Total pages in book: 38
Estimated words: 35443 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 35443 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
I take the phone and gasp. "Oh, my God." My hand even goes to my mouth. "She's gorgeous!"
Legion is nodding. "Yep," he sighs. "It’s pretty hard to hate your pedophile brother when the kid looks like that."
I frown. He's not exactly wrong… but.
"Sorry," he says, squeezin' my leg. "Whatever, right? I mean, she was seventeen. I don't agree with it, but it's done. And… yeah. I guess… I've decided… I won't kill him." He points at me. "But I want it on record that if he fucking steps out of line, ever. One inch. This deal is over and I will put him in the ground. My sister's happiness is the only thing standing between him and the red dirt."
I nod, letting out a long breath. Because I know he's serious.
"I get it. He deserves that. I don't forgive him either. But…" I frown and make a pouty face. Something I do not normally do. "If they came home… it would make me so happy."
We stare at each other for a moment, searching each other's eyes. And I know what he's thinking, because it's the same thing I'm thinking. Though neither of us says it.
We're thinking about how the line between good and evil can narrow so much and so suddenly, it nearly disappears.
What Colt did was wrong. I mean, that's just poor self-control on the low end and predatory behavior on the high.
But who am I to talk?
Or Legion, for that matter.
He buried thirty-six people behind his clubhouse.
A thin line indeed.
CHAPTER 11
At some point, we fall asleep. After the movie is over, after Savannah insists on cleaning up like a housewife, after the night is gone and the mornin' is comin', Savannah drapes herself over me like she's afraid I'll disappear again.
And I let her. Because if there's one thing I've learned about this world, nothing is permanent.
Somethin' wakes me before the sun comes up. Then the buzzin' of my phone solves the riddle. I lean over tryin' not to wake Savannah, and grab it off the coffee table.
It's four-thirty and the message is from Diesel. I need to talk to you.
I extract myself from Savannah's arms, makin' her groan. But I just kiss her and whisper, "I'll be right back."
I shrug on my jacket and go outside, closing the door behind me as I press Diesel's contact.
He answers first ring and I say, "Someone better be dead for you to be waking me up at four fuckin' thirty, Diesel."
"Yeah," he drawls. "Someone is."
"What the hell are you talkin' about?"
"Havoc."
"Havoc?" For a moment I'm relieved. "Yeah. He is. Been that way for a month now. What's that got to do with this call?”
Diesel lets out a long, slow breath on the other end of the line—the kind that sounds like it was caught somewhere in his chest for a while before he finally let it go. "I forgot too," he says, his voice rougher than usual. "I'm not callin' to put that on you. With everything that went down, everything that's still goin' down—I just forgot. We both did."
"I ask again. What the fuck are you talkin' about?"
"June, Legion. We forgot about fuckin' June."
The name lands like a gut punch. The hard kind that makes you immediately feel sick. "Oh, fuck. Did you talk to her?"
"I literally had a dream about her and just woke up sick."
"Yeah," Mama Jo's voice in the background. "And he started yellin' at me for it!"
"Woman," Diesel snaps. "I already fuckin' apologized for that, but it is your fuckin' job to take care of the old ladies!"
"I know," Mama Jo hits back. "I was out there on day three with all the other bitches. It's not my fault you and fuck-face didn't have the decency to go pay your respects! I'm not a damn babysitter!"
While they go back and forth—Diesel barking, Mama Jo giving just as good as she gets—I stop hearing any of it. Their voices blur into something distant, like radio static coming through thick walls, and everything else collapses in on itself. The weight of it hits me fast and ugly, the way bad things always do when you've been holding too much else in your hands to see them coming.
June Dun. Havoc's wife. Six kids, a farmstead ten miles out, bake sales, and school drives, and a woman who wore vintage dresses like she was born in a better era than the rest of us.
A woman who baked bread for the club on patch days. Whose loyalty to her man, her family, and this club in that order was absolute.
Every single time she kissed Havoc goodbye and he rode out, she knew—the way all the old ladies know—that this might be the last look of him she ever gets.
He took three bullets for the club. Literally went down shootin'.
And I never went to see her.