Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 94076 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 470(@200wpm)___ 376(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94076 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 470(@200wpm)___ 376(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
It’s close to two a.m. when I ride back to the Knights of St. Boniface clubhouse. It’s an old castle on the hill overlooking St. Boniface. Most of the castle is in ruins, but we make it work—we have for more than a hundred years, when the very first Knights of St. Boniface chapter was formed. They rose out of the ashes of World War I and bought the abandoned castle as their clubhouse.
Tonight, with the full moon shining behind it, the clubhouse looks majestic. Resilient. Like home.
I pass through the tall wrought-iron gates and along the winding driveway, still feeling the effects of tonight with every breath I take.
Which isn’t like me.
After a kill, I’m usually buzzing. Every nerve and fiber fizzing with wild energy.
Ridding the world of one more asshole brings a bag of mixed emotions and creates a frenetic energy in me that takes time to ease. I like to help it along by fucking it out of me.
Usually, I reach for one of the club girls, and we spend the night in mutual gratification. There is no shortage of them in our clubhouse. Beautiful, nurturing women who are soft and gentle, with hands that know how to soothe.
But not tonight.
I’m too fucking haunted by Carina and Beth to go looking for anything like that. Instead of feeling high, I feel a different kind of energy.
One of remorse and rage mixed with sadness and regret.
Fucking it out of my body doesn’t seem right.
Almost disrespectful.
After turning right at the end of the driveway, I pull into the underground parking garage beneath the clubhouse. It used to be an old boat slipway leading down to the beach. Now it’s where we keep our Harleys and club vehicles.
I park my bike next to Beast’s gigantic black and chrome monster and kill the engine. Tonight I don’t need pussy, I need a bottle of Jack and some alone time.
But Beast is waiting for me at the bottom of the stairwell leading into the clubhouse. He’s an enormous man. Seven feet tall with tattooed-covered muscles and a fierceness about him that can only come from true grit. Scars twist across his face, the markings of a woman who wanted revenge a long time ago.
He’s our club president and a damned good one. He used to be a moody sonofabitch until he met his wife. Now the fucker smiles all the time. It doesn’t take a genius to see he’s crazy in love with her, and why wouldn’t he be. She’s gorgeous and feisty, and the moment I saw her I could see why he was obsessed with her.
If I sound like I’m jealous, I’m not. I’m a realist. There’s no point wanting something I’ll never have. What they have is a once-in-a-lifetime love. All-consuming and written in the stars. A love like that isn’t waiting for me, and I’m not going to lose sleep over it. I like my pussy with no expectation.
“I was starting to wonder if you were coming back,” Beast says, his big arms folded as he leans against the stone wall.
“I needed to ride.”
He nods. If anyone knows how I’m feeling, it’s him. He carries the weight of this club on his shoulders and has taken his fair share of nighttime rides to quell the lingering rage of a kill.
“Eugene taken care of?” he asks.
“I left him to the birds,” I say, walking past him and into the stairwell. He follows, and we climb the stone steps to the castle foyer.
“The authorities are at the gravesite.” His deep voice echoes along the stone walls.
I don’t tell him that I already know. That I rode out there and watched from a distance as the flashlights of the authorities moved through the trees, and the medical examiner set up his lights and tent around Beth’s grave.
I don’t tell him that I was there when they excavated her remains. Or that I stayed until they loaded her into the back of the medical examiner’s van and drove away.
Because he would ask me why, and I’m not ready to admit that this whole thing has hit me harder than anything else that has come before it.
I don’t tell him I could have ended Eugene’s life with a single bullet, but I didn’t, because those girls needed him to pay for what he did to them, and I was the only person who could do it.
So I did. I made him pay. Limb by limb. Tooth by tooth. Second by second. Until I felt a knowing inside me that the girls were avenged.
And I sure as fuck don’t have it in me tonight to explain to my president what this has done to me.
How I couldn’t leave Beth. That the least I could do was to watch her remains being pulled from the lonely, dark earth and sent back into the light where her parents could bury her so she could rest in peace.