by Malcom, Anne
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Caroline
I wrote the story.
Not the one that Emily wanted.
Not the one I had intended on writing going in.
Though none of my stories ever ended up how I intended.
Emily was pissed at the start, until I gave her the piece on Miguel Fernandez I’d written from what I’d heard from club members, from Rosie, from various sources, victims.
And then she was happy.
Yes, Emily was happy to hear about one of the most disgusting human beings to walk the planet, to read about his sins, in detail. Because apparently, that was going to be a better movie.
Not that I was going to write a fucking book about it. But she would figure a way to make it happen.
That was Emily.
Apparently my story got all sorts of praise. Awards. I got job offers and emails every day. Dream jobs. A dream life, presumably.
But I didn’t want my dream life.
I wanted my nightmare.
I stared at the screen. At the words.
They’re sinners, but they’re not devils.
They do good deeds, yet no one would call them angels.
You’d put the Sons of Templar slightly toward the worse end of the good vs. evil scale if such a scale existed. Which it doesn’t, of course.
We fool ourselves with the notion that there is a good, right way to live life and a terrible and wrong way to live it. And to the outsider, the Sons of Templar must look so wrong and terrible.
In my time with them, sure, they did some wrong and terrible things. But not because of the cuts that serve as a second skin. Because of the fact they’re human beings. Just because you live on the ‘right’ side of the picket fence, doesn’t make you immune from making terrible choices or doing ‘bad’ things.
Humanity is a disease that plagues us all, and the only cure is death.
So for better or for worse, we’re all human.
Which is what the Sons of Templar are.
They love their wives with a ferocity I haven’t seen in my life. They respect women, despite the backward fact that ‘club girls’ are treated as property. Because these girls are not without agency. Their titles, from what I see, are not shackles, but something that makes them freer to do what they want with their bodies and lives.
Elders are respected.
Children are cherished.
Brotherhood reigns supreme above everything.
Blood is thicker than water. And it’s blood and motor oil holding this chapter together. Because it was torn apart last Christmas. With a death toll that sickens the soul. Especially when you understand what a family the club is.
One that breaks the law, is prone to violence and doesn’t shy away from a gunfight, but a family nonetheless.
This reporter had planned on a story that was glaringly honest, that stripped the ugly underbelly of organized crime and showed it to the world. I could do that. In my time with the Sons of Templar, I witnessed damning acts.
But then, what does damned even mean?
In my time there, I learn we’re all damned. In our own ways.
So I’m not going to do my duty as a reporter to tell the unvarnished truth, no matter who it hurts. I’m instead going to do my duty as a human being.
And I’m going to shut up.
I shut my laptop, deciding I was never going to open it again.
* * *
A woman entered through the front door that I was sure had been locked. She stepped inside, her heel crunching on something. A takeout box, or more likely a can of something. Beer, that I’d got for when my brother came to visit, and I’d used as a last resort. She looked around, wordlessly, expression blank.
“So how does rock bottom feel?” she asked.
I dropped the bottle I’d fallen asleep cradling. I didn’t hear it hit the floor. She was definitely blurry, I was definitely drunk, but I was pretty sure I was sober enough to make out the fact that Scarlett was here, in my living room, in Castle Springs.
I squinted against that terrible light she was bringing into my dark living room. It illuminated the absolute mess I’d been living in. It illuminated rock bottom. Bottles of wine. Cans of beer. Barely eaten takeout.
I saw scenes like this in movies, when someone got their heart broken, got fired, or just had a complete mental break. I watched these scenes with scorn, thinking no such thing happened. People couldn’t just check out. I’d seen the worst of things, experienced the worst, and I didn’t gorge myself on food and booze and live in filth. No, I kept going.
My arrogance was shattered when I got home from New Mexico. After I’d seen my family, cuddled my nephew, used the last of my strength to put on a front.
And then I came home.
I wrote my stories.
Submitted them.
Fielded calls, offers, went through the motions of actually living life. I saw my family every day because I yearned for their company. Comfort was uneasy, wrong when I was with them. I felt dirty, carrying around the secret of where Liam was now. Who Liam was now. I was good at deceiving them, though. It became what held me together.
But there was only so long that it could last.
It happened at the grocery store. Because pivotal, horrible moments usually happened in the most mundane of places.
I was contemplating Ben and Jerry’s in the frozen food section, wondering if I would actually be that cliché.
And someone called my name.
Mary.
I froze for the handful of seconds it took for her to approach me, smiling. I was ice when she hugged me. When she spoke normally, happily, not knowing the son she thought was buried was twenty hours away.
I managed the exchange. Somehow.
She said goodbye, something about a bake sale she needed to prepare for. I wanted to scream at her ‘your son is alive, and he is broken and you have no idea, you’re baking fucking cakes.’
But I smiled. Hugged her again. Promised to have lunch.
