I could finally take Doug down.
"Gotta let them come in," I told my brothers, all of us instinctively moving around, finding spots to prop ourselves that provided both the element of surprise and protection.
"Is anyone hit?" I asked in a low voice.
"No," Hatcher answered.
"Just a graze on my thigh," Calloway told me. "Is your arm bad?"
"Flesh wound."
We fell silent then, waiting.
I would never know what went through their minds in those minutes. All I knew was what went down in mine.
It was mostly disappointment.
At the waste.
At the loss of life.
At the way everything goes to shit when the most vital, basic rule of brotherhood gets broken.
It was just such a fucking waste.
And it was all because of Doug.
Though it had never been spoken, I knew my brothers knew to leave him to me. That I needed to handle him. That it was my place to make him pay for what he had done.
The bikes cut off just outside the front door.
I swear you could hear guns cocking.
Really, it was a trap and they should have known it.
Yet in they stormed anyway.
Cocky and stupid and far too easily picked off.
It was over in a matter of two minutes.
Yet where there should have been silence, there was a woman screaming.
I didn't recognize the voice, but I sure as hell recognized the name she was screaming.
"Sera!"
"Fuck," I hissed, moving on pure instinct, stepping over bodies in my rush to get to my old room, finding the door locked. I wasn't even aware of the thought that told me to do it, but my foot rose, kicking the door in.
There they were on the floor beside the half open closet door.
Sera was curled up on her side, the woman who must have been Joey curled over her, hands pressing.
And those hands were covered in blood.
"She's hit?" I asked, dropping down beside Joey.
"Don't touch her!" she shrieked, throwing herself over her sister's body.
"It's okay. That's Thayer," Sera's voice consoled her sister, but all I could hear was the hiss of her voice, the pain there. "He's going to help," she added, trying to press up.
"No, don't move. Joey, make some room. I need to look," I demanded, nudging her with my arm, not even feeling anything despite doing so the arm with the graze wound. My mind was too focused on Sera and the blood soaking through her shirt to give a shit about my superficial wound. "What the fuck are you doing here?" I hissed, mostly to myself as I yanked up her shirt, seeing the ugly gunshot wound at the lower outer side of her stomach.
"I had to save my sister," Sera told me, eyes wincing.
"I told you I would save her. You should have trusted me," I told her, voice softer than I expected it to come out. "Take a breath," I told her just a second before swiping some of the blood off her skin with her shirt. "I know," I said as she yelped, body jolting. "Okay, this has to come out. But it's not that bad. It feels worse than it is. It's not deep."
It had torn through a wall before it had hit her, thank God.
"She needs to go to the hospital!" Joey insisted through tears.
"I can't," Sera insisted even as I opened my mouth to say the same thing.
The hospital meant there would be questions about how she'd gotten shot. There would be cops. Speculation. The possibility for saying the wrong thing.
If I thought it was necessary, I'd take her. Of course I would. But once the bullet was out, it would just need a quick stitch. I'd been stitching my own wounds since I was still falling out of trees as a kid. I'd gotten pretty good at it.
"Joey, go get vodka," I demanded. "Joey!"
"Don't yell at her," Calloway's voice scolded from behind me. "I'll get it."
"What aren't you telling me?" I asked when he came back with the vodka and a stitch kit, sitting there watching my profile.
"He's not here."
"Who's not here?"
"Doug."
Fuck.
Things had happened too fast.
I hadn't had a second to realize that fact myself.
"Get out there and keep an eye. And be careful by that basement door," I reminded them. "We'll handle that after this," I added, uncapping the vodka, pouring it over my hands.
"Mother fucker!" Sera shrieked when I poured the vodka over her skin without warning. I found it was more merciful that way.
"You're alright," I assured her, cleaning the tweezers. "This is going to be over in two minutes." I pressed one palm into her far shoulder, holding her against the floor. "I'm sorry," I told her when her pained gaze held mine.
Then, without any more delay, I dug the tweezers into the wound.
If I lived a hundred years, I was pretty sure I would hear her screams in my nightmares until the day I died.
At some point, Joey moved in, cradling her sister's head, murmuring little nothings as I finally dug out the bullet, then started stitching.
"She passed out, sweetheart," I told Joey when she started shrieking her sister's name. "Let her stay out. It's kinder this way."
"I did this to her!" she cried, body crumbling much like her spirit.
"So did I," I told her. It wasn't much for sympathy. But I was always someone who called it like it was. We'd both had a hand in why Sera was in this clubhouse on this night, catching a bullet. That was on the both of us. I wasn't one for sugarcoating shit. We would both have to live with that fact. "Okay. She's done. Listen to me," I told her, waiting for her to pull herself together enough to meet my eyes. "You can break down later. I need your help right now."
"Okay," she agreed, nodding hard.
"I am going to put her on that bed. I need you to stay with her. If she wakes up, give her some of this vodka for pain relief. I will find something better for her later. Keep her down. She can not move around. And you need to stay with her. No matter what you hear going on outside there. You are safe now, okay? So there is nothing to worry about. Just take care of her."
