His Favorite Color is Blood - Coffin Nails MC (gay biker dark romance) (Sex & Mayhem Book 8) (16 page)

Once he could feel his fingertips
tingle, the van was right next to him, and in a jump worthy of a panther, he
leaped forward and grabbed onto the car door. As soon as his feet were steady
on the ledge, he grabbed the bewildered Bob by the throat, staring right at
him. Both his elbows were now pressing on the driver’s door from the inside,
one hand pointing a gun at Bob, the other digging into his Adam’s apple.

There was a panicked hesitation
in the man’s eyes, and in them Grim could already see the reflection of the
trees coming closer. “I’m gonna shoot you sooner than you squash me,” he
growled, poking the barrel against Bob’s sweaty temple. Every time the van
shook over the uneven road, Grim’s hold on the van became less stable. He
needed to get off fast. “Slow down. Gently, and I might not kill you.”

A lie for a lie.

Bob gasped, and only now, Grim
noticed that one finger was missing on his bloodied hand. “I was just the
driver,” he whined, and at that moment, Grim knew he’d won. Bob slowed down,
his face sweaty, his teeth clattering.

“The handbrake,” said Grim dryly,
and the moment Bob did as he was told, Grim smashed the gun against the
bastard’s head, knocking him out.

Ten minutes later, Grim had Bob
handcuffed in the back of the van and was heading back to the house, where
Misha sat at a healthy distance from the handcuffed man, and despite the
visible trembling in his limbs, he stayed put, guarding the bloodied prisoner.

Grim slid out of the cab,
positive that Bob wouldn’t be able to run this time, and rushed toward Misha,
his bloodlust suddenly replaced by a tender sensation that made him want to
drag Misha into his arms and rock him until he calmed down. “You okay?”

Misha swallowed. “I-I wanted to
hide. Leave for somewhere safe and secluded, and away from this kind of shit.”
He almost choked on a huge gulp of air. “But if he got free, you could have
been in danger …”

Grim stood still, watching Misha
from above, and only then, the exhaustion of the fight slowly settled in his
muscles, and he knelt in front of Misha. “Thank you. You didn’t have to do
that.”

Misha put the gun down next to
him and stumbled forward to hug Grim tightly. “You’re bleeding,” he whispered
and gave Grim a kiss on the cheek.

Grim frowned and looked down,
even as he held on to Misha, so relieved to have this warm body in his arms
again. There was a small flesh wound on Grim’s side, but it didn’t look
serious, so he cuddled up to Misha, letting his eyes shut for a moment as he
memorized Misha’s shape.

“I’m fine. Are you?”

Misha nodded, but there was no
joy on his face. No victorious grin. “I told you they would find me. I will
never be safe.”

His words re-opened a hole in
Grim’s chest, but he nodded. “I will need to find out how they tracked us down.
You better go inside.”

“Why?”

Grim took in a deep breath and
played with a strand of hair, one of many that escaped Misha’s bun during the
fight. “It won’t be pleasant to look at, birdie.”

Misha raised his eyes at Grim and
squeezed his dirty fingers. “If they work for the people who held me, trust me,
they deserve whatever you serve them. I want to see it.” There was a depth of
darkness in the brown eyes with shadows Grim couldn’t fully understand. Nothing
left of the happy boy who had been sucking on a popsicle half an hour ago.

Grim nodded and looked at Black,
who still seemed unconscious in the open back of the van. Grim might be done
with the hunting, but he still had feeding time to anticipate.

Chapter 13 – Misha

The skinning knife was like an
insect crawling underneath Black’s skin. The man choked, twisted, and screamed
so loudly Misha’s ears started aching, but hanging head down off a meat hook in
the shed, with his hands tied to a large stone that kept him less mobile, he
had no way of escaping the torture as Grim slowly separated his hide from
flesh. The scent of fresh blood was overwhelming Misha’s senses as Grim worked,
repeating his questions again and again. Black had fainted several times
already, but he wouldn’t be spared the torture. A bit of icy water was enough
to bring him back to Grim’s strong, bloodied hands and the hunting knives the
owner of the cabin kept here.

Bob was hanging close by,
untouched yet, but there was an angry bruise spreading across his forehead, and
the gunshot wound he’d received during the shootout with Grim was like a gaping
hole in his flesh. It twitched as he sobbed, spilling tears that rolled down
his temples and onto the floor.

Watching the torture was … a
strange experience. Nothing like the many horrors Misha had seen in the
compound where he was kept. Thinking back to the many innocent prisoners
mutilated, killed, and raped, he couldn’t help but think that the man’s
suffering was just. That Grim was a hand of justice itself, bringing the
torment back to the people who wanted to cause it. After all, what would have
Misha’s fate have been if they’d abducted him? If Zero got him back, would he
cut off Misha’s fingers? Arms? Would he skin him as well? Blind him? Keep him
in a cell until he starved or went mad?

