by Zahra Girard
She forces a small smile. “What we’ve started? You mean me crashing at your place? Or the times we’ve fucked? Cause that’s all this is.”
“Don’t fucking lie to me. You’ve always fought your problems on your own. Except the one time you asked for help, when you were up against a problem you couldn’t handle on your own. And now I’m just to expect that, suddenly, the other time you come to me — after everything that happened between us, after you left me for dead — that there isn’t something that’s beyond FUBAR’d with your life?” I say. The blood pounding in my ears in rage is so deafening I can hardly hear my own scream. “I might be an alcoholic, I might have my own fucking demons, I might be violent, but I’m not fucking stupid.”
She rolls her eyes in a way intended to make me want to wring her neck, but the hurt in those hazel orbs is so glaring that not even her feigned disdain can hide it.
“You’re just a fucking tool, Jarrett. That’s all you are. Something I can use and throw away when I’m fucking done with you. And I am fucking done with you.”
“Then why did you come here? If it didn’t mean a damn to you, if I don’t mean a damn to you, then why the fuck did you even show up? What’s with this story about needing a place to stay so you and Jake can get on your feet? Was that a fucking lie? You’ve done fine on your fucking own. Hell, you’ve been doing it on your own your whole goddamn life. Tell me that, Selena.”
Her smile disappears and raging fire lights her eyes.
She spits in my face and storms off down the road.
“Get the fuck out of my way and don’t ever fucking presume to talk to me about my kid,” she shouts at me over her shoulder. “I’m not your second chance, Jarrett Hayes. I’m not your shot at a normal life. I’m just some bitch who used you, and you should just forget I ever fucking existed.”
I let her leave. She’s right.
For a man like me, there’s no such thing as a second chance.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Selena
It’s easier this way. It’s always easier this way. I’d rather spit in his face and leave him, standing there angry and mute, than hang around to face the consequences.
So I cut and run. It’s what I always do. I’m good at it.
He calls my name once, but I don’t respond. I don’t even turn around to look because I know if I do, the chance I’ll break is too great.
And I can’t break. I can’t waver. Because Jake depends on it.
But I leave that parking lot with tears flowing from my eyes.
I know what could happen if things were just a little different between us. I’ve seen flashes of the kind of man he can be, in between those moments where his demons get the better of him. I know that if I hung around, if I made it clear that I really give a damn about him, he could pull it together. He could make a step towards progress instead of falling backward.
He really could be my second chance.
But I can’t do it.
I can’t leave myself vulnerable like that.
Time and again, this world has taught me that if you open yourself up to someone, all you’re doing is making it easier for them to hurt you. I do a good enough job of hurting myself on my own, I don’t need anyone else’s help to experience pain.
When Jarrett and I were together in Reno, that’s the closest I’d ever been with anyone. Even Jake’s father — some ‘friend of the club’ who I had a passing acquaintance with one night after too much bourbon, a man who never had even a passing predilection towards using condoms — kept his distance; I never really saw him after that night, and I doubt he even knows he has a son.
But I never needed him. I never needed anyone. I could handle things on my own.
And when Jarrett and I pulled off that heist, when I held in my hands enough cash to actually start my life, and my kid’s life, over again — somewhere safe, somewhere new, somewhere independent — I took that cash and I ran.
I never paid my debt.
Until a couple weeks ago, my debt never caught up with me.
And then someone knocked on my door. He was dressed well, in a shirt and tie, and he smiled and introduced himself as Killian Ward. When I told him I’d never heard of him and asked him what he was here about, he told me he was the head of the Bloody Jackals chapter in Salem. But I could call him ‘Bones’, he said.
I tried to shut the door, but he lashed out and knocked me backwards, and I hit the ground screaming.
Killian loomed over me, still smiling, and he casually pressed the barrel of his gun to my forehead; the steel was so cold, it made me shiver while he leaned and whispered into my ear that he wasn’t planning on killing me, but, if I wouldn’t shut up, he’d teach me what it’s like to watch the light die in your child’s eyes as they learn what pain truly is.
I shut up, then. One of Killian’s associates came in and took Jake away. Every selfish choice I’d made caught up with me in that instant that I saw my child taken away as collateral.
My child. A commodity.
They took us to their clubhouse and, in a back room, they did things to me I’ll never forget.
I’ll never forget the way he smiled at me while he made me scream.
I’ll never forget those whispered threats of what he’d do to my child if I didn’t cooperate and get them the information that they wanted.
All because of a war.
All because of Jarrett and his club’s business.
And all because of me.
Each step forward is a step towards town and my eventual freedom. Each step forward is a step away from a man and from his club that would’ve accepted me as one of their own. But instead, I chose to burn them and condemn them to a bloody death.
I’ve got one path ahead of me: to walk every last painful mile to Jarrett’s house, to collect my things, to pray the men holding my son will honor their word, and to try to start over some place far away from here and every painful memory of what could’ve been, if only I hadn’t been such a selfish idiot two years ago.
I have to forget about everyone behind me.
