“He said what?” Hannah pushed another glass of wine into Emma’s hands. It was a dark liquid, smelling vaguely like apples, or spice, or something vaguely sinful. Emma took a long sip of it, letting the flavor linger on her tongue. The taste of the wine matched Hannah’s living room. The space was all decorated with rich dark woods and elegant prints of artwork. It seemed to match her friend, and not.
“Before or after he said he was going to sleep with Samantha?” Emma curled on the lush sofa. A comfortable pillow was snuggled up against her back. A soft throw blanket was curled over her legs. Everything around her was comfortable. Everything inside felt broken.
A soft clink of Hannah’s wedding ring tapping glass drew Emma’s attention to her own blank finger. She sighed softy. Maybe it had all been some stupid fantasy, a dream she was never meant to realize.
“Oh, honey.” Hannah reached across the space between them with her ringless hand and clutched Emma’s. “That sucks.” Hannah’s hair was coiled around sponge curlers. The wet locks smelled of some sort of chemical, the kind a woman used when she wanted to give her locks an extra bit of oompf. It wasn’t a bad smell, but it was strong.
“Were you getting ready to go somewhere?” Emma asked. She took another long sip of wine.
“Rudy and I were going to try to do date night.”
Emma suddenly felt guilty. “Oh god, I’m so sorry, Hannah. I’ll leave you be. I shouldn’t have come over I just—”
“Now you sit down right there,” Hannah commanded. Her big eyes were filled with concern. It nearly broke Emma’s heart. “Rudy and I both care about you, Emma. You know that.”
“I know, but—”
“I’m going to sound like my mother when I say no buts, but I’m going to say it anyway. No buts. No nothing. My friend is having a crap night, and if that means I have to put off a date to help make her feel a little better, I’m going to.”
“I don’t deserve you.” Emma smiled.
“Well, as much as I’d like to blame it all on you, that man you are angry with started it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he called about ten minutes before you did, told Rudy to meet him at The Saloon.”
Emma felt her heart do a confused clench. He hadn’t gone to Samantha’s? Was he going there later? Or just not at all? Why was he being so mean?
“I don’t understand.” Emma looked into her wineglass. Her morose face stared back at her. Was she such a terrible woman that a man like him would be deliberately mean so he didn’t have to see her anymore?
“Don’t you?” Hannah asked gently. Her voice was filled with maternal affection. “He’s pushing you away.”
“I managed to figure that out, thanks.”
“Not because he doesn’t care, sweetie. He cares too much.” Hannah took another hefty drink and then set her glass aside. “He’s being all kinds of uppity because he’s afraid of ruining things on accident.”
“So, what? He’s doing it on purpose.”
“Yes.” Hannah laughed. “He’s the kind of guy who likes to be in control of pretty much everything.”
“Usually,” Emma admitted. Her mind flashed back to a few choice moments during their more sensual moments. “He doesn’t always need to be in control.”
Hannah made a lascivious sound. “Oh really? Do tell.”
“I don’t want to talk about that now.”
Hannah shrugged her shoulder. “Yes, you do. It helps.”
Emma rolled her eyes. It sounded like the biggest load of…well…she had ever heard. “Talking about the sex I am not going to be having anymore is somehow supposed to help?”
“You know nothing about breaking up with someone, do you?”
Emma blinked. It was true. She didn’t. The closest she had ever come to a boyfriend growing up had been Rudy, and that relationship had been fairly awkward from beginning to end. It had been a blessing when it ended. There had been several very short dating stints after him, but school had always come first, and nothing had really started, let alone ended.
“Oh god,” Emma gasped. Anger and sadness and fear surged up inside of her chest. Her hand started to shake. “I haven’t. I’ve never been in a real relationship. This wasn’t supposed to be real either. It was just supposed to happen and then everything got all…oh god.”
The shaking got worse. Droplets of wine splashed over the rim. Hannah took the glass from her. Emma dragged the blanket up her chest. It offered warmth, but no comfort. She clutched the edge of the fabric until her knuckles turned white.
“He broke up with me.”