Then I calmly filled my cart up with as much booze as I could. I didn’t give a shit about clichés anymore.
Then I drove home.
Unloaded the car.
Locked my door.
And broke the fuck down.
My phone had long since died.
I wondered if my family had been calling, worried. But they likely just thought I was writing a story, and they knew not to bother me for that.
I wondered if Liam had called.
Of course he hadn’t.
Dead men didn’t use phones.
Liam was dead.
“How did you get in here?” I blinked at Scarlett as she closed the door and tore open the drapes.
The effect was painful and immediate. I flinched away from the sun like a vampire.
Cool air filtered through the window she opened.
“I picked the locks,” she said, like it was obvious.
I blinked at her, making out the tight white jeans, pink platforms and a barely-there pink tube top. Her blonde hair was piled atop her head. Her makeup was flawless, if a little over the top.
I idly wondered what the residents of Castle Springs thought when Scarlett breezed through. Then again, Scarlett wouldn’t have been wondering one single bit about what people were thinking.
“How do you know how to pick locks?” I asked, rubbing my pounding head and leaning forward to look for the closest bottle that wasn’t empty.
“How do you think I would know?” she countered.
Scarlett moved, not to try and stop me from drinking in the daylight when I was obviously having some kind of emotional break, but to hand me the half empty bottle of vodka.
No way was it half full.
I took it without thanks.
She sat down on the chair across from me, glanced around my immaculately decorated living room, full of empty bottles, dead plants, and dead souls.
“What are you doing here?” I asked after a swig.
She shrugged. “Have had a lot of free time now I’m not helping my husband prepare for a war.”
Something lanced inside me at her words. They were drenched in her own, hard kind of sorrow.
I used more vodka for that pain.
“Can I offer you a drink or something to eat?” I asked, my mother’s manners all but embedded into me. “Though the only thing nonalcoholic I have at this point is tap water and snacks that consisted of cold pizza and questionable Chinese.”
Scarlett grinned. “This isn’t a time for tap water.” She reached over to take the bottle from me and took a long swig.
She was silent for a long time after handing it to me.
“Are you here to bring me back to the club?” I asked finally. “Lecture me on what a mistake I made leaving?”
She shook her head. “Not my style.”
I took another swig.
Scarlett crossed her legs. “I’m here ‘cause I guessed you might need a friend and I needed a road trip.”
I raised my brow. “A twenty-four hour road trip?”
She nodded.
I waited for more. There was no more. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said finally.
“I didn’t ask you to talk about it,” she countered. Her eyes ran over me. “I will ask you to take a shower, put on some clothes that aren’t covered in stains and maybe run a brush through your hair. More for my sake than yours. It’s just uncomfortable looking at you.”
I almost grinned. Scarlett obviously did not do sympathy. Or comfort. Which was exactly what I needed.
So I got up. Showered. Put on clothes that didn’t smell as bad as they looked, and I ran a brush through my hair.
Scarlett was in the same place as she was when I walked back in. The bottle was actually empty now.
“Okay, I’m gonna need to know one thing,” she said.
My stomach dropped. Here it was. The inevitable morbid human curiosity about how things were destroyed, the uglier, the better.
“Where’s the seediest and shittiest bar in this town and how okay are you to drive?” she asked instead.
This time I did grin.
* * *
“Would your husband approve of you being in a seedy bar in a tiny town in Castle Springs, drinking in the middle of the day?” I asked after the third drink.
We barely spoke during the first two.
Scarlett, I discovered, was not a woman to do girl talk over cocktails. And she was not a woman to order a cocktail.
She sipped her vodka, straight up. “My husband does not have the right to disapprove or approve of my actions,” she replied. “He knew this when he married me, so he knew things like this are part in parcel of life with a former club whore. Plus, he’s busy, hanging photos.” She winked, but I sensed some vulnerability there.
I sipped my vodka—on the rocks—and thought on it. “How is he?” I asked finally, unable to stop with the emotional cutting. She knew who I was talking about. He was here, a ghost, more so than he’d ever been when I thought he was really dead.
“Crappy. Obviously,” she said, not pulling punches. “Though he’s showering and going outside every day so maybe better than you.” She paused. “Though he is going outside in order to do things like beat drug dealers half to death, so I guess that makes you almost even.”
“He’s beating drug dealers half to death?” I repeated.
She nodded. “I know. He’s salvageable if he’s not actually killing them.”
I had forced myself to think about how Liam might be doing. Tried to convince myself not only did I not care but that he deserved to feel as horrible as he could.
I couldn’t admit that I had not only understood why he did what he did but forgave it too. I couldn’t do that because being angry was so much easier than being heartbroken.
“Are you here to tell me that we need to get back together?” I half hoped she was. I hoped she’d sink her nails into my skin and drag me back to New Mexico. So I could be their captive again.
No way I was going there of my own volition.
Scarlett laughed, throaty and attractive. “Fuck no,” she said, motioning to the bartender—who had been drooling at her—for two more.