My selfish short-sighted choices have left me on my own.
It’s just me and my son. Everyone else I’m leaving behind is as good as dead.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Jarrett
She’s right: men like me don’t get second chances. It’s fucking foolish of me to expect otherwise. I’ll always be a soldier. A killer. Until I die in the same kind violence that I feel so lost without.
I watch her walk away down the road until her form disappears off in the horizon. She’s chosen her path. This is what she wants. She’s always been loyal to herself and never to anyone else. Not even me. Despite what I’d started to feel developing between us.
I shouldn’t have expected more from a selfish bitch like her. I should’ve learned my lesson from the night of that robbery when I took a bullet in the shoulder just to keep her safe from blame. When I did everything I could to make it appear that this woman — who will gladly lie to you through her cherry-red lips — was innocent.
I let her shoot me just to sell the lie that she was innocent in the robbery. And then she left me. A smarter man would’ve taken that as a clue.
But I had to go on believing in second chances like a fucking chump.
She’s life’s way of taunting me by giving me a glimpse of a ‘what if’ where being happy, at peace, and with her at my side as my old lady, before ripping it away.
“What’s wrong, brother?” Bear says the second I come back through that door. He’s always had a sixth-sense for these things. The man’s a warrior through-and-through, but he’s got a heart and he knows how to use it.
“Fuck off,” I growl.
I’m in no mood for talking.
I sit down at the bar, motion for Sam to bring me a drink.
“Not until you let me know what’s up, or at least that you’re not going to start something,” Sam says.
“She left,” I say. Then,
frowning, I pat down my pockets. “Fucking hell. Took my phone, too.”
“I’m sure she’ll get it back to you, bro. Or you can use one of those app things to track it down,” Ozzy says.
I ignore Ozzy and fix Sam with a stare. “Whiskey, please.”
She puts the first of many glasses in front of me.
Time drips by in a peaty haze, where the only sound in my ears is the angry voice inside of me. This is what I deserve. This is what I’ve earned. Fucking foolish of me to have some vision of the future that included that flighty bitch and her kid.
I down my whiskey with resolve to forget this shit. To purge myself with burning liquor.
Everyone in the clubhouse keeps their distance while I drink. And drink. And drink.
And though it doesn’t seem to do the trick in killing the pain I feel, I keep up. There’s no sense in being a quitter.
“Jarrett,” Bears warning cuts through the alcoholic haze.
“Fuck off,” I repeat again.
“Not now, brother,” he says. Even in the state I’m in, I can hear the urgency in his voice.
“What is it?”
“We need to get to the cabin. All of us. Now.”
There’s something in the way he says it that rips me back to earth, somewhere in the proximity of sobriety. Like a cold shower and a cup of strong coffee during a night of drinking.
I blink my eyes to focus. My stumbling ass follows him outside and I pull myself atop my bike. Behind me, Ozzy and Sam both follow, faces masks of stone.
We all know somethings wrong.
Bear hardly waits for the sound of my bike starting before he tears out of the parking lot. We tear ass down the roads until we reach the cabin. The wind smacks my face time and again, working with my thudding heart and coursing adrenaline to keep me somewhat sober.
We smell the cabin before we get there.
Smoke. Acrid in the way that burns nostrils and imprints itself in your memory. It’s the smell of burning flesh.
The four of us come to a stop at the end of the gravel driveway. Gunney’s already here, along Rog, Shiner, Preacher, and every prospect. Every able-bodied man with a gun gazes down at the smoking bloody wreckage in front of them. All that remains of the cabin is a charred wreck and three burnt corpses wearing camo.
Gunney looks over the four of us and says just two words.
“It’s gone.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Jarrett
War’s come home.
“What the fuck, Gunney?” Bear says, practically leaping off his bike and charging towards our president. His voice is ripped through with grief and rage. “Do you see what you’ve fucking done?”
Staying stone-faced in front of Bear’s rage, Gunney hardly blinks.
It takes four men to hold Bear back.
But I hardly spare a look for him. Deaf to the world, I can’t take my eyes off the ruin in front of me. It doesn’t matter where on earth you are — Kandahar, Rainier, or fucking Fiji — burnt bodies always smell the same. There’s an aroma reminiscent of frying beef from the seared flesh, there’s a scent almost like grilled pork from the cooked fat, there’s a coppery, metallic tang in the air from the boiled blood, and, underneath it all, a smell almost like cooked liver from what remains of the organs.
In the end, it’s all just meat.
They say that smell is the sense closest tied to memory. A whiff of baking cookies can take you back to a sunny afternoon in your mom’s kitchen. To this day, the smell of churros takes me back to that day with Selena and Jake in Vegas. It’s the happiest I’d been in a long time. I remember getting up the morning we left and seeing Jake playing with about a dozen little animal figurines. As soon as I asked about them, he launched into this motor-mouthed talk — the way kids do when they’re really psyched about something — about the zoo in Vegas. I got bombarded with everything he knew about lions and tigers and polar bears and zebras. And tigers. Especially tigers.
