Burn Down the Night (2 page)

I turned and pulled the gun out of the back of my pants. Held it dead center on Lagan. Dad had taught me to hold a gun. And Dad hadn't messed around when it came to guns.

“Yeah, you can help me,” I said, taking off my hat with my other hand. My lank brown hair fell down around my shoulders, into my eyes. “You can tell me where my sister is.”

Lagan didn't even flinch. He didn't blink those wide eyes, black like holes. Like snake eyes.

I'd been blonde when he knew me with short hair, all blind and soft with gratitude. A completely different person with a different name than this woman I was now, with the gun and the bombs and the rage.

“Sister?”

“Jennifer Matthews.”

His eyebrow rose just a little in that pale, white face of his. “Olivia.” My real name; I hadn't heard it out of anyone's mouth in months. And it wasn't a question. Of course he knew me. He'd all but owned me for six months. “You look different. Not at all well.”

“Fuck you very much. Where's my sister?”

“In our home.” His voice made me shake, that soft sing-song he used. And the memories rattled the lock on the door I kept them behind. He was baiting me and I knew it, had expected it, but I was so keyed up with anger and adrenaline—I couldn't resist.

“Where did you move the compound?”

“You know the rules, Olivia. If you leave, you never get to come back. You don't get to know where we move to. She chose to stay when you left, so you don't get to see her. Ever again.”

“She's a kid and you brainwashed her.”
Stop. Stop, Joan. Focus. Don't waste time fighting him.
I'd done that before and lost. Badly. “And if you don't tell me where you moved the camp I will kill you, asshole.”

There you go, back on the speech.

His smile was so patronizing it made me want to shoot him just for having a face.

“The camp is housed within the power and protection of the Lord,” Lagan said, lifting his hands like some kind of backwoods man of God.

“Stop the bullshit. I'm not one of your wives.” I pulled the cellphone out of my pocket. It had been repurposed as a detonator for the car outside.

“I have two bombs, Lagan. One outside. One in this room.”

“You're lying, Olivia. You've always been a terrible liar. Your heart and your mind are—”

I held up the cellphone and with my thumb, pressed the code. Jennifer's birthday.

A millisecond later a shattering boom split the night. The car in the back parking lot exploded.

I sent up a quick prayer that no one was there. Not even Rabbit.

To my great satisfaction, Lagan's face flinched. His hand reached forward to grab the edge of a chair.

“Tell me,” I said, “where she is or the two of us are next.”

“Joan.”

Jesus. It was Max, standing back in the shadows in the corner of the room. He stepped forward into the circle made by the bright overhead light.

“What are you doing in here?” I cried.
I saw you leave. You LEFT.

“Zo called me back,” he said. “What are you doing?”

For a second, just a second—not even—for half a heartbeat, I wavered.

“I'm sorry,” I breathed to Max. His blue eyes. That electric stillness of him. That gorgeous calm.

Lagan lurched toward me and I snapped back into focus. I held the gun toward Max and the cellphone detonator toward Lagan.

“Where is my sister?”

“If you blow us up, you'll never know.”

“If I blow you up, you can't hurt her anymore. You can't hurt anyone.”

“You're the only wife I hurt,” Lagan said, giving me some version of a pitying expression. It was bullshit, of course; he hurt everyone he touched. “I give people what they need. Purpose. Work. Family. You…you cheap piece of trash, you wanted to be hurt. Needed it—”

“Tell me, asshole!” I screamed, losing the edges of myself, feeling myself start to explode like one of those time-lapse videos of a bullet through a water balloon or some shit. I was coming apart.

“Never, Olivia,” he said, and he folded his arms over his chest. His dead eyes looked right into me.

“I'm not bluffing,” I cocked the Ruger I had bought from one of the girls' husbands and aimed it at his head. “And I'm a very good shot.”

“Joan!” It was Max again and he'd been edging up beside me. Fuck. I spun slightly, aiming the gun back toward him.

“Max. Please, stay out of this—”

“So you can blow us all up? Fuck that, psycho,” he snapped. He grabbed the hand holding the gun and twisted it, nearly dislocating my wrist.