Hannah wrapped an arm over her and pulled Emma down until her head was resting in Hannah’s lap. With the gentle care of a mother Hannah tugged the golden hair out of a slap-dash tail and spread the locks out. She combed her fingers through Emma’s hair and shushed her gently.
The kindness broke her. She started to cry. Her tears were bright and hot. They spilled out of her eyes and down her cheeks so fast they almost hurt. She curled her legs up on the sofa and tightened herself into a ball.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Hannah shushed.
“It’s not,” Emma sobbed, “it’s not okay at all!”
“It will be. I promise.”
Emma didn’t believe her. She wanted to. It was a nice thought that in a little time, and with a little effort, she might feel better. It seemed, at this moment, impossible. Her heart felt like it was breaking into a hundred pieces, each one smaller than the last. They all ached.
“It hurts,” she whispered, not sure if she was telling Hannah or herself.
“I know.”
The sound of a baby crying came out through the monitor. Emma sat up.
“Stay right there. I’ll be right back.”
Emma drew her legs up on the couch and rested her head against the arm. Her bones felt too heavy inside of her body, as if she suddenly weighed too much to sit up on her own. When Hannah came back she was holding her little one. The child’s face was red and puffed up with a hard wake up.
“Oh gosh, look at you, sleepy face.” Emma smiled sadly as the baby flopped its head against his mother’s shoulder.
“Do you want to hold her?” Hannah asked, offering up the squirming child.
Emma had to think about it. She liked children, though she wasn’t particularly familiar with them. She had no siblings and no cousins. There hadn’t been a lot of children wandering around the college campus either. Even so, the idea of holding something so small made her feel a little better.
“Yes, yes, I do.” Emma held out her arms.
Hannah tenderly deposited the child into her arms. The little one felt heavier than she would have thought. There was so much weight in such a small amount of space.
The baby looked up, the sleepiness sliding away from a pair of eyes as dark and vibrant as the mother’s. There was a definite touch of Rudy, too, around the nose and the way the ears stuck out. “There we go,” Hannah said.
Emma felt a small smile touch her lips. “Did you always know you wanted to be a mother?”
Hannah shrugged. “Not really. It was more of the idea that if I got pregnant, I’d be okay with it. If I didn’t, I’d be all right with that, too.” There was a short pause before Hannah asked, “Do you want to be a mother?”
“I do,” Emma said simply. “I know, we talked about it a little, but I never got to have a mother, never got any siblings. I always wanted the American dream. The house with the picket fence, the two point five kids, the dogs, the respected job I did in between carting the kids to and from soccer practice.”
“Nothing wrong with that.” Hannah stood up and refilled the glasses. She pushed one into Emma’s hand.
“Socially speaking, there is everything wrong with it.” Emma took a sip and adjusted the baby to lie on her lap rather than in her arm. “Last year there was an unprecedented amount of women going to the emergency room for heart attacks because they stressed themselves out over the ‘having it all’ attitude.”
Hannah burst out into an amused laugh. “Sweetie, if you ever go to the ER, it will definitely be because of stress.”
Emma laughed, and though her heart was in pieces, she felt a little lighter.
“So, what are you going to do?” Hannah asked.
“Well, as it stands right now, I plan on finishing this glass of wine and snuggling the baby.” Emma raised her glass and clinked it merrily against her friend’s.
“And then?” Hannah ran her thumb over the soft foot of the little one.
“Then I am going to stay at my dad’s house for a few nights and figure everything else out.”
# # #
“You’re an idiot,” Leon leaned over The Saloon’s bar, pouring out a beer with the perfect amount of misty foam at the top. “A grade A one at that.”
“People keep calling me that, it’s getting damned annoying.” Kellan took the beer and drank it. It didn’t taste as good as it should. She tasted like beer that night after the steakhouse. She had tasted like beer and wildness, and even then she’d told him no. It meant something to him, but he didn’t know exactly what. “Why am I an idiot?”
“You let her go.” Joe slipped into the chair next to him. He shrugged his shoulders. “No, you pushed her away, broke her.”