Misha had no compassion in his
heart for men who worked for a monster like Zero. He imagined the many faces of
his rapists instead of Black’s, and that made watching him squirm and cry all
the better. Misha bit down on his lip and squeezed his fists, cooped up in a
dark corner of the hunting shed, safe behind Grim’s broad back.

“You won’t cooperate, will you?”
asked Grim, slapping Black’s face with his bloodied hand.

The wood beneath their feet
absorbed all the excess blood quickly, soaking it all in, as it did all the
times when hunters had skinned and gutted their catch here. Misha felt safe in
his spot with a rolled-up blanket underneath him, and he couldn’t help but
stare at the red sheen on Grim’s back. He had been wiping off the blood on his
own body, smearing it onto his skin and leaving abstract traces every time he
touched himself. He was steady and calm, as if separating a man’s skin from his
muscle was nothing to him, as if the cries for help didn’t bother him one bit.
And yet, knowing Grim was doing this for Misha tickled Misha’s pride.

Black coughed and shook his head
violently. Misha knew why. Black would be dead if he told them anything. He
would die in the gruesomest way imaginable or worse yet, become goods, have his
family kidnapped and tortured. If the man had balls, he would not speak.

Grim relaxed and then grabbed
Black’s shriveled dick and pulled on it while his hand tightened around the
handle of a serrated blade.

“Kill me …” Black rasped with
some bloody spittle dripping down his lips.

Bob started sobbing violently. “I
didn’t know anything, I swear!”

Misha looked to Bob’s bruised,
naked body, thinking back to when he’d been this vulnerable, available to be
violated by anyone who had the money and connections to come and see him. “You
accepted the job to kidnap an amputee,” he whispered.

Grim looked back with a small
smile, and then, with a few precise pulls, separated Black’s genitals from the
rest of his body and tossed them into the small metal tub, which he soon pulled
closer to sit underneath the bleeding man.

Bob tried to pull away, but he
had to know there was no way he could do that, and he swayed a bit in the air.
“Oh no, God, no,” he uttered hysterically, screaming loud enough to drown out
Black’s whimpers. “What kind of monster are you? This is insane!”

Grim touched the streaks of blood
running down Black’s twitching chest from the raw flesh where his cock and
balls had been. “I’m this boy’s guardian. You came here thinking the three of
you were predators out for prey. That’s what you get for not knowing your place
in the food chain.”

Misha’s insides felt a little
warmer when he heard Grim being so protective of him. He’d never had a real
guardian. Always on his own. As a little boy, with alcoholics for parents, he had
never known safety. But now he was getting to taste it for the first time.

Grim turning the knife to Bob was
enough to have him start talking again, though the man was barely intelligible
through his violent sobs. “I will talk, I will! Ask, and I will answer!”

“How did you find us?” asked Grim
calmly and pushed Black’s body into a gentle sway over the tub.

“A chip. There’s a chip in his
stump. We could only catch the signal every now and then, so it took a while.” He
spoke so fast it took Misha a few seconds to comprehend what he was saying.

Misha screamed out and looked
down to his stumps in terror. “Where? Where? He’s tracking me! He’s been
tracking me all along! No, no, no.” His fingertips roamed over the many scars
as his breath became erratic, and soon it was his fingernails scratching at the
stump. “Take it out! Take it out!”

Grim moved closer, and he quickly
grabbed Misha with bloodied hands. “Don’t. Please, stop.”

“He could be tracking me now!
Like I’m some fucking lost lamb.” Misha tried to pull his hands back to the
stumps, but Grim’s steady grip wouldn’t let him.

“Calm down. He thinks those
fuckups are dealing with it. We have several hours to spare. It will be fine,”
said Grim, leaning down so he could look into Misha’s eyes. It was awfully
quiet all of a sudden, and when Misha briefly looked back toward the meat
hooks, he saw blood dripping from gashes across Black and Bob’s throats.

“Please, I need it out. He left
something in me. I’m going to puke. It’s like Satan’s seed, and it’s in me, so
he knows where I am.”

Grim squeezed his hands tighter,
staining them with the blood of their attackers. “We will take it out. There’s
no chapter here, but in Charleston, they have a doctor on call.”

“No, no! I can’t have it in me—”
Misha’s windpipe clenched so tightly he couldn’t breathe anymore. He felt as if
there was a tumor growing into his bone, ready to choke the life out of him
when it was least expected.

Grim’s jaw muscles twitched. “You
can’t just scratch it out. It’s dangerous.”

Misha managed to gulp half a
breath. “Then cut it out. You have the knives. Just cut it!”

Grim shook his head and pulled
Misha into his arms. “We don’t know where it is. I can’t do that. We will go to
a doctor, and he will take care of it.

“Even a doctor could be his spy!
You don’t know!” He punched Grim’s shoulder and tried to pull away.

Grim looked into Misha’s eyes and
squeezed his arms. “That’s why we’ll go to someone I can vouch for. It will be
fine. I will bury them, get rid of the van, and we will go.”

