Lariat

by Marata Eros

  But I won’t. Here is somebody else who could have come for me when I needed protection.

  And didn’t.

  “As you might have already guessed, I am your real mother.”

  “Yes,” I say, boring cavern-like holes into her skull with one eyeball.

  She fists the material of her navy pencil skirt then smooths her hands over the material and meets my eyes again. Black hair, with fine gray strands like tinsel falls forward, partially hiding her face.

  “Your father loved me,” she begins, and I want to rail against her. I saw how my father loved my mother. What they had wasn’t feigned.

  “The woman you believed to be your mother… was your aunt.”

  They were married. Memories jumble inside my addled brain. No, no, no.

  She holds up a palm. “It isn’t what you think. He was protecting her. They were hiding in plain sight, if you will. They thought they’d escaped the family.”

  Mafia.

  “When really, it was only a matter of time. They posed as a married couple, and that gave them an extended hiatus without violence, without fear.”

  Memories of my dad kissing my mother’s cheek surface. Every intimacy I witnessed had not been sexual, I dimly realize.

  She lifts her delicate chin, her bone structure so similar to my own. “I was sent to seduce him.”

  My fingers close into fists, straining the tight plastic. “Why?”

  “I was to do it, or I would die,” she says simply. “It was the ultimate revenge. Get Greg to love me. Then I became pregnant with his child.” Her eyes slide away then return to mine. “When I became pregnant, he knew he couldn’t divorce his sister. Their false marriage was keeping her alive. It was keeping her away from who she was supposed to be married to.”

  “Who?” I ask, though I’m certain.

  “Antonio Ricci.”

  “Shit,” I say with a painful exhale. My mind spins as I put everything together.

  “So she was supposed to marry Ricci, and my father—her brother—helped her escape an arranged marriage by marrying her under a false name?”

  She nods. “Then, as a cruelty to me, he saw to Greg and Libby’s deaths. That left you vulnerable.”

  Horribly vulnerable. She has no idea.

  Or maybe she does. My eyes narrow.

  “We know about Arnold Jenkins, Angela.”

  Her admission is like a sucker punch. My already shallow breathing becomes shallow scoops of oxygen on the surface, and I can barely breathe. Stars burst at the fringe of my vision like firecrackers.

  “He was part of the example to the family. Deserters will be punished. Being female or being a child, or both, is not enough of a deterrent to keep it from happening.”

  Ricci had my parents killed then made sure I was placed with that raping monster.

  I throw up without warning. One second, I’m dissecting the treachery surrounding my life, and the next, pain explodes in my midsection as my abused ribs shriek and I evacuate Trudie’s delicious lasagna I ate hours ago.

  “I don’t think I can stand this, Dean.”

  Dean, the Talker and he of the throwing ice water at bound women, narrows eyes so pale they look like dirty window glass. Hands knotted, he flexes his powerful arms behind his back. “Tough. I got my instructions.”

  “She’s my daughter. And regardless of the example they’ve made of her, Angela doesn’t deserve this. Untie her. See to her injuries.”

  “I don’t give a fuck about her. She’s just another crack I put marks on and get to stick my dick in.”

  God. Vomit dribbles out of my mouth, and a second wave tries to claim me.

  I beat the urge down viciously. It’s not so hard, considering how awful I feel.

  I’ve felt worse. Everything I suffer now is measured to before, the terrifying misery of Jenkins. And still—broken ribs, beaten body, and one awful revelation later, it’s all still better than before.

  My bio-mom stands, facing off with the mob fucker. “Ricci said that once she was captured, we could have a relationship.”

  Not possible.

  My parents might not have been perfect, and the woman posing as my mom may have really been my aunt. But she loved me better than a dozen real moms.

  That memory is pure, and I don’t want the taint of another superimposed over it. I lift my chin. “Don’t bother; it’s too late. Jenkins made sure of that.”

  She flinches as though I’d hit her. “I begged Ricci not to let you be in that man’s care.”

  His care. His brutality, you mean.