“How do y’all even know this?” Kellan demanded.
“Hannah,” Rudy offered, pouring himself a beer. “Emma called her. You know women.”
“I know women,” Vinny offered. “I’ve had four wives, I know a lot about women. Trust me. You did the right thing, the best thing.” He lifted his drink in a liquid salute, a few drops of amber splashing along his wrist.
“Shit.” Kellan slapped the beer, now half empty, back on the table. The liquid sloshed over the edge and onto the bar. “Why do they have to talk about things?”
“It’s what women do. Why don’t you try it?” Joe offered. He swept a bar rag over the spills and tossed it back into the wash bin. “It’s therapeutic.”
“Fuck that,” Vinny chimed in, shaking his grizzly head so hard his stiff beard swished from one side to the other. “Get drunk, buy some company, bury yourself in some really big…” He held his hands out in front of his chest and jostled invisible breasts.
The others laughed, or cheered, or, in the case of Phantom, said nothing at all. Kellan took his drink in hand. He tried to think about finding another woman but all he could picture was Emma, laid out on his sheets like an offering, her arms raised in enthusiastic surrender.
“What do you want me to say? She was getting close, too close.” He shook his head. “I told her not to.”
“Since when do women listen to what you tell them?” Vinny demanded.
“They don’t when you talk.” Leon slapped the other man on the back. “No one listens when you talk, old man.”
Vinny shrugged good-naturedly and took another drink.
Leon came around the bar, his big boots stomping as he made his way across the aged wood. For a moment, Kellan could do nothing but admire that Leon had been here the longest. Vinny was older, he was nearing sixty, but could still ride. He had come to the club late. Somewhere after he had lost one wife and before he’d found the second Vinny had wandered in like a lost dog looking for a pack.
Leon, though, had been around even before Mac had. The patch on his jacket stated Founder, and marked him as one of the first members of the club. Mac’s had read Second Generation. There was a time, maybe twenty years before, when Leon could have been president, but he hadn’t wanted it. He liked being the secretary, keeping track of everything. It was Leon’s way to remember and catalog.
“I’ve known that girl since she was born. Hell, her momma and my wife took those Lamaze classes together. She barely cried, did you know that? Barely a peep. Doctors were worried at first, worried she might have something wrong up here.” Leon motioned to his head with one age spotted hand. The bar stool whispered as he settled himself on it.
“There is nothing wrong with that girl’s brain,” Joe snorted.
Leon nodded his agreement, “Damn right. Smart as a whip.”
“She deserves better,” Kellan said flatly.
Rudy nodded. “She’s had dreams. Ever since she was little she’s had dreams of a good life away from all this.” He motioned around to the clubhouse until the dramatic gesture landed on the long Beasts’ tapestry that hung behind the bar.
Leon rolled his eyes. “Y’all idiots don’t know shit.”
“Don’t be shy, Leon. Tell us how you feel.” Joe slid another drink to the man.
There was general laughter and more liquor. There was always more liquor. Someone had the frame of mine to pull out a bucket of peanuts.
“So everyone agrees Emma is smart.” There was a general mummer of agreement. Leon nodded his head and cracked a peanut between his fingers. Bits of shell fell against the bar. “Good, then why the hell don’t you think she is smart enough to decide who she wants to be with?”
Silence, thick and heavy, fell around the room. The only sound was Phantom, sweeping up peanut shells from the floor.
“Barbie,” Joe said after a moment.
“What?” Kellan asked. “Did you just go crazy, Joe?”
“Barbie, well, Barbara. I know, the irony of naming is not lost on me, but it worked. Her name was Barbara Lawrence and she was everything.” He stood up and opened the trash lid for Phantom to deposit the dustpan full of shells. “She looked how Barbie ought to look, with long legs and blonde hair and the kind of rack Vinny would appreciate.”
“Here! Here!” Vinny cheered. “God bless excellent racks!”
“Amen, brother.” Leon clinked his glass to Vinny’s cheerfully.
