Chapter 33
Raeleen
“What an asshole!”
I laughed, my heart feeling light for the first time since I found out about Pyre’s deception. Granted that had only been four hours. I’d managed to get in a good hard cry, and then a nap to take care of the headache that the crying had caused. Then my phone started blowing up.
I’d been just about to answer when my doorbell rang. And there they’d been.
Harlow had an entire chocolate cake in her hands.
Mona had brought ice cream. Kaisa looked like she’d bought out all the chocolate in town.
Maya had brought lunch, Chinese food, and Melody had an entire box filled with wines and hard liquor.
By the end of this visit I’d have to run fifty miles to burn all the sugar off.
Ainsley had given me an apologetic smile and a shrug. “I figured they had all the food and liquor taken care of so I brought this. She held up her phone.
I raised my brows. “Are we going to prank call people?”
She scoffed. “Like we can do that anymore thanks to caller ID. I’m supplying the tunes. All the scorned angry woman music we could ever ask for.”
They had gathered around me, plying me with chocolate, listening ears, and comfort.
“Well, he is,” Ramona said, defending her last statement. “You don’t break into your girlfriend’s business and steal from her.”
“She wasn’t his girlfriend then,” Melody pointed out, ever the levelheaded practical one of our group. Well, her and Ainsley.
“He was dating her,” Kaisa countered. “She makes a valid point.”
“He deserves so much more than one punch to the face,” Maya added.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” I said with a sigh. The regret of my actions had settled in not long after I woke up.
“It’s-” Everyone looked over at Ainsley and she sighed. “Look. It was an asshole move on his part,” she said to the group. “But one thing you all have to realize,” she met my eyes, “especially you, is that these guys will do whatever is necessary to finish club business. They follow orders-”
“So she should be pissed off at Cypher,” Harlow said, eyes narrowing.
“No. No, that’s not what I’m saying,” Ainsley said hastily.
“Honestly, half the time these guys go off half-cocked and Cypher ends up cleaning up the mess.” We were all staring at her.
She held her hands up in a peaceful gesture.
“I swear I didn’t know they broke into your place, Rae.
I would’ve told you. Which is why they made sure I didn’t know about it.
They operate in straight lines, but crooked morals.
If they need something they bulldoze straight to it, then deal with the repercussions later.
Right and wrong, boundaries…they have their own definitions to those things. ”
Eyes softened and shoulders relaxed as they continued listening to Ainsley.
“I’m just saying that the things they do for the club, for Cypher’s security firm, in a way…
they’ll always come first.” She paused and tilted her head.
“Not first… That was a bad choice of words, but they are a high priority to these men. If you’re their old lady they’ll tell you what’s going on and what they’re going to do, but the odds of you convincing them not to?
Slim to none.” She shrugged. “Why do you think I had to resign as sheriff? I figured out pretty quickly that I’d always end up in a compromising situation if I dated Warrant and stayed.
So I made the choice I could live with.”
Everyone was silent for a few moments, letting that sink in.
“I work with Owen all the time,” I finally said. “With Cheyenne and even other nearby law enforcement.” A grimness settled over me. “Does that mean I need to resign as the medical examiner if I stay with Pyre?”
“Not necessarily,” Harlow said with a shake of her head.
“It would be a huge blow to the town if you did,” Kaisa said, a worried look on her face.
“Not to mention the sheriff’s office and my offices too,” Melody added. There was a look of panic on her face. “We close cases so much quicker because of you. If we had to wait for Cheyenne to get us back their ME reports…” She shook her head as if she couldn’t bear to say the words.
“That’s up to you,” Ainsley said, giving them a firm look. “But honestly Rae, you’re not law enforcement. You could still do your job and keep the guy.”
“Not if he’s going to demand sensitive information from me,” I pointed. Then a frown crossed my face. “Right?”
Maya shrugged. “How often are you really going to run into this kind of thing?”
We all looked over at her in surprise.
