Doom’s Downfall (Reapers Rejects MC: Second Generation: Mexico #3)

Prologue

Doom

Many Years Ago…

There's blood under my fingernails. I can feel it drying, going tight against the skin, cracking when I flex my hands on the steering wheel. Some of it's mine. Most of it isn't.

The car smells like gasoline, copper, and the sharp chemical bite of gunpowder that's settled into my clothes.

My sister's pressed against the passenger door as far from me as the seatbelt allows, her forehead against the window, her knees pulled to her chest.

She hasn't spoken since I carried her out.

She flinched when I touched her.

Not a small flinch—her whole body recoiled like I'd burned her, and the sound she made wasn't a scream.

It was worse.

It was the sound of someone who's forgotten that being touched can mean anything other than pain.

Behind us, the glow from the fires is still visible in the rearview mirror.

Orange against the Nevada desert, two separate points of light where the stash houses used to be.

By the morning there'll be nothing left but foundation and ash. Good.

Eleven men.

I count them without meaning to, my brain going through the motions whether I want it to or not.

The first is the guard at the south entrance—throat, quick, quiet.

The second and third are in the hallway, reaching for weapons they never get to.

After that, the numbers blur into motion: doorways and muzzle flash and the flat crack of a pistol and the wet sound of a body hitting concrete.

I don't feel anything while it's happening.

Not rage, not fear, not satisfaction.

Just the flat calmness of a plan going exactly the way I wanted it to.

The feelings will come later. They always do.

Six months. That's how long I waited.

Six months of showing up to work for Marco Salcedo like nothing's wrong, like my sister hasn't been taken from her apartment on a random afternoon and sold to his business associates at a table in the back room of a restaurant.

Sold. Like furniture. Like a car with low mileage.

I stand in that same restaurant days later and watch Marco eat a steak and talk about the Dodgers while I know—I know—that somewhere in this city my sister is in a room she can't leave, and the men who bought her are doing things to her that I can't think about without my hands starting to shake.

So I don't think about it. I plan instead.

I'm eighteen. Old enough to kill. Young enough to believe I can fix what I've broken.

The gasoline is the easy part.

Weeks of buying five-gallon containers from different stations across Clark County, never the same one twice, paying cash, wearing a hat.

I store them in my mother's garage while she works double shifts at the hospital.

She never asks. Maybe she knows.

Maybe she sees it in my face when I come home from working for the man who sold her daughter and sit at the kitchen table with my fists balled under the cloth, eating rice and beans and swallowing fury with every bite.

The hard part is the waiting.

Going to sleep every night knowing my sister is somewhere I can't reach, with people who paid for her like she's product.

Waking up at odd hours in the night with my sheets soaked in sweat because I've dreamed about what they're doing to her, and the dreams are bad, but the truth is probably worse.

Putting on a clean shirt and driving to Marco's compound where he claps me on the shoulder and tells me I'm doing good work, and I smile, nod, and imagine what his face will look like when it's burning.

I map every property he owns.

Two stash houses, a restaurant, a garage he uses for distribution, and a strip mall office he keeps for meetings.

I track rotations, shift changes, who carries what weapon, who drinks on the job, who leaves early, whose wife is pregnant, who parks facing out for a fast exit.

By the end of month four, I can walk through any of his buildings with my eyes closed.

During month five, I find out where they're keeping her.

A house in Pahrump, seventy miles outside Vegas, owned by a man whose name I never learn and don't need to.

Two men are posted outside, and one’s on the inside.

My sister’s in a room with a deadbolt on the wrong side of the door.

When I get confirmation of the address, I sit in my car in a Walmart parking lot for twenty minutes with my hands on the wheel, not moving, not breathing right, just letting the rage cycle through me until it burns itself into something cold and useful.

I hit the stash houses first.

Both at the same time isn't possible alone, so I go east, then west, forty minutes apart.

Gasoline through the windows. A match. The first one catches fast—cheap drywall and carpet and whatever product is stacked in the back room goes up like kindling.

By the time I reach the second, the scanner chatter is already going wild.

Marco's men are scrambling to figure out what's happening to their supply while I walk into the second house through the back door.

Five men are in the east house. They don't get out.

