Chapter 1
About Ten Years Later
ZANE
I haven’t been back to LA much since I escaped from prison right after they sentenced me for killing the priest. Life. I couldn’t do life in prison, I was barely eighteen years old. I couldn’t do life away from Sienna.
Even though she betrayed me.
Even though she lied and said the priest never raped her.
Even though she never spoke to me again after I killed him for her.
Not even after I risked my freedom for her for the second time and went to see her after I escaped.
She just smiled sadly from her bedroom window and waved at me. Wouldn’t come down to talk to me. Didn’t even come close to running away with me like I hoped and prayed she would. I didn’t even get to ask her, because we hadn’t spoken since she told me about the rapes.
I’ve been back in LA for months now. Back with my old friends, Rogue Angels MC. I’m supposed to be laying low, careful not to be seen. Because I’m still on the FBI’s Most Wanted List and I’ll never come off it.
But no one would know I’m that skinny blond and blue-eyed kid on the picture they have for me. No one would know I’m the digitally aged version of that kid they update the listing with every so often either.
I look nothing like that kid. And I am nothing like that kid.
I spend the past ten years on the run—an outlaw, a renegade, a ghost—and those years were rough.
I’m sure my own mother wouldn’t recognize me anymore, if she still spoke to me.
She doesn’t. No one in my family does. The Rogues are my only friends and family now.
And they’re not all that friendly. They all disowned me too after I killed the priest. Cut me loose just like everyone else had.
But at least the Prez, Rogue finally welcomed me back now.
He’s my oldest friend in the world and I understand he had no choice but to let me go ten years ago, since he and the MC all about delivering justice.
Things are different now. But not completely.
So I obey their wishes. Don’t go out during the day. Hide.
But every night I ride. Usually to the church where my life ended in more ways than one. The Cathedral of Our Lady of Mercy. I haven’t seen much mercy from her. I haven’t shown much mercy either.
It’s late. The street is quiet. The Santa Ana winds are blowing hot and eerie.
They’re making my skin crawl in a way I can’t shake off, and this night strange, ominous, like something out of a horror movie.
It’s like those moments right before everything normal becomes abnormal and you’re sick to your stomach with fear and weirdness for the rest of your life.
I never thought I’d have a long life. Ten years post escaping from prison is already more than I ever expected to get.
Maybe tonight I’ll ride past Sienna’s old house too.
See her ghostly outline in the window of her bedroom waving at me.
Because she no longer lives there. She barely still lives in my memory.
Except on dark, moonless nights like this one when the weird wind blows.
The kind that makes you feel alive even though you’re as good as dead.
The church is as formidable as it always was. White walls that seem to glow even in the darkness. No outward signs of the horrors they housed and probably continue to house.
Yet a certain peace emanates from it anyway.
Created by years and years of people on their knees praying inside it, probably.
I used to know that peace. At mass. Back before I was a killer.
I don’t know it anymore. I just have a very faint memory of it.
The kind that tastes and feels like acid, burning through everything.
Because I’ll never have peace like that again. Because I don’t deserve it. And because Sienna is the only one who can ever give me back that peace.
By taking back her lies.
By telling me what I did took away her nightmares.
Telling me that it was worth it.
That she loves me.
I start my bike as that thought floods my brain with yet more corrosive acid. The loud, harsh sound of the engine rips through the peaceful silence of the night. And through that stupid, pointless thought.
She didn’t love me then and she certainly doesn’t love me now.
All I want from her are some answers. I’ve wanted them for years. And I won’t find them staring at the church where I lost my life because I thought I had all the answers. And I won’t find them at the house where she no longer lives.
I might find them at the house where she lives now. Up north in Monterey Bay. With her husband.
I’m sure I’ll find some answers there. But I doubt I’ll like them.
Which is why I never went to look for them before. I never went to look for her even though she’s been on my mind every day for the past ten years.
But it’s time now.
It’s time I get what peace I still can. From the woman whose lies took away my life more terribly than hands wrapped around my throat ever could.
Sienna has some answering to do. She has some reckoning to face. Some lies to take back. Some peace to bestow.
She owes me that much.