The door to the room opens, Razor enters, and when he spots what’s in my hands, he warily eyes Emily, then me. I show him my cell. “She needs to go, and I need a printer. Full page. Eight-by-ten. Nothing smaller. Nothing bigger. This has to be precise.”
A shadow crosses his face as he notices the picture I had promised to delete off my phone. “Get out, Emily.”
I don’t cower at the pure anger radiating from Razor, but Emily is out the door in seconds. I maintain eye contact with Razor, and he steps closer, towering over me as if he could will me into compliance. He can glower, he can yell, but this is Razor and he could never hurt me because he is built to the core to protect.
“I can crack this code, but I need this printed out.”
“This isn’t a game. It’s not a crossword puzzle or a seek-and-find. What’s on your phone is a powder keg and I will not allow you to be a casualty of the explosion.”
My heart aches at the pain in his eyes. He’s lost so much, more than I could ever comprehend. “No one will know I cracked this unless you tell or I tell, and we’re both capable of keeping secrets.”
Razor’s head falls back and he stares at the ceiling. A battle wages inside him between protecting me and gaining the answers he craves. “You don’t understand how bad this is.”
“I don’t understand. None of it, but I understand me. You think I can stop hunting for a solution, but I can’t. This code is in my brain and the wheels won’t stop, not even for you.”
I take his hand and squeeze it. “You know more about me than anyone else. I’ve told you more, told you secrets about my brain, and while you’re the one that understands me better than anyone, you still don’t truly understand. I’m not able to stop what happens in my mind. I’ll go crazy if I don’t solve this, so you can help me or you can fight me, but here’s the thing—the reason we get along so well is because you’re like me. Once something’s in our brain, it doesn’t stop.”
Razor’s shaking his head as he cups my face. There’s a desperation in his voice I’ve never heard. “It’s not the same. My mind is nothing like yours, and you’re right, I don’t fully understand, but I can’t drag you any further into this. I can’t lose you.”
I lay my hands over his. “You won’t. Because where my brain won’t stop, you can’t stop protecting the people you care for. I can crack this code, Razor, and I can do it knowing that whatever it is you’re scared of, you will never let it touch me. I trust you.”
Razor searches my eyes for an answer to a question he has yet to pose. “Stay here. I mean it, Breanna. You don’t move a foot.” He yanks the bylaws from my hands and he’s out the door.
RAZOR
EMILY’S SITTING IN Cyrus’s recliner, and her eyes are puffy. She wipes at a tear, but damn if her chin isn’t lifted in that pissed-off way of hers. Not sure what happened, but it could be on the same radiation fallout level as what’s going on with me and Breanna.
Oz is a wall in front of the screen door with his arms crossed over his chest, glaring at Emily in the same angry way she’s glaring at him. “Emily told Breanna about the Riot.”
Fuck me, this night keeps getting better. “Why?”
“Because she needed to know,” Emily spits out. “The same way I deserved to know.”
Emily’s not from our world. She’s Eli’s daughter, but she was raised far away from here and then was dragged into the middle of our worst nightmare earlier this summer.
There’s a reason why we keep our business to ourselves and Emily has a lot to learn about being a club girl. It isn’t lost on me how much Breanna will have to accept if she sticks with me and what I’m about to do will make it tougher for her to understand why I keep secrets.
“Do you remember what happened when Violet told you things she shouldn’t?” Oz says.
“Are you talking about the things that would have been easier to tell me from the beginning? Yes, I do remember. If Breanna’s life is going to be in jeopardy, it should be up to her whether she wants to be in the line of fire.”
Oz morphs into twelve shades of red and I’m out the door. Emily’s right. Oz knows it, but Emily promised Oz and Eli that if she visited, she’d play by their rules, not her own. Oz and Emily are a blowtorch and gasoline together and odds are they’ll be in the horizontal position within the next fifteen minutes.
