by Jordan Marie
“Well, to be fair, he doesn’t realize the training we’ve had,” says Katie. “I haven’t ever told him, or showed him for that matter… though that might change tonight, the damn bastard.” That last part makes me smile.
As they continue the meeting, I’m still smarting over being discussed in the same breath as Teena. The only part that makes me feel marginally better is when Skull denies having a girlfriend. That’s short-lived, however, when I remember back all those years when Skull told me he didn’t have girlfriends. I guess old dogs keep the same old fucking tricks.
As they reveal more and more, my mind goes into planning mode. Nothing about this is going to be easy, but it can be done. The hardest part will be getting away from the club to attack. Plus, Skull is planning on attacking Friday, which only leaves us tomorrow to do it before he gets the chance. Not much breathing time for sure.
“I know where the lake is,” Candy pipes up.
“I have a small john-boat we can load in the back of Briar’s old truck. I’ve been on the Green River. It’s pretty lazy, not a lot of current. We can put a trolling motor on there and be across the lake in no time,” Sacks says.
“We need a diversion, really,” Annie puts in. “Someone who can distract them and get all eyes on her while the rest of us make our move.”
“Damsel in distress,” Louise says, grabbing our attention.
“What do you mean?” asks Annie.
“She’s saying one of us can pretend to be stranded and distract them and get inside while the rest of us come up from the river,” I answer, seeing the plan unfold in my mind. This could really work.
“Especially if the woman who’s distracting has big boobs and a ready smile,” Katie joins in with a wry grin.
All eyes go to Louise, who is easily a double D, possibly larger. She’s pretty too, with dark black hair that falls in waves over her deep chocolate skin, which glistens. She could easily double for Sanaa Lathan.
“Do you know any self-defense? Can you shoot a gun?”
“And then some,” she says confidently.
I don’t like it. I wish I could be the one to do that part, but I’d be recognized immediately. This will have to be the way it is, I guess. My eyes go back to the phone when I hear Skull.
“Damn it, Torch!”
“Oh, shit,” Katie says, and we all watch the screen again.
“Damn you, Skull. You don’t know what Redmond did to Katie,” he growls. Katie gasps, and I reach around to hold her hand. “You don’t know what he let Matthew do to both of them!” Torch growls, and my heart stops.
“What does he know, Katie? What did you tell him?”
She looks over her shoulder at me with tears in her eyes.
“Almost everything,” she whispers, and I feel a cold splash of dread fill me.
No…
“Damn it, Torch!” I yell, distracted by the way Gabby is moving and shifting in my arms. She pulls herself up and immediately starts tugging on the gage in my ear.
“Damn you, Skull. You don’t know what Redmond did to Katie. You don’t know what he let Matthew do to both of them. I’m going, and the only way you can stop me is to put a bullet in me.”
His words makes my blood run cold.
“Matthew tortured Beth?” I ask, not even recognizing my own voice.
“Daily,” Torch growls. “Her and Katie both,” he delivers in a deadly calm, but it’s full of hate.
“Unka Torch!” Gabby squeals, pushing against me to try and get to him.
“Hey, kiddo,” Torch smiles, even if it doesn’t touch his eyes, and he reaches for her.
Bastard has no idea the knife he’s twisting in my gut right now. The wound burns white hot. Knowing my child chooses Torch over me kills. I’m still a stranger to her, despite being around her just as much as he is. She’s bonded with him. I want to scream at the unfairness of it. I’m her father! I should have been there for her first breath… her first tears, her first tooth, her first words… I’ll never get any of it back. Never.
Hate, anger, and rage burn inside of me as I turn in my chair to lower Gabby onto the floor. Her legs kick out until I make sure she’s standing strong, then she takes off running towards my brother. I watch as he scoops her up and her face explodes in happiness as she giggles. It destroys me. He blows on her stomach and makes noises, then kisses all over it. Gabby laughs louder and pulls on his hair when he stops.