The three at the restaurant come next.

I catch them in the parking lot, loading cash into a van.

Two go down before the third turns around. He has a Glock, but his hands are shaking so badly he can't thumb the safety.

I take his own weapon from him and use it against him.

Then Pahrump.

The two outside are smoking, watching the glow on the horizon, and arguing about whether to run.

I don't give them the chance to decide. The one inside hears the shots and is reaching for a shotgun propped against the wall when I come through the front door.

He's heavy, slow, and I put him down before his fingers close around the stock.

The house goes quiet. Just the tick of a clock on the wall, my own breathing, and the smell of cordite hanging in the air like fog.

The deadbolt is a Schlage. Standard. I kick the door twice and the frame splinters.

She's on a mattress on the floor.

No sheets. A bottle of water and an empty takeout container beside her.

She's wearing a man's t-shirt that hangs past her thighs and nothing else.

Her hair is matted, tangled into knots at the back of her head like no one's touched it in weeks except to pull.

Her wrists have ligature marks—raw, red, some scabbed over and reopened.

Her collarbones jut out sharper than I remember.

She's lost weight she didn't have to lose.

The room smells like sweat and something stale and human that makes my stomach clench.

There's a bucket in the corner. A chain bolted to the wall with an open padlock hanging from it.

I look at that chain and for the first time tonight my hands start shaking, because the chain is short—four feet, maybe five—and the mattress is just within its reach, and I understand with a clarity that splits me open exactly what her days have looked like in this room.

When she sees me, she doesn't scream. Doesn't cry.

She just looks at me with eyes that have gone completely flat—no recognition, no relief, nothing—and says, "No me toques."

Don't touch me.

I put my hands up. Palms out. Blood on both of them.

"It's me, kiddo," I tell her, and my voice doesn't sound like mine. It sounds like it's coming from the bottom of a well. "We're getting the fuck out of here, right now."

She shakes her head.

Not refusing to leave—refusing to believe any of it is real.

I've seen that look on people in shock.

The brain shuts down when the body's been through too much.

She's somewhere far away, locked behind her own eyes, and the man standing in her doorway, covered in other men's blood isn't bringing her back.

I take off my jacket and hold it out.

She stares at it for a long time.

Her fingers twitch twice before she reaches for it, and when she does, she pulls it against her chest like armor, like it's the first thing she's been given instead of had taken.

We walk out through the front door, past the bodies, past the spent casings on the tile floor.

I open the passenger side of the Honda I bought for eight hundred dollars cash from a lot in North Las Vegas.

She gets in without a word. I go around to the driver's side. Before I start the engine I grip the steering wheel until my knuckles go white, because if I don't hold on to something I'm going to go back inside that house and set it on fire too.

We drive.

That was two hours ago now.

The fires are smaller in the rearview, fading points of orange against a dark sky.

My sister hasn't moved.

Her breathing is steady but shallow, and every few minutes her hands clench and release in the fabric of my jacket like she's testing whether her fingers still work.

I take the exit toward Primm, away from Vegas, toward the California border.

There's a motel I know that doesn't ask questions and takes cash.

We'll stay there tonight. Tomorrow, I'll call my mother and figure out what comes next.

"This all happened because of you." Her voice is so quiet I almost miss it under the road noise.

I glance over.

She's still pressed against the door, still facing the window, but her jaw is working like she's chewing on words before letting them out.

"If you hadn't been working for him," she says, "he never would've known I existed."

I don't answer.

The words hit me like a blade slipping between ribs—precise, quiet, and deep enough to reach something vital.

There's nothing to say to something that's true.

I brought this to her door. I was the connection. I was the reason Marco Salcedo knew I had a sister, knew where she lived, knew she could be used.

Every night she spent chained to that wall is a night I put her there, and we both know it.

She doesn't speak again for the rest of the drive.

When we get to the motel, I check in and we go into a room with two double beds and a carpet that smells like cigarette smoke and bleach.

She goes into the bathroom and locks the door. The shower runs for forty-five minutes.

I sit on the edge of the bed and listen to the water and wonder if she's trying to wash off six months, or just standing under the spray because the heat is the first kind thing her body's felt since April.