Tank

I don't have much of a conscience. Ghosts of the men I've killed never haunt me in the dead of night. Me and the Grim Reaper had that arrangement.

But I've been mulling around Sanctuary all morning like I'm a ghost myself. For the first time in my life, I don't want to kill a man. To the point that I'm considering preventing it and fuck the consequences.

Roxie, Cross' almost wife, is making dinner in the kitchen. For the last couple of hours, I've been wandering in and out of there, tasting what she's cooking and considering telling her about my problem, since maybe this one needs a woman's perspective.

"What is it, Tank?" she asks when I walk in for the fifth time. "Are you in the mood to cook? Do you want to help me?"

She took over all the cooking duties soon after she moved in. Before that it was my job for awhile. I took over the cooking after Cross banned all the women from the house when his daughter moved in with us. I had no choice, since the others either couldn’t cook worth shit or plain refused to, and I enjoyed it. It was relaxing. But I can't say I miss it.

I shake my head and try to smile, but it's just not happening today. "Your cooking is much better than mine ever was."

"Maybe," she says, stirring the chili she's making in a huge pot that comes up to her breasts. "But I could use some help around the kitchen. When are you and the others gonna find good women to come live here too?"

She's asking mostly as a joke, I can tell from her tone.

"I can't speak for anyone else…" I say anyway, but then stop talking. The thing is, I've already found a good woman, but she's so wrong despite being so right.

Roxie pauses in her stirring and gazes at me with a very thoughtful expression in her eyes.

"You've already met someone," she says, and it's not a question.

"Yeah," I say and chuckle, since it's not hard to smile when I'm thinking about Kim. "She doesn’t cook though."

Roxie starts stirring the pot again, but she's still looking at me thoughtfully.

"Her not cooking isn't the only problem, is it?" she asks after a few minutes of silence.

Telling her all about Kim is probably as good as telling Cross, which I'll have to do eventually anyway. But maybe she'll have some suggestion on how to fix my problem that neither me or Cross will come up with. So I might as well give it a shot.

"I'm supposed to kill her father," I say.

She gasps, actually shakes all over, then glares at me like I've just run over her dog or something. It takes me a few moments to realize where her reaction is coming from. Her own father was killed by the president of Hell's Spawn MC, so yeah, I should've chosen my words more carefully.

"Sorry," I mutter, even though that's not gonna fix anything.

"Don't say sorry to me, she's the one you have to apologize to," she says in a huffy, angry voice.

"I don't think I can," I say.

"Yeah, you're right," she says a little more calmly. "She'll never forgive you for something like that."

Tell me something I don't know, woman.

But it's not her fault I'm in this mess. I had plenty of time to find out who Kim really was before falling for her so hard I can't go a second without thinking about her.

"What do you think I should do?" I ask straight out.

She stops stirring the pot altogether and lays the wooden spoon on the counter next to the stove before facing me.

"I can't tell you what to do. You do what you do, what you've always done," she says, her hands twitching like she wants to grip mine.

Roxie is a warm woman, a kind woman, she's the embodiment of what I picture a mother to be. I wouldn't know myself, since the two women who brought me up were far from motherly, and I never knew my own. I was wrong to bother her with this.

"But since you asked for my advice, I'll give it," she adds. "If you truly love this woman, you can't do that to her. And you can't stand back and let someone else do it instead of you. Maybe there's another way. Maybe her father doesn't have to die. But I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, am I?"

She smiles sadly as she asks it, and I shrug. "No, I pretty much figured all this out for myself."

Maybe she's right, maybe there is another way. But I don't see it, and I doubt Cross will either. It seems I've well and truly run out of bonuses with the Grim Reaper. Now it's time to pay up. And the price is steep as hell.

* * *

Sitting around HQ won't fix it. Thinking too hard won't fix it. I know what I have to do. It won't be easy, but I know. And there's no way around it.

Kim's texted me before noon, but I haven't replied yet. So she has every right to sound a little annoyed when I finally call her at five.

"I was beginning to think you'd be too busy for me all day," she says playfully, but I can hear the annoyed edge behind the words.

"Me too," I say, lying again the way I've lied to her since we met. Is what we have even real if all I've done is lied? It is real. What I feel for her goes beyond anything words can express and there's no lying about it.

"Want to get some dinner tonight?" she asks.

"I want to see you right now," I tell her, and that's also the whole truth. "We can eat if you're hungry."

We make plans to meet in town, at the diner where we had our first dinner date. I arrive almost half an hour early, hoping she'll be early too. But she's not. I'm not hungry at all, but I'll eat. And afterwards I'll give her the best time she's ever had. Something to remember. And that will be that. Then all we had will just be something to remember. A lot of something to remember. Something very hard to forget. But it's better that way.

The kiss she gives me when she finally arrives will be hard to forget too. The way her softness complements my hardness will be impossible to forget.