“Uh-g-in! Unka Torch! Uh-g-in!” she shrieks, and he repeats. I watch until I can’t handle it anymore. I need to know what happened to Beth.
“Did he rape her?” I growl, and the room goes still. Even Gabby picks up the anger in my voice and buries her face into Torch’s neck.
“What do you care?” he asks. “You said you were through with Beth,” the bastard cockily shoots back at me.
“Did. He. Rape. Her.” I ask, punching each word singularly and with hardened anger. He’s about two steps away from feeling a wrath that I have never given one of my brothers before. The only thing saving him from being thrown across the room right now is the fact that he’s holding my daughter.
“Brother, you treat Beth like shit for the choices she made, but her choices saved my woman’s life. For that, she has my thanks and my loyalty. So, I’m not telling you. It’s Beth’s story to tell, and if she wants to tell you, then she will.”
“Everyone out!” I growl.
Silence rings through the room, except for little Gabby who whispers, “He mad.” Regret fills me. I don’t want her to see me as the monster I’ve become. I just can’t seem to stop it. I have so much rage boiling inside of me that it’s slowly killing me. Chairs begin scraping across the concrete floor as the men finally obey.
“Sabre, you take Gabby.”
“Sure thing, boss.”
Once everyone clears out and we’re left with just the two of us, we stare at each other in a tense showdown.
“Tell me,” I order, waiting.
Torch is silent and looks me over. I do my best to keep my face impassive, but I know I failed to lock down all of my emotion when he leans back and stares me in the eyes.
“You still love her.”
“That doesn’t concern you, motherfucker. Answer the question. La violo?”
He stares at me a few more minutes. Just when I’m about to go off, he answers, “No.”
Relief floods through me and I stand up. I need some fresh air. Shit. I’m lying to myself. I know I need to let out some of the anger inside of me… let it run free where no one can see me. That’s the only way I’m able to function these days. My thoughts immediately turn to Pistol. He may meet his end today like he’s been begging me for.
I’m almost to the door when Torch stops me. “Skull?”
“Si?” My voice is hoarse, the monster inside of me too close to the surface.
“There can be things that a woman endures. Things that are worse than or at least just as bad as rape,” he says, and any relief I felt earlier is gone in an instant. I’m left with a coldness that is deep and freezes me to the bone.
“What…” I clear my throat and try to breathe.
Before I can finish my question, Torch continues. “Whatever hell you blame Beth for putting you through, brother, believe me when I tell you that she paid for it over and over.”
“I don’t—”
“And her hell almost killed her, brother. It almost ended her. It was so bad that it caused the sweet innocent woman you fell in love with to take a man’s life. Think about that.”
I can’t say anything to him. I couldn’t if I wanted to. Mierda! Right now, I’m having trouble standing. It takes me a little bit to go over everything he’s told me. When I finally do speak, my voice is thick with emotion.
“She should have told me,” I growl, trying my best to hang on to my anger.
“Katie said Beth tried. She said Beth stood tall and faced the devil and told him to go straight to hell, even,” Torch says.
“Then why?” I
growl, frustrated.
“Redmond played his trump card. He showed her a video of you in the scopes of a rifle, telling Beth your life was in her hands.”
Fucking Donahues and their stunts they pull. I’m so fucking tired of the way they have manipulated and ruined my life.
“It still doesn’t mean shit. She should have…”
“Maybe so,” Torch agrees, again interrupting me. Fucking asshole. I don’t want logic—not right now. “But the asshole also dragged Katie out, bound up, crying, gagged, and having been badly beaten. A sister she loved. A sister that, up until that point, Beth believed was dead and lost to her forever. I think that might just tip the scales a little, don’t you? Especially if you’ve lived the life that Beth has, sheltered and guarded from the world.”
I want to scream at him or beat the fuck out of him. I don’t want to talk or even work through my anger at Beth. I need it. I need the distance.
