Chapter 15: The Cage

Nash Garrison had told himself he was only going to look.

He rode up the mountain road with his helmet on the seat behind him and her stitches itching over his left eye.

Mara had put those stitches in at three in the morning, with her fingers on his face and her breath on his cheek.

He had thought about that touch every hour since, and about the other thing too.

Six years of her in a bedroom with a lock on the outside.

He could not sit in a clinic and breathe that in.

So he rode toward the clubhouse alone, as he had three times before.

Each time he had turned back.

This time he did not turn back.

Four miles past the pass, a log lay across the road.

He braked hard and the back tire slid.

Six riders came out of the pines with bats and a chain.

He got his knife out and put it into one man's thigh before the first bat caught him across the ribs.

The second blow dropped him.

After that he mostly remembered boots, and the taste of dirt, and his own voice saying her name through broken teeth.

He woke in the cage.

It was the old steel dog run behind the clubhouse garage, where the club kept men who owed money.

Nash had stood outside it as a boy and watched his father wrestle a drunk into it.

Now it smelled of bleach and old blood, and his hands were zip-tied to the bars.

His left eye had swollen shut over her stitches, and one of the stitches had torn.

That made him angrier than anything else.

"Don't pull at it," a voice said.

The road captain stood on the other side of the wire.

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