I head to my motorcycle, slip Breanna’s folder out of my saddlebag and fly back into the house. Emily and Oz aren’t kissing on the couch, but they are in the kitchen and they aren’t screaming. Instead, he’s hugging her, comforting her, and by the way her shoulders shake, she’s crying. The two of them shared a seriously fucked-up summer. Turns out I’m not the only one still capable of crushing fireflies.
Breanna’s watching the party unfold from the window seat. I close the door behind me and it doesn’t cause her to jump or tear her gaze away from the window. It’s like the world that seemed hurried before spiraled into slow motion.
“There’s a lot of drunk people out there.” Her voice is lifeless.
There are. “Lot of drunk people at Shamrock’s, too.”
“Are the girls you had sex with out there?”
Why doesn’t she just put a nail gun to my head and continually shoot one sharp piece of metal into my skull after another? That’d be less painful. “Probably. They love parties.”
She doesn’t respond and my boots sound too heavy on the floor as I walk toward her.
“When I’m eighteen, will you take me to these parties?” she asks.
I sit beside her and lean my back against the wall. Outside a guy from the Lanesville chapter is enjoying a lap dance near the bonfire. If Breanna’s hung up on that, she ought to love the debauchery going on within the clubhouse. “If you want.”
“What if I don’t want to go?”
“Then you don’t.”
“But you’ll still go, won’t you?”
“Already told you, if you’re with me, then I’m yours. You either trust me or you don’t. But it’s my goal to remain in the club.”
I extend the bylaws and the folder I stole from her. Doing this could buy me a ticket out of the club, it’s putting Breanna in danger, but... “I trust you.”
Her face crumples as her shoulders roll forward. “This is so different from my life.”
“But it doesn’t make it wrong. The party is what you make of it. Stuff goes on that may not be your thing, but it doesn’t mean you won’t have a great time hanging with Emily or Rebecca. Don’t let your fears create walls or define you.”
Breanna accepts the folder and I’m not sure I like the way she studies me. “Have you tried living up to that advice?”
A punch straight to my heart, and the fucked-up thing? I don’t know why her words hurt. “This place doesn’t scare me.”
“I’m not sure about that. I think your demons haunt you wherever you go.”
My mother’s ghost haunts me like a second layer of skin. I strive for numb within the chaos of my emotions, but the emotions win every time. Breanna’s right, it doesn’t matter where I’m at—home, the clubhouse, Olivia’s, even my bike—my mother’s death claws at me like an evil spirit bound to rip through my skin so it can gain possession.
“You really do trust me,” Breanna says in a quiet voice.
“Yeah.”
Breanna opens the folder and I lose her the moment she spots the crossword code. Her eyes narrow and dart and her expression completely smooths out. She lays the bylaws next to the code and her eyes dance between the two pages. Her fingers flitter in the air as if she’s writing on a chalkboard. If I didn’t know better, I’d guess she’s in a trance.
It’s because of those demons she mentioned that I’m permitting her to have a crack at the code again. If she has a chance of finding my answers, then I have a shot at doing w
hat the club is desperate for me to do—to let go of Mom and finally trust them.
“It’s a cipher,” she says to herself. “A cipher. So how does the key go into the lock?”
Her fingers skim over the bylaws and she flinches, reminiscent of the day she solved the puzzle in class. My muscles tighten and nausea spins through my gut. What if this has nothing to do with Mom? What if this is old or new bullshit between the Terror and the Riot and I’m dragging Breanna into a world that will make her a target?
The need to protect her bulldozes through my veins. I can’t lose her. Losing Breanna is not an option. My hand flicks out to seize the paper. “I change my mind—”
She’s faster than me and is on her feet and across the room. Breanna grabs a pencil and stabs holes into the code—taking out the letters and numbers that are supposed to contain the answers. It’s like her mind has fractured.
“What are you doing?” I demand.
