Game Changer (Hell's Saints Motorcycle Club) (19 page)

Reno pushed open the door careful not to make any noise. He heard them the minute he entered the house. A female voice that wasn’t Raine’s was “oh daddying” someone all over the place. Reno recognized the sound of desperation and whoever this chick was, was fucking desperate. Then he heard the whiny sick pitch of some seriously fucked up dude.

In the thirty seconds it took him to round the corner he was hearing grunts and screams. Then he shot three holes in the sick bastard who was straddling the screaming chick and getting reading to thrust a nine inch in her neck. Raine was on the floor holding her knee and grimacing in pain. The blonde chick hadn’t moved out from under the sick bastard who had thumped dead over her.

A whoosh came from the side of Reno and he turned just in time to see Claire dart passed him and run to her sister. Damn her, bitch was told to stay in the car. Fucking women. Never fucking listen.

Reno surveyed the scene before him and couldn’t fucking believe it.

Couldn’t Fucking Believe It.

He walked over to kick the dead whiny guy off the blonde. Then he looked down at her to make sure she wasn’t dead too. She wasn’t moving. She had been beaten around her face badly and the one eye that was not swollen shut was looking vacantly up at him. Shock. She was going into shock. Goddammit.
GODDAMMIT.

Then he looked over at Raine who had her head nuzzled in her sister’s neck, was cradling her knee in her hands and was sitting very still. Claire was whispering something soothing into her hair and rocking her in her arms. The front of Raine was riddled with splashes of the psycho’s fucking brain.

JESUS.

The dead guy had bled all over the place. Pieces of the back of his head blown apart. Reno had fired three shots from a powerful gun at close range. The house was pretty far away from anything he had seen driving up the hill but shit, shots like that in a wooded area like this could resound for miles. He needed to get them all the fuck out of there, then he needed to get someone here to clean up this mess. His prints were on the door handle and all over the wall that had hidden his approach on the way in.

And his prints were on file. Definitely on file.

FUCK.

He looked at the three woman. He had to give it to them. Not one of the woman had gone hysterical on him. Of course, the one on the floor had definitely gone into full on shock now. She had started shaking like a wet dog, but she had stopped screaming the minute he had dropped the guy. Raine had left her sister’s arms and had crawled to the couch to grab an old knitted afghan. She had elevated the blonde’s feet with pillows, had pressed two fingers against her throat and was covering her with the blanket. Claire had run to get the bitch some water.

“What are the chances someone’s gonna call about those shots?” Reno looked down at Raine.

Raine looked up at him. Jesus, her eyes were so dilated they were fucking purple. Then he looked at Claire. Her hands were shaking so hard water was spilling out of the top of the damn glass. The three of them were way passed being scared. They were terrified, and still
still
holding their shit together. Respect. Reno had to give it to them.

“No chance.” Raine forced herself to focus on Reno.

“No chance?” Reno repeated.

“None. There’s always been shots coming from the woods as long as I’ve been here. Kids target shooting. Hunting at times when it’s in season and not in season. God only knows what else is going on but no one pays attention. Plus we’re miles away from the center of town. The Police department has two units. And one is always parked at Beth Zaminskies’s house. So, yeah. No chance.

Reno nodded. Small town justice. Either the locals were a big pain in the ass pissing vigilantism in the guise of carrying out the law or they were off banging the local widow, not giving a shit. Sounds like Willows Point had the not giving a shit kind. First thing that had gone right for him all day.

“Do what you have do to get her on her feet, then we gotta split. I’m gonna make a call. When I’m back, we’re gone. Feel me?”

Raine nodded.

“Addy?”

Raine stared at him blankly.

Claire spoke up, “Junction Route Three. There’s an old lamp post at the end of the driveway.”

Reno nodded to her. Then stared hard at her. Claire looked away quickly.

“Told you to stay in the car, woman.” Reno snarled.

Claire looked at him then. Her eyes violet in her dead white face.

Jesus.

“Gonna leave it for another time, sugar. But we’re having that conversation.” Reno said to her more gently than he wanted to.

Dammit it all to hell. Claire wasn’t at all what he had expected and the little piece was getting to him. He needed to get some air and figure this shit out.

Reno left the women to it and stepped outside to make the call. Sonofabitch! Prosper was going to be pissed. More than that, Reno was pissed at himself. He should not have listened to Raine. Bitch wasn’t anything but trouble for him. Nothing but. Jesus, though. He had to hand it to them both. Those two had moved into action with barely a whimper between them. It wasn’t lost on Reno that he had left them in there with a dead body. A dead body with two body shots and half his head blown out. A dead body with a nine inch blade clutched in his hand.

Close range and messy.

Most chicks would have lost their shit. Even the blonde was going into
quiet
hysteria. Maybe it was what they called a delayed reaction. Post traumatic shit. Gonna be a fun fucking drive home if that was the case.

Reno had killed before. His hands were steady when he lit his Winston. Then he took a long pull and felt the sweet nicotine reach his system. He walked to the car and reached into the glove box for the cheap throwaway cell he always kept on hand. He flipped over the phone and the call was answered on the second ring.

