by Marata Eros
“How much longer?” I ask, my gaze on the all-concrete building. Windows like the many eyes of an insect ride the top perimeter, looking down on them with glass scorn.
Gloomy fucking thing. As much as I hate to admit it, maybe a garden at the top won't be too bad.
“Impenetrable as fuck,” Noose says, easily plucking my thoughts out of thin air.
“Yeah,” I answer softly. He's right. Looks like a square hunk of concrete from the outside, but it’s the Rock of Gibraltar. Fortification is the goal. Keeps brothers and bitches safe. Snare probably loves the thing.
“A couple of weeks, give or take,” he answers, waffling a palm back and forth as he light his third cig. “Lariat's having some bullshit problems with proper pipe fall for the head.”
My lips tweak at the military term for bathroom. Noose isn't much for change.
“It's just county code bullshit. Gotta have a certain percentage of fall so all the growlers and shit can go where they gotta go. Can't have turds getting lost.” He shrugs, but his lips curl into a faint smile. Nothing like referencing toilet habits for comedic relief.
We laugh.
“So you still up at the cabin?”
Noose's eyes meet mine.
“Yeah.” I look away. “Quiet up there. House is about done.”
We stand in comfortable silence while he smokes. Neither of us has to talk.
Soon, I join him.
“Kinda boondock shit you got happening out by Snare. Love living in the city,” he admits.
“Yeah, lot of noise there.” I don't say how backfire from cars makes me think of enemy gunfire.
Noose already knows.
I guess we all react differently to war. Quiet gives me some peace. Noise is disorienting as fuck. Panic loads my shorts like shit.
Don't fucking need that.
“Who'd you say was building your pad?”
“Custom home outfit. Terhune.”
“Ah.” Noose tilts his head, brows meeting. “Yeah. Remember that now. Seen their building down in the valley.”
More silence.
“It's better now with Rose.”
My heart picks up stray beats. “What?” Can't help the hoarseness in my voice—the warning.
Noose looks at me. “The nightmares and shit. The sweats, the fucking shakes.”
I blink. “You—what the fuck is this?” I pop my jaw back. “Confession time?”
Noose shrugs his broad shoulders. “Trying to help.”
“Don't.” My eyes narrow.
“All right, having a woman you care about—sounds stupid.” Noose looks down, shaking his head. He flicks an ash half a finger long. It falls like gray rain beside his shit kicker.
I wait. Finally, when he doesn't talk anymore I say, “All right—fuck it. What?”
He looks up. “We're killers, Wring. You, me, Lariat—hell even Snare has come around.” A smile ghosts his lips. “But”—he looks up at the sky, lighting his fourth cigarette in forty minutes—“Rose makes me feel safe.” His voice is a thread between us.
I snort. “No fucking way. You could kill five people with your eyes closed. Our hands, our weapons—we're lethal. How does a slip of a woman without skills make you feel safe, Noose?”
His neck reddens. “Not here.” He taps his temple. “Here, man.” Noose's hand moves to his heart.
Our eyes lock, and suddenly, the silence is awkward. His words cling to me.
Suffocating me.
I turn around on my booted heel and march my ass back to the ride.
Noose follows, his heavy treads matching mine.
He grabs my arm, and I spin around. Angry, frustrated, and more exhausted than I have a right to be.
“Don't,” I say in a low voice.
“I don't fucking dream anymore.”
I rip my arm from his grasp. “Good for you.”
Noose flings his arms away. “ʼKay, you stubborn fuck. I'm done with sharing the feels with your tenacious ass.”
“Good,” I say, hopping on my bike. I can't take his brand of encouragement. Can't accept it. Why doesn't he leave the fuck alone?
Noose doesn't say anything.
I blast away, kicking up a spray of gravel on the temporary gravel driveway.
I run, using my bike to carve distance.
Noose's words chase me.
Chapter 2
Shannon
I smooth my long thick hair back into a low knot at my neck.