“I mean, this is Sentinel. It’s pretty boring most of the time. I doubt something like this will even come up again-”
“Shhhh… Ugh,” Mona groaned. “Don’t say stuff like that!”
Maya rolled her eyes. “Really? I didn’t take you as the superstitious kind, Ramona.”
Mona pulled out her keychain and waved a rabbit’s foot at Maya. “Of course I am.”
“You’re a reporter. You report facts. Not silly super-”
“Ah, ah, ah,” Mona glanced around as though we were being overheard, “let’s stop while we’re ahead.”
Maya threw up her hands. “Fine. But all I’m saying is at most they might have you help them with stuff on occasion.”
“Stuff…” I said, expecting clarification.
“I don’t know. Maybe they’ll want you to help examine a body.”
“I’m pretty sure Pyre has that under control,” Kaisa said.
“Whatever,” Maya said with a wave of her hand.
“So if you were dating one of them, you wouldn’t feel like you’d need to give up your seat as a County Commissioner?” I asked.
“Hell, no!” She looked at me like I was crazy. “I worked hard to get that position.”
“But they might use you to…influence things,” Melody pointed out.
She shrugged and shot Ainsley an apologetic look. “Call me corrupt if you want, but if it’s in Sentinel’s best interest and helps them out, I don’t care. Especially if I get to keep one of the hot bikers,” she said with a sly smile.
Everyone stewed on that as Maya popped a piece of chocolate into her mouth. Eventually they all looked my way again. “What do you think, Rae?” Harlow asked.
“I don’t know,” I said with a sigh. They’d given me a lot to think about and now I needed to mull it all over.
“We’re forgetting that he did all this without telling her,” Mona pointed out, hands going to her hips.
“Well, she wasn’t his old lady at the time,” Ainsley pointed out. “He wouldn’t have been able to tell her anything. Now, moving forward, he can.”
“But will he?” Melody asked.
“I don’t see any reason why he wouldn’t.”
“I may have accused him of dating me just so he could find out information,” I told the group.
They all stopped, mouths hanging open.
“Oh, sweetie,” Harlow said, sadness etched into her face. “Do you really believe that?”
“I did at the time,” I admitted. “Now… I don’t know. I don’t want to believe it’s true-”
“It’s not,” Ainsley insisted. “I don’t believe that for a minute.”
“I’m worried that I’ll forgive him but it was actually what started all this.”
“He went after you though,” Kaisa countered. I nodded, confused. “Why would he bother to go after you? To try to explain? If he only dated you to get information then he’d let you go. It would be his way of getting out of the relationship.”
“Yeah, and you said he looked pissed at Rotor for spilling the beans,” Maya added. “He’d be relieved if he didn’t want to continue things with you.”
“He probably would’ve told you himself actually, if he really wanted to be rid of you,” Melody said with a nod.
“And he did go after you to save your life,” Mona added.
“You should’ve seen him, Rae,” Ainsley said. “He was ready to rip anyone in front of him to pieces to get to you.” She tilted her head. “He kind of did exactly that…”
Harlow looked around at our group. “So it’s settled?”
“What’s settled?” I asked, panic creeping in because Harlow had that look on her face. The one that said she’d just planned my wedding in her head.
“You’ll forgive Pyre, set some boundaries with him, keep your job, and get married and live happily ever after.”
Yup, damn her. I stared at her dumbfounded. “I-”
“That sounds reasonable to me,” Melody said, cutting in.
There was a chorus of agreement. I shook my head with a shocked laugh.
“But first, we listen to angry music. Angry chick music, or angry head banging music first?” Ainsley asked as if the matter was actually concluded.
“Head banging music,” the group said, coming to a unanimous consensus about this as easily as they had about my love life.
I couldn’t help but smile and shake my head. They were insane. And I loved them. They’d certainly given me a lot to think about.
It was weird unlocking the door to the funeral home the next day.
As if this huge crazy night, people trying to kill me, being rescued, Pyre telling me he loved me, then finding out he’d betrayed me hadn’t happened.
It was like it was a book I’d read about someone else.