“Hey, Man. Junction Route 3. Lamp post at the end of the dirt drive. Need clean sweep.”

After answering exactly two more questions, Reno was satisfied things would be taken care of.

Now he had to go back inside and deal with the Powerpuff Girls.

“If there’s anything you want. Take it now. Only one or two things. We need to be able to fit that shit in the trunk.”

Reno braced himself waiting for the questions and then the tears. The house had to fucking go. No matter how hard you try, there’s no way to get rid of blood and bodily fluid shit. Dead men told tales, no doubt about it. And there was no way Reno was doing time over killing that piece of shit Gino. Executive fucking decision. Prosper would understand and if not, the hell with it. He would rather deal with Prosper than with Lady Fucking Injustice any day of the week. So Reno laid down the law and waited.

The three of them were huddled together. They had moved the blonde to the couch, and changed her into some pink sweat suit shit. There was still blood matted in her hair but they had done their best to clean her up. She was cocooned in the afghan and Claire was having her take little sips from the glass of water. Some of the color was back in her but her eyes were scary blank. There was a clear plastic bag filled with bloody clothes sitting on the coffee table. Gino was lying stone cold dead beside it.

“There’s nothing we want here.” Claire answered quietly when Raine didn’t. Raine nodded in agreement.

“Wasn’t this your grandmother’s house? Sure there ain’t any shit you want to take to remember her by?” Reno thought about Pinky and how even though she had a lot of nasty memories of that house in Nevada, she had still wanted to take a piece of it with her. God only knew why, Reno wasn’t good at figuring women shit out but there it was.

The two of them just stared at him.

“Look, we’re gonna have to torch it.” Reno said harshly, making sure they got it.

“We understand that, Reno.” Raine said quietly and wrapped her arms around herself tight.

Claire ignored him. She looked at the blonde and gently said, “Honey, we’re going to have to leave now. Can you walk if we help you?”

Glory turned her head slowly to look at Claire. It took a while before the words made their way to Glory’s dazed mind. Claire gave her that time. Holding Glory’s eyes gently with her own, Claire nodded encouragement.

Glory nodded back.

Then Reno said, “Let’s get the fuck outta here.”

And they did.

“I’M GONNA FUCKIN KILL YOU!” Prosper had Reno up against the wall, his forearm a stronghold on his neck.

Reno was starting to turn blue but made not one move to defend himself.

Then with another roar Prosper grabbed him by his cut and threw him straight across the room. Straight across it. Reno felt himself being thrown air bound and land with a thump against the back wall.

“GET UP! GET UP YOU IRRESPONSIBLE INEPT PIECE OF SHIT.”

Reno got up.

Prosper was on him again.

BAM. Reno’s head snapped back with the power of the punch. Then another vicious blow to his rib cage sent him right to his knees. Then another and another. Then an uppercut to the jaw.

Reno moaning, made an attempt to get back up. He deserved the smack down and was doing his best not to blow lunch.

“STAY DOWN.” Prosper had his foot on Reno’s neck.

“STAY THE FUCK DOWN RENO.” Prosper roared the warning. Damn it all to hell, his hand was killing him. He was gonna have to ice those knuckles. Another reason to want to kill Reno. Prosper hadn’t been this fucking insanely crazy mad since Jack Winston had left his girls alone. Twenty fucking years of holding his temper was fucking long enough.

“I FUCKING GIVE YOU AN ORDER, YOU FUCKING OBEY THAT ORDER. MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, IT AVOIDS PEOPLE GETTING KILLED! YOU HEAR ME? YOU STUPID MOTHER FUCKING IDIOT!”

Reno groaned from his place on the floor, “I hear ya, boss. This shit’s on me. All on me. I’m sorry man. I really am.”

Every single bone in his body hurt and he was wondering how many ribs were cracked.

Prosper looked at Reno. He rubbed the back of his neck hard with his hand and felt the sting of his knuckles begin to swell. The kid had taken the beating like the man Prosper knew him to be. Came back to the MC. Told it straight, took full responsibility and manned up for the smack down.

His fucking fuck up had almost cost all of their lives. Christ All Mighty. Dolly and Pinky would have gone out of their goddam minds. Anything happen to that boy, might as well bury Dolly with him. Prosper loved Reno. Loved him like a son. Dammit. His girls, his son, he almost lost them all today because Reno decided to take a damn nap. Jesus. This father stuff was gonna be the death of him. If Prosper had lost any of them he would have put a bullet to his own head.

Smack down over. What’s done is done, at least Reno had the brains to clean up the mess. That was something. And when it came down to it, he had driven three dazed and fucking traumatized women six hours in a car, all of them holding their shit together. All of them safe. There was that.

Prosper slapped Reno on the back and pulled him hard towards him. “Son, you and your sisters are gonna be the goddamn mother fucking death of me.”

Reno felt something inside him bleed open. Reno had always loved Prosper liked that. Always. But he never knew for sure that Prosper felt the same way. Jesus, it felt good knowing it. He would have gone through a thousand smack downs to hear Prosper say it.

