“Fuckin’ animal!” I roar, pounding into his meaty torso, one punch following the next so fast Ogre lets out a series of grunts which sound like the rat-a-tat of a machine-gun. They were leaving. Goddamn, they were leaving, which means I could’ve missed them, which means he would’ve had Callie and my daughter. God fuckin’ damn it.
Ogre pushes me away. The man’s strong. I stumble back into the wall. Down the hall, nurses are screaming. Somewhere off to the left, Callie is screaming. But I hear nothing but Ogre’s grunts. His face is twisted in pain from my strikes. He comes at me with a big right hook, which, if it connected, would kill me. Not just knock me out, but kill me. But he’s slow. I dodge it, and he hits the wall instead. He punches straight through the wall, throwing plaster and wood everywhere.
I spin around behind him, jabbing him twice in the back of his head, then landing a haymaker just as he turns around, smashing him in the nose and sending him to his knees. His nose makes a loud, sickening crunch noise and he brings his hands to his face, bleeding through his clasping fingers. I take out my Eagle and lay it against his head.
“You threaten my fuckin’ family?” I growl, pressing the barrel of the Eagle firmly into his forehead. “Kidnap my fuckin’ daughter? Take my fuckin’ woman? Betray the fuckin’ club?”
I stroke the trigger, getting ready to send his brains against the hallway wall, getting ready to see the big lump of shit collapse.
“No,” Callie says. “Damien—no.”
“No?” I laugh, my voice gritty from the ice and the rain and the stress and the possibility of losing my family before I ever really experienced what it was like to have one. “No? Callie, this piece of fuckin’ shit—”
“Deserves to die,” Callie says. “But if you kill him you’ll go to prison. People are watching. There are cameras. They will show that he was on his knees when you pulled the trigger. It won’t be self-defense.”
I growl again, but I know she’s right. Fuckin’ hell.
I lean down, gun still pressed against his head, and hiss into Ogre’s ear: “Where’s Tinhorn’s money, you fuckin’ giant sack of shit? Let me tell you somethin’, I can do the fuckin’ time for killing you. It ain’t a thing to me. So if you don’t tell me where Tinhorn’s money is, you’re a fuckin’ dead man.”
I expect him to put up a fight, but the tooling up has made him realize that he’s human, and he tells me where the money is in a shaky voice. Buried deep next to the flowers just outside the club. All this time, buried right under my feet.
“Callie,” I say, standing up and keeping the gun trained on Ogre. “Call the police.”
Callie leaves the hallway, and returns in a few moments with a sleepy-eyed cop. The cop pulls his weapon and trains it on me, and then Callie explains who I am, what the situation is, and he trains it on Ogre, instead. I step back and put away my gun, but the cop won’t let me join Callie until backup arrives, just in case. So for about ten minutes Ogre and I kneel side by side, hands on our heads.
Then a cop called Wesson arrives and Callie explains the situation to him. Ogre is handcuffed, and I’m allowed to climb to my feet. I swear, the quick hug which Callie and I share is about the sweetest thing I’ve ever felt in my life. As the cops drag Ogre away, he roars over his shoulder: “Vengeance is mine, and retribution. In due time their foot will slip, for the day of their calamity is near. And the impending things are hastening upon them!” He’s still roaring when they take him out into the parking lot, his voice mixing with the rain and the sirens.
Callie, Officer Wesson, and I go to the Gertrude’s room. Callie rushes to Alice, picks her up, and hugs her close to her chest, kissing her on the forehead. “I think Ogre might have given her something,” she says. “She’s too calm.”
Officer Wesson goes and finds a nurse, and Alice is looked over.
The three of us sit in the waiting room, in the dim yellow light. I look at myself in the reflection of the vending machine, at my ragged, crazy beard, my wide black eyes, my soaked-through clothes. Then I turn to Callie, and she is smiling at me, even if it is a tired, exhausted smile.
“You protected her,” I say. “You protected our daughter.”
She laughs without humor. “I did what any rodent would do.”
“No.” I lay my hands on her hands, squeezing them tightly. “You did what any damn good mother would do.”
Now she smiles for real. Officer Wesson takes me away for questioning, and it’s the first time in my life I’m not pissed off by talking to the police.
When we return—Officer Wesson couldn’t find any holes in my story—Callie is holding Alice in her arms once again, both of them asleep, snoring sweetly. I sit down next to them, watching over my family.
I can sleep later.
Epilogue
Damien
I wake up on a sunny Sunday in July, in our house in Leawood, to the sound of Callie frying bacon. For a while I just lie here, listening to the sizzling of the bacon, letting the smell waft in through the kitchen into the bedroom. Bacon on a Sunday morning, and the sound of Alice playing with her blocks in the living room, giggling and clicking them together . . . goddamn, but this is the life, even if it is exactly the kind of life I never dreamt I could have.
