The door slammed behind me as my strides ate across the gravel driveway. My skin felt stretched too tightly across my bones, and if I didn’t get away fromher,I’d do something there was no coming back from. A small part of my mind whispered to me that she didn’t do anything wrong.Shedidn’t deserve to suffer, but the snarling and angry rest of my brain was so damned pissed off. I grabbed a cigarette from the pack in my cut pocket and fished my lighter out of my jeans. I sat on a boulder on the west side of the clubhouse, set back away from the building. When Ellis was little, she came out here to this spot a lot; she called it her thinkin’ spot. She even etched her name into the rock when she was ten. I ran my fingers over the worn letters, taking a deep drag off my cig. I inhaled the burn and held it in my lungs before slowly exhaling. Every breath I took was one Ellis never got the chance to take, so I made sure each one slowly poisoned me.
Gravel crunched behind me, and I knew who it was before he even spoke.
“I thought you told Lorna you were going to quit?” Ratched and my mom were always harping on me to quit smoking and drinking so much.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t. Don’t worry, she’s used to disappointment.” I stubbed my cig out on the heel of my boot and put the butt into an empty beer can I kept out here for that purpose.
“You came out here to Ellis’s spot for a pity party? Coulda done that at the bar, man.” I turned, snarling at one of my oldest friends.
“What the fuck do you even know about it?”
“You aren’t the only person who lost someone, Priest! We all loved Ellis; we all miss her. Your mom is worrying herself sick for you, your dad is trying to be patient with you, and your brothers are here to support you. I know you’re disappointed that someone else got to Slyzec before you could…”
I grabbed Ratched by his cut and hauled him into me, getting in his face.
“Disappointed?” I spit. “I’m not fucking disappointed. I’m livid. I’m so goddamn angry that some crazy bitch off the street put an end to him like it was nothing when I’ve been trying to catch him for two years! I swore to her that I’d make him pay and…and I…fuck!” I shoved Ratched away from me, both of us breathing heavily.
Two years. For two years, she’d been gone, and I’d spent every spare moment I had away from the club searching for Roger fucking Slyzec so I could avenge my sister. I’d traveled all over Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California following leads. I’d pored over the case files on Slyzec’s victims and knew all their names. The ones law enforcement knew about anyway. Who knew how many victims he had that hadn’t been tied to him yet? That was the other reason I hated the psycho girl sitting at my mother’s dining table. She killed Slyzec, and now all the answers to my questions died with him. I couldn’t interrogate him, torture him, make him regret ever even thinking about hurting all those women. Killing Ellis. Now, I’d never get the chance…and it was all. Her. Fault.
I swallowed back my rage, tucking it behind my rib cage where it lived now. It had become part of me ever since the day they found Ellis’sbody, like a second stomach. This one was always hungry, and nothing I did could quell the sharp pangs that gripped me. Hunting Slyzec helped suppress my appetite for revenge because I was actively doing something to satisfy the need. Now, I felt untethered and unsure how to ease this gnawing hunger for revenge. Not to mention the eternal guilt I’d always feel for how I behaved… what I’d said to Ellis before I knew those would be the last words I ever spoke to my sister. Slyzec killed her, but it was my fault she was dead.
I could feel my dinner rising up my gullet, and I turned my back on Ratched in an attempt to calm myself down. My guilt and rage spiral would have to wait until I didn’t have an audience. Clearing my throat, I turned back to Ratched.
“You and Bones talked to her. What do you think?”
Ratched sighed, taking the change of topic in stride.“She’s obviously malnourished but otherwise seems healthy enough. She has a screw loose upstairs, but I’m not a psychiatrist, so I can’t explain exactly what’s going on up there. It could be a trauma response. She gets agitated when her past or family are mentioned.”
I snorted back a derisive laugh, turning to face Ratched. “Great, another crazy white girl with daddy issues. How unique.”
“I think it’s more than that. Most chicks have a name, know their birth date, shit like that. Hell, they usually tell you their goddamn star sign. This girl is different. Something darker than a bad divorce happened. Her… man, her fingerprints were burned off. Someone went through a lot of trouble to make sure she couldn’t ever be identified. From what I could see, she has some pretty extensive scarring as well.” He was right, that wasn’t something you saw every day.
“What does Bones think?” Other than my dad, Bones, Ratched, and Cricket were the only people on the planet I trusted completely. Some shit went down in Mexico right before Bones and his mom immigrated to the US when he was a kid and it left an indelible mark on Bones’s soul. He ended up making his first kill, keeping a bone from the body in a small pouch in his pocket. The man carried around bones from murders he’s committed, yet I trusted his judgment one hundred percent.
“Funnily enough, I think he likes her crazy ass. She’s unhinged, no doubt about that. Bones seems to believe there’s a method to hermadness. He said that just because we didn’t understand it doesn’t mean it doesn’t make some kind of sense. I think it might be like we’re playing a game of telephone with her. She’s talking, making sense in her mind, but there’s just enough detail or context missing by the time we hear it, so it sounds like random nonsense to us.”
