Chapter Twenty-Three
One Last Rev
Stunned, I turned in the direction Romeo indicated. Standing no more than five feet away from me was a man in a black hoodie with the hood up, and a leather prospect’s cut over it. The deep hood covered most of his face, and I caught a hint of yellow-tinted night-driving glasses in place as well. But that crooked smile and tentative wave of a hand told me all I needed to know.
Josh. He was really here.
Despite all odds, Romeo had come through for me yet again.
“Josh.” Instinctively I stepped toward him so I could give him a hug before I stopped myself. If Hades did have spies lurking around, the last thing I wanted to do was make my brother stick out in this crowd by paying obvious attention to him. “I’m glad to see you’re still in one piece.”
“I’m glad to still be in one piece.” The smile that lit my brother’s expression, at least as far as I could see it, was worlds apart from the bitter mask he’d been wearing the last time we’d seen each other. He seemed like a different person altogether, a better, more stable person who was more like the brother I remembered. It took everything I had not to throw my arms around him and welcome him back to life. “Word on the street is you’re wearing Romeo’s patch. Is that true?”
For an answer, I shrugged my coat off my shoulders to catch at my elbows and turned to show him the back of the jacket Romeo had given me. “Ta-da.”
“Wow, it’s official, then. You’re Romeo’s ol’ lady.”
“I will never, ever fully get over being called old while I’m still in my twenties. But yeah,” I added, turning to shoot a smile at the man in question. “I’m his, and he’s mine.”
“Damn straight.” Romeo helped me put my coat back in place before putting his arm around my shoulders. “Took you long enough to figure it out.”
“I’m happy for you,” Josh said, and I was pleased to hear the sincerity in his tone. “Romeo’s a good guy. I’ve learned that much about him since I’ve been here, so I know you’re going to be treated right. After everything you’ve been through, Shiloh, you deserve all the happiness in the world. That’s what I told Mom and Dad when I went to see them.”
For a full second I thought I’d heard him wrong. “What?”
Josh nodded in a solemn way. “I told them everything, Shiloh—cooking in college, selling to the wrong people, your kidnapping and torture and how I could’ve put a stop to it by giving them what they wanted, but didn’t. All of it. They needed to know the truth so they could start figuring out how to mend their relationship with you.”
I was so stunned I could barely remember how to speak. “I… You just… Mend things with me?”
“Yeah. You should know that Dad was especially hit with the need to reach out to you in the hope of trying to be a family again. Romeo can back me up on that.”
Just when I thought I couldn’t be any more shocked. “How would you know anything about this?” I asked Romeo, looking up at him.
He shrugged. “I was there.”
“Why?”
“Someone had to drive your brother over to their house.”
“He actually didn’t give me a choice,” Josh said sheepishly. “I swear, Shiloh, I had every intention of doing it all on my own once things had cooled down and the time was right.”
“The time is always right when it comes to clearing the air,” Romeo declared, giving my brother a hard stare. “This was a step you needed to take for yourself, and for your sister. Even if this is as far as the McKeen family dynamic goes, at least it can move on from this point knowing what the truth is.”
“I just can’t believe it.” The words came out of my mouth on autopilot, and I found myself shaking my head. “I never thought the day would come when I would ever have to even think about talking to them face-to-face again.”
“It’s up to you if you decide to open that door,” Romeo said, giving my shoulders a reassuring squeeze. “Just know that they’re going to be there knocking.”
“I really hope you do decide to answer that door, Shiloh,” my brother added when I didn’t say anything. “It’s more than a matter of family ties or obligation we’re talking about here. It’s a matter of forgiveness.”
“I’m not sure they deserve forgiveness.” And wow, that really did just come out of my mouth.
Josh dipped his head so that I couldn’t see any part of his face. “I hope you don’t mean that,” he said at length, and I could barely hear him over the roar of the bonfire. “Because if you can’t forgive Mom and Dad, how are you ever going to truly forgive me?”
Oh, Josh.
Before I could find an answer for him, Tyr, on a massive beast of a Harley with loads of chrome and T-bar handlebars, rolled up to the bonfire, the crowd parting for him as he went. Several cheered the showy appearance of their leader, but I felt the sudden tension locking Romeo’s body in place.
This wasn’t planned. I could tell by Romeo’s reaction.
Not good. Definitely not good.