With Tinhorn’s debt money, and some of my own savings, I bought us a three-bedroom in the suburbs. Me, a suburb man, goddamn. But it’s fitting me better than I ever would’ve dreamed before all this started. I’m already beginning to give Gunner more and more responsibility, slowly transitioning out of the club. I reckon it’s time I tried something else, for my family. Maybe I’ll have a go at being a mechanic, or a doorman, or a bodyguard, somethin’ like that. But money isn’t a concern for at least a few years; my savings will cover us for a while, as well as my share in the club, even if it becomes a silent share. But I want to leave the club, ’cause I won’t have Callie and my daughter anywhere near that life.
I roll over onto my back, arm over my head, thinking about Ogre. He was shanked to death three months after getting to prison. Turns out one of the Specters’, a psychopath named Grizzly, survived the blast only to get chucked in prison a few months later on drug charges. When he found out Ogre was in prison—and when I put the word out that Ogre was the arsonist—he took his chance, and now Ogre is gone. Maybe he’s up in the sky with that God he loved so much, or maybe he’s just in a cemetery somewhere. Either way, he can never touch my family again.
I sit up when Callie walks into the bedroom, one hand on her hip, head tilted, wearing an apron and shorts and a tank top, still the sexiest, sleekest thing I’ve ever seen in my life, still capable of getting me rock-hard just by the sight of her.
“Morning, lazy,” she says.
Just outside the window, in the garden, Alice lets out a giggle and tosses one of her blocks across the grass. I look out on her, through the blinds, making sure she’s safe. The garden is empty but for her, and if anybody tried to harm her, I wouldn’t hesitate to throw myself through the glass.
“Morning, beautiful,” I respond.
She dances across the room, laying the plate on my bare chest.
I sit up, devour the sandwich, and then watch her for a while. She just sits on the edge of the bed, ankles crossed, looking like the sexiest woman alive.
“Damn, but I love you,” I say.
She blows me a kiss. “Love you, too.”
Then she squeals as I toss the plate onto the mattress and dive across the room, tackling her to the bed. I kiss down her belly, and she tells me we can’t, not with Alice just out there, and I tell her that I’ll just make her come, just once, and if any bastard tries to hurt Alice, I’ll break his neck.
She may be a mother now, a responsible woman, but there’s still a damn lot of lust in her, and when I talk about protecting our daughter, that really gets her going. She grabs my hair and pushes me down to her pussy urgently.
Callie
When I wake from my afternoon nap—an indulgence I’m ever grateful for�
��I wake up to a vase of flowers. For a second, I flinch, leaning back, remembering the thorny flowers and all the pain they brought. But thankfully, these are just red roses, and Damien has even sheared the stems, making them smooth. It’s little touches like that which make me sure nobody could ever take his place.
I walk through the house, still in awe that this is ours—in mine and Damien’s name—and that we have paid for it outright, no mortgage, something to leave to Alice one day. I make my way into the back garden. Alice sits on the floor, playing with her dolls and her action figures. She can’t decide if she likes the army men more than the princesses, and Damien and I are content with letting her make up her own mind. Damien kneels off to one side, his bike up on stilts, working at it with a wrench.
He wipes grease from his forehead with a rag and calls over to Alice. “Look, sweetheart, Daddy is a grease monster.” Then he juts out his chin, making his bushy beard look bigger, and goes, “Arrrggghh!” Alice always loves when he does that; she giggles, the most beautiful sound in the world.
Then Damien looks up and sees me standing there. “You sneakin’ around, Mommy?”
“You know me,” I say. “I am a rat, a mouse, squirrel, Guinea pig.” I dance over to Alice, who watches me with wide, loving eyes. My eyes, I realize, big and wide and brown. And I will make sure that those eyes see lots of good things, way more good things than me or Damien were ever allowed to see, and far fewer bad things, too. I kneel down next to her. “Mommy’s a rat, baby, did you know that?”
She grins up at me.
Damien starts working the wrench again, grunting, his powerful muscles shifting, the thorns on his arms moving as though they are real thorns, blowing in the wind.
And as I sit here, I think of the Movement, and Mom, and the running, and the pain; I think of love, and contentment, and a sense of belonging.
I find myself wishing I could climb through time and talk to that little girl who was forced to stand outside Master’s bedroom door. I know exactly what I would say to her. I have thought about it many times. Looking around the sun-touched garden, Damien’s bike glinting, Alice’s eyes full of love and life, I think of it again.
“Fight through the pain, because one day, you will be happier than you can even understand. I promise.”
THE END
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WICKED
Chapter One
Shayla Queene wondered if Sam Gardener’s disgusting leer was something that viewers could feel through the screen, or if that was a special delight that only she was privy to. She could read the thoughts blazing across his face as easily as if they were on a teleprompter, and she had to suppress a scowl as she approached him.
Sam grabbed the microphone from her hand, running his fingers through his trademark wispy gray hair. It seemed fitting to her that the weatherman at the station had hair that literally looked like a cloud.
