Chapter 1
Callie
5 years ago…
I shouldn’t have been at the party. It had been a bad idea from the very beginning, and that was before my ride had vanished into the upstairs of the house to have a drunken one-night-stand with a guy who had more acne than facial hair. It wasn’t my scene. I’d prided myself on being the wild child of my high school, but nothing had prepared me for that part of town. I didn’t know the names of the drugs that were spread across the coffee table, and I didn’t want to know—I didn’t even want to be near them.
I had decided to flip my parents the bird by going out with a friend that I knew they thought very little of. They’d grounded me the night before for breaking curfew by a measly ten minutes, but then they did me the favor of going out to dinner with my dad’s boss, leaving me all alone and full of teenage spite. I called Mallory to pick me up, and within fifteen minutes of their departure, I was on my way to Chula Vista with a girl who smoked pot while she drove and carried a flask around with her at school.
When we arrived, I stuck close to Mal, practically holding her hand as we walked through the house full of people who were both older and harder than anyone I’d partied with before. High school house parties, where we’d stolen our parents’ liquor and spent the night with kids we’d known since grade school, hadn’t prepared me for what we walked into. Mal seemed to blend into the crowd. She laughed at jokes I didn’t understand, and nonchalantly nodded her head to the music blaring through the speakers, while I stuck out like a nun at a Rob Zombie concert.
I’d dressed to impress, pairing low-waist jean shorts with a skimpy tank top that showed a sliver of my belly. I felt almost reckless when I left the house, as if I’d turned into a sluttier version of myself as a final f*ck you to my overly strict parents. But when we got to the party, my version of slutty was a joke compared to what the other women were wearing. And they were women—older than us by at least a couple of years in age and hundreds of years in experience. It was mortifying, like we were playing at being grown-ups.
I was hell-bent on proving a point to my parents; I could do what I wanted. I wasn’t going to be treated like a child when I was practically an adult. So, even though all of my internal warning systems were screaming, I accepted a cup of some sort of alcohol from a man I’d never met. Then I smiled how I’d practiced—with my mouth closed tightly over my teeth and my left cheek showing off a dimple.
The house was full of people dancing, drinking, and yelling over rock music that I’d never heard before. It’s not that I didn’t listen to rock, I listened to everything really, but this was angrier than I preferred. I couldn’t even understand the words—where was the fun in that type of music? I was sitting in the corner, on an ottoman that had been pushed aside to clear the floor, and trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. I wasn’t feeling rebellious anymore. I wasn’t angry at my parents and I was no longer trying to prove a point.
I just wanted to go home.
Whatever I’d drunk when I first arrived was making me feel really sick to my stomach, but I was too afraid to go to the bathroom. I didn’t want to stand up and be noticed. These guys were not the kind I was used to; the ones I could wrap around my finger with a flip of my hair and a wide smile. They were big, and tattooed, and they passed around the women as if they were Fireball whiskey and they needed a shot. I’d seen one woman leave the room four separate times with different men, and each time she returned looking dazed, unkempt, and strangely satisfied. I knew what she was doing, but having it play out in front of me made my face heat in embarrassment. I was so out of my element it wasn’t even funny.
I just wanted to get the hell out of there, but unless I wanted to call my parents for a ride home, I was stuck.
I was sixteen. I would have rather run home barefoot through broken glass than called my parents to have them pick me up from a party. It was bad enough that I’d gotten braces during my junior year of high school, pretty much ensuring that I wouldn’t smile with my mouth open for the entire year—I didn’t need my mommy picking me up from a party, too. There was no way in hell that my mother would just quietly pull up to the end of the driveway. Even with my dad trying to calm her down, she’d be at the front door yelling and chastising in Spanish, making me look like a twelve-year-old.
So, I sat in that corner for over an hour as my stomach grew worse, until finally, I thought I would pass out or vomit all over the carpet. The thought of puking in front of all the people around me was enough to push all my fears aside. I had to find a bathroom. As I stood up, the world began to spin, and I leaned my hand against the wall to get my balance. Shouldn’t that drink have worn off? It had been hours since I’d had anything. It shouldn’t have been getting worse, but it was. I’d only felt that way once before—my parents had been out of town and I’d raided their liquor cabinet with my baby brother. God, I wished I were home with him. He would’ve seen the problem and gotten me to a bathroom. Hell, he would have put me to bed by then.
I took a couple steps away from the wall, and that’s when I grabbed the attention of the room. I felt eyes on me as I made my way across the floor, shuffling my feet across the carpet. My legs felt heavy and unsteady as I reached the entryway to the house. My head was spinning as I tried to decide if I should make my way out the front door that was so close, or to the bathroom at the end of the hallway. I turned slowly toward the front door, thinking that would be my safest bet. I only took a couple of slow steps before there was a guy behind me, both hands holding me steady and making my skin crawl as his fingers pressed into my belly through my tank top.
