One Week Later

I pulled up at the clubhouse on Christmas Eve night. The night when normal people were inside with their families, drinking cocoa and watching stupid Christmas movies, likely wearing stupid sweaters, wearing stupid lives that I pretended—in the light at least—I despised.

That’s what Christmas was about after all.

Stupid sweaters.

Stupid family.

It was a holiday that Hallmark and the media, in general, shoved down your throat until you choked on mistletoe and false expectations. Because Christmas was never great. There was always that uncle that got too drunk. That boyfriend that got you the wrong gift. The parents who were pretending to love each other for ‘the holidays’ but doing a fucking terrible job.

Not that I had a whole lot of experience.

I gleaned what I did know from friends and movies.

I didn’t let myself think about the life that I had before, and the memories of it were dusty, decaying, covered in cobwebs. I was hoping one day they’d disappear altogether so I wasn’t weighed down with their presence.

The holidays were the worst, when the Christmas breeze moved some of that dust, cleared the cobwebs and invited introspection of those memories. Of that life I pretended didn’t exist.

The holidays were just a period of time when the stores were crowded and people wore ugly sweaters.

Nothing more.

I was okay with that.

Or that’s what I told myself through the years.

That I preferred eating bad Chinese food and watching horror movies alone in my underwear, the screams of some stupid heroine drowning out the utter thundering silence.

There’s nothing louder than loneliness on the holidays.

Which was why I was pulling my car into the Sons of Templar lot nearing midnight, thankful I could hear the thumping of the base of the music and the dim light flickering from the common room.

You couldn’t count on bikers for a lot of things, but you could count on them to give Christmas traditions a big middle finger.

I was glad of the fact I wasn’t in the Amber chapter. Everyone in that fucking town had caught something and were all married with families. They even went legit. Granted, legit for bikers was still pretty fucked up. But they didn’t run guns anymore, which was our club’s main source of income.

Club girls weren’t meant to know this stuff.

The right girls knew it all but also knew how to keep their mouths shut and play dumb.

I played dumb very well.

I played a lot of things very well.

Like being a well-adjusted human being, amongst other things.

Well-adjusted was relative here.

My heels clicked against the concrete of the parking lot, suddenly somehow drowning out the base of the music inside. Ice crept up the nape of my neck, which had nothing to do with the dusting of snow on the ground.

Something’s wrong, my instincts whispered to me.

No, my demons whispered to me. And their whisper was definitely louder than the music, now almost screaming in my ear.

I shook off the whispers, opening the door.

The drowning and silent scream of death worked well to drown out the whispers.

* * *

Once I got into the common room, it turned out my demons were right.

As they usually were about violence and death, for that was all they knew.

The first thing that stopped me was my heel sliding on a thick liquid on the floor. In a biker clubhouse, there was usually various liquids on the floor at any time.

Including blood.

Which was what I slipped in.

I caught myself before I went tumbling onto the floor. I took a second to regain my physical balance. Then, blinking around the room, I took a fuck of a lot more seconds to regain my mental balance.

Even amongst the music, the place was quiet as a tomb.

Because there was not a living soul in this building.

I didn’t count because my soul was long gone.

I didn’t even have to walk farther to know everyone was dead.

The fact that Levi was lying inches from my foot, with his throat slit and his lifeblood covering the floor, told me that everyone was gone. That and the scattering of bodies that surrounded me. Almost all of the club. A lot of the men I’d seen almost every day for half a decade. Known in all senses of the word.

My heartbeat didn’t falter.

Not even when I saw Kim’s body atop the pool table.

She’d been here almost as long as me. Though we weren’t friends, because neither of us had the emotional tools for that, we had been comrades in arms. Fucked up sisters.

Her throat was slit too.

My only reaction was a rough inhale, not a good idea, since the scent of blood imprinted itself on my senses, clung to my lungs. Those memories covered in cobwebs threatened to burst into the forefront of my mind, this scene far too familiar to the one in the past I pretended didn’t exist.

The small creak of a floorboard everyone in the clubhouse knew to dodge if they wanted to be quiet jerked me into action and my gun was out of my purse and pointed at the figure in the doorway to the hall before I could properly comprehend.

I worked on instincts.

I’d been taking self-defense classes and shooting at a range for twelve years. My body may have been used to whore myself out, but it would never again be taken from me against my will.

The man in the doorway immediately lifted his own weapon, a split second after I did.

“Too slow,” I said, taking in the man.

He was large, in height and in size. Not by fat, but by muscle. I was used to muscled men. I was surrounded by them. Now I was surrounded by their corpses.

I mentally shook myself, ridding myself of the thought and the grief that came with it. There was no time from grief. I needed to survive.