I screamed and lifted my knee to nail him in the crotch but he jerked sideways and all he got was a knee to his thigh. I tried to kick him, a leg sweep to take out his ankles, but he sidestepped that, too. I leaned down to bite his hand, but he didn't flinch. Didn't do anything but twist my arm so hard my hand went numb and the gun fell to the ground. And then he reached for my other hand, bent back the fingers that gripped the cellphone until they, too, went limp. He snagged the phone and the gun and shoved them into his back pocket.

“Don't!” I sobbed, watching out of the corner of my eye as Lagan made it to the door. I lunged after him but Max held on to me, nearly breaking my arm.

“Let me go!”

“So you can get yourself killed?”

“My sister…” I sobbed.

“He wasn't going to tell you.”

I fought him. I fought him with all my rage. Head butts and kicks, everything I'd been taught of fighting dirty in my shitty life.

None of it any use.

Honest to God, I don't know why I was surprised.

“Jesus, come on. Joan. Cops are coming and you will be put away.” He tried to pull me up by my armpits, but I was a pitbull, trained to kill.

There was no Plan B. This bullshit plan took me months and every penny I had.

Jennifer was farther away than ever.

Smoke was beginning to roll into the room through the door Lagan had left open as he left.

“I have to stop him,” I cried. “I have to. Max—”

“God save me from crazy bitches,” Max muttered. He put his arm across my back and lifted me. I still fought him. I wanted to burn down the night.

“You ruined everything!” I screamed and smacked at him with my dead heavy hands. I clawed and scratched and his hard face just got harder.

Hit me!
I screamed in my head.
Hit me!

He dragged me out of the room, down the smoke-filled hallway toward the back entrance. He pushed open the door and we were belched out into a black night filled with smoke and fire and screams.

“Jesus,” he muttered. “You really did it.”

My feet hit the gravel of the parking lot. The bikers were back here and there was a lot of smoke. The car I'd blown up was burning out in the weeds. There was one man in a Skulls cut on the ground, but he was getting to his feet.

I felt a momentary relief that there weren't more bodies.

“Where's Lagan?” I screamed, peering through the smoke.

“His black SUV is gone,” Max said. “The driver probably had it ready the second the fire alarm got pulled. You didn't stand a chance, Joan.”

“Max!” Another voice broke through the noise and Max turned, his arm still around me, keeping me up. Because the fight was draining out of me and my legs could barely support me. My knees buckled and I would have been on the ground if it weren't for Max's steely strength.

A man limped out of the smoke.

“Rabbit,” Max said. “Everyone okay? We need to get the guys gone before the cops get here.”

Rabbit was beat up. His face was nearly black with smoke and his arm was at a weird angle. So weird in fact that it took me a second to realize he was holding a gun in his other hand.

He lifted it toward Max.

Max pushed me away and reached into his back pocket for my gun. As he pulled it out, my cellphone fell out, too. He pushed me again and I hooked my phone with my foot, dragging it with me as I stumbled to the side. It seemed smart to gather what weapons I could.

It seemed smart actually to get the hell out of there. Max had fucked everything up for me. I owed him no loyalty.

But somehow I couldn't move.

Suddenly Rabbit wasn't alone. There were a few more guys with him. Gray-faced and bleeding from cuts and scrapes.

“What's going on?” Max asked.

It was pretty obvious to me what was going on. There'd been rumblings of dissent in the Skulls for weeks. These boys liked to bitch worse than the strippers.

I reached for the phone at my feet, but I was dizzy and shaky and fell to my knees.

“You can't be trusted, brother,” Rabbit said.

“Yeah?” Max held out his arms. “Funny, I'm not the one holding a gun on anyone.”

“You left,” Rabbit said. “And we all know you weren't going to come back.”

“But I'm here.”

“Because I made you!” Rabbit screamed, spittle flying. He looked like a madman. “I made you come back because you're a coward. And there's no room in the club for cowards, especially at the head of the table.”