At least that was how it seemed when I stepped into my quiet office.
I frowned down at my desk. “What…” Picking up the note, I sighed and read it.
I was here. Wanted to let you know. I hope you enjoy them.
-Pyre
It took me a minute to figure out what the note said because he had abysmal handwriting. He really could have been a doctor with the illegibility of his penmanship.
Scowling down at the note, I asked out loud, “Enjoy what?” Looking around, I studied the desk, half expecting to see flowers.
Nothing. No, he wouldn’t do flowers. I wandered out into the area where I did the majority of my work.
I doubted he would have left anything in the front section of my funeral home.
He wouldn’t want one of my clients finding whatever ‘they’ were before me.
I began searching around. When I found nothing out in the open, I turned to the morgue drawers. He wouldn’t… I grabbed the first handle and slid the drawer open. My eyes widened as I stared down at an ear.
My lips made an O of surprise, but no sound came out. I looked around, half expecting Pyre to pop out to explain himself. This was…so like him, to be honest. An unexpected ‘gift’ from a man most people found odd.
Grabbing a pair of gloves off the adjoining wall, I picked up the ear and placed it on my slab. Then my brows drew together. One ear would not constitute him writing ‘them’. I turned back to the drawers and began opening more.
A finger. A foot. A toe, not from the aforementioned foot.
I began placing the body parts onto my slab.
By the time I was done, I realized that there were too many fingers, ears, and toes to be from one body.
This was a large collection. I stared down at the eyeball I was holding in my gloved hand.
I wasn’t bothered in the slightest. I was curious.
What’s worse, him for collecting these? Or me for wanting to piece them together like a puzzle?
I set the eyeball down in the pile. There was one drawer left. Going over, I yanked it open. A yelp popped out of my mouth before I could stop it. I slammed the door shut quickly. No way. I opened it again, but this time it was empty. “What the hell?” I muttered.
I had a sneaking suspicion, so I opened the drawer next to me, this time ready.
Pyre stared up at me, a neutral expression on his face.
I placed my hand to my racing heart. “You’re going to give me a heart attack,” I complained.
Then I looked back and forth between the two drawers. “How? They’re not connected… How?”
“Old trick.” He climbed off of the stretcher inside the drawer. It creaked and groaned under his weight. “Sorry about that.”
“How long were you in there?” I asked incredulously. “You must be freezing.” Those drawers were used to keep dead bodies from decomposing too quickly.
“Not too long.”
I put my hands on my hips. “And how did you get in?”
“Warrant picked the lock. Same as the last time.”
My eyes narrowed. He was telling the truth and I had asked. “Tell him if he does that again I’m going to make him regret it. Better yet, I’ll tell him.”
“Rae, I-”
I held up my hand and he fell silent, though he looked irritated that I wasn’t letting him speak. “Where did these come from?” I grabbed the foot and waved it at him, then pointed it to the body parts piled on my slab.
“The Iron Circle Crew.” He met my eyes. “I have a habit of…taking trophies.”
I blinked at that. “Then why are you…giving…them to me?”
“I wanted you to know that if anyone tried to hurt you—to even touch you—that I’d take them apart, piece by piece.”
He said it with complete honesty and not a touch of emotion.
He had those locked down tight right now.
And I believed him. He and his brothers had killed those men for me.
Granted, it sounded like they were the club’s enemies and likely to die anyway, but they’d died when and how they had because they’d taken me.
I closed my eyes. There was something seriously wrong with me because that made my heart melt a little. That he would go so far for me. It put a check in the column of the theory that he really did want me as his old lady, versus he’d just been using me.
Opening my eyes again, I searched his face. “Pyre.” He stood before me, quiet, listening. “...thank you…for the…gifts.” I looked over at the body parts. What was I supposed to do with those? “But I still need time and space to think.”
“I’d like to apologize.”
“I’m not ready to hear it.”
His jaw was flexing again, but he nodded, turned, and left me alone with enough parts to make a monster from. At least if you wanted it to be mostly made of fingers and toes.