“Gravediggers! Eyes front.” After an ear-splitting rev of his bike to make sure he had everyone’s attention, Tyr let it idle while his voice carried over the noise of the engine, the crowd and probably over to the cops on the other side of the street. “Tonight, we celebrate our shared success as a club, a brotherhood, but most of all a family. We work together, play together, and share together in the prosperity our hard work has brought us. We’re successful because we know we are stronger together than we are alone. That’s what it is to be this brotherhood. That’s what it is to be this family.”
A cheer went up, but I’d have to be in a coma to not notice Romeo remained silent and watchful, his unblinking gaze fixed on Tyr.
“Sadly, like all families, we get hit hard by tragedy. Tonight is one of those times. I just got word that we’ve lost one of our brothers.”
Oh, no. No, no, no…
“Arthur, our prospect who was on the verge of earning his patch, has died from his wounds. This makes him the first official casualty of a situation we did not start, but we will now fucking finish. Make no mistake—this is a matter of survival.”
“Smart,” my brother murmured beside me while the reality of the situation churned like broken glass in my head. “He knows LEO’s listening in, so he avoids using words like war and fight.”
“Arthur.” I clamped a hand over my mouth to keep from crying out. Horror and grief stabbed through me, squeezing my chest until my eyes watered and I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t care about what was smart, or about LEOs, or anything else. Arthur was dead because I sent him on a silly little errand. If I hadn’t noticed the discrepancy in the food order, or had gone after the delivery man myself, maybe Arthur would still be…
Romeo’s arms came around me and held me close to this chest, and that contact alone stilled the vicious racing of my thoughts.
“So, I say to my brothers and our extended Gravedigger family, tonight we’re going to celebrate our prospect, Arthur. And we’re going to kick that celebration off by sending the patch he earned up to be with him on the smoke of this bonfire.” Tyr held up the familiar oval Gravedigger patch for all to see, “With it goes our solemn promise that we will never forget his name, and to find true Gravedigger justice for him if it’s the last goddamn thing we do. This is how we honor our brother. This is how we honor each other, because if you attack one of us, you attack all of us. Justice will be served for Arthur.”
Another raucous wave of cheers went up, but it was far different from anything I’d heard that night. This was a guttural growl of barely contained fury, a collective roar of rage and pain, and it was the most dangerous thing I had ever heard. It was echoed in the chest I rested against, and I shifted against Romeo to search his face. It was tight with tension and his eyes burned with an inner fire I could almost feel as Tyr approached the bonfire and tossed Arthur’s patch onto the pyre.
Goodbye, King Arthur. You would have been an awesome Gravedigger.
“Now, to my brothers, I speak solely to you.” Tyr headed back to straddle his idling bike once more and looked around at the people bathed in the golden glow of the fire. “Let’s give Arthur a proper Gravedigger send-off by giving him one last rev. Go get your bikes, huddle up around the fire, and let’s make so much fucking noise that it rings out as a warning to both heaven and hell, and that warning is this—prepare to have a force of nature sweeping down on you, because Arthur of the Gravediggers MC is coming your way. Let’s rev.”
Tyr revved his bike while Romeo gave me a squeeze and put his mouth to my ear. “Gotta go, baby. Chef,” he added, looking to my brother. “Stay with your sister while I’m gone.”
“Got it.” Josh moved to take Romeo’s place by my side.
I watched Romeo disappear into the crowd before turning to Josh. “One last rev?”
“It’s an old biker tradition that goes way back to the beginning of motorcycle gangs that formed right after the Second World War. When one of their own dies, his brothers rev their bikes as loud as they can. Think of it as a respectful moment of silence, except completely deafening.”
“I see.” I stared at the bonfire until it blurred under a veil of unshed tears. “Arthur would have loved that.”
“You knew him?”
“Yeah.” I sniffled, then quickly wiped at the tears as they fell. Unlike the revving of engines, Arthur would have hated my tears. “He was my bodyguard. And my friend.”
“Damn, I’m sorry, Shiloh.” He shifted, and his hand brushed mine seemingly by accident. “One way or the other, you’ve been put through the wringer. I wish like hell I could hug you, but even now we’re probably being watched, so I can’t. I’ve done enough damage to your life.”
“Watched? You mean by Hades’s spies? If he has them, I mean,” I added hastily, remembering all too well I wasn’t supposed to know anything about spies.
“Oh, he has them,” came the grim response. “Hades has an army full of devoted moles sprinkled throughout the city, and I have to admit, I’ve never understood why they’re so devoted.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, take Tyr for instance.” Josh discreetly tilted his head in the direction of the Gravedigger president. “He’s a great leader, because he acts like he sees every brother in his club as his equal. He doesn’t put himself above anyone else, and he seems to go into the trenches with his brothers to get just as dirty as they do. Hades, though… that bastard sees himself as King Shit of Turd Hill. Everyone else is his servant. No one’s a brother to him. How could they be, when Hades believes he’s as powerful as the deity he’s named after?”
