Butch

by Trent Jordan

  “You?” Axle said.

  Red Raven feigned ignorance, even laughing at the suggestion.

  “Me?” he said. “What, am I going to bore him to death with stories of an old man? No, I come with a much more foreboding threat.”

  “Not your words,” I said. “Your bullets.”

  Red Raven glared at me, but I could see the panic in his eyes. He knew that we’d caught him redhanded. He knew we’d kill him.

  “Because of you,” Axle said. “Multiple people are dead. Because of you, we could have lost many more lives. Because of you, the Fallen Saints have been allowed to thrive in a town where we had kept them under check. Tell us what you know, and we’ll make your death quick.”

  Red Raven glanced back at Axle, then at me. No longer was the “wise elder” that; I now saw the face of a man terrified to die, a man who was staring death in the face as close as he ever had. The presence of multiple Black Reapers was nothing in comparison to how close the Grim Reaper was.

  “You want to work under a president like Lane?” Red Raven said. His voice was as scared shitless as I had ever heard anyone’s in the club, let alone the eldest member. “You want to work for daddy’s boy? This club was great under Roger Carter. And who becomes president? The most tenured member? The wisest? Or the piss stain of a boy? The wrong fucking Carter?

  Neither of us showed any reaction. I briefly let my eyes glimpse over to the street. Patriot had made his way to whoever was on that bike. He was smiling, but I don’t think any of us expected this facade to last much longer.

  “He’s the president, Red Raven, and if you had your complaints, you should have said them to all of us in church,” Axle said. “Instead, you became a rat.”

  “I did not!” Red Raven growled. He was trying to keep his voice quiet, but it was breaking. Soon, we’d have to kill him just for the silence. “I recognized where the two clubs were headed. I recognized that the Black Reapers are a dying breed. The Fallen Saints may have terrible morals and ethics, but they’re survivors. And in a world like this, morals will only get you as far as those who play by them.”

  He looked over at me.

  “You may think I don’t know much about you, Brian, but I know more than you think.”

  The fuck does he know my name?

  “Don’t act surprised, I know who you are,” he said. “I know everything about everyone in the club. That’s the thing. A raven has a bird’s eye view. He sees things other people are oblivious to. And I just happen to be soaked in blood from all my years. You know what it’s like. You know how you have to fight, to scrap, to kill in this world.”

  I snorted. Nothing Red Raven was going to say was going to change my mind, but I also already knew that I would never forget anything said here tonight.

  “And Axle,” Red Raven said. “You and Patriot know that war offers no space for compassion. You kill to win. I had to kill my loyalty to the club.”

  “What do you know about the Saints?” I said.

  Red Raven shook his head.

  “Not a damn thing,” he said. “And at this point, it wouldn’t do you any fucking—”

  Red Raven never got to finish his words.

  As soon as he made it clear that he wasn’t going to tell us anything, I raised my gun, aimed it right between his temples, pulled the trigger, and dropped the rat to the ground with one shot.

  “No!!!”

  A shrill shriek came from the sidewalk. It confirmed my worst fear. Pink Raven just saw me murder his father.

  Patriot tackled Pink Raven, knocking a gun away from him, though he took a vicious punch from Pink Raven’s right hand. The delay was just enough, though, for me and Axle to subdue him. By the time we’d gotten over to him, Lane had opened the door, cursed loudly at the corpse by his front door, and then shut the door again. The entire scene was chaotic.

  “What the fuck was that for?!?” Pink Raven yelled underneath our weight, showing surprising strength.

  “Your father was a rat!” Axle yelled, grunting in between his words to hold him down.

  “You lie!” Pink Raven shouted. “My father would never do that!”

  “We have proof, Raven,” I said.

  It felt too insulting to add Pink right now. He’d just witnessed his father being killed, his own officers doing the job. I couldn’t imagine what he was going through.

  “No! No! No!”

  “Grab his gun, Patriot!” I commanded.

  Patriot, still rubbing his face, did as requested. We disarmed him, removing a knife and another gun, and then let him get on his feet. He screamed and shoved us, but he was done trying to hurt us. He knew he’d suffered the worst of it.

  “We have proof, Raven,” I repeated, my voice slightly softer than before.

  He looked past me, looked at his father, and sniffled as tears welled in his eyes.

  “Even if that is true,” he said. “You fucking murdered my father right before my eyes.”

  He glared at me, at Axle, at Patriot, and over our shoulder at Lane, who had emerged, standing in front of Red Raven.

  “I fucking hate all of you,” he said. “You think you’re fit to lead? Some fucking club this is. Killing its own goddamn members without any deliberation.”

  He spat on me. I didn’t react. I figured eventually, he’d run out of steam. He was almost certainly going to quit the club, but at least the saga of the rat would be over.

  “I’m sorry, Raven,” I said. “We had to do it.”

  “Bullshit!” Pink Raven said through tears. “Don’t ever fucking reach out to me ever again!”

  With that, he brushed past us, brushed past Lane, and knelt by his father. I brought Lane over to me, and the four of us watched in silence as Pink Raven appeared to say a prayer for his father.

  “The rat’s gone,” Axle said.