  I clamp my lips shut. “And what stopped you from protecting me?”

  Dean’s sullen silence stands between us, making the chasm seem even wider.

  “Ricci said he’d kill me, and I’d never have a chance to be your mother. That an example had to be made so no one would ever be able to escape tradition again.” Her voice ends in a whisper.

  “How’d that work out?” I spit through my pain.

  A single tear brims on her eye, so close a color to my own that it’s like looking in a mirror. “Badly.” But her chin lifts, and I see myself tucked in there for an instant. “However, I think things just got better.”

  She smiles and turns calmly to Dean. She extracts her hand from behind a single pleat in her skirt and puts a bullet in his brain.

  The retort shoots pain into my ears, and I clench my teeth to keep from screaming.

  Dean’s brains decorate the wall behind him, sliding down the surface behind his body like a slow-moving mass of bright red sludge. The thicker bits cling to the soup that was his brain.

  I swallow another urge to puke as my real mother calmly pivots and walks toward me.

  Oh my God. Oh my God.

  “It’s okay now, Angela.”

  I shake my head. “Just kill me now. If you ever felt anything for me, just end me so I don’t have to…” I close my eyes, dying inside—saying the words anyway. “So I don’t ever have to be touched against my will again.”

  Her voice comes so close to my ear, I recoil. “I’m not here to kill you.”

  I open my eyes slowly. Her own are inches from my face. “I’ve been waiting for the right moment for years. And I don’t care if I die anymore. Your life is worth more than my own.”

  She sets the gun carefully on the bare concrete floor and extracts a knife from the pocket of her skirt.

  I suck in a breath.

  But instead of hurting me, she cuts through the bindings.

  I fall forward, and she catches me.

  I want to squirm away, but I realize I can’t move. I can’t feel my arms or legs yet. My lungs feel crushed.

  “Broken ribs,” I say in a low voice.

  Her smile is bright, satisfied. “You hurt the other men quite badly.”

  My smile is pained but genuine as I remember decimating knees and noses. “Good.”

  “Can you walk?” she asks.

  No. I nod.

  I lurch to my feet, and she tucks me under her arm.

  “You’re tall,” I say in surprise.

  “Yes.”

  I awkwardly turn, scabbing onto her blouse, my eyes bulging slightly. “They’ll have heard the gunshot.”

  She shakes her head, and I notice how beautiful she is.

  “Soundproof.”

  My relief wheezes out of me. “Okay.”

  We make our way across the room. I’m shuffling as she practically drags me behind her.

  Finally, we get to the solid steel door, and she raps a patterned knock on the surface.

  It opens wide, and one of the men who beat me senseless appears. Tape covers his nose where I broke it, and when he speaks, his voice is damaged.

  Must have been that esophagus love I gave him with my knuckles.

  His expression is clearly puzzled. “Bethany—what?”

  My bio-mom had picked up the gun as we walked to the door. She parks the muzzle comfortably against the man’s head and pulls the trigger.

&n
bsp; A black hole appears in his forehead, brains shooting out like a reverse cannon as half his face disintegrates in a cloud of gore.

  I slowly blink, breathing shallowly out of my mouth. It hurts, but I can’t breathe through my nose.

  Keep it together, Angel. Don’t lose it now.

  The guy sort of staggers backward, like a zombie without a plan, and tips over, landing with a plank-like thud on the floor behind him.

  “Okay?” my mother asks in an unaffected voice.

  I give a shaky nod.

  “We’re going to step over Harold and make our way outside. We’re almost there, Angel.”

  I want to ask her not to use my nickname, but since she appears to be saving me, I’ll hold off. Besides, I’m too hurt to argue.

  She guides me carefully over the top of Harold, and the narrow corridor appears to grow longer as we travel the length.

  I’ve never made such a long journey in my life. By the time we reach the end, I’m a sweating, shaking mess.

  She presses the door open, and blissful fresh air hits me like a salve. The other man who I remember punching me in my face over the same wound Tommy gave me rises with an obvious limp from a metal folding chair.

