Everything that had happened since Ollie’s birth mom had shown up at the club’s gates demanding to see him now made perfect sense. Steel knew who had killed Dixie Gilbert and framed Steel for the murder, who had salted the ice, who had set their consignment store on fire, who had cut Jenna’s brake lines… He knew it all, and worse, he knew why.
No good deed really does go unpunished.
He’d done his good deed. Years ago, he’d turned a man in for killing innocent civilians. Now that man was out…and he’d gotten his revenge. He’d taken from Steel far more than Steel had ever taken from him.
Griffin Shaw. Former Marine Sniper. Papaw had trained Shaw right alongside Steel. The two of them had been neck and neck for most tests and trials, but in the end, Steel had prevailed. Shaw had been disappointed, sure, but he’d congratulated Steel to his face while plotting his downfall. It had only been a weird twist of fate that had prevented Steel from being framed for murder thirty years ago.
Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, though. Steel should have seen it coming when Dixie Gilbert had been murdered and the evidence pointed to Steel. But it hadn’t even crossed his mind. He’d written Griffin Shaw off three decades ago. The man hadn’t even been on his radar.
He was now.
Now there was no place on this fucking earth that he could hide where Steel would not find him. He had the time, he had the money, and now, he had the motive.
Grief swirled in Steel’s soul, morphing into rage, hate, and fury. A molten heat burned inside him, melting the glue thathad once held Steel’s pieces together. He shattered, a roar of vengeance billowing from his core.
His fist pounded against the hard surface beneath him, but the stone proved stronger than the bones in his fingers. He did not stop. He did not cry. He’d only allowed himself one tear, and he’d already shed it. Blood mixed with rain as his skin fractured and split. Steel forced himself to his feet, mud caked on him like icing. His boot connected with the unforgiving granite he paid money to have her name etched into. He hated the sight of it, the curve of the letters that were once so sacred to him.
It did not budge, though the mud beneath him did. The more he kicked and hit and fought, the more he started to sink into the very soil they’d just covered her coffin with. Would it be too much to hope that it pulled him under like quicksand so he could join her?
A hand on his shoulder stopped him. Steel slid in the mud, his balance taken by grief and rage. He looked to his left to see Scar. Knowing his silent brother as he did, Steel was not surprised that he’d stayed out in the rain with Steel.
Gasping for breath, Steel saw the same rage and anguish in Scar’s bright sapphire blue eyes that currently fueled Steel’s soul. He knew in that moment what his brother planned to do.
“You don’t have to,” Steel warned. “This is my fight.”
Scar dropped his hand from Steel’s shoulder, and Steel noticed how he fisted his fingers around his palm like he was trying to ease the ache of a burn. Determination radiated off of the silent man.
Steel knew there was nothing he could say to keep his brother from coming with him. But this was also Scar. Of everyone in the club, if he had to choose one brother to accompany him on this bloody crusade, it would be him. The brother whose moral compass faced anywhere but north. “The others will want to come too. If we leave now, we can slip by them without notice.”
No one would expect Steel to miss the reception entirely. But how could he go into that room with her picture everywhere and expect to accept condolences and be social when hermurdererstill breathed air?
Scar looked over his shoulder. Somehow in the time it took everyone to go inside and the rain to start and for Steel to crumble, Scar had moved their two hogs to the road by the cemetery.
Steel took one last look at the old white church where his remaining family was mourning before turning his back on it. He got his feet out of the mud and nodded once. “Let’s ride.”
CHAPTER 11
“Time… It’s such a funny concept.” Steel’s emotionless voice was only challenged by the sounds of the hotel boiler room and the pitiful whimpers of the man screwed to the wooden chair before him. He was sure there were people who would find the incessant hum of machinery soothing, like white noise in the background, but he was not one of them. It was nothing to him, neither a distraction nor a calming influence. Like his heart beating in his chest, it was there, but it was useless.
“We think we have all the time in the world, yet we move at such speeds, so impatient to get from A to B that we don’t even pause to think about what we havenow.” Steel reached for another black, eight-inch screw. The coolness of the metal did not register as he fitted the flathead to the drill bit. “Nineteen years, Harris. I had barely nineteen years with her. I can still hear her first laugh, her firstword. I watched her grow, from a chubby, little infant to the beautiful, young woman who was gunned down in the streets like an animal. Nineteen years might seem like a lot, but it’s not. I wanted moretime.” He placed the point of the screw in the middle of the man’s lower left arm, parallel to the screw embedded in his right arm. “But that time issomething I’ll never get back. I know that. What I need now is aname.You can claim client confidentiality all you want, but you and I both know that’s a load of horseshit.”
Jeremy Harris was in his late forties. He had what could only be described as a seventies’ pornstache, along with a beer belly and a gold-plated tooth. For years, he was part of the underbelly of D.C., his grimy, pudgy fingers in little bits of each pie. His main source of income, though, was making identities. Unlike Keys who fabricated a person and their background on the computer like they’d always been there, Harris had a way of bringing the dead back to life. Figuratively, of course. As a family buried their loved one, Harris was busy taking over the deceased’s identity and selling it on the Black Market.
Griffin Shaw had purchased one or more of those identities.
Steel pulled the trigger. The metal, spiral thread pierced its way through flesh and muscle until it reached bone. Ignoring the screams of agony echoing through the concrete room, Steel applied more pressure to the handle of the drill. He no longer needed Scar to hold the man steady. Despite Harris’ weak attempts to struggle when he’d first been seated in the chair, the middle of his hands and each wrist were already secured to the wooden arms. Harris’ feet were bound by rope, but not for long.
There was a loudcrack, followed by an anguished bellow as the screw forced its way through the bone, down through tissue, and out the other side. As it made contact with the wood of the chair, the chuck of Steel’s drill started to enter Harris’ arm.
Satisfied the screw wasn’t going anywhere, Steel released the trigger and stepped away. There was a discarded kitchen table propped against the wall with only three legs. He wouldn’t trust the table to hold any of Jenna’s cooking, but he’d certainly utilize it to hold his recently purchased power tools. The kind-eyed woman at the hardware store hadn’t even blinked twice when Steel placed the items in his cart on the checkout counter. Whatwould she have thought if she knew what the box of screws was really intended for?
“I need a name, Harris. We know Shaw lived under Adrian Voss after he escaped Primis. He went to your rival, Demetri.” Steel turned. “He’s currently enjoying a lye bath behind you. The hotel was rude enough to not even put that amenity on their website.” Steel picked up the next screw. “The identity Demetri gave him lasted a good while. He could have kept using it, except he messed up. That ID was attached to a vehicle that got a ticket for being illegally parked outside my daughter’s campus back in December.” Steel was careful to avoid the puddle of piss on the floor beneath the sniveling, whimpering man as he approached again. “I know that Shaw came to you exactly three weeks ago.Five daysafter hemurderedmydaughter.”
Steel placed the tip of the screw just outside Harris’ right ear. He wasn’t a surgeon and didn’t know where the man’s eardrum was precisely located, but he figured he had the general location. Worst case, he got another screw and tried again.
After all, the man could still speak without his hearing. Hell, he could shout it for all Steel cared, so long as he gave up the identity or identities Shaw was now using.
“Stop! Please… I don’t know. I… Oh God, please, for the love of God, please just stop…”