“Maybe the people who follow him like being ruled?”
“Could be, but I think most of Hades’s people approve of the way he interacts with the rest of the world.”
I shook my head. “You’ve lost me.”
“There was this little pet store that opened up in a strip mall in Hades’s territory,” he said after a moment, his voice haunted and barely heard above the noise of Tyr’s idling bike. “It was run by a couple of hippy-dippy sisters who thought everyone was like them—sweet and kind and ready to protect all the helpless creatures of the world. Hades went to the grand opening of this shop and busted out the aquariums with a baseball bat, wrung the necks of all the birds, and took the puppies to be fed to his dogs that he keeps for dog fighting—his favorite sport, by the way. Then he left. He didn’t even shake them down for protection money, or anything. He just didn’t like that they existed, so he made sure they didn’t.”
“My God.” I swallowed hard and tried not to picture the torture of all those poor animals, but damn, it was hard. No wonder my brother had been so strung out on nerves he hadn’t even been recognizable to me. “Who could possibly want to follow someone like that?”
“People who’re just like him. The cruelty-lovers and the chaos agents. The psychopathic outcasts of civil society. The biker world’s always attracted that kind of personality, because they’re all a little anti-establishment at their core. But Hades is on a whole other level of anarchy. He wants to burn it all down, just for the fun of seeing the flames. That kind of crazy attracts those who are like-minded, and I think that’s why his people are so fanatically loyal to him. When they’re with Hades, they have permission to be their worst selves.”
Well, that sounded completely horrible. “I’d like to think that sort of person is few and far between.”
“That may be, but if they’re true believers of chaos, numbers don’t matter, Shiloh. Trust me, things like compassion and a basic sense of decency don’t weigh them down. They’re monsters in human skin, and they’ll happily kill anyone who threatens to put an end to their fucked-up kind of fun. Killing is fun for them, so wiping out as many people as possible is nothing more than playing a first-person shooter in their eyes. They even keep score, the sick bastards.”
That was so twisted I could barely wrap my mind around it. “How did you survive in that hell, Josh?”
“I became one of them.” The confession came out so quietly I had to strain to hear it. “I’ve… done things, Shiloh. Terrible things. It doesn’t matter that they made me do them. What matters is that I chose to do them to save my own fucking skin. How the hell do I atone for that? How the hell do I atone for choosing to become a monster?”
“I forgive you,” I said impulsively, and when I realized that what I’d said was true, I reached out and squeezed his hand. “If I can forgive you for everything that’s happened, maybe you should try forgiving yourself.”
His fingers squeezed mine before he let go. “I’ve been working on getting my head right ever since I got out of the Chicago Gravediggers, and Romeo has been helping me with that. In a lot of ways he’s got the same traits as most bikers—hates rules, limitations and fake-ass niceties of society, that kind of thing. But he gives a damn about people, you know? The reason he took me to see Mom and Dad was because he cares so much about you, and the polite way he treated them—well, Mom anyway, not so much Dad—told me he’s got a soul. Same with Tyr. You know what they say, like attracts like, and I think most of these guys are like—” He started to sweep a hand at the crowd around the bonfire before he froze. “Holy shit.”
“What?” Instantly on alert, I glanced around and saw nothing that would make my brother lose all color. “What is it, Josh?”
“One of Hades’s guys is here—oh, fuck.” Abruptly he turned his back on the bonfire, his eyes casting wildly about. “Jesus, Jesus, I think he saw me. I’m not sure, but I think he saw me. We need to get out of here, Shiloh. Now.”
“Stop.” It took all my strength not to freak out and look around for the bad guy, but the last thing I wanted to do was tip them off that we had spotted them. “Take a breath and don’t panic, okay? And whatever you do, do not run. Predators love it when you run, so don’t.” I’d learned that early on from Marvel, when he’d laugh as I tried to keep out of his reach—a hard thing to do in a locked room.
“What the fuck are we supposed to do then, wait like docile little lambs for him to come over here and slaughter us?”
Damn, his panic was getting to me. “Josh, think, okay? He’s the one in enemy territory, not us. It would be insane for him to expose himself now by killing us in front of all these people. As long as we stay front and center, he can’t lift a finger against us.”