The bar was all but empty, save for the few resident alcoholics that barely glanced at us when we entered the dingy place that was known to be a home for the hopeless. And even Scarlett, a certified sex kitten didn’t get a response from anyone but the bartender. Everyone else was too deep in their own sorrows.
And those suckers must’ve been deep not to surface and appreciate Scarlett.
“I’m very aware that we don’t live in a fairytale world,” she said. “And what you and Jagger have, it’s never gonna result in a happy ever after, even best-case scenario. I know that like I know my ending is never gonna be any fuckin’ thing like Cinderella’s. Not just because my prince is anything but charming.” She winked. “And he’s a king. Just not the kind from Disney.”
Our drinks were placed in front of us, empties swiped away.
Scarlett grinned.
“On the house,” the bartender winked, who looked to be older than dirt and sounded like a packet of cigarettes a day.
“There are still charming men in the world,” she said to him, lifting her drink in a toast. She looked to me. “You won’t find them in the Sons of Templar clubhouse, though. They’re charming in the way the devil is charming. He’ll sweet talk you long enough to claim your soul and never give it back. And what you and Jagger have, it’s not healthy. For a number of reasons, but let’s least start with how fucked up your history is. Like top level fucked up. And this coming from me, means something. You’re not good for each other. You’re both too damaged, there’s too much wrong. In an ideal world, you’d both find someone marginally more well-adjusted than each of you to balance you out. To make sure that every day of your life isn’t a battle.” She sipped.
I listened with a bleeding heart.
“But this isn’t an ideal world, I think we both know that,” she continued. “And in our world, every day of our lives is gonna be a battle, the least we can do is know that at the end of that battle we’ve got an orgasm, a man that’s probably gonna damn our soul even more.” She shrugged. “I don’t know, depends how enjoyable you find damnation.”
I clutched my drink.
I enjoyed damnation to the point of destruction.
That was the problem.
“I’m not here to drag you back,” Scarlett said. “I am here to tell you that Jagger’s gonna turn up tomorrow morning at his parents’ house. Your choice what you do. Shower first, though.”
I was frozen.
He was coming here.
To see his parents?
Scarlett was right.
I had a choice to make.
Jagger
He was afraid.
No, he was beyond afraid, terrified or just plain scared.
And he wasn’t staring in the face of a mission, the barrel of a gun, a knife about to slice through his face and his soul.
No, he was staring at the door to his childhood home. He was staring at the place that held mostly happy memories. Not all happy, because that wasn’t how life worked.
How family worked.
Times were good and times were bad. Struggles in his parents’ marriage. Trouble with his sister. Money problems. That was the way of life.
But the good memories overtook all that.
Because his family was a good one.
They made it through those hard times that were barely a blip in his memories.
But he’d given them hard times that would be more than a blip. They were a huge, ugly rancid scar on a life that they’d made sure was mostly good for them. He’d made the decision to ruin his family. He’d known they’d hold it together, because that’s what he’d had to tell himself in order to live with himself.
Pathetic.
He couldn’t entertain the thought that his parents might divorce because the
pain of losing a child might fracture their marriage in a way that pain and loss could distance some people. He didn’t imagine his sister struggling with the loss of her brother, the loss of her happy life.
He definitely didn’t think about Caroline’s grief putting her in danger, tearing at her the way it did. He barely survived the knowledge, the truth of what he’d done to her.
How in the fuck was he meant to do it with his mom, dad, and sister?
He couldn’t. That was how.
It was the truth. The ugly, unvarnished and cowardly truth. He didn’t have it in him. He could run into a battle knowing that he might not come out. He could kill a man in cold blood. See things other people would seek a bullet to the brain to stop haunting them.
All of that wasn’t a product of bravery. It was a product of cowardice. Because seeing that, doing that, it was all so he didn’t have to stand here, right fucking here, on the stone walk leading to the two-story restored Victorian with blue window shutters, and a lifetime full of memories.
Memories that had once smelled like fresh baked cookies, his father’s cigars—ones he sneaked from his mom while she pretended she didn’t know—his sister’s perfume that she wore too much of until their mother righted her ways.
All of it had mixed together in his mind, one of the sweetest smells, aside from Caroline.
Memories were nice that way, preserving things not even the way they were, but the way they had to be in your mind.
But now they were rancid, rotted, because he was faced with the truth.
Jagger turned his back, intending on getting on his bike and riding back to the club. Finding someone to kill. Then finding a bottle.
Not coming out for a long time.
If ever.
Because he didn’t know if he’d be able to face himself sober with the knowledge of what he’d thrown away because he was a fucking coward.
He turned and faced himself with another memory.
But this one was more beautiful than even his mind could preserve.
And she was scowling at him, arms folded.
“You’re not turning your back on them, Liam Hargrave,” she snapped, snatching his hand and yanking him back around.
