A Brother At My Back

by A. J. Downey

  “Awww, dammit!” Reaver cried. “You did that way too soon. You gotta make fuckers like him suffer. Put the fear of God into ‘em a little.” He stuck his lower lip out and pouted but I was staring past him at Cooper who was writhing at the end of his bonds like he couldn’t get away from Silas fast enough, even though there was nowhere for him to go.

  It suddenly clicked. Why they called this place Point Nowhere.

  I shook my head at what Reaver had said, watching my ex, motionless and hanging, swinging slightly by virtue of inertia alone. The blood was falling from him in a wet spatter, seeping across the cement floor. I couldn’t hear the patter of it, my ears still ringing from firing the gun in the enclosed space. The vibrations still echoed on the air, reverberating soundlessly from the steel walls, sightless, soundless, but still palpable. Well, maybe that was just me projecting the magnitude of what I’d just done into the physical space. A way to psychologically rationalize to myself that this was, indeed, huge. Life-altering on a scale that I’d yet to comprehend and wouldn’t, until I had time to process.

  “You don’t fuck with a rabid dog and try to retrain it, you put it down,” I said, and turned to Cooper whose eyes were too wide, nostrils flaring and contracting with every breath, screaming muffled behind the duct tape, and the rage and pain surged again.

  My feet carried me across the cement floor but I don’t remember putting any thought into walking. I pressed the barrel of the empty gun into his cheek and I knew it was hot, I knew it would burn. He screamed behind his gag and started to sob, and I hissed at him, “Judas,” as I pressed the burning kiss of the barrel harder into his cheek.

  “She was so hung up on you and you knew it. You used it.”

  He shuddered and shook, the chains holding him rattling as he sobbed and I backed off in revulsion and turned to Reaver.

  “You can do whatever you want with this one,” I said, and I knew deep down inside exactly what I was doing by telling him that. I saw the monster move behind his eyes. The darkness and crazy rise to the surface that I knew instinctively was there. Psychopath, antisocial, sociopath, pick your flavor of disenfranchised crazy and I was sure Reaver had it. He was too charming for it not to be. He was good at making people like him. Even me, but I was less than a quarter away from my practicum and I knew there was broken to him, that he held a severely-cracked psyche inside.

  I dropped the gun back to my side and took two rushed steps back from Cooper Reese. I looked back to Reaver and told him, “Make him suffer like he made Delia suffer,” and it was like he lit up like a fucking kid on Christmas morning.

  “Fuck, I’m out of here,” Nox declared from behind me and I startled. I’d forgotten they were even there.

  “Me, too,” Rush said. “I don’t need nightmares for the rest of my life.”

  “I’ve had enough for one day, too,” Archer said, tiredly.

  “No way are you staying for what you just asked for,” Dragon said.

  “I don’t need to,” I replied and my voice was as cold as the falling snow outside. “I am so done.”

  32

  Zeb…

  I asked Nox to phone ahead to the club. We rode back to it in the back seat of the black Escalade the club kept for things like this. Archer drove, Rush sat shotgun, and Nox sat behind me and and Tiff in the third row of seats. Tiffany had retreated inside her own head and stared out the window on her side of the cage. I wanted to hold it together and wanted to hold her at the same time, but I knew the two were at odds with each other.

  She’d shot Silas at a pretty close range and was probably covered in all sorts of forensic evidence. We needed to deal with it, and quickly, which is why I’d had Nox call ahead.

  “Pull around back, eh?” I said to Archer when we got close to the club and he grunted. A wordless acknowledgment of what I’d said. That was just Archer, though. He was always a bit of a grump.

  I dismissed it, rather than being a bit of a dag for once. I was more concerned with getting home and hosed with Tiff. The mission was only half done. No one ever stops to think about the cleanup efforts or the after-effects of your first time killing someone. I wouldn’t be surprised at Tiff going bush for a while over this. I had my first time, but in the end, I was too much of an extrovert to stay away from people for too long. Tiff wasn’t the same as me, though. I was afraid if she went bush, she wouldn’t come back from it. I couldn’t tell which way she’d go, though.