Misha sobbed as if he were the seventeen-year-old
weakling again, unable to fight for his life. He hadn’t known about the chip,
yet now he could almost sense it throbbing under his skin like a live cockroach
feeding on his fear.

He nodded, completely frantic on
the inside. Maybe he could distract Grim and get to the knives? Slice the legs
open and find the fucking thing? His fear of Zero was much bigger than his fear
of blades.

Grim exhaled and rubbed his
forehead, deflated. “Fucking hell. Those motherfuckers made such a mess,” he
said and started quickly stripping down.

Misha’s nose was plugged, so he
kept taking big open-mouthed breaths, eyeing the knives and waiting for the
right moment.

Grim tossed his clothes to the
floor and picked up a sheet of thick plastic, which he put close to the tub.
With a bit of shuffling about, he dropped Black’s dead body on the sheet and
gathered it around him.

Misha crawled closer, and when
Grim was busy with Bob’s body, he snatched one of the daggers. Even now, with
his goal so certain, he could hardly stand holding something this sharp,
instantly thinking of how it could slice into his flesh and scratch against
bone. He turned his back on Grim and put the blade against his skin, begging
unnamed gods for the courage to go through with the cut.

“Misha?”

The question came like from
behind a glass wall, muted, dull, the only object in focus being the one in his
hand. He pushed the knife down, hoping that the chip would be in this stump,
not the other. The first pang of pain made him hiss, but before he could do
anything else, a big, strong hand clenched on his wrist so hard, he dropped the
knife with a yelp.

Grim fell on Misha with a growl
that didn’t belong in a human’s throat. The red streaks on his face and chest
made him look even more like a wild beast as he pushed Misha against the wooden
floor. “What the fuck are you doing, huh? I told you we’re gonna see a doctor!”

“It will be too late!” Misha
yelled back. “If he comes for me, I’d rather kill myself!”

Grim’s handsome face twisted in
anger. “Who? Who are you so afraid of?”

Misha slumped to the floor, the
panic too much for his body to bear. “The man who took my legs. He cut them off
with a hacksaw. And if he gets to me, he will cut me again. I can’t go through
that, I can’t!”

Grim’s hands clenched on Misha’s
even harder, and his eyes burned. “He did what? He ... cut them off? What?”

Tears pooled in Misha’s eyes
until they spilled, and he wanted to laugh. Just when he thought he didn’t have
many tears left in him, it seemed they were just locked in with his emotions,
which now flooded out in gallons.

“I was healthy, and fit, and I
had things going for me. And he took everything. He cut my legs and filmed it
so other cruel freaks like him could watch. He intended to kill me, but I
survived. Now that I think about it though, he did kill me. He murdered
everything I was.” Misha let his stumps curl closer to his thighs and looked up
at Grim, wondering if he could possibly understand what Misha was saying.

Grim was still and his eyes drilled
holes in Misha’s neck as he took deep, heavy breaths. “Who is he?” he whispered
in the end, finally looking into Misha’s face with a rage burning behind the
calm grey of his eyes. It was so cruel, Misha longed to see it unleashed on
everyone who ever hurt him.

“He goes by ‘Zero’,” Misha
whispered, slightly calmed down by Grim’s intense stare. “He runs the organization
who owned the base the Coffin Nails raided. He makes videos of torture.
Distributes them on the dark web. He doesn’t know what mercy is. He’s sick in
the head, and he ruined my life.”

Grim squeezed Misha’s hands,
watching him fiercely. “And when I find him, what do you want me to do to him?”
he asked quietly.

“I don’t want you to find him.
He’s dangerous. He would hurt you. He destroys people.”

“He won’t see me coming. No one
does,” said Grim, gently stroking Misha’s cheek with his fingers, which were
sticky with blood.

“I want him to suffer. And then
burn, until there’s nothing left of him.” Strangely enough, even though Misha
doubted there was a chance for this to happen, saying it out loud made him feel
better.

A shudder went through Grim, and
he nodded, glancing into Misha’s eyes with a warmth that could melt the ice of
fear around Misha’s heart. “He deserves what’s coming. He broke you, and he
needs to pay.”

Misha let out a deep breath, and
stroked Grim’s shoulder. “Thank you.”

Grim pushed his forehead against
Misha’s and pulled him deep into the protection of his arms. “You’re mine now.
All mine.”

And despite their relationship
being something out of a nightmare, Misha couldn’t help but nod, hugging Grim
tightly. “I am.”

Grim pressed a soft kiss to
Misha’s temple. “You need to pack our things so that we can go quick, you
understand?”

“Yes. I’m sorry I’m a mess. I’ll
try harder.” Misha stroked Grim’s nape, and he didn’t even know when his
breathing became even again.

Grim molded his face to Misha’s,
brushing his hand over Misha’s back. “I need to trust you, okay? Don’t hurt
yourself. I’ve got it.”

Misha sighed but nodded in the
end. “I trust you.” And the weight of the words was like a heavy blanket over
his shoulders. They mattered, he meant them, and he wouldn’t let Grim down.