  “But at what cost?” Lane muttered, shaking his head.

  “We lose Pink Raven, we’ll be fine. If he goes to the Saints, at least we know—”

  “I don’t mean that,” Lane said, cutting Axle off.

  I knew what he meant.

  I knew word would spread very fast that we had killed one of our own. I knew that if we did not control the narrative, we were going to have a mutiny in the club. Even if we did, there were going to be dissidents.

  Pink Raven stood, having grabbed what looked like a cross from his father’s chest, and walked over to us. He looked at us with what I could only describe as pure hatred and venom before pushing past us and to his bike. When he revved it and peeled off, it really looked like a rocket taking off.

  “Lane, man,” Patriot said. “I think you better get the word out before he does.”

  “Yeah,” Lane said. “I know.”

  He sighed.

  “I just hope we didn’t solve one problem by creating an even bigger one.”

  Unfortunately, I was starting to think the fact that we had murdered Red Raven in front of his son had all but sealed that. I wished I had thought through this better, but I wasn’t a thinker. I was what I had just done.

  A killer.

  “Everyone go home,” Lane said. “Protect yourselves. But go home. We all need space to make sense of what happened.”

  “I’m not leaving you,” I said.

  “No,” Lane said. “I have to make some calls, anyway.”

  With Cole.

  “I need to make sure everyone associated with us knows what just happened.”

  I disagreed entirely with his decision. But it was not my decision to disagree with.

  “Stay safe, Lane,” Patriot said.

  May we all stay safe. It’s about to get a lot uglier from here.

  Thea

  I’ve been used again.

  I’ve been manipulated and treated like shit again.

  And I have no one to blame but myself for getting to this point.

  I paced my small apartment that night, completely sure that I would never see my camera again. At best, I’d head to the clubhouse at
some point, see Brian, and he’d point out that he had it somewhere in some corner of the clubhouse. I’d find it mangled and abused, just like my body and soul had been. Maybe that would be appropriate, after all.

  No, that’s not right. Brian is an honest man. He told you everything about his past, didn’t he?

  He said he’d get the camera back to you. You may not have had a choice in the matter, but he’ll bring it back. He has to.

  But reassuring myself of this was like reassuring myself that I could find another job after I got laid off. Even though some superficial signs were suggesting that it wasn’t an unreasonable assumption, that didn’t mean that the actual signs pointed toward the outcome I wanted. If anything, all I was doing was just making myself more naïve.

  I must have paced in that apartment for hours. It wasn’t like pacing was going to magically bring my camera back, and it wasn’t like it was helping me at all. Maybe walking would somehow reveal the answers?

  It wasn’t like anything else had.

  But I didn’t go on a walk. I didn’t feel safe in this town, and as fucked up as it was to say, I had to be ready if Brian came to me at some point.

  It was close to midnight when a loud knock came at my door. It was much too controlled and loud for it to be accidental. I peered through the peephole, saw a man so tall that his face was above the hole, and opened the door. Brian stood there, his arms crossed, and… without my camera.

  “Hey?” I said.

  It was a question because I wasn’t sure if he’d come by to give me bad news or seek something else out. One could never tell most of the time with him.

  “Hey,” he said swallowing. “Do you mind if I spend the night here?”

  I stepped back. Of course he could, but that seemed like a very sharp change from needing the camera for something of an emergency.

  “Yeah?” I said, again in the form of a question. “What’s going on, Brian?”

  Brian didn’t answer as he stepped inside. He took off his boots, left them by the front door, and walked slowly to my bedroom, the very one that we’d had sex only just a week or so ago. It was sort of wild to think that in that time, we’d been less intimate physically… and yet we’d actually gotten closer.

  His walk, though, was not the usual Brian walk. When Brian strode through a place, it was like he always knew his size and his presence. He never moved accidentally, and he was very aware of what he could do to people. But Brian now instead walked like a zombie, moving straight and without much cognizance for his surroundings.

  “Brian,” I said just as he sat on the edge of the bed. “Alright, let’s start with the simple question. Where is my camera?”

  “Where you last saw it,” he said. “In my motorcycle.”

  “OK, can you go get it?”

  He let out a loud sigh.

  “Not right now,” he said. “I’m sorry, but—”

  “Brian, don’t,” I said.

  I liked Brian, but I could not play games with the camera. I needed to know what was going on, and I didn’t care if it repelled the one person who treated me as Thea the human and not Thea the club sex doll. Shit, at this point, I’d just go to Arizona if I was going to have my own personal film work taken from me.

  Brian said nothing, though, remaining in place. I was tempted to go get the damn thing myself, but I was terrified at what a biker would do at someone else touching their bike. It was as intimate a part of themselves as anything else.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” I said. “At least let me know how it affects the club if you can’t tell me details. I was willing to be ignorant before, but when you take what’s mine, I need to know.”

  Brian looked at me with a haunted, heavy appearance in his eyes. For a man who freely admitted to murdering the brother of his ex-girlfriend and who probably did a lot of horrible things in his current role in the club, he sure seemed to carry a heavy weight in his face right now.

  “You don’t need—”

  “Brian!”

  He sighed.

