by Hazel Parker
“And that’s the point!” Kyle said, pointing at me for emphasis. “They’ll figure out soon enough that we’re here. They’ll come here tonight. And then peace will come to me, either through death or through my brothers’ death!”
He started to laugh again. My initial reaction was to call him insane and say he was sick, but that wasn’t going to help at all. He would just agree, laugh some more, and then dismiss me for later. I hated to say it, but I had to empathize. I had to do the things I always made my characters do, the kind of thing that seemed easy in the novels but was much harder in real life—forgiveness.
“Do you think this is the only way you’ll find peace?”
I tried my hardest to make it sound like I was genuinely curious.
“I’m sorry?” Kyle said, the smile still on his face, but his tone one of confusion.
“You said you’ll either find peace through death or through your brothers’ deaths, right? What if there was peace some other way? What if, say, you moved away? Left all of this behind?”
“A noble idea. But a silly one.”
Kyle rose from the chair and raised his hands as if performing a grand speech before a captive audience.
“To run away would be to avoid the punches, but I would never avoid the punches in my mind,” he said. He sounded like the eighth-grader who was trying too hard to make metaphors work. “No matter how far I move away from Marcel and Jack, I will never be far enough away to escape their taunts and their words. No, I am tired of running away.”
You never really have run away, Kyle. He wasn’t just crazy right now; his entire sense of reality was being warped. And for what? Because I had chosen his stable and sane brother over him? Because I would have chosen almost literally anyone else over him?
I refused to believe this was my fault, but I vowed to myself that if I got the opportunity, I would do my part to help Jack get rid of Kyle. I prayed it didn’t end in death, but the more time that went by, the more inevitable that seemed.
“I will not leave. I have accepted tonight as my fate, one way or the other. I have embraced tonight, knowing that all of the torment of my mind, all of the trauma that I have gone through will finally find closure.”
“There has to be another way, Kyle,” I said. “Surely, there must be something that can be done to prevent this. Did killing your uncle help you at all?”
That Kyle’s immediate response appeared to be one of disappointment was all the answer I needed.
“Do you think killing your brothers will help? Your issues stem from within. And yes, I agree, you need to find peace. But there has to be something that can work. Something that can, I don’t know, ease your soul and your mind, as you say.”
Kyle seemed to take what I said to heart, looking at the ground, folding his arms, and digging deep into his mind—or what was left of it, at least. This most certainly was not the man I had met at the coffee house just a short while ago; that man, though awkward and traumatized, at least was a functioning member of society, perhaps even a contributing one. But now?
It was a tragedy, honestly.
Then Kyle looked up with a smile on his face. It was a creepy, unsettling smile—and also the exact same smile that he had given me at the coffee house. Back then, I had seen it as sweet, certainly a little off, but nothing more than just a quirk of his.
Now, though, it was outright terrifying.
“You are right,” he said, his voice sounding more and more uplifted by the minute. “You are right, Lilly Robertson. There is something that can be done instead of this.”
“What?” I said, even though I hesitated to ask the question.
He walked over to me, unfurled his hand before me, and tilted his head forward.
“Sleep with me, Lilly,” he said. “Make love to me. You are the woman of my dreams. You are the only person in my life who ever showed genuine interest. I know that the past few weeks have been confusing for you with my brother. I’m willing to look past the things that you have done if you will join me upstairs and pleasure me as I have so imagined pleasuring you.”
Icky didn’t even come close to describing how awkward this whole situation felt. Disgusting was an understatement.
And I wasn’t talking about Kyle’s words. I was talking about the fact that I even considered it all, wondering, in some way, if it really would prevent the violence that was all but inevitable. How sick was that? I was willing to sleep with the person who most disturbed me as some sort of bizarre sacrifice to save the lives of all the Stones.
But this wasn’t a book, where such a sacrifice could be made. This was reality. And even if I could rationalize sleeping with him, there was no way in hell my body could ever go along with it. It was a no, an absolute no, an unchanging no.