  “Everybody out,” Archer declared when we pulled up on the track. Off to one side, Blue, Thirteen, and Data stood warming their hands over a fire in the pit.

  “Come on,” I urged Tiffany out of the back seat and toward the flames.

  “I don’t really feel like being social,” she said gently and Archer huffed a laugh.

  “Ain’t about being social, it’s about covering your damn tracks. Do what he says.” I frowned at him and made a motion behind Tiff like he should pump the brakes. He scowled back and walked away muttering some shit about amateur hour under his breath.

  Nox and Rush looked on in our direction with twin looks of worry plastered on their twin, but very different, faces.

  “She’ll be right,” I told ‘em and Nox nodded, giving his twin’s jacket sleeve a tug. They followed their older brother in the back of the club.

  “There they are,” Thirteen declared when we came ‘round the cage, then cheerfully said to Tiffany, “Best get to doing what you do, girl.”

  “What?” she asked, and her face smoothed out into confusion that almost looked like surprise.

  I worried about her. I think she was going into a bit of shock over what she’d done, but she was in good company. Wasn’t a soul among my bros that would judge her poorly for killing that wally.

  “Strip,” Data explained to her. “All of it, in a pile, right there,” he said and pointed to the snow beside her.

  “What? Out here?”

  “Don’t need you tracking DNA up inside the club, Sweetheart. Git her done and Zeb’ll get you into a hot shower in no time.”

  “Just trying to keep us all safe,” Blue said gently and captured Tiff’s eyes with his own. He had a way about him, calm-like, that tended to rub off on everyone else. Especially when the shit was flying.

  Tiffany nodded and stripped bare, shivering in the frigid snowfall.

  “Come on, quick,” I said and she trotted across the snow making a beeline for the outbuilding.

  She said through chattering teeth, “I hope there will never be one, but next time, remind me to murder someone in the summer.”

  I barked a laugh at her black humor and felt my shoulders loosen up with relief. If she were coping with dark humor, then she had the constitution for this. She would make it.

  I turned on the hot in the washroom and told her, “I’ll be back. Going to grab you a flannel and a couple towels.”

  She practically dove under the spray letting out a little “Ah, ah, ha!” at going from such an extreme cold to warm.

  “You good?” I asked, making sure, and she nodded, letting the water soak her hair.

  I made quick work of striding up the hall and keying my way back into my room. I went for the supplies in the top of my closet and took it as a sign that there were just enough of my towels left that I could shower with her. I stripped down fast and pulled on a pair of shorts to make my way back to her but when I entered the washroom, it wasn’t how I’d left her.

  She’d waited until I was gone but she’d finally cracked and now she sat on the shower floor, hugging her knees and sobbing. I set the things on the bench, locked the washroom’s door, and got in there with her, going to the shower floor and pulling her into my lap. Holding her while she wept and just letting her go, letting her cry. She earned a good cry, I reckon.

  * * *

  Sometime later, we were laying in my bed, nude and wrapped in each other, but I hadn’t tried to give my ferret a run. She didn’t need that. She just needed contact and hadn’t seemed to mind we were skin on skin.
We’d lain there silent for the longest time and was almost dozed off when her voice startled me awake.

  “Were you really shot?” she asked and I jolted. She raised her head from my chest and turned to look at me, her eyes wide.

  “I’m sorry!”

  “Don’t be, eh. It’s all good.”

  She studied my face for a long time and I felt my heart sink as she tried to sort through her tangled emotions. Seeing that asshole again had scrambled her but good. I patiently waited her out, waited for her to decide I really meant what I said and that it was okay to relax again. She settled, laying her head back down, fingertips playing along a scar on my stomach from a knifing when I was a teen.

  “Got knifed there,” I said and she stilled her fingers.

  “Where were you shot?” she asked.

  “My leg.”

  “Oh.”

  More silence, and I wished I could see her face and what she was thinking.

