Banshee (Shotgun Saints MC #2)

Prologue

Banshee

I’m winning.

Three jacks and a pair of sevens, and Colt doesn’t have a goddamn clue.

He’s sitting across from me with that same shit-eating grin he always wears when he thinks he’s got me beat, tapping his cards against the edge of the table like that’s supposed to intimidate someone.

I take a pull of my beer, let the condensation drip onto my jeans, and wait for him to make his move.

The clubhouse is loud tonight.

A good loud.

The jukebox is playing Waylon, brothers are talking over each other, and someone’s racking the pool table with a crack that echoes off the concrete walls.

Phantom’s in the corner booth going over something with the treasurer, and Shadow’s across the room bullshitting with a couple of prospects about the run we’ve got planned for Saturday.

I can hear his laugh from here—deep, easy, the kind that comes from a man who’s settled in his own skin.

I’m settled in mine, too.

Right now, at this moment, I am exactly where I’m supposed to be.

Cold beer, good hand, my brothers around me, and my wife safe at home getting ready to go meet her best friend for dinner.

I don’t know yet that this is the last time I’ll feel like this.

Colt pushes his chips in. I let him. Then I lay down my cards and watch his face collapse. “Son of a bitch, Lee.”

“You telegraph everything, brother. Might as well play with your hand face-up.”

He flips me off. I grin—wide, genuine, the kind that comes easy because life is simple and good and I don’t know enough to be grateful for it yet.

That’s the cruelest part about the before. You never know you’re living in it.

My phone buzzes against my thigh.

I pull it out.

Rose’s name on the screen, her contact photo the one I took last summer on Earl’s porch—sun in her blonde hair, laughing at something I said that wasn’t even funny.

She always laughed at the unfunny ones.

Said that was the real test of love.

Anyone can laugh at a good joke.

I push back from the table. “Deal me out.”

“You just took fifty bucks off me, you’re not leaving—”

“Wife’s calling.” I’m already walking. The brothers give me shit for it—they always do, the ones who don’t understand that answering on the first ring isn’t weakness, it’s a privilege.

I earned the right to be the person she calls.

I step outside into the October night.

The air smells like wet asphalt and cedar, the sky low and heavy with clouds that haven’t fully committed to a downpour yet.

Just a mist. Fine droplets catching in the security light above the door.

I lean against the brick wall of the clubhouse and swipe to answer.

“Hey, darlin’.”

“Hey yourself.” Her voice is warm through the speaker, slightly distracted.

I can hear the rhythm of the road underneath—tires on wet pavement, the hum of her little Honda. “I’m running late. Bex is going to kill me.”

“Bex will survive. Where are you?”

“About twenty minutes out. I got held up at school—Tommy threw up all over the reading rug again, the third time this month. That kid’s mother needs to stop sending him with Lunchables. His stomach can’t handle the processed cheese.”

I tip my head back against the wall and close my eyes.

This. This right here.

Her voice in my ear, telling me about some kid’s weak stomach, the rain misting across my face.

This is everything. I’ve been alive thirty-three years and I didn’t start breathing right until I met her.

“You sound tired,” she says.

“I’m not tired. Just won fifty bucks off Colt.”

“Poor Colt. You’re terrible to that man.”

“He keeps sitting down at my table. That’s on him.”

She laughs. Soft and easy, like wind chimes on a porch.

That’s what Rose sounds like—everything gentle, everything good, a sound that makes you want to sit still and let it wash over you.

“Drive safe,” I tell her. “Roads are slick.”

“I know how to drive in the rain, Lee.” I can hear her smiling.

That specific tone she gets when she’s rolling her eyes at me with love behind it.

Five years of marriage and I can map her expressions by sound alone.

“I know you do. Humor me.”

“Always.” A pause. The windshield wipers keep time. “I love you.”

“Love you too, Rosie. Tell Bex I said hey.”

“She’ll say something inappropriate. She always does.”

“That’s why we keep her around.”

Another laugh. Shorter this time.

Then a breath that shifts—catches—and the sound underneath changes.

The steady hum of the road fractures.

Tires losing grip.

A sound I will learn to identify as hydroplaning, as tread on wet asphalt giving way, as physics betraying every promise the universe ever made me.

“Lee—”

My name. Just my name.

Not a scream. A question.

Like she’s confused about what’s happening, like the car is doing something she doesn’t understand, and the first person she reaches for is me.

Then the impact.

Metal. Glass.

A sound so violent it doesn’t register as real—it’s too big, too loud, a compression of noise that punches through the phone speaker and cracks something in the center of my chest.