Getting ready for story time at the Kent Public Library has me wanting to look the part. My eyes rove my form in the silvered antique full-length mirror set diagonally in the corner of my tiny room.
A slim-fitting but proper-length pencil skirt grazes just above my knees. I’ve paired the conservative navy skirt with a shell blouse in ivory without a hint of yellow. It shows no cleavage but still outlines my figure perfectly. Two-inch heels offer enough style to keep me out of “meh” territory. It's the only place to work within walking distance, so I don't need a car.
There's no money for that.
As it is, our little house is flanked by two commercial warehouses in the Kent Valley. At only one thousand square feet and pre–1940 construction, the anomalous little house is seated in prime real estate. It’s a holdover from an era when a bunch of houses just like ours dotted the Kent Valley—mainly homesteads for local farms that had since been eaten up my technology and commerce. Our tiny place had once belonged to my great-grandfather. It'd actually served as a cottage, an outcropping of a larger farmhouse, long gone now.
Our cottage survives on a sixteenth of an acre out of the original forty. Mom owns that small sliver, the remaining property is gone. The property taxes are so high, I barely have enough to keep us in food. Because Mom's health is so dire, I can only hold a part-time job. Someone needs to take care of her.
My pensive face stares back at me, life's troubles tumbling around inside my head like clothes in a dryer.
A cup shatters, and my shoulder's slump from their regularly erect posture. Why does she try? Breathing through my irritation, I try to calm my nerves and smooth my skirt with damp palms.
Mom needs me.
I pivot then stomp out of my room. I'm completely prepared to chastise—until I see her stooped over the shattered tea cup. Her soft tears splash on the worn linoleum, cracked and abused from its long life, as her grief sinks into the floor's decaying crevices.
“I'm sorry, Shannon. I just, I know how hard you're working. I want to do something. To matter.”
My heart breaks, and I rush over there, helping Mom up. Careful to avoid her hands, I extend my forearm, and she places the flat of her palms on my arm. She pushes off at the same time as I lift, and we get her on her feet.
What if she'd fallen instead of just trying to bend over to clean up the shards?
“Mom,” I say gently, “you can't do stuff like this before your meds have kicked in.”
The meds that are killing her.
She nods quickly, her steel-colored, chin-length hair flowing forward in a curtain.
I guide Mom slowly to her favorite chair and arrange the pillows to cushion her fragile and inflamed joints.
The rheumatoid arthritis has robbed her of agility, strength, and most importantly—her freedom.
The medication she's taken since I was eighteen months old has weakened her muscle tissue.
Including the heart.
Take this medication or never move. Take it and eventually have a heart attack.
Great options.
So Mom took the medication so she could care for her child and herself. When the disease progressed enough to cripple her body, she still took it.
Then I stayed with her instead of pursuing anything for myself.
There are no benefits for someone who’s never worked and gets struck down by a disease during youth. So Mom had me at thirty-seven. And now she's only sixty-two.
Medicare doesn't kick in until age sixty-five.
She won't
live to see it, though. The doctors have made that much clear. And we might not hang on to this house until then.
I can't allow that to happen.
I can't let anyone take this house before Mom dies.
Not the tax authorities for delinquent payment. Not the gang members who have moved into both the commercial buildings and sandwich our property like rotting meat.
I shiver.
But how's one twenty-five-year-old, part-time librarian supposed to fight the money men—or the gangs?
“You look nice, Shannon,” Mom says through a watery smile, breaking into my thoughts.
My constant worries slide away at the expression on her face. Anxiety, regret, and guilt. “Thanks, Mom.”
Though her hair is solid pewter now, and her wrinkles are few. The ones that mark her face are in the right spot. By her eyes.
Proof of all the smiles.
Pale blue eyes blink up at me, and I do a quick scan of the immediate area. Water jug with large handles and integral straw. Check. Meds laid out. Check.
Lunch pail. Check.
She has the remote to the TV—but even better than that is the pile of newspapers, magazines, and nonfiction books. Mom adores reading.
