Ghost met Steel’s eyes and made the universal signal to hurry up. Steel knew it had nothing to do with Ghost not wanting to give Steel the time he needed to avenge his daughter and everything to do with their need to finish before the sun rose.
Kelly and Eoin were proof that it wasn’t only the bosses who were responsible. They may have issued the order, but it was Desmond who had pulled the trigger. Desmond who decided not to wait until Rodney Baldwin was alone to shoot. He was the man truly responsible for Melanie’s murder. Kelly and Eoin were just the players who moved the pawn into place.
“Let him watch his son die and then shoot him,” he said to anyone who wanted to volunteer for that assignment.
Steel left the room, turning his back on the four, soon to be six, bodies. Keys might be in his van, but he’d be on cleanup duty with whoever remained behind.
Papaw and Ghost followed. Outside, a line of bikes were set up. Their headlights the only illumination on the dark lawn. Kitty straddled a bike with Poison leaning up against him. Basedon how he moved his arm, he likely had his hand down the front of her pants while they were waiting.
Seamus stood off to the side on the wide porch. Gypsy was still tailing him, though the man wasn’t doing anything but applying first aid to his new brand.
In the shadows of the headlights, two figures could be seen behind the bikes. Both bound with their hands behind their backs and their ankles tied together, they each had a long chain wrapped numerous times around their torso, which connected each of them to a single bike. Steel noticed Desmond was the one attached to his hog. The driver whose name Steel had never caught was chained to Ghost’s. They weren’t gagged, but their pleas for mercy wasted what limited breaths they had left in this world.
“We ready?” Poison asked. Kitty moved back on their bike so she could get on in front of him. He passed her a helmet before putting one on his own head.
For some reason, their act of safety struck Steel as ironic, considering. But if Jenna were here, Steel knew he’d be doing the same. Straddling his bike, Steel turned the key. His hog wasn’t the only one to roar to life as the club members started theirs.
Not waiting to see if anyone else was ready, Steel put his bike into gear and headed down the drive. Ghost soon caught up to him. Steel heard the others a little further back as the screams of the men being dragged alive behind the bikes echoed across the cloudless night.
CHAPTER 16
Thingsend. It’s the one assurance everything has. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. Even tracing a Möbius strip has to start somewhere. Some find peace in that, knowing that the cycle will renew and start again. Others dread the end so much that they don’t stop to cherish what they have now. Round and round until something gives and everything crumbles.
Everything ends—just as Steel’s motorcycle ride was forced to when he ran out of gas.
He didn’t know where he was, just that he was on the edge of a random mountain road in the Poconos. The metal chain behind his bike rattled ominously as he set the kickstand and dismounted.
Maybe it was a sign of his exhaustion, or perhaps he was finally going insane. After all the things he’d done, after all the things he’d seen, losing his daughter, his baby girl, had finally broken him. He hadn’t cared about what evidence he left in his wake, and he certainly had no moral issue with dragging a human being to death behind his motorcycle on a public road. Despite it being the middle of the night, anyone could have seen him.
Not much remained of Desmond. If he’d only driven for a short period of time, the body would have been beaten, battered, and gruesome, sure, but it would have mostly been whole. But Steel hadn’t driven for a short period of time. He’d had a nearly full tank of gas, and the open roads had called to him like a balm to his soul.
Maybe being insane wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
Gravel, asphalt, debris, sticks, stones, and who knew what else had torn into Desmond.. Steel had blocked everything out, even the cries for mercy from the driver, whom Ghost had dragged behind his bike. For miles and miles, it was just Steel, the roar of his hog, and the agonizing screams of the man who’d killed his daughter.
And even when those wails no longer serenaded the night, he kept going.
Sitting sideways on his bike seat, Steel folded his arms as he stared out at the brightening horizon. He wasn’t so in his head that he didn’t hear or see the MC members milling about. Logically, he knew they had to have helped cover the tracks of the bodies, as well as blood and pieces that came off.
Steel had no intention of going to jail, but if he had, this was the crime he would have been proud to be convicted of. He was aware of how lucky he was to have his former club at his back and to clean up any evidence he left behind. As justified as he was to kill the men whose actions had led to his daughter’s murder, he’d gone about it quite sloppily. Normally, he was much more methodical.
Then again, there was nothingnormalabout experiencing the loss of a child. He could have never predicted how he would react as he’d never believed this reality a possibility.
The sun rose. They were on the side of a steep mountain road, overlooking nothing but tall trees and foliage. All thatseparated Steel from a sheer drop down into the unknown was a short wooden fence that was far too rotted to be called a barrier.
Ghost approached Steel from the rear of his bike. Out of the corner of his eye, Steel saw the chain being removed from the bar under his seat and then what remained of Desmond’s body was taken away. Keys must have caught up to them at one point because Steel saw him spraying the ground leading up to Steel’s motorcycle with something from a white bottle.
Before Ghost could say anything, Steel said, “Thank you.”
Ghost raised a ginger brow. “After everything you’ve done for us since you started this club almost nine years ago, you owe us nothing.”
Steel glanced at the man before nodding once and then turning back to face the open vastness before him. How numb was he that its incredible beauty did nothing to soothe him. He wanted to get back on his bike, no destination, no plan.
“Keys brought gas for us. The colonial home is cleaned up. We took up the offer of a club from Atlantic City to help destroy the evidence. Figured a massive bonfire would draw too much attention.”
He wasn’t wrong. Fire was a fast destroyer, but it also was like lighting a beacon to the local authorities. He really was getting sloppy. If Scar hadn’t been with him when he tracked down Shaw, there was a good chance that he would have gotten caught then too.
“Are you coming home with us?”