The kid is just full of so much life and energy. And then I looked up from my coffee and I saw here. Standing there. Watching us with this wistful smile on her face. She’d probably heard Jake talk about the animals a million times before. But she’d never been able to take him.
I saw that smile of hers and I knew exactly what I needed to do.
I sniff. Testing the air. Tasting it on my tongue.
But this smell?
This visceral mix of cindered flesh and guts?
It rips me back to a particular day. Weeks away from ending deployment. To a patrol through a nameless valley outside Kandy Land — the spiteful, spitted epithet we gave to that epicenter of insurgency — a place where one wrong step by one of my brothers-in-arms set things off like a fateful flick of a domino. A chain of IEDs that seemed to roll explosions in slo-mo towards our patrol. An ambush that led to entrapment, to being pinned down for hours waiting for backup, taking cover in steel wreckage next to the seared remnants of my friends.
I vomit.
Every bit of today’s alcohol leaves my gullet in a burning stream.
In its place, my gut fills with a roiling mix of fear and rage.
Until Ozzy’s quiet voice cuts through the disquiet blaring in my skull.
He’s strolling among the wreckage, his path taking him deeper than any of the other men.
“Guys, where’s Grease?”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Selena
It takes hours to get back to Jarrett’s home. My feet are blistered and bleeding by the time I unlock his front door. I have a limp and every muscle in my body is begging for a break. But I can’t rest. I need t leave. Now.
I pack my things and I steal a pistol I find laying out on his kitchen counter next to a half-empty bottle of Irish whiskey. It doesn’t take long before I’m ready to go. I never came here intending to settle down, anyway. Of course, I never counted on seeing again the side of Jarrett that I could envision settling down with. He’s always been an asshole with a death-wish, the kind of man you want for a night or two, and then you kick him out of your bed. Except, there’s this side of him that likes to come out and show me the kind of man he must’ve been before life fucked him up.
It’s that side of him that ruins me.
It’s that side of him that I love, just as much as I want to fuck.
Why does he have to make this so hard?
Why is it he keeps showing me flashes of what we could have together if only I didn’t make selfish choice after selfish choice?
Every time, I try to go it on my own. Every step forward is a struggle. I fight and I fight and I fight, and for a moment, I claw my way up to the top of my own pathetic little hill. I stand on my own.
And then life and my own arrogant short-sightedness cut me off at the knees.
Fortune turns to misfortune. Love and happiness become pain.
And I hit the ground lower than when I started.
I take out Jarrett’s phone. I send another text to that same number.
When do I get my son?
Time ticks by in tense seconds, my heart hinging on a little electronic vibration and a handful of pixels.
Heartbreaking minutes eek by in painful silence.
Nothing.
I’d prefer anything to the deafening quiet.
It tells me all I need to know, and what I should’ve known from the start. I’m alone.
I leave.
I get on my busted, borrowed bike — which I suppose is mine now, for good, considering I’ll never see Jarrett again to return it to him — and I start for the highway.
I’ve got miles to go to get to Salem. I’m sure that’s where my son is, where the Bloody Jackals are holding him. That’s the chapter that Killian runs, and I know that psycho wouldn’t let his leverage over me get out of his sight.
I don’t expect to live. I don’t even have much of a plan, other than show up and do whatever I can to get my son free. All I have is a gun and a sickening sense of desperation gnawing at my
insides.
I’m probably going to die. And death would be preferable to how I’m feeling now.
This is the lowest I’ve been. I’ve lost everyone. I’ve failed everyone. Even my son.
But there’s nothing else I can do. I have no out. I have nowhere to run except to the place where they’re holding my son. He’s the last good thing in my life and, whatever it costs, I have to try to save him.
My sputtering, weary bike hits the highway, whining between my legs and shuddering every time I get close to passing forty-five miles per hour.
I have a gun and a prayer. That’s it. Considering how I’ve lived my life, I doubt heaven gives a good god damn for my screams. But all the same, I’m heading southward.
I’ll get to my son, or die trying.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Jarrett
“Prospects, clean this fucking mess up. Get rid of these bodies. The rest of you, back to the clubhouse,” Gunney barks. “It’s time for church. It’s time to figure this shitstorm out.”
It’s baleful glares all around as we prepare to leave the smoking site of cinders that used to be a cabin. There is so much anger and violence simmering below the surface, and, the stark realization that no matter how hard we hit whoever attacked us — no matter how many of these sons of bitches we kill — we’ll be fighting each other after.
But me? I’m hardly here. I’m hardly seeing anything — I’m seven thousand miles away, in a blood-soaked canyon outside that dusty hell-on-earth, Kandahar. That day, the bloodiest day in a string of bloody days, was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Something smooth and soft wraps around my hand and leads me to the bike. I can barely put one foot in front of the other. Something’s constricting my throat, something’s kicking my heart into overdrive and flooding my system with adrenaline. I’m surrounded by friends and grim silence; I’m in the middle of a war zone.