“Where you going? The party’s in here, sweetheart,” he told me, pulling my body toward the living room again.
I couldn’t seem to get my legs to stay put, and the heels of my Vans squeaked on the wood floor as he pulled me back. My fingernails were digging into his forearms, but doing little damage as I stuttered and squeaked, trying to get him to let me go.
“I need—I’m going to be sick,” I groaned desperately, cringing as he started chuckling.
I wasn’t sure what was happening, but I knew I didn’t want the man touching me. His free hand was roaming all over my thighs and breasts, and my heartbeat roared in my ears when I realized he really wasn’t going to let me go. My struggles seemed to make him bolder and I whimpered as his hand started to slide up my shorts.
I was looking longingly at the front door, my heart in my throat and praying for deliverance, when all of a sudden it came. But not in the manner I would have ever envisioned.
The door burst open quickly, and the man behind me paused at the entrance of the living room, giving me a glimpse of the men stomping into the house. They were huge, all of them, and they were covered in tattoos and matching black leather vests. They didn’t seem happy.
There was a clear hierarchy in the group that even I could catch in my fuzzy state, and the leader was one of the most gorgeous guys I’d ever seen. He had to be over six feet tall and his shoulders were massive. He had full-sleeve tattoos wrapped around his arms, and I wondered vaguely how I could find him attractive when his face was covered in a full beard. If I hadn’t been ready to crawl out of my skin at the arm encircling me, I might have smiled. But the vibe in the room had changed when the men walked through the door and I just wanted to get as far away from the situation as I could. I was just a high school student from Mira Mesa; I just wanted to go home.
“Jose,” Beard Guy nodded to the man holding me, his body coiled tight. “We got business. Why don’t you let her go and we can talk.”
“Eh, this one’s mine for the night. Grab a beer while I bring her upstairs. I’ll be with you in a minute,” he replied with a forced chuckle.
When his arm tightened to move me, I whimpered and tried again to pull his arm from around my waist. I knew if he got me upstairs, I wouldn’t be going anywhere that night, and saliva pooled in my mouth as I envisioned what that would entail. My head had dropped forward, feeling too heavy for my neck, and I slammed it backward, trying to hit anything I could. It felt like I was moving in slow motion, and I guess I was, because my head landed ineffectually on his shoulder. I left it there, too tired to fight.
Beard Guy raised his eyebrows as he finally got a good look at me, and I could only imagine what he was seeing. My tank top had risen with the arm wrapped around me, my hair was falling out of its ponytail, and my mouth was slack, showing off my braces with little purple rubber bands. For the first time that night I hoped that someone would see me as I truly was—a scared sixteen-year-old girl with a mouthful of orthodontia and makeup covered pimples.
Before I could speak, four men who’d been at the back of the house joined us in the entryway, and the energy in the room went from tense to electric. The man holding me let go and I dropped to the floor in a heap of arms and legs. As I scurried to get my limbs under me to crawl away, I heard the men arguing above me. Beard Guy never raised his voice, but the way he spoke was much scarier than Jose’s screaming in Spanish. I couldn’t figure out what they were arguing about, but at that point I was too concerned with myself to care. I got to my hands and knees and crawled toward the men in the vests. They had to take me with them. I didn’t care what their problem was with the guys at the party; they couldn’t leave me alone with them.
When I reached the leader, I kneeled at his feet and slowly wrapped my arm around his thigh. He was warm and he smelled good and I wanted to rest where I was for just a moment, so I closed my eyes and laid my head on his thigh.
“What the f*ck?” I heard him rumble above me as his hand weaved through my hair. “You f*ckin’ drug her?”
He sounded pissed off, but I couldn’t tell who his anger was directed at, so I leaned my head back to look up at his face. He wasn’t looking at me, so I pulled on his pant leg to get his attention. He didn’t look away from the guys across from him, and just when I thought he was going to completely ignore me, he looked down and his brown eyes met mine.
I didn’t think he would help. I was tired and disoriented and afraid, but I knew I had to try one last time to get away from there. It didn’t ever dawn on me that I might be exchanging one bad situation for another.
“Please,” I whispered, but my word was lost in the sound of a gunshot. He shoved me sideways to the floor as another shot rang out, this one closer to us. I whimpered and tried to crawl away, but he held firm to my hair, pressing my face into the floor.
I wondered detachedly if that was my punishment for disobeying my parents, and then everything went black.