“True, indeed,” Joe said with a wistful sigh. “On top of that she was wealthy, heiress wealthy, and magnanimous to boot. We had plans. We were going to go to Africa and save the world. Some Brad and Angelina daydream, I assume. We were young; she was perfect. But I, like many a twenty-year-old boy, was stupid.”
“What did you do?” Kellan asked, his curiosity piqued.
“I may have taken a swanky brunette to my bed while under the influence of a generous amount of Jim Beam.” Joe bowed his head.
“Are you comparing sticking your dick into some brunette to Kellan’s stupidity?”
“I am,” Joe said, “and here is why. We all have a Barbie in our lives.”
“Don’t I wish,” Viv muttered.
“We all have a Barbie,” Joe continued. “That woman very well might have made the difference between who we are and who we could have been.”
There was a moment of silence. Kellan could only guess that all of them were thinking of their own Barbie. Was that what Emma was? Could she be the difference between what he was and who he could be? He thought of the way she smiled at him, and the way she felt lying on his shoulder. She was a good woman, a good person.
The door opened and the rest of the club poured in. Kellan cleared his throat and drank down the last of his beer.
“All right, men, settle in.” He let his voice carry across everyone. “Phantom and Rudy have done some good footwork. We’ve got a map of Gabriel’s compound.”
Rudy picked up a long tube of rolled paper. With a flick it unraveled and lay across the pool table like a tablecloth. It was a blueprint, with several large blank unmapped areas, mostly towards the inside.
“So Gabriel has dumped most of his drug money into his house. It’s like some Mexican villa sitting on top of this big ol’ mountain, just waiting for someone dumb enough to attack it. He’s got gates, guard dogs, shooters, state-of-the-art everything built to keep everyone out.”
“Should be a walk in the park,” Vinny snorted.
“Yeah,” Kellan said. “But Phantom found something.”
All eyes flicked to the skinny pale guy who looked half swallowed by his nearly empty vest. He stood there like a statue, letting them look before he went back to sweeping the floor.
“There’s a back way,” Rudy continued. He pulled out a second map, this one geological in nature, showing rings of elevation. A highlighter had drawn a line through a back path. “This was an old farm road, but it was nearly forgotten when the interstates bypassed it. Partly because the farthest point is collapsed. We can take the bikes most of the way up there, but there is going to be a pretty decent hike towards the end of the road and Gabriel’s place.”
“Gabriel isn’t expecting anyone to come up the back way, is he?”
“No,” Rudy said. “He thinks the southern side of his little compound is perfectly safe, backed it right up to the mountain. It’s pretty impressive and it’s not going to be easy.”
“Boy,” Vinny laughed, “we didn’t sign up for this to be easy. Now, what do you want to do?”
“Well, that’s going to be up to a club vote. Gabriel has targeted Emma specifically, and Mac before he died, so we figure a one to one strike is best. We take out Gabriel, we take out his piece of crap brother, and we let the rest of his little gang fall on themselves.”
“We aren’t afraid of a little reciprocity?” Joe asked.
“It’s personal. Most of the cartel knows working with us is better than against us. The Beasts make good protection and good transport. They don’t want to cause waves where they aren’t needed. This isn’t a gang on gang strike, but person to person.”
“All right, so what, we send up our best snipers? That’s gonna be you, and maybe Phantom.”
“Yeah,” Kellan stretched out his legs. Ignoring the sound of a glass breaking as the men resettled themselves. “Dad did love his hunting trips.”
“All right, so we are gonna…ow. What the hell?” Leon paused. His eyes narrowed and he reached behind himself. When he brought his hand back, the fingers were covered in blood. His face drained of color. The age spots on his hands stood out like coffee stains on copy paper. “Oh…shit.”
“Dad?” Rudy stood up, and his father fell to the ground. “Dad!”
It happened quickly after that. The door exploded open, and four men thick with Latin heritage burst into the bar and unloaded automatic weapons. Bullets rained down around them. Beasts dove, or reached for their own guns. It was admirable, but ultimately pointless.
In that first wave bodies crumpled to the floor. Kellan couldn’t keep track of who was down and who was fighting. All he could smell was blood and gunpowder.