  His eyes drill me, and his big, meaty hands fist as though he’s ready for a re-do. “What the—”

  “Hi,” Bethany says in a breathy voice and shoots him at point-blank range.

  The movement jars my ribs, and I moan, even as half of his head blows off, sounding like a burst watermelon as it lands on the asphalt and only his mouth and part of his sheered off nose remain.

  By now, I’m pretty sure I’m deaf. Bethany’s mouth is moving—forming words—but all I can hear is a sharp ringing. All I can smell is the scent of gunpowder and metal.

  But I’ll be deaf and alive, I have time to think.

  Then Tommy’s there, behind her, a gun in his hand.

  My eyes widen at him, and that’s the only warning I have time to give to this woman who gave birth to me.

  A hole blooms like a red flower in her upper chest.

  Hands sliding down the front of me, she clings. Earnest eyes of bright chartreuse gaze up at me. “I… loved you—Angel.”

  I didn’t realize I was in any shape to hold her, but I do.

  We sink together, and her hair falls across my lap like a black fall of water.

  “No,” I choke.

  Tommy is moving toward us. His smile tells me he thinks we’re sitting ducks. I know I must look like hell, and he shot Bethany.

  I move my hand to cover the gun she still has her finger hooked around.

  Her eyes move to mine and hold.

  I flick my glance upward. Tommy is almost on us.

  His attention is so focused on my face that he doesn’t notice my subtle movement.

  Dammit, I can’t get her finger out of the trigger!

  Then Tommy’s head lists sideways.

  Something is around his neck—a small rope of some kind. Many knots decorate the length of it with exacting separation.

  The noose jerks.

  The crunch of Tommy’s neck breaking fills the space.

  I sit there, hardly breathing, with my dying mother in my arms.

  Hurt, confused, and afraid, I stare as Tommy appears to slowly collapse in on himself.

  Revealing Lariat.

  I hiccup back a sob I’m too injured to make.

  He smiles, letting the body drop, and steps over it, coming to me.

  Coming for me.

  Chapter 22

  Lariat

  “I want answers!” I roar into the closed space.

  “Calm the fuck down!” Noose bellows back, veins standing out at equal attention on his thick throat. “I told you—we don’t know what happened. Only that Angel was at her office, shots were fired, cops are crawling the scene, and that pretty boy attorney shot himself.”

  I jerk my chin up from glaring at the floor and stare at Noose. “That guy loved himself. I knew that inside five seconds of meeting him. There’s no way he’d off himself.”

  “That’s not entirely accurate. You didn’t meet him—your fists did.” Noose folds his arms, eyelids lowering to look at me through a slanted mercury gaze.

  I shrug, then grit out, “Where’s Angel?”

  Snare blasts into church, a grin riding his face, causing the scar he has to buckle over his upper lip. “Got someone who saw Angel.”

  “Snare—”

  “Settle, brother.” His grin widens. “They’re not far. And you’ll never believe where they’ve hidden her.”

  I’m in no mood to guess. Angel’s in trouble. She didn’t do what the fuck I said and stay put at her girlfriend’s. Every minute we waste is a minute they can hurt her.

  He tells me, and my mouth gapes. “The old clubhouse?”

  “Beautiful,” Wring says. “We can be there inside ten minutes.”

  I’m already striding for the door. “Less.”

  *

  I’d been going off half-cocked, when the brothers forced me to slow down long enough to form a game plan.

  We had leased the last place, and it had been a shithole. It’s the very reason we decided to restore the World War II bunker. We paid cash. It belonged to Road Kill MC free and clear.

  As we pull up a few blocks from the old digs, we kill the car’s engine. It’s the second time today we didn’t use our bikes. We don’t want to announce ourselves. We also didn’t temp fate by carrying.

  We are carrying, but nothing of the bullet-and-metal variety, but of rope and skill—with a chaser of vengeance.

  Snare takes rear point, and compared to my ex-SEAL teammates, he’s loud as we approach the old clubhouse.

