Getaway Car [HS]

Chapter Eighteen

The metallic taste of blood is strong on her tongue as she runs it over her lips to clean them of the sticky liquid. It trickled from her nose and into her mouth on the way back down the long driveway from Leo's house to the car parked around the corner. An arm was thrown over Harry's broad shoulders, their hands intertwined, and she leaned on him for support through the growing aches and pains shooting through her battered body.

Harley is slumped over in the passenger seat on the way home. Her eyes squeeze shut against the loud conversation, music, and bright lights coming at her from every direction through the closed windows on their way past a cluster of clubs and bars.

Night is upon them.

Apparently, they spent hours at Leo's house. Not that she was aware of anything after being beaten within an inch of her life in the parlor room and left there to rot. She was able to watch as they forced Harry to sit at the table for a game of poker and talk about plans for a counterattack against Perez. Torturing him. Testing him.

They continued on that way for what felt like forever. Drinking, going over plans, and playing all while pretending there wasn't a nearly unconscious, beaten woman lying on the ground. She was too afraid of what they might do if she tried to leave to do anything but lay and listen, sniffling through her tears.

By three days from now, they've been ordered to find one of the three men who attempted to murder Leo and kill him. He narrowly escaped the bloodbath with his life after witnessing his two buddies having their brains blown out by the very man they were sent after. There was more information than that shared about the incident, but she ended up tuning everything out after a certain point. It wasn't until they were cleared to go that she came back to her body and saw Harry standing above her with an unreadable expression.

Her first impulse was to flinch at the hands scooping her up to lift her from the floor. And while realizing it was him, not any of the three men watching the interaction like hawks from across the room, soothed her with the knowledge that she was safe, it did nothing to stop what he said before the beating from continuing to reverberate in her head.

Kill her if y'want. I don't care.

Was it an act? Or, she wondered on the walk out of the behemoth of a mansion with the proximity of his body keeping her sane, was everything else that preceded it the act? Was he stomaching her presence to have sex with her and forcing himself through their vulnerable conversations for a few good orgasms? More importantly, why would the possibility of being used by him disappoint her? They said they hated each other today. Nothing he said to Leo, if truthful, should have hurt or surprised her.

The tissues he swiped from a table in the entryway are soaked through with blood where she holds the crumpled-up wad to her nose. Everything is fuzzy from the amount of trauma she took. They never knocked her unconscious for longer than a second, but they came pretty close, and the blood has only recently stopped trickling down her nose from the impact of some of those hits.

It took Oliver holding her back as David pummeled her to keep her from breaking free. Harry watched with a purposefully blank face as she bucked and fought back with all of her strength until the fire inside of her dwindled bit by bit, leaving her bruised and wheezing for air face-down on the ground. As much as it killed him to sit by and hear the quiet sniffles of her crying, they let him know that she never went unconscious.

Out of the corner of his eye, he watches her pull the tissues back and inspect her swelling face in the mirror. It was pulled down the second she became well enough to do more than sit with her head back on the headrest and breathe deeply.

"If my body doesn't magically feel like it wasn't hit by a freight train in two days, I have no clue how I'm gonna drive for you on the next job," she says.