His first thought went to Emma. Was she okay? Did Gabriel already have her? In the moment of hesitation that these thoughts fostered, a slug grazed his shoulder. Pain, sharp and hot, pulsed across his hip.
“Get down!” someone yelled at him.
Kellan took cover behind the heavy wooden pool table. Pieces of oak and green velvet peppered the air. The sound of men screaming was second only to the deafening burst of gunfire. Out of instinct, rather than thought, Kellan went for his own gun. The cold, heavy weight of the pistol was a small comfort in comparison to whatever it was Gabriel’s minions were wielding.
He would rather have had a rifle. He was good with a rifle. It was the one good thing his father had done. For a moment all he could think of was that cougar sunning herself on a rock, her big eyes blinking slowly.
He rolled to one side, his shoulder hitting the ground. He tried not to think about the fact that there was a puddle of dark blood beneath his shoulder as he aimed the gun and fired. The first bullet wasn’t intended for one of the shooters, it was for the fluorescent bulbs above them. The second was for the glass windows behind them. The shooters flinched as shards of glass fell down around them. It wasn’t much, but it was just enough that his men could return fire.
He leveled his gun again and took another shot. The gun jerked and he saw blood bloom on the shirt of one of the men. His eyes went wide enough behind the dark of his sunglasses that Kellan could see a flicker of white above the lenses. He shot again, and the man’s head rocked back. The shades flew in an arc, shattering against the broken window.
Wild cursing caught Kellan’s attention. He chanced a look to his left. Vinny had managed to get behind the bar where the best of the weapons were stock piled. His thick hands hefted a 12-gauge double-barrel shotgun. Blood was pouring down one side of his face, and glistening in the gray streak of his beard. The telltale sound of the pump seemed to echo through the din. The flash was like a firework. The boom of it rocked the room, and Kellan’s ears began to ring.
The second shooter flew backwards. Vinny fired again. His body, half off the ground, flopped backwards with a boneless grace. His body hit the ground, but his hand spasmed on the trigger, and a fresh wave of bullets split the air.
More glass shattered as the dead man’s gun decimated the bar. The thick scent of alcohol joined the musk of fire and death. Vinny’s body fell. Blood arced through the air, staining the bar.
The gun continued to fire until there were no more bullets. It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, but it stretched like an eternity. Kellan wasn’t sure he was going to survive, that any of them were going to survive, but all he could think about was Emma.
Would she mourn him? Would she cry at his funeral the way she had at her father’s? No, probably not. She’d probably spit on his coffin for all the terrible things he had said to her. Leon had been right. Kellan was an idiot for pushing her away. He was never going to find someone like her again. Gabriel was going to get to her.
That thought rocked him. The edge of the pool table collapsed, and the shiny resin balls clattered next to him. The cool touch of them against his hand felt vaguely surreal. Could anything be cold in the heat of battle?
“Dad! Dad!”
The sound of Rudy’s voice was the first thing Kellan heard when the ringing in his ears subsided. Rudy dove next to Leon’s body.
There was a difference in the way a live body laid on the ground versus a dead one. There was more space with a live body, all those muscles working to keep a person in a rigid line. When someone was dead, well and truly dead, there was nothing holding them up. Nothing that kept every inch of the flesh from hitting the ground.
Kellan didn’t need to check to know Leon was dead. He wasn’t the only one.
Not many had survived the first round of shots, and even fewer had seen the fight all the way to the end. Vinny’s oversized form was found in a puddle of liquor, blood, and other bodily fluids. His face was slack, and his eyes had rolled back until all anyone could see was white.
“Shit,” Kellan cursed. “Joe.”
It seemed somehow more wrong to find Joe with his back against the wall, a pair of Barettas in his hands. Leon and Vinny had put in their time and had long since believed the life was going to claim them. Joe hadn’t. He was a business boy playing at being criminal. Kellan had always assumed he’d go crawling back to his wealthy dad or that heiress.