“You want the president patch? It's yours. You want my cut?” He started to shrug out of the beat-up leather vest. “It's all yours.”

“Not good enough,” another one of the guys standing in the semicircle around Rabbit said.

“So what's it going to be?” Max asked, his arms held out.

“Only blood will do.”

“Then what are you waiting for, asshole—”

Rabbit fired and Max went down. His leg kicked out behind him and his whole body followed like he was doing a gruesome pirouette.

I screamed, but it didn't even register in the noise. The sirens were getting closer. The bikers closed ranks around Max kicking him, stomping him.

Jesus. God.

When things went to shit, they really went to shit.

They were going to kill him and he was my only link to Lagan. The only person in this shit show that Lagan talked to, and after that scene in the office, Lagan would trust Max.

If I wanted my sister alive, I needed Max alive.

Lo and behold, Plan B.

With shaking fingers I pulled out the cellphone and hit the code for the second bomb, strapped under one of the chairs in that back room.

Another explosion. Small. But there was more smoke. More chaos.

Rabbit and the rest of the thugs looked up and looked at each other.

“What do we do?” one of them asked. Clearly the brainiac in the group.

“Let's get the fuck out of here,” Rabbit said and pointed the gun at Max's head and pulled the trigger.

I was working on being very small and very unnoticeable so I clapped my hand to my mouth so no one could hear me scream.

The Skulls scattered like flies and I ran, crouched low, across the parking lot to my car and then drove it closer to Max with the headlights off.

I crept out of the car, left it running, and ran the few feet between me and Max.

He was facedown in the dirt and not moving.

A pool of black blood, reflecting the fire and smoke from the building, was spreading around his leg.

Panic filled my throat like bile.

I had two semesters of LPN training from another lifetime under my belt, but it came flooding back, screamed at me in my aunt Fern's voice.

Which was only fitting.

Aunt Fern was my go-to in all medical emergencies.

Pulse. Check for a pulse.

I reached for Max's neck and found his heartbeat. Good and strong. A miracle.

Airway. His chest was moving. We were in luck.

Spinal injury. Aunt Fern and all my textbooks told me not to move him, but we didn't have that luxury.

As carefully as I could, I rolled him onto his back. He groaned and cried out, and I figured he was dealing with at least a few bruised ribs. His legs and arms all shifted and jerked in pain, so I let go of my worry about a spinal injury.

There was a lot of blood on his face, rivers of it, and I swept some of it away with my hand, trying to see what had happened.

What I was dealing with.

Minutes ago I was ready to burn this whole place to the ground and this man with it.

Now I was risking everything to perform first aid. I couldn't get Jennifer back from inside a jail cell. But I couldn't get Jennifer back without Max.

Work faster, I told myself.

Oh Lord, his face was a mess. They really tuned him up. But the second bullet must have missed him.

“A graze,” he murmured. “Bullet.”

“Yeah,” I said, touching the bleeding raw edges of the bullet's path across the side of his head. The furrow was buried in the edges of his black hair.

He hissed, closing his eyes. A bullet graze and maybe a concussion based on how he couldn't keep his eyes open.

He was bleeding from his calf; I found the entrance wound, but there was no exit wound. I could feel the lump of the bullet in the meat of his muscle.

Shit.

I grabbed the faded, red-and-white bandana from my hoodie pocket and wrapped it around his calf, which woke him up enough to scream at me.

“Fuck you!”

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” I said quickly, like it made a difference. “I'm sorry. Just…pass out if it hurts too much.”

“Get out of here,” he groaned. “Cops will arrest you.”

“Cops will arrest you, too.” The story would be drug deal gone bad. And Max was a big part of that equation. “And if you go to jail, you know those brothers of yours will finish the job.”

“Crazy bitch, what do you care?”

I didn't have time to explain how he was my link to Lagan. A faulty link I couldn't actually trust. But the only link I had.

“I don't,” I said. “I don't care about you at all.”

But I think I knew, even then. Before all the shit that happened next, the way I hurt him over and over again. The way he hurt me.