She ignores me, tearing at the letters and numbers in such methodical movements that I’m not sure she’s aware of anything beyond her thoughts.
“Breanna!” I shout, but she rips out the last number and then slides the paper she mutilated over the bylaws. My world stills, but Breanna tears another piece of paper from the folder and begins to write.
A slow pulse forms in my brain. Letters poke out through the bylaws and the first word is a name. All the years of twisting comes to a head—it’s my mother’s name. It’s Layla.
The first code, the one that caused me to forbid Breanna to continue, said to consider this our warning shot.
“Razor,” Breanna says as if she’s attempting to talk me off a ledge. “Look at me.”
I can’t. I can focus only on my mother’s name. In the detective’s file, that code was the first and the one containing my mother’s name was the second. The first code a warning—the second one...
“Razor,” she says again. “You don’t know for sure what it means.”
Yeah, I really fucking do know. Anger reverberates between my muscles and bones. The Riot killed my mother and everyone in this club fucking knew. Everyone but me.
I round for the door, feeling like a freight train. My fists ball at my sides. The answers are coming, even if it means beating the hell out of someone.
Breanna’s voice calls behind me, but it’s like she’s on the opposite end of a long tunnel. She sure as shit is shouting, but there’s a vibration in my brain driving me now. The storm within me has been building for years and I’m seconds away from destructive landfall.
Oz bolts from the kitchen, clutching my biceps, shouting, but I don’t hear any words. Just a loud buzz, just my brain cracking in half. He’s pulling on my arm, but I’m a bull going for the target. My hand slams into the screen door and I’m on the front porch.
Chevy had been laughing, but his face falls. He plants his feet and tosses out his arms in an attempt to slow me down. Another yank back and it’s Oz still pulling on my arm. The buzzing in my brain gets louder, Oz and Chevy are in my space, but they can’t halt my momentum.
The guys from the board are at a smaller bonfire near the tree line. They’re laughing. Talking shit. Enjoying the fact that they’ve tried to play with my life. Yelling. Loud shouts. It’s near me, but the chaos controlling me makes it incoherent.
Each man glances up and, like Chevy, they stare at me like I’ve lost my mind. I have. I’ve gone fucking crazy. Pigpen’s on the move. His hands are a stop sign and Eli’s hustling fast to the left, his mouth spewing something, but I’m tracking my father.
He tosses down his beer and has the nerve to act like he’s concerned.
“You can’t hit a brother! You can’t hit a brother!” It’s Oz and Chevy. They’re tackling me. Reminding me of a club rule. Fuck the club because the club has fucked me over.
I’m fighting them like I’m the Colts’ offense, but when I gain no ground, I look my father straight in the eye. “The Riot killed her. The Riot fucking murdered my mother!”
It’s silence. A stillness that causes a cold chill to slither down my spine. The buzzing is gone and my two best friends are no longer battling me, but curling their fingers into my arms as if to hold all three of us up.
“All those years.” A wave of hurt crashes into me. “I blamed myself. I carried her death like a cross, and this club, this family, let me slowly die because I wasn’t worthy of the truth.”
“Who told you?” Anger replaces my father’s shock. “Did you visit the detective?”
Oz and Chevy release me as they also regard me like I’m capable of that type of betrayal. “That’s what you think of me, isn’t it? Disloyal?”
“How else?” Dad shouts.
“Enough!” Cyrus expects compliance. “This isn’t the time or the place.”
“There’s never a time or a place!” I yell. “We’re doing this now!”
Cyrus steps in front of me and he’s not the man I’ve claimed as a surrogate grandfather but the badass biker I’ve seen take men down in a brawl. “Either you take your girl home or I have someone do it for you. Seventeen and here this time of night is nonnegotiable.”
His eyes sway to beyond my shoulder and my stomach knots. Breanna. Fuck me, I forgot about Breanna. On the front porch steps, Emily has an arm around Breanna’s shoulders and the two prospects assigned to Emily’s protection have created a barrier at the bottom of the steps. I abandoned her, just like I promised I wouldn’t.
