“Come on,” Lennon said, grabbing my hand, “let’s eat. So who have you met so far?” She handed me a plate, and I watched her start to load up her own. She wasn’t shy with her portions, and that made me like her even more. There was enough food to feed an army, and I couldn’t remember the last time I ate, so I was making grabby hands for the spaghetti tongs.
“I’ve met Duke, Priest, Bones, Ratched, Cricket, and Pyro. He’s a twat, by the way. I’m going to junk-punch him at the earliest opportunity. Maybe once all these kids go home. I don’t want his screams to scare them.” I was thoughtful like that. “Oh, and I recognize that guy over there,” I said, nodding to a guy sitting across from Bones, who was busy shoveling food into his face. “I’m pretty sure that’s the guy I Xena kicked in the chest when they found me and Sheila.” Lennon followed my eyeline to the guy in question.
“Oh, that’s Bard. He’s not too bad. He grew up in Canada and met Cricket in Las Vegas. They became insta-bros or something, and when Cricket came home, he brought Bard with him. He patched in and has been here ever since.”
“You seem to know a lot about everyone,” I mumbled through a mouthful of spaghetti. I knew my table manners were probably not as good as they should have been, but it had been such a long time since I had eaten a sit-down meal, it felt kind of surreal.
I slurped a long piece of spaghetti into my mouth, making a little boy who sat across the table from me giggle. I crossed my eyes at him, and he used his spoon to catapult a cherry tomato from his salad right at my face. I popped up a bit out of my chair like a trained seal and caught the tomato in my mouth, much to the shock and delight of the little troublemaker across the table. I winked at him and then realized our antics had caught the attention of the other adults at the table, who had gone quiet. Priest scowled at me, which seemed to be how his face always looked when it was pointed in my direction. Duke looked mildly amused, and the lady next to him darted her eyes from Duke to me and back again. Duke cleared his throat and announced, “For those of you who don’t know, we have a guest. Girl here has done a service to the club and will be staying in the guest room until it’s repaid. She’s to be treated with respect.”
Priest stood, his chair scraping the floor loudly, and stormed out of the dining room. A door slammed not long after. The woman sitting next to Duke went to follow, but he stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Let him go, baby. He just needs some time.” Duke looked like he was hoping someone would change the subject and take the focus off Priest’s pissy behavior, and I was just the gal for the job.
“Thank you, Mr. President Duke. This food is so much better than the dumpster dinner I would have had back in my alleyway. Dumpster spice gives the food a little….je ne se quoi. I think that’s Portuguese for raging shits, but I’m not a linguist, so you’ll have to google it to check.” Bard choked on his mouthful of food, and Cricket had to pat him on the back to help him get it down. He was such a good guy, my conscience was.
“It’s just Duke, Girl.” He gestured to the woman by his side. “This is my ole lady, Lorna. She and some of the other ole ladies are the chefs.” I nodded to her and waved; she looked so sad. Maybe she thought I was missing my dumpster spice, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Lennon saw me watching Lorna. She leaned into me a bit and explained, “Lorna is Priest’s mom. Losing Ellis was devastating for everyone, but Lorna hasn’t ever been the same.” Conversations had resumed around the table, and everyone resumed eating, assuming the drama was over for the night. As people finished their food, they scraped their plates off into a trash can and placed their dirty dishes, cups, and utensils into busboy tubs near the door. Soon, the only people left at the table were Duke, Lorna, Bones, Cricket, Lennon, and me. Duke gestured to Lennon, who rose with Lorna and took the tubs into the kitchen.
“I can help clean up,” I offered. Duke sat back in his chair and sighed.
“Thanks for the offer. Next time, you can help out with clean up. Tonight, I wanted to get a few things straight with you.” I sat a little straighter in my chair, picking up on the tension coming off Duke in waves. I placed my hands flat on the table, readying myself to run if things went sideways. Duke sounded like he was trying to say “we need to talk” in a subtle way, and even I knew that “we need to talk” was never the opening salvo to a fun conversation.
“Oh yeah? And what things would those be?”
“Bones told me about the agreement he made with you. The club stands by what y’all agreed to. You’re welcome to stay here until Sheila is ready to hit the road. However, I feel like we need some ground rules. You won’t leave the compound without permission and an escort. I don’t want you wandering off.”