He stared at me like I was deranged. “So our plan is just to stand here?”
“Our plan is to tell someone like Tyr or Romeo or one of his officers that you’ve spotted the spy in their midst.”
“Shiloh, he’s wearing a lieutenant’s badge, I can see it from here. That means he is one of Tyr’s officers.”
Shit. Shit, shit, shit…
“Don’t you get it? All that sonofabitch has to do is yell out that I’m a threat, that I’m one of Hades’s men, and this crowd will go after me with fucking pitchforks.”
That part was probably true. The moment Tyr announced Arthur had died, even I had felt it—a terrible bloodlust and a need for vengeance. For a lot of these people it wouldn’t matter that their fury would be taken out on the wrong man. Just the suggestion from a Gravedigger lieutenant that Josh was one of Hades’s men would be enough for them to wipe Josh out of existence.
Not to mention the spy wouldn’t hesitate to deflect attention away from himself. If he even suspected Josh could blow his cover, he’d have no choice but to silence my brother forever.
But we still had the advantage, if we just kept our cool.
“Nice and casual, we’re going to make our way over to Tyr, and you’re going to tell him who it is.” I laced my hand with his, not at all surprised to find his fingers had gone ice cold. “Don’t look around, don’t make eye contact with anyone, okay? I’ll lead the way with a smile on my face to show how calm we are. Don’t worry, we’ve got this.”
“Shiloh… okay, yeah. We’ve got this.”
He tried to sound tough while his icy fingers gripped mine.
I’d taken only two steps in Tyr’s direction when dozens of bikes flooded in as one and started to rev loudly enough to make my ears bleed. I looked around, trying to see if Romeo was one of them, hoping he was closer to us than Tyr, but all I saw were unfamiliar faces. Hell, at this point I’d take Zee or even Ashtray to tell our story to—
BOOM.
Josh and I hit the deck, the asphalt beneath my hands and knees as cold as ice. For several seconds I thought a bomb had gone off before I realized someone had tossed a heavy-duty firework into the bonfire. The people gathered around the bonfire cried out, the acrid smell of gunpowder poisoned the air, and like a switch being thrown all hell broke loose in the Gravedigger compound.
“Who the fuck threw that?” I heard Tyr roar even as my brother unceremoniously hauled me to my feet and dragged me away from that chaotic knot of people, bikes and fire, and nearly got us run over by an incoming Harley. “Swear to Christ, I will fucking find you—”
“He’s coming, he’s coming, he’s coming!” Wide-eyed with outright terror, Josh ran off into the darkness, dragging me behind him like a pull-toy, and I would have bet every cent I had that he’d forgotten he was holding on to me.
“Josh, wait.” The borrowed platform heels I wore weren’t meant for mad dashes. To my horror, first one then the other flew off my feet to be left behind in our wake. “Josh, goddamn it, stop.” We reached the island of straggly trees and bushes in the middle of the parking lot, and I went to one knee in the gravel when I stepped on something thorny in the darkness. My toes were already going numb, but I still felt that. “Geez, what the hell is wrong with you? You’re like that commercial of idiotic teenagers hiding from the killer behind a wall of chainsaws instead of getting in the car and calmly driving away.” With a hiss, I plucked the burr out of my foot, then yanked my phone out of my pocket and hit Romeo’s number. “I’m calling Romeo. I don’t want him to panic when he can’t find us at the bonfire. Which we’re returning to, by the way.” At the very least I needed to retrieve my shoes so I didn’t come down with another case of frostbite.
“Idiotic?” Clearly my brother’s brain was a few steps behind me, and he stared at me as if he didn’t know who I was. “You’d run too if you’d ever seen this guy in action. He laughs when people scream. He thinks all human suffering is funny, especially when it comes to skinning people. I mean, fucking skinning people, can you imagine? If he traps you—”
“But that’s exactly my point, Josh. He’s the one who’s trapped in here with us.” Putting the phone to my ear, I listened to the other end of the line ring. “Us, as in lots of people. You’re just helping him out by separating us from anyone who’s strong enough to do something about him.”
“Looks like your sister got all the street smarts while you got the book smarts, Chef.” The familiar voice came out of the darkness, and I turned to watch Slash emerge from the shadows, a gun in his hand and a grin on his face. “Ditch the phone, Shy. Now.”
My blood iced over even as Romeo answered the phone. “Shy? Where are you?”
Without saying a word and keeping the line open, I dropped my phone into the thorny, leafless bush I stood next to.
Find me, Romeo. Find me, find me, find me, please.