I swing my glare back at my father. “There was a code in the detective’s file. Two of them. I took pictures.”
There’s a muttered curse behind me as they solve the puzzle of how I figured it out.
“I never talked to the detective again. Doing it would have made life easier, but I’m loyal.” I shove the words like a knife into his heart. “Nice to know what everyone thinks of me.”
As I walk for my girl, Eli captures my arm and exerts enough force that I stop because I’m too fucking exhausted to throw a punch. “What?”
“There are moving parts to this problem. Shit you can’t begin to comprehend. You get her home, then you come back here. You’re still a part of this club and that is a fucking order.”
Am I still a part of this club? Was this cut mine to begin with? Was it nothing more than a pity offering from men who don’t respect me?
Eli releases me, and as I continue toward Breanna, I remember what she’s said about her family, about how happiness in numbers is an illusion. Maybe she’s right. Maybe no matter how much faith we try to put into the idea of family, in the end, we’re fucked.
RAZOR
I FLY INTO the open space near the clubhouse going double what I normally do. Kerosene’s running in my veins and I’m thirty seconds away from someone striking a match.
Breanna appeared lost when I dropped her off. She hugged me, I hugged her and it was difficult to let her go and return to this nest of liars. My fists are aching to punch someone for this entire damn day. Everything’s a fucking mess and I don’t know how to stem the bleeding from the multiple hits I’ve taken.
The party that was supposed to be for me is out of control, just like I am on the inside. I stalk through the crowd and a couple guys call my name, wondering where I’ve been, and one girl has the nerve to slip in front of me like I’ll skid to a halt because she’s wearing next to nothing. But I’m on the warpath, stopping for no one.
I’m up the stairs and don’t bother knocking as I enter the boardroom. There had been conversation, but it goes silent when the door shuts behind me. All of them are here, all of them seated at the long wooden table, and they all look at me. Each and every member of the board including Cyrus, Eli, Pigpen and my father.
Pigpen hooks his foot around the metal folding chair Eli sat in weeks before and it scrapes against the tiles. The floor beneath me pulses with the beat o
f the turned-up bass from the music downstairs. My steps fall in time with the rhythm. I take the seat, and this time it’s not Eli sitting across from me, but my father.
We’re eye to eye. His green ones peer into Mom’s blue ones. There’re a million questions in my head. A heart full of anger, rage that belongs to a man, but there are times when I’m before my father that a part of me feels like I’m ten.
A cramping in my gut.
Ten.
Years have passed. My body has aged. Knowledge has been gained, but a piece of my soul has remained frozen.
The board’s right—I’ve never moved past Mom.
“Did you love her?” I ask.
Dad jolts as if the question shocks him.
“You fought,” I continue. “A lot. So tell me if you fucking loved her.”
Dad rests his arms on the table and leans toward me. “I loved her more than I loved anything else in my life. You’re my son, and you’ve gone through hell, but ever question my love for her again and I’ll lay you out.”
I nod and on the outside I’m still as stone, but that ten-year-old boy on the inside collapses in tears. Lots of tears. Tears that I have never fucking shed.
“I was on the phone with her while they chased her,” he says. “I listened to her as she was begging for me to help. I listened as she understood we weren’t going to get there fast enough and I listened as she told me that she loved me and you more than she loved her own life. Did I love her? Yeah, I loved her and I had to listen helplessly as the woman I loved died.”
I drop my head into my hands and wetness burns my eyes. She loved me. My mother loved me.
“Your mother drew the Riot away,” says Cyrus in a quiet voice that’s too sorrowful for the loud noises seeping in from below. “When she came out of work, she found the code stuck under her windshield and she knew the Riot was near. She didn’t know what it meant, but she knew it was bad. She called your father, he told her to get to the clubhouse, but she refused to go there.”