I quirked my eyebrow up.“Is that so? Am I your prisoner, Duke?” My voice dropped an octave or two; I referred to it as my murder purr. I’d lived as a prisoner most of my life. Been there, done that. I wasn’t keen to do it again, either. If Duke thought I’d trade the Callahan family’s captivity for his, he was bonkers. I don’t think he appreciated my murder purr or the fact that I was petting my fork. One of the old cartoon movies I’d had in the basement,The Little Mermaid, taught me that forks had many uses; you could use one to brush your hair or stabsomeone in the eye with it…and I had already brushed my hair today. Duke could catch a dinglehopper to the face if he wanted to test me.
“I’ll tell you what you are, Girl. You’re an unknown quantity. You managed to take down a serial killer—in a pretty brutal way, I might add. For such a young little thing, you took on a killer and four armed bikers without a second thought. We don’t know anything about you other than you’re homeless and are attached to your van. Tell us more about yourself, where you come from, and who your family is. Give us some answers, establish trust, and then you can come and go as you please.”
“Trust isn’t my forte, Duke. I don’t owe you shit. Sheila and I would have happily driven off into the sunset together, but you guys locked me up, smacked me around, and then bribed me to stay with promises of showering Sheila in champagne wishes and caviar dreams.”
“You tell us you don’t have a name or a home, but you came from somewhere. The fact that you don’t want to tell us who your family is and that you’d rather go back to living in an alley or in your van instead of asking us to get in contact with your relatives makes me wonder who the fuck they are. I can see scars all over your arms, chest, and back in that tank top so I know you’ve been through some shit. You want to roam around without an escort, tell us who you are.”
Panic rose from the pit of my stomach, simmering at the base of my esophagus along with the spaghetti I had eaten and threatening to rise up and out of my mouth. I tried my best not to think about my scars, but at Duke’s casual mention of my damage, I was forced to acknowledge their existence. My skin crawled, and I glared at Duke, resenting the shit out of his questions.
“My scars are my own. My past is alsomine. I’ll tell someone about it when I’m damn good and ready, or maybe I’ll lock it up in a cage and bury it in the crawlspace of my memory. Either way, it’s up to me. You aren’t the boss of me, Duke. I’m aguestwho will be treated with respect, remember?”
“Chica loca,” Bones chimed in, “you are our guest, and guests usually follow the house rules. So they aren’t rude, yes?”
I narrowed my eyes at him... hmm maybe he had a point. Granted, I had never been a guest before, so I wasn’t completely clear on the rules.Duke looked from Bones to me and decided to hand the conversational reins over to him for the time being.
I sniffed and turned my nose up in my best attempt to look self-assured, releasing my hold on my fork. “Let’s just say I don’t know how to be a guest. What are the rules? Other than needing a field trip buddy if I want to go somewhere.”
“The rules are simple. You stay here until Sheila is ready. You don’t leave without an escort; you stay in the living areas of the clubhouse and don’t snoop in church or the offices. No violence.” I tossed my hair over my shoulder and fluttered my eyelashes at Bones innocently. Yeah, he wasn’t buying it. “No violence, chica loca. You’re safe here.”
I rolled my eyes. “Tell that to Pyro. I’m a woman in a strange place filled with strange men. I’ll defend myself in any way that I deem necessary or entertaining at the time. Self-defense is nonnegotiable.” Bones and Duke shared a look.
“Alright,” Duke agreed, “you don’t start any fights, but if someone puts their hands on you of course you can defend yourself. Non-lethally, though,” he added.
“Pyro is an exception,” I stipulated. Bones was about to open his mouth to argue, I could tell, so I cut him off. “I won’t kill him, but I owe him ten. He fucked with me because he thought he could. Me and my stabby fork are gonna disabuse him of that notion. But I won’t kill him, I promise. You agree to this, and I’ll agree to your house rules. Deal?” Duke gave me an assessing look, his icy-blue eyes weighing and measuring me. I wasn’t asking for a lot, just a slight maiming in exchange for gracious guest behavior. Duke nodded his head like he had come to a conclusion, or maybe he was bopping along to some mind music like I do all the time. You never know.
“Alright, Girl, you got yourself a deal. I was going to punish Pyro for going against my edict to leave you alone in the cellar, but this time…thisonetime, mind you, I’ll let you have your justice. After that, though, it’s self-defense only. You feel me?”
A sinister smile spread across my face.“Yeah, Duke. I feel you.” But not as much as Pyro was about to feel me and my four-tined friend.
Chapter 5
Priest