“Kyle, you can’t be serious,” I said. “You know romance doesn’t work—”
“I don’t care how it fucking works!” he said, exploding into my face and causing me to fall out of my chair. “I only care about you and me, Lilly. You are the rose petal of my life. You are the flower that puts the touch on my garden.”
What the fuck is he even talking about?
“All of this will disappear…if you allow me to show how I love you.”
Love? Love? Fucking love?
“This isn’t love, Kyle,” I said. “Love is what you build together, not separately. Love…”
I gulped. Fuck it.
“Love is what happens when you spend time together, when you support each other, when you know the other person better than you know yourself,” I said. “Kyle, you are still very capable of finding that love.”
Yeah, I was spewing some bullshit about his future prospects. But if I could make it sound authentic…
“You sleep with me right now, you kill your brothers, that’s only a temporary reward. You’ll still be unfulfilled. I’m sorry that you got dragged into this mess, and I’m sorry that Jack and you got caught in a love triangle of sorts. But I can promise you that if you put the effort in to find something real, something more…you can get it. But you won’t get it here. And you won’t get it on one date. It takes time.”
Kyle stared at me for a long time after that, and I almost wondered if the words had just gone so far over his head that he hadn’t even heard the last part of them. This wasn’t going to be that productive, anyways; it was a Hail Mary attempt of sorts.
“That sounds like something out of one of your books,” he said. “But I don’t care about other women. I don’t want a Stephanie, an Amanda, a Taylor, a Jackie, a Rachel, or anyone else. I want you, Lilly. So I’ll give you one last chance to pick better. Come sleep with me.”
“And if I do so, will you stop the violence? Will you tell Jack and Marcel that it’s over and that you won’t do anything more?”
Kyle snorted. It was enough to invalidate what he said next.
“Of course. The violence will cease immediately. And we will become one whole family again.”
Kyle’s last few words, of course, told me he was full of shit, but I already knew that. I took his hand and used it to lift me up.
And then I kneed him right in the groin and shoved him to the ground.
“You’re so full of shit, Kyle,” I said. “You think that you can just use sex for power? I feel so bad for you. You think tonight’s going to bring you peace. The deaths of your brothers would do nothing but bring you more heartache. You might think I’m full of it now, but when the moment comes and you realize that it’s going to be your last thought, you’ll know the truth. You wasted your life being an asshole.”
“Stupid whore!” Kyle roared.
He lunged to push me, but I easily dodged him. One guard had come to the entrance of the kitchen, ready to do whatever Kyle ordered, but Kyle seemed to prefer to keep the fight between us. Fine by me—it wasn’t like I believed I could win a fight against a man almost certainly over two hundred and fifty pounds.
“That’s the closest I’ll come to touching your junk, Kyle,” I said. “I li
ked you as a kid because I saw good in you. Even a couple of weeks ago, at the coffee shop, I liked you. You at least were empathic and were kind. Now? Now, I don’t know what to make of you.”
Kyle slowly rose from the ground, looked at me, and actually started to cry. It was a pitiful sight, honestly—pity was absolutely what I felt for him.
But then I felt fear that he was just going to lose his mind entirely and kill me for what I had done. I looked at the guard cautiously; he was stoic and unmoving, his rifle pointed down.
“I loved you, Lilly,” Kyle said. “I loved you! And this is how you treat me?”
I didn’t say a word. Nothing was going to satiate him short of sleeping with him, and that wasn’t something I was going to do unless I had a gun pointed at my head. And even then, I would resist every step of the way.
“You…you’re just like everyone else in my life. Say you love me, and then treat me like shit. Leave me for dead. Jesus. All of you are the fucking worst. The fucking worst!”
He then waved me upstairs.
“Go,” he said. “Go to my room. You’ll know which one it is. And don’t you dare fucking leave until I tell you to. Go! Before I do something more!”