I continued taking stock of the man. His skin was caramel, Hispanic, tattoos peeked from the sleeves of his Henley, spanning his hands, which were both fastened around his gun.

A Sig P226, 9mm. Interesting.

Most likely ex-SEAL.

I focused on what was on top of the Henley.

A cut.

A Sons of Templar cut.

I didn’t lower my gun.

He wasn’t from this chapter, nor did I recognize him from any of the others. I’d been with the club long enough to know a lot of members.

Biblically.

I’d remember this man.

Because he was hot, of course. But because he was something else.

His eyes were a stark blue. Clear, inquisitive, cold.

I liked that.

He had an emptiness about him that I responded to.

“Put the gun down, sweetheart, and we’ll talk,” he said calmly. His voice was low, scratchy. Rough. Fucking beautiful.

Though not something to focus on right now.

I laughed. “Yeah, good try. I’m not doing anything until you tell me who the fuck you are and what the fuck you’re doing here, considering you’re the one sneaking around what used to be a clubhouse and is now a fucking tomb.”

His expression didn’t falter. “I’m the one wearin’ the cut, sweetheart. This is my club, these are my brothers. You’re the one who’s gotta explain.”

I raised my brow as I got his meaning. I almost wanted to laugh if I weren’t afraid that it would’ve come out as hysterical and perhaps the gateway to a full on mental breakdown. “You think I did this.” I gestured around. “I’m holding a gun, and if you’ll look at the huge gaping wounds in the bodies, you’ll see their throats were slit. Not something you can do with this.” I shook my piece only slightly, making sure to set my sights back in a second. “And if you haven’t noticed the blood everywhere, the killer would’ve gotten his hands a little dirty with this particular job.” I gestured down my body. “Not even a speck. Now we know you’re not gonna be joining the team at CSI anytime soon, I’m going to repeat my question. Or rather I’ll change it. What chapter are you from? How’d you get here?”

His brow quirked, only slightly, in amusement if I wasn’t mistaken. How he could have anything to be amused about when he was surrounded by the corpses of his so-called brothers was beyond me. But then again, it wasn’t really. Dead was dead and there was no point dwelling on it. Grief was letting death take power over you. Nothing had power over me anymore, not even death.

Men in this world had a different relationship to death than the masses did. Which made sense since they had a different relationship with life. They lived free, hard, fast and violent. Living free meant knowing you were that much closer to death. Learning to call people brothers but also make sure you weren’t close enough so when they died, you could keep living that free and careless life.

“I’m from Cali,” he said. “Amber chapter.”

I frowned, calling up my usually very accurate memory. “I don’t recognize you and I know most of the men from the Amber chapter.”

“Don’t recognize you either, and I’d remember you,” he countered.

I doubted it.

I knew I was pretty amongst the club girls here. The prettiest. But that didn’t matter. It didn’t mean I was remarkable. Memorable. Especially to these men who fucked a different girl a night.

“I’m here,” he continued, “’cause I was on a run. And didn’t relish wakin’ up on Christmas in a Motel Six. Not that it’s anything but just another day with better food than usual and more idiots in ugly sweaters, but I was only coupla hours away from here. Figured there’d be a party.” He glanced around the room. “Guess I figured right. But I was late to this one.”

“Yeah, you’ve got a guardian demon looking after you,” I muttered, holding onto his gaze so my own didn’t stray to the bodies surrounding us.

He met my eyes again. “Don’t you mean angel?”

I smiled, empty and full of pain. “Look around you. Does this look like a place for angels? No, the second you earned the patch, you made peace with the fact that your only allies are demons and devils now.”

He regarded me long and hard and his stare was more unnerving than the gun he had pointed in my direction. “No angels, huh?” He paused. “That remains to be seen.”

Something warm and unpleasant crawled up a part of my spine that had been chilled for over a decade. A response to those words, that stare, amongst the dead.

Amongst the corpses of the only family I’d ever known.

“I’m Scarlett,” I said, just so I could make noise, shake away that feeling. “I’m a club girl. Been here for years. I’d no sooner do this than I’d slit my own throat.”

There was another pause, another stare. Then he nodded once and lowered his gun. I waited a beat before I did the same. The chances of him being the killer were slim, for many of the reasons I’d spouted off to him. He had blood on him, though, a dark maroon patch on the left knee of his jeans. But that was most likely from kneeling down into a pool of blood to check a pulse.

If he had slit as many throats as were cut here, he’d be covered.

And despite his outwardly calm demeanor, he was shaken.

Angry.

It rippled off him like the waves you see on the road on a hot day. Not something you can touch, something that disappears if you get close enough, but something visible nonetheless.