The wounds were clustered in his belly, and already there was a smell. Kellan knew enough about hunting to know when a person’s bowels had been hit. It wasn’t a good death, it was a long and lingering one where a man’s own waste slowly poisoned him.
“Kellan,” he coughed. Blood splattered onto his lips. “We get them?”
Kellan glanced over his shoulder. “Yeah, buddy, we got them.”
Joe reached out one of his hands. Kellan took it. The grip was stronger than he expected. There weren’t even calluses under the layer of blood. “Good,” he nodded. “Very good.”
He shifted his shoulder. The gun in his other hand clattered to the ground. He reached inside his jacket and pulled out his wallet. It took more effort than it should have for Joe to open it, and shake a picture out of the folds. It was a woman, and Kellan didn’t need to see the back to know it was Barbie.
“Her address is on the back. Send her a letter for me. Tell her I’m sorry, sorry for everything.”
Kellan couldn’t speak. A lump had grown in his throat. He just nodded and tucked the picture into his pocket. “I can do that.”
“Don’t let her go,” Joe said. “Don’t you dare.”
They both knew Joe wasn’t talking about Barbie. His GQ cover boy face was set in stern lines. A sheen of gray was crawling up his neck. He coughed again. His stomach jerked with the movement and he shook.
“I need you to do me another favor.”
“You’re asking a lot for a prospect.” Kellan tried to keep his voice as light as possible. It didn’t work.
“Shoot me.”
At first Kellan thought that Joe was asking as a joke. It wasn’t until he started to laugh that he realized that Joe was being serious.
“Oh, man.” Kellan looked down. “I don’t—”
“What are you going to do, pres?” he asked motioning limply to his belly. “Take me to the hospital?”
“They might be able to—”
Joe let out a bark of laughter, empty of humor. It was empty of everything but fatalistic knowledge. “If you don’t, I will, and no one wants to see that.”
Joe dumped one of his guns into Kellan’s hand. It felt heavier than it should, as if it was made of something besides metal.
“Just not in the face.” Joe smirked.
“Whatever you say, pretty boy.”
He wrapped his finger over the trigger and pointed it at Joe’s heart. His hand shook just a little as he took the shot. Joe jerked suddenly, nearly coming off the ground. His hand squeezed around Kellan’s. He felt his bones grate together as a death spasm rocked through the other man’s body. Then Joe fell back to the ground with a mortal plank. His legs shook as his body struggled to stay alive for just a few seconds longer.
He didn’t know how long he was staring at Joe’s dead body when a very pale hand tapped him on the shoulder. There was a lot of blood on Phantom’s shirt, but as far at Kellan could see none of it belonged to the boy. He stood there silently. The perfect soldier waiting for an order to act.
“Who’s left?” Kellan asked.
“Rudy,” he said, “and me.”
Twenty minutes ago there were fifteen men in this room. Fifteen men who Kellan had laughed with, drank with, and partied with. Now most of them were dead.
Kellan pulled out his cell. The battery was flashing an uncaring red. He shoved it back in his pocket.
“Rudy, call Emma. See if she’s okay.” Kellan stood up. “Phantom, get all the weapons you can, pull a truck around. We need to get out of here as soon as possible. The cops will be here soon, and we need to be gone.”
The two of them jumped to carry out the orders. Kellan racked his mind as he decided what they were going to do. The first thought that popped into his mind was simple, and brutal. He wanted to hit Gabriel back. He wanted to blow that little mansion in the mountains to pieces and make Gabriel walk through the bodies and the blood of the people he had trusted the most. It wasn’t a good thought, but it was the one keeping him breathing.
A few minutes later Rudy came back. “Emma’s not picking up. I got ahold of Hannah. Apparently she went back to her dad’s place.”
“Why?” Kellan demanded. “Why would she go there?”
Rudy couldn’t quite meet Kellan’s eyes. “She said the two of you fought, that she wanted some space to figure things out. Hannah is trying to get ahold of her now.”
“Gabriel’s got eyes on that place,” Phantom said.
“Does she know that?” Rudy asked.
Kellan felt a wave of cold hate wash through him when he said, “No.”