His sisters? Well, Raine had kept her shit totally together all the way back to the MC with not one word of complaint and no hysterical bullshit from any of them. Bitches hadn’t even asked to stop to pee, but Reno had offered. Little sister Claire. Fucking Beauty that one was. Looked just like her sister but had this quiet about her that Reno liked to be around and for sure wanted to explore.

No, he definitely wasn’t feeling brotherly towards Claire. He wondered how Prosper would take it, Reno going there, if and when that time came. Well, he sighed, he would cross the fucking bridge when he came to it. For now, he was gonna get fall down, full on, shit faced drunk with his father.

The ride back to the compound had been a long one, I guess. Honestly, most of it didn’t register. Not for any of us.

Reno chain smoked the first of hour. And he kept looking at us in the rearview, his eyes sharp and alternately taking in the three of us. The smoke had begun stinging my eyes despite the fact that Reno had his window open, the cigarette dangling from the hand he kept outside. When Claire went into a small coughing fit he immediately dropped the smoke and didn’t light up again. He asked us several times if we wanted to stop to “piss or anything.”

We didn’t.

The blonde. Glory sat rigid and still between Claire and I. Her eyes were blank pools of blue and I knew that look. That look meant one of two things. Either she had gone to a place where she could put aside the horror of what had happened to her until she could deal, or her mind lay imprisoned and shattered. I feared it was the latter. That place where I had once made a brief visit, a place that lay like a barren wasteland on the edge of sanity. A place, that once summoned, a mind had little chance of escaping from. I was afraid for Glory.

And I stayed afraid. Afraid, until that coughing jag of Claire’s split the tense silence with just enough force to jar Glory’s mind free. She reached out her hands to both Claire and mine and brought them close together to hold them on her lap. Her hands were ice cold and were eventually warmed by the heat of our own. I felt her relax just a fragment beside me and when I squeezed her hand gently, she squeezed back.

And then there was Claire. Poor Claire. Jesus, not even one day out of rehab and this. THIS. If today’s events didn’t send my sister headlong into a need for getting baked with some white gutter glitter, nothing would. Nothing.

And it wasn’t only the dead guy that posed that threat to Claire’s rehabilitative process. It was also the very much alive guy in the front seat. Talk about triggers. With his heavily inked huge biceps, the mirrored shades, the man bun and the attitude, Reno screamed beautiful bad boy.

Screamed it.

Defined it.

Spelled it in capital letters and bold faced it.

He was all the things Dolores had warned Claire to stay away from. He was all those things and he was one more. He was the guy who could not seem to manage to keep his eyes off my sister. I met his eyes in the rearview more than once after I saw them skip over us, land and then settle on Claire. After the last time, I caught his gaze and held it. And dammit all to hell, he did not back down. He not only returned my look but he held it for so long I was afraid he was going to get us run off the road or worse. When my eyes left him to look down the highway, his did the same. But that stare off, that silent battle of wills and warnings between us,that he had won.

Of course he had.

Then there was me. I was okay. That’s what I told myself. My inner dialogue was a montage of self affirming thoughts. I was okay, all right, just fine, good. I was good. Rainbows and flowers. Freaking raindrops on roses and whispers on kittens. Whispers? Jesus. I was at a point where I couldn’t even quote the lyrics from my happy place old movie. The Sound Of Music had never failed me before.

I felt a fleeting but very real moment of complete and utter self-pity. And then felt the shame of self-indulgence, and had the grace to be disappointed in myself. Shit. I had caught the least of it. Glory had been shanghaied and held by Gino the madman for god only knows how long while he plotted and executed his attack on me. And Claire did not need this after waging a war against her inner demons and winning that war. So yeah, I was golden compared to those two. I should have been in an all bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens frame of mind.

Only I wasn’t.

I glanced at Claire and she nodded slightly and tried a smile of reassurance. Then her eyes traveled the length of me and widened just a little. Before she could hide the look of dismay I saw it. Then my sister’s eyes grew soft on mine, she closed them, and rested her head back against the seat. I looked down fearfully. And yep, there it was. Multiple sprays of tiny red dots splattered across my shirt and on the skin at the top of my chest laid bare by my tee shirt. And bits of something else. There were bits of something else stuck to the specks of blood.

Holy Christ, did I have Gino’s brain matter splayed on me?

Holy Fuck. I fought down the urge to vomit and fought even harder the urge to scream.

Because I was not going to be the one to lose it.

That was not going to be me. Nah-uh.

I would not be the one to succumb to the gut wrenching fear and nausea. Gino was the one who had spread that shit. He had spread that fear and that pain to these brave women. These women who had put on gloves and knocked the fuck out of the fear that Gino had rained on them.

So dead or not, Gino could still go fuck himself.

I felt Glory’s head fall lightly to my shoulder and her hand gave mine the lightest of squeezes. I laid my dark head on her blonde one. Claire’s head moved to Glory’s shoulder and there we sat on that long ride home, drawing quiet strength from each other.