I made a dash for the stairs as I continued to hear Kyle sob. I was leaving my laptop behind and all my work, but needless to say, that was taking a hard backseat to my life right now.
I found Kyle’s room easily; it was the most decrepit, the most worn-down, the least adorned. It took me a second to put it together, but I realized I had wound up in Kyle’s old childhood home. I shut the door and tried to lock it, but the lock was jammed and wouldn’t latch shut.
But I was alive.
And for right now, that was about all I had going for me.
Jack…I sure hope you have something planned. Because at this point, it’s absolute. It’s going to be someone’s final night tonight.
Chapter 19: Biggie
“So you’re absolutely sure about this?”
Richard looked me square in the eye, standing before all of the Savage Saints in the United States. If ever there was a spot for me to question my intuition, this was it. If I was wrong, literally every single member of the Savage Saints would know.
But I knew I wasn’t wrong. I knew my brother too well. I knew that he wanted to make a point.
He had gone home. He wanted to control the narrative of what happened in that home. He wanted the last thing in that house to be him killing both of us.
It was the most Kyle thing possible.
“Am I sure in that I have concrete proof? No. Am I sure in that I know my brother better than anyone in this room and what he wants to do? Yes. Without question.”
“That’s good enough for me,” Richard said. “I ain’t ever been the law, and though I got a good relationship with my sheriff, I’m not about to test the waters in a place I’ve never been to. In any case, then let’s lay out the logistics here. Marcel?”
“With pleasure,” he said, stepping to the front.
I was just happy to have finished my bit. I had contributed to avenging Uncle’s death; whatever happened here on out was up to a team effort.
“The neighborhood that my parents used to live in, the one that we all grew up in, has turned into a run-down, drug-infested hellhole that is home to many criminals and thugs,” he said. “I have little doubt that whatever Bloodhounds are leftover, Kyle has gathered them around and has put them in front to protect him. We should anticipate that when we arrive in the neighborhood, we will face a full assault. The police might show up eventually, but needless to say, given the neighborhood’s reputation, it’s not the kind of place that is going to get immediate help.
“We will need to use our bikes as protection, take out the Bloodhounds, and converge on the house. Knowing Kyle—and this is something I have discussed with Biggie—he is likely to be hiding in his room. Once we secure the main floor, Biggie and I will take him out ourselves. If one of us has to kill Kyle in self-defense, so be it. But if the option is available, this is something we need to do for ourselves.”
“Understood,” both Trace and Richard said at the same time.
I had to imagine they had gone through something similar. Needless to say, though, it wasn’t exactly an ideal topic to revisit.
“We will leave it up to each president to organize his men however he wishes,” Marcel said. “However, on a high-level plan, we will leave here at eight p.m. Neither of us is willing to wait until later in the night. We will fire upon the enemy until it is clear, and then we will converge on the house. BK, you and your men will clear the building first, since you have the most experience.”
An extraordinarily tall and muscular man, wearing sunglasses over a mustache, simply nodded. I was a VP of an MC, and that man intimidated me a little bit.
“Otherwise, we will leave the rest up to each respective chapter,” Marcel said. “Gentlemen. I appreciate you flying out here. I can never thank you enough for the help you’ve provided. Let’s make sure we do this right. For Uncle.”
“For the Savage Saints,” Richard said.
“For what it means to be one,” Trace said.
We dispersed at that point. I waited until the room had cleared and turned to Marcel.
“Still no mercy, remember?” he said.
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” I said. “He killed Uncle. He tormented Lilly, if not more. Lilly’s not responding to my calls anymore. At this point, if there is mercy, it’ll be in the form of a quick kill. Nothing more.”
Marcel patted my shoulder, squeezed, and gave a faint smile.
“There’s no one I’d rather go into battle with than you, brother,” he said. “Thanks for being you.”