"I will," she told me, a vow, as I reached out to lift the unconscious Sera, dropping her on the bed gently, watching myself as I swiped her hair out of her face, feeling something soft settle inside. "I'll take good care of her," Joey assured me. "I owe her that."
"I will come get you when everything is clear, okay?"
"Okay," she agreed, pulling the blankets up over her sister, barely even realizing I was there anymore.
Satisfied she was in the best care she could be for the time being, I walked back into the main area, finding Calloway pulling bodies toward the door while Hatcher watched outside, waiting for Doug.
"Is it just Doug missing?" I asked, feeling my stomach lurch a bit at all the carnage, all the lives lost over a stupid war.
"Yeah. And Roux."
"Block that door Hatch," I demanded. "I think Bea must be downstairs with Roux," I told him at his raised brow. "Might need all-hand-on-deck to end this."
Though all of us knew that this wasn't over until Doug was taken care of as well. But that was a problem for another day. Today had enough of them already.
Each of us checked our guns, then made our way to the basement door, Cal unlatching it, then pulling the door open for me to head down first.
"Roux!" I called since there was no way we were surprising him with how loud the stairs creaked under our weight as we descended. "Don't make this get messier than it has to!" I called, glancing around, suddenly thankful none of us had ever been pack rats, that the space was mostly clean and open. "Roux..."
Then there he was, sliding out from behind the heating unit, hands up, though it hadn't escaped me that there was a gun in one of them.
As if sensing my mind going in that direction, he slowly folded forward, pressing it down onto the ground, kicking it away.
"This is not how you think it is," he told us, shaking his head.
&nbs
p; "Not much left to interpretation when your men mutiny against you, take over your club, and shoot your brothers."
A muscle ticked in Roux's jaw, anger, maybe?
But why?
"Where is our sister?" Calloway demanded, voice barely holding onto his anger, his bone-deep worry.
"Let me get her," he said, voice careful, like someone talking to a scared dog in the middle of the road, coaxing, reassuring. "Hold on," he added, going back behind the heating unit, and I could hear the hiss of the door opening even as Roux moved back.
If I wasn't mistaken, there was trepidation in his eyes.
I couldn't understand why.
Until my baby sister came barreling out from behind the heating unit - a bat out of hell - ninety-seven pounds of pure, undiluted fury.
Aimed at Roux.
"You bastard!" she shrieked, cocking back, then landing a right hook to Roux's jaw, sending his head whipping around. He didn't try to stop her when she slammed her hands into his shoulders. He could have. Easily. Restrained her at least. But he just stood there, taking the abuse as she continued to hit him. "I hate you! I fucking hate you!"
"Bea..." Calloway's voice called, a little hesitant, unsure, none of us understanding what was going on, why she was so angry with Roux.
To that, Bea's head whipped around, her face falling, then freezing, almost uncomprehending our presence for a full minute.
Then, all that rage she had been aiming at Roux suddenly got turned on me.
"You fucking asshole!" she yelled, charging me, landing a punch to my gut with enough force that I folded forward slightly.
"Bea, what the fuck?" I hissed, grabbing her fist when she tried to land another punch, holding it suspended in the air.
Then, well, this hard-ass, tough-as-hell girl simply... shattered. Right there in front of me, crumbling down to the floor, cradling her face in her hands.
"You let them take me!" she choked out between sobs.
Cal, Hatch, and I all shared a look, lost, having no idea what was going on.
"She never betrayed you, you fucking morons," Roux informed us, reminding us he was even there.
"What the fuck is going on?" I demanded as Cal dropped down next to Bea, reaching out for her, only to be slapped away as she curled deeper into herself, her sobs silent, but still racking her body violently.
"How the fuck could you leave her here?" Roux accused, fury plain on his face. "She was a fucking child, and you left her here to fend off the wolves."
Shit.
Shit.
Shit.
I was such an asshole.
Calloway was right all along.
Our sister hadn't betrayed us.
She'd been forced to let Doug run things.
"How could you leave her to try to deal with Doug herself? Do you have any fucking idea how twisted that bastard is? What he wanted to do to her? What he was going to let the others do to her?"
My stomach rolled. He didn't have to say it. I knew exactly what he meant.
"How..." I started, but wasn't even sure I had the right words, the right questions. My head was fucking spinning.
"Why does she hate you?" Calloway asked, recovering faster than I could.
"Because the second I realized what was going down in here, I locked her in the fucking basement."
My mind circled back to Sera telling me about the men at the club, the fact that two of them were always guarding the basement door. One was an older guy, one of the bodies in the front room. And one had been Roux.
"She's been living in the basement for almost three years?" Hatcher asked, trying to wrap his head around this new reality.
"I'm not saying she didn't try to tunnel out, but yeah," he told us, shoulders sinking a bit. "Doug wouldn't let her leave. But I couldn't let her out. I... she needed someone to look out for her."
"Why should we trust you?" I asked, not as willing to trust anyone as I maybe had once been before everything changed.
"Ask her yourself."
My gaze went back down to my sister, no longer crying, but with her arms wrapped around her body, literally trying to hold herself together.
Reaching out, I handed my gun to Hatcher before lowering myself down, reaching out, snagging her chin, dragging it up.
