cherish the way some poor children cherished a second-hand toy on Christmas morning. It was strange and a little sad, but I thought that made it even more poignant.

  I had to be more than twice this woman’s weight, and she’d tried to save me.

  “Yo.”

  I looked to the door too quickly and hissed as pain exploded through my skull. When I opened my eyes again after bracing for the pain, I saw two huge bikers in the doorway.

  One was seriously giant. Taller than my six-foot-two height by c
onsiderable inches, his shoulders so wide they nearly didn’t fit through the doorway. There was somethin’ more than just his hugeness that drew my eye and made me straighten in the bed as much as I could, somethin’ powerful that spoke of ferocity and leadership.

  I could tell by the way the other guy, tattooed from neck to fingertips in blue inked art, stood behind and to the right’a him, that the aura of leadership was founded in reality.

  “Help ya with somethin’?” I asked, one hand automatically going down to the back of the girl’s head.

  I didn’t know who these fuckers were and it was obvious the girl was tied up with some bad people. I wasn’t in the best place to defend her, but fuck me if I wouldn’t try.

  “Easy, man,” the big guy said with a wide, creased smile as he strolled into the room and moved an ugly orange plastic chair to the side of my bed. “Just wanna talk to you ’bout what went down at Eugene’s.”

  I watched the other guy moved to stand behind him and narrowed my eyes as I noticed the way he moved, lethal and smooth like a wild cat stalking his prey. It wouldn’t be a good idea to underestimate that fucker just ’cause he was leaner, slightly shorter than the other.

  “You cops?” I asked, sarcasm in my voice and the raise of my brow.

  They both laughed.

  “Nah, man, and lucky for ya too. Cops ’round ’ere don’t do much,” he leaned forward in the chair with his forearms braced on his thighs. “We do.”

  I hated that he was seated on my left side so I had to tip my head painfully to keep him in my sights and even then, my vision was still wonky, lopsided like it had a limp.

  “Club?” I asked, tilting my chin at their cuts, black leather jackets like mine only theirs had distinguishing patches on them.

  The guy sittin’ beside me wore one that said “Prez.”

  He grinned. “The Fallen MC, at your fuckin’ service. I’m Zeus Garro, my brother here is Bat Stevens.”

  “Matt Broderick,” I muttered. “Not sure how much help I’m gonna be. I jumped in when those fuckers tried to attack the girl. Don’t know the why of it all or even the who.”

  “Yeah well, the police only got the two guys traffickin’ the girls. The other guy, the one they were meetin’ with got away.”