“Thanks sweetheart,” he said, looking her up and down.
Shayla turned on her heel and stalked away. She hated how, just because she was an intern, he treated her with such condescension. As if it was that difficult to do the weather in Templeton! It was Oregon, for Christ’s sake. If it wasn’t raining, it was probably going to rain soon. How hard could it be?
But Shayla had been fetching coffees and microphones and whatever else the lazy asses at the station needed for the past year, so apparently that meant she was probably a useless idiot who deserved to be looked down on. Shayla scoffed, slipping back into her chair.
Her desk was at the back of the room, tucked away in the corner. For most people, it didn’t exist. She hadn’t even managed to score a desk until six months ago, when the other intern had quit out of sheer frustration. Damien had said it was because he wanted to try out something different, but she knew better. Shayla had thought of getting out herself a few times. How easy would it be just to give up on her dream of being a reporter? It was a tempting prospect.
Anyway, it didn’t feel like she had made any more headway than she would have if she’d sat on the bus and read out the newspaper to people all day. At least that way she might have informed a few people of what was going on in the world.
Now all she got to do was tell people when Starbucks was out of the soy, which had nearly made the news all on its own.
Shayla looked around for Naomi, the other news anchor. She was the only person at the station that Shayla got along with, even if Naomi did walk around in a cloud of her own hairspray. It wasn’t like Anthony, the other anchor, smelled any better. But Naomi was nowhere to be found. Odd, since she was usually the one person who could be counted on to be punctual. She’d had to assist the makeup artist more than once when Anthony had rolled up late, with only a couple of minutes left before he was due to be on.
Shayla checked her watch. They only had fifteen minutes until the cameras started rolling. Had Naomi come in while she was arranging the refreshments table, and snuck away in the meantime?
Shayla stepped over to one of the cameramen, Dave. “Is Naomi not here yet?”
He shrugged. “I look where I’m paid to look.”
That was helpful.
She tried the producer, Amy, next. “Hey, have you seen Naomi?”
Amy, a woman in her mid-forties who seemed to wear her headset even while she slept, chewed obnoxiously at the piece of gum in her mouth. “Have you seen my cup?”
Shayla furrowed her brow. “What cup?”
“Exactly. I’m dying of thirst over here.”
Shayla suppressed a groan and walked to the refreshments table, pouring a cup of coffee and adding the obnoxious amount of cream and sugar that Amy preferred. She brought it back to Amy and handed it over, opening her mouth to speak. Amy walked away before she even got a syllable out.
She approached Anthony next. He was Naomi’s co-anchor, so he should know where she was, right? Though most of the time Naomi was clueless as to what her coworker was up to.
“Hey, Anthony,” Shayla greeted.
He was known for having a temper, so Shayla took care to be soft with him.
He had his gaze angled down toward his phone, and didn’t look up when she spoke.
“Uh, Anthony?”
His gaze snapped up to hers, his eyes full of ire. “I heard you the first time. What?”
Shayla reminded herself to stay calm. That was the important thing. Calm.
“I was just wondering—”
Anthony put up his hand to cut her off, looking down at his phone. Then he shooed her to the side. Shayla shuffled awkwardly a couple feet away.
“Naomi’s not coming in!” he yelled.
Shayla turned her head to see Amy charging forward from the back of the room. “What?” She spat her gum into a nearby garbage can. It was a perfect shot. “What the hell is she doing?”
Shayla was wondering the same thing, but without the judgment. In its place was worry. Her fingers itched to pull out her phone from her pocket to text Naomi, but she’d only get yelled at if she did. Anthony, his royal highness, could do whatever he wanted—but the poorly paid intern could not.
Shayla began to creep away to the bathroom, but Anthony stopped her with another wave of his hand. “You!” he said, pointing at her.
Shayla frowned. It was as if he hadn’t noticed that she’d been trying to talk to him literally five minutes before.
“You can read, right?”
Shayla nodded.
“Good. Get up here and read the news with me.”
“You don’t get to make that call,” Amy interjected.
Anthony’s face hardened. “We’ll lose half our demographic if we only have me on. We need eye candy for the men.”
Shayla was pissed, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to turn down an opportunity to do some real work. Something that she’d actually worked toward in school. She
looked over at Amy, whose pudgy face was screwed up in thought.
“Fine,” Amy said finally. “But don’t mess it up.”
Though she had no plans of messing it up, she found that sentiment to be amusing anyway. What was Amy going to do? Fire her? She’d been thinking of quitting only moments before. There was only one way to go from here.
Shayla stepped up to the news desk and was thrust down onto the seat beside Anthony’s. The stylist, Meg, came at her with a fluffy brush and a hard frown. “It’s a good thing you’re naturally pretty,” she said. “Otherwise this would be a disaster.”
Devil's Due: Death Heads MC Page 16