“A little thing like her fighting like she did, killing Slyzec and leaving him to rot in the desert…She wasn’t upset or guilty about killing him either. How does some random twentysomething woman remorselessly kill and kick ass like a trained fighter? Makes me wonder where she learned to do all that.”
Ratched tried to rationalize the situation. “She was in a heightened emotional state. A man had tried to abduct her. She was afraid, adrenaline was pumping, and when her fight-or-flight response kicked in, her body chose to fight.”
I shook my head. “Nah, man, you weren’t there. She wasn’t afraid of us. She waspissed. She fought us like an unhinged spider monkey. Bones, Cricket, Bard…they all went down. She knew exactly what she was doing, and fear definitely wasn’t a factor.”
Ratched scratched at his jaw, mulling over my words. “You think she’s had professional training?”
I nodded my head. “I don’t know who, or what kind of training, or why, obviously. I’d bet my bike that she’s had combat training, maybe weapons too. We need to find out more about her. She could be a threat or a plant. We don’t know what might set her off or what kind of trouble she could bring to our door.” I turned my back on Ellis’s spot and started heading back to the clubhouse. I knew Duke decided to lay down ground rules with our “guest” and I wanted to follow up with him and Bones to make sure we were all on the same page.
Ever since we lost Ellis, I’d been going through the motions with the club. I was the VP, primed to take over as prez when Duke stepped down, but I knew my head hadn’t been in the game in a long time. I did what needed to be done, but my heart hadn’t been in it, and my main focus and drive had been on catching my sister’s murderer. Bones was our sergeant-at-arms, so a lot of my slack fell to him. He carried it for me, like a brother would, and didn’t complain. It was time to rededicate myself to the club and protect it like I had failed to do for Ellis.
Ratched walked back with me, keeping pace silently at my side. The lot had emptied a bit while we were talking. The LC relatives would have taken their kids and women home by now, so the family-friendly portion of the evening was over. The night was still young for the rest of us. We walked through the front door and saw club girls scattered around the room, draped over brothers or throwing back shots at the bar. There was a reason club girls weren’t allowed in during family events; I could see several skanks grinding on each other on the small dance floor, giving the guys playing pool a show. On one of the couches, Bard was getting a lap dance from Amber, his flavor of the week. She swayed and undulated to whatever white trash stripper song was playing from the jukebox, her fake tits firmly in place. I don’t know why chicks got fake tits, they felt like shit. No jiggle. I shook my head… whatever, to each his own, I suppose. Mindy, Erica, and some new club girl I hadn’t messed around with yet were all over by the pool tables.
Lennon was behind the bar, serving beers and whiskey and making small talk with Tank while Sticks glared at them from a booth. Lennon grew up in the club like Ellis and I did, but now she was in a weird state of limbo. She wasn’t a patched-in member, so she held no official position in the club, but she wasn’t a club girl to fuck and chuck either. Sticks would annihilate anyone who disrespected his baby girl. Unfortunately, this left her on the outskirts a lot of the time—within and without, family but not a member, welcome but off-limits. I had no problem in that regard. Ellis and Lennon had been best friends growing up, and I viewed Lennon as a sibling or little cousin. There had been a time before…everythingthat I thought Bones might have been interested in her, but he hadn’t looked at her twice in years, so maybe I was wrong.
Lennon slid me a beer before returning to her conversation with Tank, and I tipped it to her in thanks before taking a healthy swig. Ratched nudged me with his elbow and lifted his chin toward the saloon doors in the back of the room. Duke came walking in, followed by Cricket, Bones, andher. Lennon waved her over with a smile, sliding a beer into one of her hands. The girl twisted the cap off and took a long drink before wiping her mouth on the back of her hand and letting out a distinctly un-feminine belch.
“Thanks, Lennon! I think you might be my new best friend. After Sheila of course. We should form a girl squad!” She gasped and clapped her hands. “We could be the Bad Bitch Besties! B3!” Lennon laughed and said something in response, but I didn’t really hear it. I was too busy watching the girl, trying to figure her out. She seemed innocent in a way, like she hadn’t experienced much of the world if she got excited about starting some kind of best friend’s club like a damn twelve-year-old. However, the state we’d found Slyzec in indicated that the girl wasn’t all cupcakes and rainbows. The way she’d attacked us when we found her in her van also lent credence to the theory that there was more to this chick than met the eye. Which one was the real girl: the innocent wacko or the ruthless killer?
Something across the room caught her attention because suddenly, she stopped gushing about friendship bracelets or whatever she was saying to Lennon and glared. I noticed that she was running her fingers over the tines of a dinner fork. Why the hell did she have that? Bones drifted over to the bar, but Duke stayed by the saloon doors. Both watched the girl as if invested somehow in what she’d do next.
“Hold my beer, bestie,” Girl said in a seductive purr. “It’s time to unleash my lady vengeance.”