  A beaten Angel appears, half-falling out of the main entrance’s solid steel door. Instantly, my brain starts running through the floor plan of the place, thinking of the soundproofed rooms and wondering if Angel was held there.

  When I survey the shape she’s in, adrenaline sweeps through me in an extremity-tingling, nauseating surge.

  My eyes instinctively scan the area and halt on the fucker I already tap danced on, Tommy.

  He raises a gun.

  I start sprinting before I think not to.

  Angel is leaning against an older woman who looks strikingly like her.

  I won’t make it. I pour on speed.

  Tommy’s shot goes slightly wide and punches through the other woman’s shoulder.

  The impact causes her to fall.

  Angel is so hurt, she reacts by collapsing to the ground beside the older woman. She somehow manages to drag the woman onto her lap.

  As I race across the shoddy pavement with my brothers’ stealthy tread echoing in my ears, I jerk a length of knotted rope out of my pocket.

  Tommy’s body tenses as he hears or senses me positioning behind him.

  I loop the knot with my right hand and catch the tail with my left then jerk it taut.

  He makes a satisfying gasp as I set the central knot beneath his Adam’s apple.

  Tommy struggles, and that helps me tighten the hasty noose I just made.

  Blood pools toward us on the pavement from the injured woman.

  But I’m in the zone.

  I’m not thinking about Angel, the other woman, my safety, or the future.

  The only things on my mind are my hands and the knot.

  My pressure application is steady, and I feel when Tommy’s trachea collapses. I hold, counting the seconds, my posture like steel, my intent resolved.

  I feel the true weight of his body as death claims him.

  My left hand releases the tail, and it unwinds from my wrist.

  Tommy slides, giving himself a post-mortem re-break as his nose smacks the ground.

  My eyes move to Angel as she holds the bleeding woman. Her uninjured eye finds me.

  I see a lot in that one, shimmering orb.

  Maybe it’s not wishful thinking after all—me believing we have something deep.

  Our locked
gaze doesn’t break. It looks as though she might love me. A little.

  “Lariat,” she whispers, choking back a sob of relief that’s so obvious, the sound tightens my own throat with emotions.

  Angel holds her arms up. Carefully, I bend over and set the older woman gently on the ground then lift Angel into my arms.

  Nothing has ever felt better.

  *

  Doc wipes his hands and carefully walks around the bed where Angel is sleeping. It’s not a real bed, more of a glorified cot.

  But her face is peaceful. It should be; she’s doped to the max.

  “Not gonna lie. Haven’t ever had to patch a woman up like this.”

  I’m not a crier, but seeing her delicate beauty beaten off her body is almost more than I can fucking bear. I cup my hand over my face and scrub over it about four times, gaining a shaky control over my shit. “Fuckers.” I grind the word out.

  “Sounds like the other woman took care of them,” Doc says with an impressed snort.

  My gaze travels to the mystery woman on a cot identical to Angel’s. A needle is inserted in the crook of her arm, and a yoked metal rod holds two bags—one clear and one red.

  “She’s actually in decent shape. Bullet is a through and through.” He shrugs. “Got a bag of blood, maybe two, and she’s clear.”

  “Angel?” I ask.

  Doc shakes his head, bushy eyebrows rising. “Aside from the fact that you interrupted my porn viewing?”

  Wring’s lips tweak. “Old perv.”

  “Yup.” He folds his arms. “I don’t think I’ll get it up for a month after tallying your old lady’s injuries.”

  “Just tell me,” I say in a low voice, not correcting the old lady reference.

  Doc sighs. “Two broken ribs. Set her nose.” He eyeballs me, and I nod. “Fine. A broken finger, one nail missing. Strained wrist.” His eyes travel to Angel’s still form. “Looks like she pressed her body into service it couldn’t provide. Strained her own wrist handing out the discipline. Her injuries are consistent with some men I’ve seen in hand-to-hand combat.”

  “Except she’s a woman.”

  He nods. “Yes. Pound for pound, if she were fighting for her life, adrenaline would have seen her through what she was dishing out. But part of her injuries are from what she did to those men.”