He rubbed his chin with his hand, looking around the room, eyes still hard. I kept my gaze firmly on him. He was a stranger, so the fact he had become an anchor to keep me from falling into some ugly and embarrassing mental breakdown didn’t make sense.

Then again, it didn’t make sense we were surrounded by the bodies of good people. People that may have lived on violence, murder, pain. But good people nonetheless.

Sense didn’t have a place here.

“You wanna call the police or shall I?” His words rippled through my mind, through the death in the room.

I raised my brow. “Police?”

“Yeah, considering the mass murder that’s taken place,” he said dryly.

I was thankful for his cold and brutal use of sarcasm in the face of my dead family. Cold and brutal was the only way through this.

“Ah, I forgot,” I said, keeping my tone playful. “You’re the white sheep of the biker family. We’re still in the black, all the way. And I may not wear a cut, I may just be a club whore, but even I know better than calling the police.”

Something ticked in his face at my words. “We’ve got a fuck of a lot of bodies here,” he said. “Not something it’s gonna be easily hidden from the police. ‘Specially with just me and you here.”

It was a strange thing, to be alone with a stranger while everyone I was familiar with was lying dead at my feet, their blood staining my shoes. Stranger still that this man I didn’t know the name of was sparking a warmth in places that had been frozen for years. That his gaze was comforting and disquieting at the same time.

My stomach turned with his words. “I’m aware. But I’m thinking you should wait for your brothers to get as much as the evidence as you can before the police seal this whole place off.” I thought about the one person who I didn’t see here, the one person in the chapter who had a pregnant wife and a child—who was at home on Christmas Eve and likely still breathing, that was, if whoever did this hadn’t hit his place too.

Acid burned at my stomach.

I battled to stay calm, hold onto my frigid persona. I called up the mask I wore when I sat across from a psychopath with only a sheet of clear and hard plastic separating us.

I held up my finger in a waiting gesture as I deposited my gun back in my purse and replaced it with my phone, dialing and holding it to my ear.

And doing something I hadn’t done since I was a teenager.

Praying.

Though I was standing amongst the evidence that God didn’t exist.

I was living evidence that God didn’t exist.

Luckily the man answered in less than a handful of rings.

My body sagged in relief. “Hansen? Is Macy with you?”

There was a palpable silence on the other end of the phone. I was not a person to call for a chat, despite Macy being as close as a friend I’d ever have, and that meant I smiled at her and shared a beer in the clubhouse on occasion. I’d known her for five years and we hadn’t gotten past small talk. We didn’t go out shopping, have coffee together, talk about our feelings. But I cared about her, and if I saw her lifeless body tangled in amongst the corpses in the clubhouse, I likely wouldn’t have been able to hold it together.

“She’s pissin’ me off with the amount of Christmas movies she’s trying to make me and Xander watch,” he replied after a beat. “But otherwise she’s fine. What’s goin’ on?”

“You need to get to the clubhouse now,” I said as an answer. “And don’t bring Macy. Certainly not the kid.” I paused, taking a breath. “It’s bad, Hansen. Really fucking bad.”

And then I hung up because I didn’t need to say anything more.

Because I didn’t think I could say anything more.

The man was still staring at me when I put the phone back in my purse. He had watched and listened to the entire phone call.

“Thank fuck Hansen’s still here,” he muttered. “And Macy for that matter.”

“You know them?”

He nodded once. “They visit Amber every now and again, Macy and the Old Ladies at the club are like long lost fuckin’ sisters. This blow is gonna cut deep enough in a chapter that’s already fulla scars. Wouldn’t have relished those women going through more shit.”

The softness and obvious care in his tone surprised me. I had him pegged as a cold-blooded being, just like me. But then again, I wasn’t exactly the kind of woman that brought out warmth and kindness in men.

I’d met a couple of the women from the Amber chapter on occasion over the years. They were the kind of women that brought up warmth and kindness in men. They were the kind of women that created warmth in men who would otherwise be living frigid cold and emotionless forever.

“What do you wanna do while we wait for Hansen to get here?” I asked, looking from the man to the bodies at the floor.

Footsteps thundered through the silent room as the attractive stranger walked over to the bar, snatching a bottle of Jack. “That’s easy,” he said, unscrewing the top and taking a swig. “We drink the death away. As much as we can at least.”

He held the bottle out to me.

I stepped out of Levi’s blood to take it.

And I took a long swig.

Not long enough to drink the death away, nothing could do that. But to distract me from it at least.

Though it wasn’t the drink that was distracting me, it was the fire that erupted in my hand when my fingertips brushed against his, as I handed the bottle back.