I flared my nostrils as I sauntered around her like a lion stalking its prey, waiting for the perfect time to strike and feed. She belonged to him. She was his. She was precious to Satan. As far as I was concerned, she was taking up oxygen she nolonger deserved, and she only had her husband to thank for my lack of empathy.
My leather cut creaked as my arms swung slowly, my eyes fixed on her every move, my jaw tight, my teeth grinding together, and my fingers flexed around the 9mm in my hand.
One bullet.
One pull of the trigger.
That’s all it would take to steal a little piece of his victory away fromhim. A victory he had no right to take from me.
“Please.” She sobbed through an urgent breath. “Don’t… don’t do this. I… I have children.”
I stopped by her side, freezing and letting the silence take over, once again. I figured she should be allowed to appreciate the heavy thunder of her heartbeat one last time before I left.
“You do?” I eventually muttered, my voice low and calm.
She nodded furiously, her eyes scrunching tight as more tears tried to escape.
“Okay,” I sighed.
Helen blinked slowly, forcing two tears to fall down her cheeks before she sniffed back her emotion, parted her lips and dared to look up at me through her blurry eyes.
“O-okay?” she asked with disbelief, and I nodded once. “That’s… that’s it?”
My smile turned upside down, and I shrugged a shoulder.
“Now what?”
“Now… you run.”
Helen’s eyes were wild, blinking furiously to try and read my expression. When she was met with a stone-cold killer gaze, she wasted no time in using her hands to push herself up from her cold, tiled floor, her legs scrambling to get her to stand before she tried to run away.
Her breaths were frantic.
They made my heart beat faster.
It was always better when they thought they had a chance.
I watched her from the corner of my eyes. I watched her bump into their kitchen island, and I watched her knock the fruit bowl off the counter. I watched her knees give way and her body buckle as she held onto the edge and tried to escape my vengeance.
I watched as she spluttered and stuttered and almost made it to the door.
But then I took a deep breath, spun on the heels of my feet, raised my gun, and I fired… without shame.
“Goodbye, Mrs. Jon Taylor,” I whispered.
Chapter One
AYDA
We buried Harry on a beautiful spring day. The sky was the most perfect shade of indigo with cotton clouds making it look endless. It was the kind of day where he and I would have sat outside the pawnshop talking about stupid shit that really didn’t mean all that much to either one of us. No one could shoot the shit quite like Harry. He always managed to inject something poignant and full of wisdom in there, but he hid it well because he had a reputation to uphold and all that.
A day full of sunshine for his send-off was all wrong.
It should have been a dark day filled with cold rain. A day that felt like the whole world around us was mourning this man with as much pain and grief as us. We needed the rain to cloak our tears from one another, to hide from ourselves, but Harry wasn’t having any of that. I could almost hear him coughing as he laughed sadistically at a bunch of road-hardened bikers being absolute pussies, unable to hide our emotions, while secretly loving the fact that every single last one of us was taking his death so damn hard.
His resting place was near Pete’s grave, his body encased in a shiny black casket with chrome handles and the club’s reaper and hounds etched into the highly polished surface.Every one of the girls who attended dropped in a black-tipped rose and a pair of their favorite underwear, while the guys poured in enough whiskey to grow barrels at his tombstone.
All I could think as I looked down at his descending body was that Harry would have loved every second of this—the ceremonious goodbye to one of our own in the only way we knew how.