“I know what you’re trying to do here, but…” I growl, but the bastard is not quite finished yet. He blasts me, yet again.
“She was nineteen, Skull. Nineteen. Fuck, man. Think about that, will you?” I growl an unintelligible sound and rake my hands through my hair. “Nineteen, man.”
“Fine! She was right to make her choices. Doesn’t mean she shouldn’t have tried harder to see me when she had Gabby! She wasted two years! Two years that I can never have back, Torch.”
“I get it. I do. I can’t say I fully understand that, myself. Except if you get told you’re worthless and garbage to be thrown away often enough, you start to believe it.”
The fucker is pissing me off. He’s trying to clear Beth of any wrongdoing. He’s acting like I don’t have a right to be fucking pissed. That’s easy for him to say. He isn’t me. He hasn’t lived my life since Beth left. He wasn’t betrayed by the woman he loved.
“You weren’t robbed of two fucking years with your niña, left thinking you killed the woman you loved!”
Torch sighs and gets up. He slaps me hard on the shoulder.
“True, brother,” he agrees. “But if you aren’t careful, it won’t be Beth robbing you of more time with your daughter and the woman you love. It will be the bastard staring back at you in the mirror.”
Having delivered that nice little dagger, he walks around me. He goes out into the hall and closes the door. When he’s gone, I’m left… alone. Alone as I have been for years. I tear the clock down off the wall beside me and slam it into the wall across the room. It explodes on impact and shatters into a hundred pieces. That does nothing to make me feel better. Nothing.
Time to visit Pistol.
“What did you tell him, Katie?!” I yell when Sabre leaves the meeting and I can no longer hear. I don’t want Skull to know. I don’t… I can’t… “What did you tell him?!?”
“Beth, calm down. You didn’t do anything wrong. Maybe it will be good if Skull finally knows the fucking hell you lived through. Maybe that will help him understand!”
“No! I don’t want anyone to know! That’s mine! No one gets to know what I lived through! You had no right to tell Torch!”
“I had every right! He’s my man! This shit didn’t just happen to you. It happened to me too, and it happened for a hell of a lot longer! I get to share that with Torch. I need to share that with Torch. Sometimes, it gets to me so much that it fucking chokes me at night. I can’t keep it in any longer! It’s destroying me!” she cries and I close my eyes.
“We’ll leave and let you guys talk about things. Do you want to meet later tonight? Sabre and Latch tell me we’re staying at the club for the next few days while they try and take care of any threats. So we’ll all be here,” Annie whispers.
“That’d be good. We can meet in the game room in the basement. We’ll tell them we’re planning for my bachelorette party again. About nine tonight?” Katie says, her voice broken.
When everyone has finally gone, I sink to the floor, wrapping my arms around my legs. I refuse to give in to the tears. I’ve done too much of that. I look at Katie. I know she can see the tears gathered in my eyes because I see them in hers.
“I don’t want Skull to know.”
“Maybe if he knew…”
“It would what? Magically erase all the hateful words? The fact that I kept his child from him? The fact that he sleeps with another woman now? There’s no going back, Katie. It’s much too late.”
“You’re scared,” she says and I don’t bother denying it. “Is that why you didn’t want to push when you first got the pictures of Skull in the hospital? Are you afraid to show him, Beth?”
“You’ve seen Dr. Torres and Nicole. You saw the girl in the picture, Katie.”
“So? They can’t hold a candle to you, Beth. Besides, it wouldn’t matter, not if Skull loves you. Torch didn’t even blink at my scars. Not once.”
“He might have loved the Beth he knew, but it’s been too long. And we both know we might have the same scars on the inside, but on the outside…”
“If they bother you that much, why don’t you see a surgeon?”
“Money? Time away from Gabby? Fear? Pick a reason, any reason.”
“So we’re really going to go through with this? We’re going to kill Matthew?”
“I’m going to. For you, for me… for Gabby and…”
“Our real mother,” she whispers.