The phone must go flying because the audio warps, distorts, and then there’s a secondary crash—smaller, duller.

The car settling. The world finishing what it started.

I’m off the wall.

I don’t remember moving but I’m standing in the parking lot in the misting rain with the phone pressed so hard against my ear the plastic creaks.

“Rose.”

Nothing.

“Rose!”

The line is still connected.

I can hear things.

Rain on crumpled metal.

The tick of a cooling engine.

Something hissing—steam or fluid, something leaking from something broken.

And underneath all of it, so faint I have to stop breathing to catch it, a sound that might be a breath. One breath. Shallow. Wet.

Then nothing at all.

I’m screaming her name.

I know this because brothers pour out of the clubhouse behind me—Phantom, Colt, Shadow—and someone grabs my shoulders but I wrench free because I need to hear, I need to listen, she might say something, she might—

“Lee.” Shadow’s voice. Close. Steady. His hand on my arm, his other hand taking my free hand and putting keys into it. No. Taking keys out of his own pocket. “Lee. Truck. Now.”

I can’t drive.

My hands are shaking so hard I can’t close my fingers.

Shadow takes the keys back, steers me to the passenger side, and we’re moving before I can process any of it.

I’m calling 911 with a voice that doesn’t sound like mine—too calm, too clinical, giving coordinates and mile markers because that’s what I do. I’m the Road Captain, I know every highway in this county by heart.

I plotted the route she’s on a hundred times.

I know exactly where she is.

Shadow drives ninety miles an hour down rain-slicked back roads and neither of us says a word.

The phone is still connected. The line is still open.

I hold it against my ear the entire drive, listening to rain fall on what’s left of her car, and I don’t hear another breath.

Twenty-six minutes.

That’s how long the drive takes at ninety on roads meant for fifty-five.

I know because I watch every second tick on the dashboard clock. I count them the way a man on the gallows counts steps.

Each one a chance—she could cough, she could moan, she could whisper my name and I’d know she was still in there, still holding on.

Each second of silence another nail.

We see the lights before we see the wreck.

Red and blue strobing through the rain, turning the wet highway into a kaleidoscope of emergency.

Sheriff’s department. Fire truck. Ambulance with its back doors open, but no one moving fast.

That’s the thing that hits me first. No one’s rushing. When someone can still be saved, people rush.

Shadow pulls the truck onto the shoulder.

I’m out before he’s fully stopped, boots hitting wet gravel, and I’m running toward the barrier where they’ve set up flares.

A deputy steps in front of me.

Young kid, barely old enough to grow the mustache he’s attempting.

He puts his hand on my chest.

“Sir, you can’t—”

“That’s my wife.”

The kid’s face changes.

That’s the moment I know for certain, because his eyes go soft with a pity so practiced it must be something they teach at the academy.

How to look at the husband. How to arrange your features into the shape of bad news.

I push past him.

Shadow’s behind me—I hear him say something to the deputy, low and authoritative, but I’m past hearing words.

I see the Honda, or rather what’s left of it.

The driver’s side is caved in where she went off the road and hit the concrete support of an overpass.

The impact was on her side. All on her side.

A firefighter stops me before I reach the car. Older guy. Eyes that have seen this before. “Son. Don’t.”

“Is she—”

“The coroner’s been called.”

The coroner.

My knees hit the wet asphalt.

I don’t decide to fall—my body just quits.

Gives up on standing like it’s finally gotten the memo that the structural foundation of everything I am has been ripped out from underneath it.

I’m on my knees in the rain on a Texas highway, and Shadow’s hand is on my back, and somewhere in the wreckage of a blue Honda Civic is the woman I was laughing with not even an hour ago.

Shadow doesn’t try to get me up.

Doesn’t say it’s going to be okay.

He just crouches beside me in the rain with his hand on my back and waits.

That’s the thing about Shadow—he knows when words are useless.

Knows that sometimes the only thing you can do for a dying man is stay close and let him bleed.

Four minutes.

That’s how long it takes to end a life. Not hers. Mine.

I don’t remember the hospital.

I don’t remember the sheriff’s office.

I don’t remember signing papers or identifying her or any of the bureaucratic machinery that grinds forward when someone dies, indifferent to the fact that you are dying too.

I remember the house.

Shadow drives me home because I still can’t operate my own hands.

He walks me inside.

Doesn’t say anything.

Just stands in the doorway while I stand in the living room and look at all the evidence of a life that no longer exists.

Her boots by the door.