I know that's where my love of the written and spoken word came from.
“Go, honey.” She smooths her hands down her bony legs, covered by knit sweatpants in an icy lavender color. Her soft cotton broadcloth T-shirt is a matching color. The cotton fabric is all she can stand to wear against her sensitive skin. “I'm fine.”
I put my perfect, young hand over her gnarled one. The joints of her fingers are so swollen, they've caused the fingers to cant to one side.
I close my eyes in a long blink, sucking up my emotions into a bottle inside myself. “Okay, Mom.”
Tears don't fall. I always cry in my room, where Mom can't see. But I think she knows. Instead of showing my sadness, I gulp back my stupid sniveling and offer a true smile.
“That's my girl.” She looks away, gazing out the sparkling clean window at the cars rushing past on the busy street. “You have a good day with the kiddos, honey.”
I draw in a fortifying breath. “Don't call me ‘honey’—”
“Call me ‘darling,’” Mom finishes.
We grin at each other. I've been saying that for years, and she's always replied the same way.
Our private mantra.
I kiss her forehead and move to the door. Solid reinforced steel. I unlatch four locks.
I step through without looking back and relock all of them. I try the knob. Twice.
Five hours away from Mom. She'll be okay, Shannon.
I straighten my spine and begin walking the eight blocks to my job. I love it so much. When I was younger, I dreamed of being an elementary school teacher.
Or just maybe filling a home with children of my own. My smile is wistful, and a moment of rare peace passes through me.
It's probably why I don't notice Vincent until his hands are on me.
“Hey cunt,” a voice cuts through my musing like a dirty knife.
Then his greasy hands are on me, popping my feet off the sidewalk and pulling me into a small alleyway between the tall commercial buildings.
My eyes slide the three blocks to the faded red dot of the porch overhang on our house. My attention bounces around mournfully—we're very close to Kent Station, but there isn't much traffic this early on a Sunday morning.
No one to help me. “Let go!” I yell at him.
He pinches my upper arm, and I whimper. I keep saying no, hoping the gangs find an easier target.
Not some girl with an invalid mother to take care of.
“Just do what we say, and we'll take care of you, Shannon.”
I bite the grunt of pain off mid-sound. “You're hurting me.”
“I don't have to,” Vincent says oh-so-reasonably. “You spread those pretty legs for me, and I'll see you get plenty of work. We have girls that aren't half as good lookinʼ as you, bitch. You earn the cash on your back—make it easy on your mama.” His dark eyebrows hike, and his pinch goes to bruising.
I gasp, and he runs a finger over my lip. I bite the plump flesh to keep from crying out, inciting more violence. “I can get big money for your pussy. Real money.” His brows lower over his eyes in an unforgiving line. “Word on the street has it you never been tapped yet.”
I feel my eyes go wide as my breathing turns to harsh pants. They want the house bad enough that they’ve actually researched me? How would these losers even know that kind of personal information about somebody?
Calling the cops doesn't help. The fucking gang—an offshoot of the Bloods, I hear—are in possession of police scanners. They scatter like cockroaches, and when the police arrive, they're sympathetic. But without anyone to arrest, it's like I'm reporting a crime where the perpetrators are ghosts.
Hopelessness descends. “I don't have anywhere else to live, for me and my mom to go.” I've been trying to reason with them for the last three years, since they moved into the buildings that surround us. But they've begun to push harder.
He nods, a cunning smile spreading over his vile features. “I know, chica. Let me put you under my protection. You let me into that house, into your bed—and me and the brothers will take care of your mama and take real good care of you.”
He grabs his crotch, and I fight gagging.
Even with an offer as horrible as that, it's so tempting, becoming a whore to this man so I can save Mom. They've been relentless. They push, push, push. And I say no, no, no. Then there's nothing for a time.
I hadn't seen anyone in half a year, and I'd become complacent, hoping they'd found greener pastures. That a couple of defenseless women who didn't have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of was just—too much work. I finally allowed myself to believe that we were finally flying under their radar.