“For her,” I whisper. We just stare at each other for what seems like hours, but in reality is just minutes. Each of us lost in our own thoughts and what might have been… if things had only been different.
If only…
Tortured. Worse than rape. Nightmares.
I’m slamming my fist into the meat slab that hangs from the hook suspended from the ceiling. I’m zoned out, completely in my own head as Torch’s words play over and over. I want to march into Beth’s room and demand that she tell me exactly what the fuck went on while she was gone. Doing that feels like being weak. It feels like opening myself up to the woman who turned her back on me.
Everything Torch said was valid. I can’t even deny it. I’m left in the end with the same question I always have. The same question I always come back to.
Why couldn’t she choose me?
It’s selfish and, in her position, I most likely would have chosen the same path… except I would have come back to her. Nothing would have stopped me from finding my way back. Especially photos or some damned recording.
“Let me die,” a fading voice pleads, pulling me out of my head. I look up and see Pistol and even I wince. Joder. I may have gone too far this time. I may not have a choice but to grant him his wish.
“I’ll call the doctor to come knock you out,” I mumble. It’s more than he fucking deserves. I’ll have her give enough to make sure he doesn’t wake up again.
“I have…a…sis…sister,” he manages to say. I stop. Does he think he’ll gain sympathy from me after all of his betrayals?
“Why do I care? You took from me the thing that is most important above all. You planned to…”
“I know… things.”
“Anything you know, I will discover eventually.”
“About...”
“You’re dead. Nothing you tell me will save you,” I respond, just to make sure he knows I’m not playing his damn game.
“Not asking for that,” he tells me, surprising clear. His swollen eyes start to shut and I know he’s fading. That can’t happen. I walk over to the wall by the entrance and flip a button. The chain and hook slowly lower and, inch by inch, the body descends.
When Pistol’s legs buckle under him, I click off the button and walk over to him. I take the metal chain that’s been used to shackle him and slip it off the hook. His body immediately falls to the ground in a flat thud. He groans. I look over him, surveying what I’ve done to him. Moments like this are fleeting, but they’re when I know I have a little bit of sanity left in me. Moments of clarity when I look at the monster I’ve become behind closed doors and know I can never find m
y way back. I’m too far gone—too close to the edge.
Pistol’s body is just a huge lump. So many bones have been broken, so many cuts have been made that most of him doesn’t resemble anything close to the man he was before—most notably, his face. I can’t slam my fists into it as often as I want. It takes too long to recover and the satisfaction isn’t there anymore. As a result, his nose is broken, swollen, and there’s a grotesque shade of black that slowly blends into purple around his eyes… eyes that don’t see anymore, or if they do, it’s through a small slit that the swelling allows. I’m pretty sure his jaw has been broken too. His fingers and hands are shattered; that was done prior to me putting him in chains. The most telling area is his ribs and stomach. Bruised over and over, swollen and cut so the red of the blood has dried and mingled into the bruised skin. The beating I gave him tonight hasn’t added to the rainbow just yet. I have a feeling he’s not going to live until it does. Pity.
“What could you tell me that I want to hear? That could possibly make it worth me not hearing you draw your last breath, hijo de puta?” I spit on him with that last insult.
“I have… a sister… who needs protection…”
“Why in the fuck would I care?”
“Most… of what I did…” He wheezes and coughs for a few seconds before he can continue. “I did to protect her.”
“Blackmailed?” I ask, not believing him.
“Not at first.” I wait for him to finish, his breathing growing ragged, much more so than before. Maybe a rib punctured a lung. “Got in too deep… You… You protect her…”
“Protect the sister of my enemy? Why would I ever do that, cabron? You’re shit out of luck.”
“She’s innocent,” he moans and coughs. Blood drips from his lips. I definitely went too far this time. “Chrome Saints have someone in your club,” he says, coughing again.
Well, now. It looks like the motherfucker has my attention.
“Who?” I ask, kneeling down to hear his words because he’s barely whispering now.