Shakedown (Souls Chapel Revenants MC 8)

CHAPTER 1

Pennywise isn’t special. I swallow kids, too.

-Text from Belle to her brothers

BELLE

“You won’t,” Bourne challenged, his eyes gleaming with mischief.

I sighed. “I will.”

“You won’t.” He shook his head. “I know you, Belle. You talk a good game, but you’re weak. You’ll overthink it when you leave, and then you’ll stop yourself before you can fully pull the trigger.”

I sighed. “Fine. I’ll do it before we even leave our parents’ house today. Happy?”

Booth, my other brother, snickered.

Like a little bitch.

“Yes, I’m happy,” Bourne said. “I have a great life. Meanwhile, you’re practically Old Maid status, and you’re not even trying to get out there and find someone.”

I narrowed my eyes.

“Boys,” my father warned.

But the ‘boys’ didn’t listen.

My oldest brothers, who also happened to be twins, had taken it upon themselves to make my life a living hell recently, and I didn’t know why.

Every time that I came home there were always comments from the peanut gallery about how I’d ‘not gotten out’ or I continuously tried to ‘wiggle out of dates.’

Well, when the dates that I was wiggling out of were duds, I didn’t see the problem.

It wasn’t my fault that I had an IQ of one hundred and forty-three.

I was, by all accounts, a genius.

I wasn’t in the top tier of IQs or anything, but I was definitely better than above average.

Though, my father likes to tell me the only reason I had an IQ of 143 was because I’d ‘gotten bored’ with the line of questioning.

Which, technically, I had.

I’d gotten extremely bored with it, and instead of answering the last few questions, I’d kind of… guessed.

Though, just sayin’, I didn’t need some test to tell me that I was smart.

“Dad,” Booth tried to explain away his ‘teasing’ as he liked to call it. “She literally made her date cry.”

Okay, so I had done that.

But the guy had been so freakin’ full of himself.

“I didn’t make him cry.” I rolled my eyes. “I made him emotional. And it was only because he kept trying to talk about himself, his cat, and his mother. So I told him that the statistics of men finding their soul mates when they lived with their mother was very low.”

“I heard that you told him that men who owned cats generally had an estrogen imbalance.” Booth reached for a roll and buttered it before continuing. “You also told him that using a heated laptop on your thighs all day could cause infertility. And this was after the guy told you how much he wanted kids.”

“He told me that he lived out of his mother’s basement, she cooked and cleaned for him, and he had no reason to leave it.” I paused. “And the laptop thing was serious. It can cause infertility.”