"Bea... what the fuck happened after I got locked up?"
To that, her eyes closed tight, like she didn't want to look at me. A fact that cut deeper than I could have anticipated.
"Zack and Six and Doug came back in. That day. The day they shot Cal and Hatch," she told me, voice low, barely audible in the empty space. "And he told me I was going to let him run the strip club. I... I tried to tell him no."
"Of course you did," I agreed, able to picture it perfectly. The hellion wrapped in a eighteen-year-old's body. There was no way, if she didn't want to hand it over, that she would have offered it over without one hell of a fight.
"But then he..." she trailed off, taking a deep breath, likely hating the weakness in her voice, because when she spoke again, her tone was strong. "He told me all the ways he and the guys could convince me to let it happen. That was when Abe got between us. He said that I was like a daughter to him, and he was not going to let anything happen to me."
"Doug told everyone that should any of them find her alone, they got to do whatever they wanted to her. You wouldn't believe how disloyal those motherfuckers were," Roux spat. "We were the only two to step up, to stand against him on this."
Any reservations or regrets I may have been feeling about the bodies upstairs disappeared. My only regret was that it was fast for them. If those bastards had been willing to rape my little sister? Yeah, they deserved a slow, torturous death. They deserved to have their throats bleeding from begging for their lives. They deserved an agonizing slow trudge toward hell.
"Sera said you were guarding the door," I said, looking at Roux.
"Joey's sister," Roux remarked, face darkening. "Didn't realize you had an inside man."
"We didn't. Not until a few weeks ago. She needed help. We needed help."
"If only you would have remembered that you had one man in here you should have fucking known you could have trusted."
"No one stood up, Roux. No one tried to stop him from taking over."
"Turns out, he'd been working on turning them for years, Prez. Years. We all missed it until it was too late. What did you want me to do? Stand up to him and die on the spot, or pretend to go along with it, so I could protect your sister?"
To that, there was a snort from Bea, but she was too preoccupied scrubbing the tears off her face to say anything, making me shoot Roux a brow lift.
Why does she hate you so much if you were protecting her?
"Long couple of years," he told me with a shrug. "Stubborn ass woman."
I felt my head jerk back at that.
Woman.
When I'd left, she'd been a kid.
Yeah, technically an adult, but just barely. And only by the numbers. She'd been a headstrong, impulsive, impossible slip of a girl.
If Roux had been the gatekeeper, the prison warden to her back then, yeah, I could see how shit had gotten ugly, complicated, how three years could have felt like an eternity.
"I need to go," Bea declared, jumping to her feet, a ball of anxious energy. "I have to get out of here," she added, voice taking on an edge of desperation.
Everyone's eyes went to me, waiting for instructions.
I couldn't have realized how much I missed it, being in charge, having others look to me.
God, it felt good to be back.
Even if what I inherited was a giant clusterfuck of a situation.
"We got a lot of shit to handle, Bea. But if you want, Cal can take you out for something to eat. But I am going to need his set of hands. We have a lot of cleanup to do."
"Let's go," she declared, brushing past all of us, charging up the stairs, pausing a bit at the last one, hesitant to escape her prison.
But then Cal was behin
d her, and the two of them charged out alone.
"We're trusting him?" Hatch asked, jerking his head toward Roux.
"For the time being," I decided. "If he's willing to work."
"If by work, you mean burying that fuckhead and the bastards who chose to follow him, then yeah, I'm willing to work."
"That fuckhead wasn't among the dead," Hatcher told him.
"He never showed up," I added.
"He's a chickenshit," Roux spat, following us up the stairs.
"Joey, how you holding up in there?" I called through the door.
"She's okay," she answered. "She had some vodka. And she's awake."
"And she can speak for herself," Sera chimed in.
"Yeah, guess she is okay, huh?" I called back, chuckling. "I just need you guys to stay put for an hour or two. I will come get you when you can come out. Let's do this," I told Hatcher and Roux.
With that, we jumped into the dirty work, Roux going out back to get a couple wheelbarrows and shovels. Bodies were hauled into them, dragged off.
I hung back on the first round, fishing bullets out of walls, wiping them down, putting them in a bag to be disposed of, sopping up blood with a mop and rags.
The next round saw me and Roux burying.
Then when Calloway came back with a surly Bea who locked herself in her old bedroom where we could hear slamming and crashing as she likely tried to get all the shit out of the way that had been moved in by one of the guys who took over the space in her absence.
Cal did a trip with Roux.
Not once did he bitch about always being on the digging, the burying even though I knew every muscle in his body had to have been screaming from the hard work. I wasn't one-hundred-percent sure of him yet - hell, maybe I would never be one-hundred-percent sure of anyone outside of family again - but he was proving his willingness to take orders. That was something we all appreciated when the two hours I mentioned to Sera and Joey turned into six.
But around three in the morning, the clubhouse was clean, we had all showered and tossed our clothes in the washer with more than enough bleach, Hatcher had taken a ride to ditch the guns and bullets, and we could all finally take a breath.
"She passed back out?" I asked, voice low as I made my way into my old bedroom, finding Joey on the bed, shaking, likely detoxing, but watching her sister a little anxiously.
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