  “I had to execute a member of the club tonight,” he said. “The camera footage that you provided gave me what I needed. But the problem is that not everyone understands what happened. Not everyone recognizes that we had to do what we did. So we need that camera to prevent the club from splintering apart.”

  “Not everyone understands what happened?” I said. “Surely that video, or that audio—”

  “The member’s son witnessed his execution.”

  Holy shit. I put my hand to my mouth and staggered back. I tried to imagine what it would be like to witness someone executing my father with my own eyes, and I couldn’t. I literally couldn’t bring myself to imagine such a possibility. Every time I imagined someone raising a gun to my father’s head, I saw him reacting in due time to protect himself. It was like my brain could not calculate something so incomprehensible.

  “This is what I told you before,” Brian said.

  Something in his voice and face had changed. It was very subtle, and I suspect someone who wasn’t listening closely would not have noticed. But I could definitively tell that what he had done tonight was affecting him on a very, very deep level, far deeper than perhaps anything else that had happened to that point. And he was trying not to show that not only to me but to himself.

  “I am a monster. I am not a good person. I was put on this Earth to do the dirty work that no one else is willing to do. I am willing to kill and to commit violence so that others don’t have to.”

  I did something very small.

  I put my hand on Brian’s.

  And for the briefest of moments, I thought I saw his eyes well. Maybe it was something I’d imagined. Maybe it was something my mind wanted to see, so it made me see it. But I really thought we were getting through the facade he’d put up.

  “It’s OK to feel whatever you’re feeling,” I said. “You did something unimaginably hard tonight. But you told me yourself that something bad would happen by tomorrow evening if you didn’t do anything. Maybe you killing this man saved many others.”

  Brian’s eyes definitely welled now. They were nowhere near crying; his reaction was like someone seeing the early, opening seconds of an emotional movie scene. But compared to other people, he might as well have openly started bawling.

  “You do monstrous things, but sometimes, we need the monster within to come out briefly so that the angels among us can move freely,” I said. “You are not a monster, Brian. Especially with the experience you have. And you may be trying to hide it from me, but I know you’re feeling remorse right now.”

  “I regret nothing,” he said, but he noticeably turned away when he said it.

  I wrapped my fingers tighter around his hand. He delayed a second, but he returned the gesture. This process of opening him up was taking an obscene amount of time… but maybe, in a way, it was also meant to make me open up some, to make me more at ease with myself.

  We were, after all, still two kindred, broken spirits spending time together.

  “That doesn’t mean that you don’t have empathy or sorrow for the son,” I said. “You may not feel much of it, and you may be able to hide it, but that—”

  “Stop.”

  I cut myself off. I guess I had poked and prodded a little too deeply.

  For a few seconds, I only held his hand in silence, listening to his heavy breathing as he fought to remain in control. I desperately wanted to know what the deeply scarred man before me was thinking. Was he trying to face the sorrow that he felt? Was he fighting it and losing? Or was he winning the fight? If he was, did he want to win that fight, or did he feel it to be a necessary evil?

  He squeezed my hand again. In the absence of words, it was impossible to pinpoint exactly what the gesture meant, but I chose to believe that it was his way of thanking me.

  He finally turned back to me. Though his eyes were devoid of water or tear streaks, they had not reverted to the cold, callous eyes of the Sergeant-at-Arms. I was not
looking at Butch, the Black Reaper, but Brian, the man. These were the eyes that I could work with.

  And for several seconds, we just looked at each other.

  I couldn’t tell you what I was thinking, because I wasn’t thinking of anything. I was just present. I was just losing myself into the soulful gaze of Brian Young, a man who, despite often trying to be less than human, treated me as more than human. I was captivated by those haunting yet yearning eyes. I was enveloped by his presence.

  Slowly, very slowly—I mean, so slowly that it might as well have been one of those movies where it seemed like an optical illusion that people were seemingly standing still—our faces came closer together. Eventually, we were separated by mere inches. I felt the urge to just reach forward, grab his cheeks, and pull him in for a passionate kiss. But I knew if I rushed this process, just as I overwhelmed him with my words, I would have done so with my actions.

  Let it play out. He will come around. But you have to give him the chance.

  And then, eventually, when we were so close that we could feel each other’s warm breath, he closed his eyes and brought his hands to my face. I did the same.

  And we kissed.

  Not as two lovers who wanted something more with each other. Not as two attractive people acting on carnal lust.

  But two broken humans, each of us assuring the other that they had company in this world. I was assuring him that despite all of the dark things he’d done, I still saw the good in his soul. He was assuring me that even though the world had tossed me to the corner of the room, to be picked up only by horny men, I still had value to the right man.

  We were what the other needed in that exact moment.

  The kiss lasted several seconds, but it never progressed past a very slow pace. I didn’t expect us to start having sex; the kiss wasn’t erotic or sexual, anyways. It almost would have seemed like the wrong thing for this particular night—sex would have been a physical and emotional pleasure, but pleasure wasn’t really what we were looking for right now.

  It was reassurance.

  I couldn’t quite say who broke off the kiss. I could only say that it felt like we both pulled back at the same time. When we opened our eyes, it almost happened at the same time.