  “And the scar on your back?”

  “Glamorous tale that one,” I said.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Fell out of a tree when I was nine.”

  She laughed slightly and sighed. “The one on my ribs is where Silas kicked me with his damn cowboy boot. You know, the kind with the metal tip on the toe. Everyone thinks it’s a surgical scar because of the dots on either side from the stitches, but nope.”

  “What excuse did you give them that time?” I asked.

  “Kicked by a horse, fell into a barbed wire fence. They weren’t buying it, but I wasn’t about to tell them otherwise.”

  “Mm,” I murmured and traced fingertips over her skin, idle patterns from my dusty memory back when I wanted to make my dad proud before cancer took him and I got angry at the world.

  “I can’t stop wondering how this changes things,” she murmured.

  “It doesn’t. Not really. You’re changed, and you know you've changed but it’s not like you did anything in cold blood, eh. You did the world a favor.”

  “I don’t think killing anyone is doing the world a favor,” she said.

  “This time,” I said, tracing along the line of a scar on her side, “it was.”

  “I feel like I’m this awful person now,” she confessed, and I laughed a bit at the notion.

  “The fact you feel that way mean’s you’re not, eh. An awful person wouldn’t care if they were awful.”

  She pushed herself up and looked at me, “That is both incredibly smart and incredibly profound,” she said.

  I smiled one-sided, “I have been known to be both on occasion, I reckon.”

  She looked wounded, “I didn’t mean it like that!”

  “Hush now, Wahine. I know you didn’t.” I pressed her back down over my heart where I carried her always, now.

  She sighed out and asked, “You’re sure this doesn’t make me a monster?”

  “Nah, Wahine. You’re a monster-slayer if anything. You brought your friend justice, today.”

  She sniffed and I felt bad for bringing Lia up. She shuddered against me and I put my arms around her to hold her through this fresh storm of tears and man, I wished I could take her pain away.

  33

  Tiff…

  I’d done a lot of hard things in the last few days. Watched my best friend die, murdered her killers in a fit of righteous anger, wrestled with the feelings over that, but by far, worse than the second was telling Zeke, Alan, and the rest of the girls that Lia wouldn’t be coming back.

  I’d had to go back to work. I had to behave normally, and part of behaving normally when you were a stripper for a living was that the bills stopped for no one and nothing. So I was back at work, and staring at my reflection in the boudoir mirror, thinking I was looking at a ghost.

  The girl in the mirror didn’t exist anymore, did she? I mean, she looked the same as ever but ‒ the things I’d seen, the things I’d done. I wasn’t the same and I wasn’t sure how I could keep pretending that I was. The lace mask wasn’t all that effective anymore now that I wore a mask every day for completely different reasons. I had an alter-ego for real now. One of violence, baptized in blood. One of self-confidence that I had to hide behind a veneer of fragility and anxiety that I honestly didn’t feel even half as much anymore.

  There was something about killing the man that put you through hell that was a confidence boost like no other. If I could survive Silas Grable, I could survive just about anything.

  I turned my head as Alan sat himself down in the chair that Delia had always dropped into to chatter at me from while I fixed my mask and makeup for the next set. Typically, she’d sat there waiting for her turn at the mirror. It hurt, a raw, burning, aching hole in the center of my chest that she would never sit in that chair again. Would never insist I watch her dumb Hallmark movies, or ask what flavor of ice cream sounded good for that night. Would never plan a shopping trip or insist we go out and try some new thing. Last time, it had been a wine and paint night. I’d told her no, I’d had a paper to write. Now I regretted saying no, at not taking the chance to create that memory when I’d had the chance.

  “I know that look,” Alan said, leaning in and speaking in a confiding tone.

  “What look?” I asked, genuinely perplexed.

  He gave a gusty sigh and said, “You can’t stay here anymore, kid. You’re too good for this place, for one, and two, if you tried to stay I’d be afraid of the toll it would take. Delia is too much a part of this place and everywhere you look, she’s going to be there. Besides, your heart’s not in this,” he looked around and sighed heavily. “Which brings us back around to number one; you’re too good for this place. It’s time for you to move on. You’ve got options for that now.”