But no.
Here's Vincent. All six feet of threatening dark and deadly to my five feet five of Nordic paleness.
He grabs a strand of hair that’s come loose from my bun. “This shit real?” Vincent bends over my hair and sniffs it.
I'm suddenly pissed he wrecked my careful library hairdo. In fact, I'm just flat-out angry in general. Over everything. “What?” I ask in a semi-daze, my upper arm numb from his vise-like grip.
“The fucking hair!” He screams in my face, tearing out the rest of my careful hairstyle. My platinum hair falls almost to my waist, relieved of its binding.
Vincent jerks me against him. “You give me a stiff cock, bitch. All your fucking stuck-up white-girl bitch bullshit. Hiding that hot body underneath your library clothes.”
He crowds my neck, scenting me like a stud dog.
I mewl. My rage evaporating to fear so acute, I clench my legs together so I don't urinate four hundred feet from my front door.
“I bet your pussy matches the hair.”
A vehicle rumbles past the alley, and Vincent swings his head up in surprise, shoving me up against the building. I slap my palms against the rough brick.
“What the fuck?” he asks in a hoarse voice of interrupted arousal. His hand slides from my hair to my wrist. He pulls me behind him, and I trip, bumping into the back of him. I cry out when my nose rams his shoulder blade.
“Come on, puppy.” He gives a harsh tug, and I stumble forward, yelping from the abuse of my wrist.
Gliding toward us is a man, approaching slowly on a really beautiful red motorcycle. The color is like a juicy sparkling apple.
He's as fair as I am. Crisp white-blond hair is shaved close to his head, and a really flat crop of it stands about a half inch on top of his head.
Icy-blue eyes flash at the sight of us standing in the border of the alley, where shadows hide Vincent's violence.
I know the only person that's seen us will roll on by. Just a girl and guy making out in the gloom, he’ll assume.
Tears roll down my face, and my wrist is throbbing.
The motorcycle
slows. My hope flares. Please help me, my eyes beg, despite my heart pulsing sickly in my throat.
Vincent's grip tightens, and new tears follow the old. A hurt gasp escapes between my lips.
“Shut up, snatch,” Vincent growls over his shoulder.
Even sitting down on his bike, the man is huge, bigger than the gang creep with his hand on me. His eyes meet mine.
Vincent postures, and he's dangerous. In my mind's eye, he's like a rooster strutting around in the chicken coop.
This man filling my vision doesn't posture. He oozes danger.
His gaze flicks to Vincent.
“Fucking Road Kill mofo,” Vincent seethes from between his teeth and spits in the direction of the man. His snotty loogy hits the sidewalk in a gross stream, and I shudder.
The stranger frowns, his bike slowing to a crawl.
Road Kill? I have time to wonder, then he's rolling the great bike to a stop and flipping the kickstand out with the heel of his black boot. The metal tip hits the cement with a final-sounding click.
The bike settles, and the rider sweeps his leg over the seat before hopping to the curb with a grace that has my mouth hanging open.
Up close, his coloring is even more fair than mine. He's like a cool, smooth walking glacier of muscle and menace.
Maybe I shouldn't have begged silently for help. Maybe this is a prime example of jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
His eyes move over me in two seconds, lingering on my face a heartbeat longer, then he turns his attention to Vincent.
Vincent's free hand flexes into a fist. “You got a problem, Road Kill maggot?”
The stranger smiles at Vincent. The expression is so frightening, I take a step back.
I watch Vincent frown at my retreat. Without ever looking at me, he crushes my wrist. I yell helplessly, dropping to my knees.
“Oh God, please.” My hand struggles over his to release me.
“Let the girl go.”
That voice. It's deep. Articulate. Resonant. The tone strikes me like a wake-up chime, and I ignore the extreme pain, daring to look up.
His crystalline eyes are for Vincent—he never looks at me or acts like I'm even there.
I pant through the grinding white-hot agony of my wrist.
