Chapter Nine
Slaughter
I woke to birdsong and the smell of jasmine.
My head pounded like someone had taken a sledgehammer to my skull, and my mouth tasted like I had been chewing on leather. The sun was already high, too high, and the light stabbed through my eyelids like knives. I groaned and rolled onto my side, my hand brushing against something cold and smooth.
Glass.
I cracked one eye open and found myself staring at an empty bottle of Hell’s Inferno whiskey lying in the grass beside me.
The label was peeling. The glass was smudged with dirt and fingerprints.
My fingerprints. I sat up slowly, every muscle in my body protesting the movement.
My clothes were damp with dew, my jeans stiff and uncomfortable. I was shirtless and barefoot.
Where the hell am I? I blinked, trying to focus through the fog in my head. Trees. Open field. A pond—still and glassy in the morning light, reflecting the sky like a mirror.
The Owens-Miller Farm. Shadow’s place. I’d been staying here for... how long? Two weeks? Three? Time had blurred into a haze of sleepless nights and whiskey-soaked days, the walls of that guest room closing in tighter and tighter until I couldn’t breathe.
But how the hell did I end up out here?
I pushed myself to my feet, swaying slightly as the world tilted and spun. My head throbbed in time with my heartbeat, and I had to close my eyes for a moment to keep from throwing up. Then I smelled it. Jasmine. Sweet and floral and achingly familiar.
Julie.
My eyes snapped open as I turned in a slow circle and scanned the field, the trees, the pond. My heart was pounding now, a frantic rhythm that had nothing to do with the hangover and everything to do with the scent that clung to the air around me. She had been here.
I knew it. I could feel it.
“Julie?” My voice came out rough and broken, barely more than a whisper. “Julie, baby, where are you?”
Nothing. Just the wind rustling through the grass and the distant call of a crow.
But she had been here. I knew she had. I could smell her everywhere.
On my skin, in my hair, in the air I was breathing.
It was her shampoo, her lotion, the perfume she used to wear on special occasions.
I stumbled forward, my bare feet sinking into the soft earth as I moved toward the pond.
Maybe she was there. Maybe she was waiting for me, just out of sight, just beyond the trees.
“Julie!” I called louder this time, desperation creeping into my voice. “Julie, please. I know you’re here. I can smell you. I can feel you.” But the pond was empty. The field was empty. There was nothing but grass and sky and the mocking silence of a world that had taken her from me.
I stood there for a long moment, my chest heaving, my hands clenched into fists at my sides.
My mind was racing, trying to piece together fragments of memory that didn’t quite fit.
I remembered leaving the house. I remembered the whiskey burning down my throat, the stars overhead, the way the moonlight had turned the pond into liquid silver. And I remembered her.
Julie.
She had come to me. I was sure of it. She had appeared out of the darkness like an angel, her hair loose around her shoulders, her skin glowing in the moonlight.
She had let me hold her, touch her, kiss her.
She had given herself to me the way she always had—willingly, completely, without reservation.
It had been real. It had to be real.
But now she was gone, and I was standing here alone with nothing but an empty whiskey bottle and the lingering scent of jasmine to prove she had ever been here at all.
I turned and started walking, my feet carrying me back toward the house without conscious thought.
I needed to find her. I needed to understand what had happened, why she had left, and where she had gone.
I stumbled past the greenhouse, barely registering the rows of plants visible through the glass walls. My focus was singular, desperate.
“Julie!” I called again, my voice cracking. “Julie, please!”
“Slaughter.”
I spun around, my heart leaping into my throat. Shadow stood a few feet away, his expression carefully neutral. He was dressed in jeans and a plain black T-shirt, his arms crossed over his chest. He looked like he had been up for hours. Calm, collected, completely at ease.
“Where is she?” I demanded, taking a step toward him. “Where’s Julie? I know she was here. I can smell her. I can—”
“Brother.” Shadow’s voice was gentle but firm. “Julie’s not here.”
“Bullshit.” The word came out harsh and angry. “I know what I felt. I know what I smelled. She was here, Shadow. She came to me last night. She—”
“You were drunk,” Shadow said quietly. “You’ve been drinking every night since you got here. Last night you took a bottle of Hell’s Inferno and walked out to the pond. I found you passed out this morning and left you to sleep it off.”
I shook my head, refusing to accept it. “No. No, she was real. I held her. I touched her. I—”
I stopped, the words dying in my throat.
I had made love to her. The memory was hazy, fragmented, but it was there.
The feel of her skin beneath my hands, the taste of her lips, the way she’d gasped my name as I moved inside her.
It had been real. It had to be real. “The jasmine,” I said desperately, grasping at anything that might prove I wasn’t losing my mind.
“I can smell jasmine everywhere. That was Julie’s scent. She always smelled of jasmine.”
Shadow sighed, and for the first time, I saw something like pity in his eyes.
“My sisters run a homeopathic business,” he said gently. “They make soaps, lotions, oils—all natural stuff. Jasmine’s one of their most popular scents. It’s all over this farm, brother. In the greenhouse, in the house, in the fields. You’re smelling their products, not Julie.”
The words hit me like a punch to the gut.
No. No, that can’t be right. But even as I tried to deny it, logic crept in. Cold and merciless and impossible to ignore. Julie was dead. She had been dead for weeks. She wasn’t coming back. She couldn’t come back. And yet...
“I know what I felt,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. “I know she was with me.”
Shadow stepped closer, his hand coming to rest on my shoulder. “You need more time, brother. That’s all. You’re grieving. You’re hurting. And your mind is trying to make sense of something that doesn’t make sense. But Julie’s gone. She’s not coming back.”
