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.”