“I could say the same right back,” I said. “But let’s get ready. Eight o’clock will be here before we realize it.”
* * *
The sight was unlike anything I had ever seen in my life, and that included the powerful image of all of the West Coast Savage Saints standing before our garage as it opened.
From various warehouses, connections, and unknown sources, we had procured enough motorcycles that everyone—over thirty of us, probably over forty of us—had bikes that we would take to the neighborhood. A few of the West Coast Saints bitched about how they weren’t as good as their own bikes, but it was mostly jesting sarcasm than anything serious. And besides, it wasn’t about the bikes—it was about the brotherhood.
Marcel, Richard, and Trace were at the front, with Marcel taking the point of everyone. Dom, Splitter—the Green Hills’ VP—and I flanked them on the right. The sergeant-at-arms—BK, Barber, and Niner—flanked them on the left.
And behind us, a whole horde of pissed off, vengeful Savage Saints officers, members, and prospects revved their engines, hyped and ready to roar into battle.
Marcel turned to his left, shaking hands with Richard. He did the same with Trace. He turned back to me and nodded, a gesture that expressed trust and faith in me more than words ever could.
And with that, his engine came to life, and the Savage Saints roared into our final battle with my brother.
The ride over came under a cloudy night, the moon bright but not fully visible. It felt like a storm would strike at any moment, but for now, the rain was at bay. There was no sound of thunder, but the tut-tut-tut of our engines produced its own kind. We were a storm of a different kind.
We moved past other traffic with ease, and every car was more than willing to acquiesce to let us go by. Perhaps some would have had the stupid idea of fighting back against a few bikers, but the sight of over three dozen bikers driving by, all in rigid, militaristic formation, was enough to subdue any man of rational means. It was just as well—we didn’t need to expend our energy on something that ultimately didn’t matter.
I started to recognize the old landmarks as we pulled forward. The barbershop that my parents would take us to. The kabob place that Marcel and I took dates to as teenagers. The winding road that essentia
lly served as a demarcation line between the normal part of Astoria and the more run-down areas of it.
And then, finally, the fifth stop sign along a series of intersections before we turned left. Left into our old neighborhood. Here goes nothing.
Marcel, Richard, and Trace all turned left first, and immediately, they reached for their guns and fired toward my old house. Whatever brief moment of nostalgia I would have felt vanished quickly under the cascade of gunfire that filled the streets. We quickly formed a sort of half-circle, using our motorcycles for cover as we laid down suppressing fire on the targets ahead.
It became readily apparent that while Kyle might have brought the full force of the Bloodhounds, he had not anticipated the entire Savage Saints army coming in to do the job. The Bloodhounds screamed about how there were “so many of them” and how “that’s not what the boss said would happen!” Although one of the members of the Green Hills suffered a wound that looked like it might kill him, the result was starting to be pretty lopsided.
“Jack!” Marcel yelled from the front. “I see a lot more in the old home. Clearing out that place is going to be a real bitch compared to this!”
“Then we better start moving in now!” I shouted. “No reason to play whack-a-mole out here!”
That game of mole whacking ended a little later, and as soon as silence had filled the air for more than five seconds, I ran with Marcel up to the entrance. But just before we got to the entrance, we heard laughter above us. I looked up and trained my gun at the sound, but I pulled back when I saw…
When I saw Lilly being held in a headlock by Kyle.
“Oh, is this your lady, brother?” Kyle said.
His hair was frazzled, his eyes glossed over. Kyle might have always been an asshole, but he had always held on to some measure of sanity. The Kyle I was looking at was not that Kyle; frankly, I’d already seen the last of the Kyle that could have been saved. This was what madness had driven him to be.
“You better not fucking do anything to her!”
“Oh?” he said, laughing as Lilly tried to pull away. She tried to shout, but she had something taped over her mouth. “Don’t you worry, brother, I haven’t done anything yet. Yet! Yet! Hahahahaha!”