I wanted to argue. I wanted to scream at him, to tell him he was wrong, that he didn’t understand. But the words wouldn’t come. Because deep down, in the part of my brain that still functioned on logic and reason, I knew he was right.
My Julie was dead. She had died giving birth to Aurora.
She was buried in Tennessee, six feet under the ground, her body cold and still and gone.
But God help me, I could still feel her.
I could still smell her. I could still taste her on my lips.
And I didn’t know how to reconcile those two truths.
“I need to go,” I said abruptly, pulling away from Shadow’s hand. “I need to get out of here. Clear my head.”
“Slaughter—”
“I can’t stay here,” I said, my voice rough with emotion. “I can’t... I can’t think straight. I need the road. I need to ride.”
Shadow studied me for a long moment, his dark eyes searching my face. Then he nodded slowly.
“Alright,” he said. “But you call me if you need anything. You hear me? Anything.”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
I turned and walked back toward the house, my mind already racing ahead to the next step. Pack my shit. Get on my bike. Ride until the noise in my head quiets down.
Ride until I can breathe again.
The road stretched out before me like a ribbon of black asphalt cutting through the heart of America.
I had been riding for days. Maybe a week, maybe more.
Time had lost all meaning somewhere around the Oklahoma-Arkansas border, and I had stopped caring about things like clocks and calendars and where I was supposed to be.
All that mattered was the road. The wind in my face.
The roar of the engine beneath me. The endless miles that stretched out in every direction, promising escape, promising peace, promising something that I couldn’t quite name.
But no matter how far I rode, no matter how fast I pushed the bike, I couldn’t outrun the memory of that night.
It played on a loop in my mind, vivid and relentless.
The moonlight on the water. The scent of jasmine in the air. The way she appeared out of the darkness like a dream made flesh.
Julie.
My Julie.
She had come to me that night. I was sure of it. She had let me hold her, touch her, love her the way I had loved her since we were kids. And she had given herself to me. Willingly, completely, the way she had the very first time we had been together.
I remembered that night like it was yesterday.
We’d been seventeen. High school sweethearts sneaking away from a bonfire party to find some privacy in the back of my truck.
She had been nervous, her hands trembling as she unbuttoned her shirt.
But she had looked at me with those big brown eyes and told me she loved me, that she wanted this, that she wanted me.
And I had made love to her as gently as I knew how, whispering promises against her skin, telling her I would love her forever, that I would never let her go.
I had kept that promise. I loved her every day of our lives together. I married her. I built a life with her. I had given her everything I had to give. And then she’d died. And I had been left with nothing but memories and a daughter I couldn’t bear to look at.
But that night at the pond...
That night, she had come back to me. I could still feel the way her body had fit against mine, soft and warm and perfect. I could still taste her lips, still hear the way she gasped my name as I moved inside her.
It had been real.
It had to be real.
Because if it wasn’t, if it had all been some whiskey-soaked hallucination, some cruel trick of my grief-addled mind, then I was losing it.
I was going insane. And I couldn’t afford to go insane.
Not when I had a daughter waiting for me back in Tennessee.
Not when I had a club that needed me, brothers who depended on me.
But God, I wanted to believe it had been real.
I wanted to believe that Julie had found a way to come back to me, even if it was just for one night.
That she had forgiven me for failing her, for letting her die, for abandoning our daughter.
I wanted to believe that somewhere, somehow, she was still with me.
The miles blurred together. Highways and back roads, truck stops and dive bars, nameless towns that all looked the same.
I rode through rain and heat and the kind of bone-deep exhaustion that made my hands shake on the handlebars.
But I kept riding. Because stopping meant thinking.
And thinking meant facing a truth I wasn’t ready to face.
That Julie was gone. That she wasn’t coming back.
That the woman I held that night at the pond had been nothing more than a figment of my imagination, a ghost conjured by grief and whiskey and the desperate need to feel something other than pain.
But even as I tried to convince myself of that, another truth was growing inside me.
A quiet and insistent truth that was becoming impossible to ignore.
I needed to go back. Back to Lawton. Back to the Owens Farm. Back to that pond where I had felt her, smelled her, tasted her. Because something had happened that night. Something real, tangible, and undeniable. And I needed to understand what it was.
The pull grew stronger with every mile I put between myself and Oklahoma. It was a physical thing, a tether wrapped around my chest, tugging me back toward something I couldn’t name.
At first, I fought it. I rode east, then north, then west again, trying to outrun the feeling. I told myself I was being ridiculous, that there was nothing waiting for me in Lawton except more pain and confusion. But the pull didn’t weaken.
If anything, it grew stronger. It whispered to me in the quiet moments between towns. It haunted my dreams when I finally collapsed in some cheap motel room. It followed me like a shadow, relentless and unyielding.
Go back.
You need to go back.
She’s waiting for you.
I didn’t know who “she” was. Julie was dead.
She wasn’t waiting for anyone. But the voice in my head didn’t care about logic or reason, or the cold, hard facts of reality.
It just kept pulling. And finally, somewhere in the middle of nowhere—Kansas, probably—I stopped fighting it.
I pulled off the highway and sat on my bike in the parking lot of a gas station, staring at the horizon as the sun set in a blaze of orange and gold.
I was tired. Bone-tired. Soul-tired, and I was done running.
Whatever was waiting for me in Lawton—whether it was answers or more questions, peace or more pain—I needed to face it.
I needed to go back to that pond. I needed to understand what had happened that night.
And I needed to know if the scent of jasmine that still clung to my skin was real or just another ghost haunting the ruins of my broken heart.
I started the bike and turned south.
Toward Oklahoma. Toward Lawton. Toward whatever truth was waiting for me there. Because I couldn’t deny it anymore.
I couldn’t outrun it.
The pull was too strong.
And God help me, I was going back.