  I stared at him a little wide-eyed and didn’t immediately know what to say, but what I knew not to do was argue because he spoke the truth. Everything he said had been doing lazy circles in my mind all night. My shift was almost up. Nik would be coming soon to pick me up and I straightened up a little and said, “It won’t leave you too short? On dancers, I mean.”

  I mean, Lia wasn’t coming back and if I left now… that was two; one girl had come up pregnant and was going to have to knock this shit off once she started to show, which was going to be sooner rather than later with how far along she was. Would have been nice if she’d ‘fessed up to being knocked up sooner so Alan could have started looking sooner but that was how a lot of these bitches were… not exactly long on smarts, never thinking beyond their next payday.

  “Not your place to worry about that, kid. I’m the boss, remember?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said and looked down. I opened my mouth to ask for something and closed it, shaking my head.

  “Spill it,” he ordered.

  “You’re not my boss now,” I said and he grinned.

  “I haven’t fired you yet and you haven’t said ‘I quit’ so let me milk it for the last few seconds I can, huh?”

  I laughed a little and tried not to get teary. This was more painful than I expected it was going to be. The whole idea of leaving.

  “I was, ah, wondering if I could save the last dance for someone special,” I said.

  “Depends, is that someone me, Zeke, or a certain tribal-tattooed motherfucker that quite frankly, scares the living daylights out of me?”

  I smiled and laughed slightly. “It happens to be that last one,” I said.

  “Let me ask you something.” I nodded, listening. “He takes real good care of you?”

  “Words cannot describe,” I told him. “It’s everything it’s supposed to be and more if that makes sense.”

  He nodded slowly and reached up, tipping my chin with light fingertips. He flicked the pad of his thumb along my jaw in a feather-light touch that was so barely there it might as well have never been at all. The weight of the moment felt very father-daughter like and I kind of held my breath, enjoying it for the moment. I guess, if I had to be honest, even though we weren’t far apart in age enough for him to be
my dad, Alan was the closest thing to one I’d ever really had. It added another unexpected layer of ow to the whole I-was-really-leaving thing.

  “He treats you the way you deserve, so yeah. You can save the last dance. Just let me know when you want to go on and what song. I’ll let Drake know.” Drake was our DJ.

  I nodded and said, “Thanks.”

  “Just get on out of here and do well with whatever you do with your life from here on out.” He pushed himself to his feet. “Succeed. That’s all I ask.” He looked me over, his eyes roving over my face and he sighed. “While I’m sorry to see you go, I’m so happy you’re leaving. I really mean it when I say you’re one of the best and far too good to stay here.”

  “You make my mascara run, we’re gonna have problems boss.”

  He smiled and said, “Not anymore. You’re your own boss, now,” and with that, he walked away, down the hall, carrying on straight before making the turn and the end and heading up the back stair to his office.

  “Crap,” I muttered, snagging tissues out of the box on the table and pressing them to my eyes.

  There was nothing for it. I cried like a little bitch. At least these weren’t tears of heartbreak, though. Bittersweet, but definitely not broken.

  34

  Zeb…

  “Hey, bro,” I said kindly, with a nod to Zeke.

  “You don’t have to stop up front, you know,” he said.

  “Ah, nah, yeah, I know. I wanted to. Wanted to see how you were doing.” He gave a shrug and shook his head, mouth drawn and grim. I nodded and he moved the frayed rope aside.

  “Since you’re here, you might want to get in there. It’s Francesca’s last dance.”

  “Thanks, bro. I reckon I owe you a cold one some night.”

  “Maybe after the weather warms up,” he said, but though it was meant to be humorous there was no humor in it. Delia being gone hit Zeke harder than anyone realized and it didn’t take a genius to realize that he had been as secretly infatuated with her as she had been with that Cooper bloke.