But after I kill her step-father, there'll be no more looking her in the eye. No more kissing her with abandon, no more getting lost in her wetness and her softness. I've never been an honest man, but keeping that from her is not something I can face.

"So, Benji's play is on Tuesday," she says while we're waiting for our food to arrive. "You're coming, right?"

"Sure am," I say and smile at her. "Wouldn't miss it for the world."

Another lie. I'll be at Grey's on Tuesday, but not to see the play. And she won't see me there. It'll be the last time I see her. The last time I see her brother. Probably one of the last times both of them are happy for a good long while.

"Will your whole family be there?" I ask. "Even your step-father?"

I hate myself for asking, for making these horrible plans and for involving her in them. But I doubt he'll be bringing his bodyguards to a family event like that and grabbing him there will be a whole lot easier than breaking into his house and murdering him in his sleep with his wife right there.

The look she gives me is very naughty, and inviting enough to make me forget all that.

"Are you worried about meeting him?" she asks.

I grin. "Yeah, I kinda am."

"He says he'll be there, but I don't have to introduce you yet, if you don't want," she says, and I can't tell if she's sad about that, or whether it's what she'd prefer.

"We'll see how it goes," I say and she nods, then gives me another one of her minxy smiles, as she reaches into her back pocket.

"So, you like to play at being a biker," she says as she produces a folded up newspaper page. "But do you actually know any real bikers?"

"Why?" I ask slowly, cautiously.

I'd rather not talk about any of that on this, our last date. She hasn't mentioned my style of dress, which she thinks is just a hipster phase for me, in weeks.

"I came across this article today," she says and unfolds her newspaper clipping. My stomach cramps up, tightens like I've swallowed a gallon of quick-drying cement. I'm staring at the scene we left behind in Washington a couple of days ago.

"It says this killing was part of a biker gang war," she says. "And way back, I interviewed some members of this motorcycle club that the guy who was killed belonged to. I don't remember him personally."

Yeah, I didn't remember Seven at all from our past dealings with Hell's Spawn MC either. He must've come on board recently.

She paused, and is now just looking at me with her lips slightly parted, her chest rising and falling fast with her excited breathing. I have no idea what she expects me to say, no idea what I should say. Eventually she realizes I'm not gonna speak.

"I was thinking of researching this story then writing an article on the underground, outlaw biker gangs and their wars," she says. "It'd be a sort of follow-up on my original article from eight years ago, the one that launched my career. I'm hoping this one might restart it, since I haven't produced anything new in more than six months," she says with a grin. "Do you know anyone I could interview? All off the record of course, no names need to be exchanged, I don't even have to see their faces while they're talking to me."

That cement I swallowed a couple of minutes ago is now filling my entire body. It's a good thing the waitress brings our food just then, so I have a few moments to compose myself, think of a way to handle this. A part of me just wants to come clean right now, tell her who I am, tell her I'm the guy who can tell her exactly what happened on that day. Tell her all the reasons why. Stop lying. Beg her to take me as I am, stay with me forever. But I can't. And she certainly can't write no damn article about it.

"Why would you want to go researching a sad story like that?" I ask.

"Precisely because it's a sad story," she says. "That poor child's mother was killed too, and I suppose he's very lucky to be alive. I'm glad the monsters who cold-bloodedly killed his mother had enough humanity in them to let him live."

"The woman was an accident," I say automatically, without thinking, because I can't have her believing I'm a monster.

Her eyes grow very wide, the burger she picked up to take a bite of hanging from her hand, oozing gravy onto the plate.

"I mean, I assume it was an accident," I correct myself. "The target was the guy, wasn't he? Why kill his wife too but let the child live?"

She shrugs, and finally takes a bite and chews slowly.

"Maybe so as not to leave any witnesses," she says. "Maybe they assumed the kid was too young to remember, but the mother would talk. So, do you know anyone I could speak to?"

This conversation has gone on long enough.

"No more talk of bikers, Kim," I say more harshly than her request warrants just on the face of it. But she'll be in danger if she starts poking around in this. The kind of danger I can't protect her from. "That's a vicious and dangerous world, and no place for you. Find a safer story to write."

This time her eyes turn sharp and don't soften. "You know something about what happened, don't you?"

I pick up my burger and take a bite, even though it feels like I'm chewing rocks.

"Nope, I don't know anything about any of that," I say, once I swallow. "But it seems dangerous. Especially with the way they're killing women."

"I'll decide what's too dangerous, thank you very much," she says icily. "I've been doing it just fine for almost a decade, and you don't have to try and keep me safe. I know how to take care of myself."

"That I don't doubt," I say and grin at her. "Now eat up. I have a very special place to show you after dinner. It's my favorite spot in the whole world."

It's also a great spot to have our last night together. Kim is wrong for me and I'm wrong for her. Right now, I'm still the only one who knows that, and I can spare her the pain finding out will bring her. I'll do my best to spare her at least the pain of knowing she fell in love with the man who will destroy her family.