My Maddie (Hades Hangmen 8)

I was a bastard. I fucking hated myself for what I’d said to him. Telling him he’d be a shit papa. So I’d chased after him as he ran from the cabin, riding by his side. Showing him, I never meant any of what I said, that I fucking loved him as he was. He is my brother. I didn’t need him to be like everyone else. He’d saved me. He’d given me a home and a family. It didn’t matter that he was different, that we didn’t talk much or grabbed a beer at the bar while shooting the shit.

I’d smiled as I’d ridden toward the fuckers we were tracking. The Cade brothers riding together, killing the cunts that hurt Maddie. That is, until one of the assholes waved a snake at him. A motherfucking snake brought Flame to his knees. My brother, my brother who wasn’t scared of anything, the most brutal and ruthless killer there ever was, fell apart in front of my eyes.

Isaiah. He’d called me Isaiah. The brother he lost. He’d called the dicks who tortured us poppa and Pastor Hughes. And he’d fucking broke. He dropped to his knees and broke.

“Ash?” He looked into my eyes and called me fucking Isaiah. Not Ash, the brother he already had. But Isaiah, the brother he had lost. “ASH?” I snapped the fuck out of the memory.

“You okay?” Rider asked and shone a light into my eyes. I pushed the light aside and shuffled off the bed. “Ash, you need to rest.”

“I ain’t resting,” I growled and tried to pull a shirt over my head. I fucking hissed when the pain from the stitches pulled at my skin.

“Ash, forget the shirt and lie on the damn bed,” Rider ordered.

I pulled on a leather jacket and grabbed a pack of smokes from my pocket, putting one in my mouth. “I’m out,” I said and tried to leave the room.

“Ash, you need to rest. Don’t go out drinking. Your body has to heal. Alcohol will fuck with the drugs I’ve given you.” Rider tried to lecture me as I pushed past him, heading toward the door. I didn’t fucking care about healing. I didn’t care about resting. I wanted to get off my face on whiskey and eliminate the sound of Flame’s voice from my skull. The voice that came from his mouth when he’d been talking to Poppa and the pastor. The kid-like voice accompanied by the scared shitless look on his face.

I sniffed, feeling my throat start to burn at the fucking memory of Flame like that. But I couldn’t remove his face from my mind. I couldn’t get the fucking tears, which had tracked through the blood on his cheeks, out of my mind.

Flame fucking cried.

I smashed through the door and strode into the night. AK had gone to get Phebe and Saffie from Mae’s. I wasn’t staying to see them. My chest burned just thinking of Saffie, so I quickly lit up the smoke and took a long inhale. The nicotine helped some, but not fucking enough. The night was fucking silent. I couldn’t even hear Viking’s voice, which was a constant around these cabins.

I didn’t want silence. I didn’t want to think of being tied to the tree then cut by knives and bitten by fucking snakes. And I sure as fuck didn’t want to think of Flame. Flame, my brother, who I’d fucking betrayed with my words. Flame, who might never come the fuck back, from wherever his mind had taken him.

I glanced to our cabin and looked for any signs of movement. There wasn’t any. I didn’t even realize I was walking forward until I stopped near Flame and Maddie’s bedroom window. I took a deep breath, trying hard to fucking convince myself he’d be okay. He’s good. Isaiah is good… The way Flame looked at me thinking I was his other brother… he hadn’t ever looked at me that way. He never kept eye contact, period. But he had when he thought I’d been Isaiah. Not Ash, not the brother he’d had pushed on him when he’d found me in the cellar. Not the brother who looked just like him. Who just wanted to be just like him.

Isaiah. He didn’t want me. He wanted the brother who had died.

I breathed out smoke into the night air, and fucking hated myself when I looked through the window. I wished I hadn’t. I wished I’d turned toward the bar, like I’d intended. My chest was already fucking cracked in two, aching so fucking hard that I could barely breathe. But seeing Maddie on the bed, holding my brother’s hand to her stomach… and she was crying. Maddie, the strongest woman I knew, she was also breaking apart.

I moved my feet, managing to make it about a foot before my head pressed against the wood of the cabin. All the fucking energy in my body drained away. My feet gave way and I collapsed to my knees. I ignored my skin’s screams from my patchwork of stitches and snakebites. I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t get to my feet and make my way to the fucking the bar. I had nothing left. I was being fucking drowned by all the shit in my head—Flame falling apart, Flame slipping into a darkness I doubted he could come back from, my words to him that ruined any love he might have felt for me, Maddie crying on the bed, his kid in her belly, and the chance he would never again be the Flame we all knew and loved.

I couldn’t hold them back. Nothing could have stopped the tears streaming down my face. Not even God himself could stop the sobs that came ripping like demons from my throat. My hands slammed to the ground. My lit smoke was crushed under my palm. And then like a dam bursting, every fucked up thing in my shit life barreled forward, shit no one knew. Shit I hadn’t confessed to a single person alive—my poppa lashing me with his belt, forcing me onto my knees, pushing his limp dick into my mouth, smacking my skull when he failed to get hard. I shook my head, but the memories became a tidal wave, nothing was gonna stop them—the cellar, Poppa trying to push inside me and when he couldn’t, assaulting me in other degrading ways.

My throat was raw with the tears and heavy breaths. “No!” I hissed, when I saw a rope hanging from a tree. I hit my head. “No!” I begged into the night. “Don’t show me her.” Maybe Flame was right, maybe I did have demons in my blood, maybe I shared his flames. Because despite my begging to God or anyone listening, I saw her. I felt myself walking to the tree, my mama swinging from the noose around her neck. Gone. Motherfucking gone. Unable to take my poppa’s shit anymore. Finding death by her own hand preferable to spending one more day with him. That’s what the fucker did. He destroyed his wives in every way until they couldn’t deal with life anymore, couldn’t even fucking stay behind for the sake of their kids. I clenched my teeth, trying to stop the uncontrollable tears and sobs pouring from my mouth. But it was all too much. All of this shit was too fucking much!

I stretched my hand up to the side of the cabin, trying to lift myself up. But then I saw Slash. He was in the trees, watching, always fucking watching me. I watched as Diego moved behind him, Slash dropping to the ground as Diego fired and he took a bullet for me. His eyes frosted over with death. Then I saw Flame tied to the tree, so fucking out of his mind that he didn’t even recognize his own wife. And Maddie, right now, crying beside Flame, who might never come back to her and their unborn kid.

I couldn’t do it. I had nothing left inside me to give. There was fuck all light, just a black hole that destroyed any joy or happiness I might have tasted. Apparently, it wasn’t in the cards for me—happiness. In no fucking part of my life could the joy and happiness stay without being wiped away by darkness and pain.

Lights suddenly flooded the clearing that contained the cabins. I heard a truck’s engine cut out and the distinctive sound of AK and Phebe’s voices. Saffie would be there too, silently walking behind her mama. I couldn’t see her, but I thought of her blond hair, her perfect fucking face and her eyes that saw too much every time she looked at me. Like she was the one person who had found the hidden entrance into my mind, into whatever remained of my fucked up heart.

But I wouldn’t drag her down with me. I saw the bitch in the cage in my mind and felt sick. I knew Saffie had had a similar life. The thought of anyone doing that to her, made me wanna slit throats and rip out hearts. She was good. Like Flame had believed Isaiah to be. Sapphira Deyes was pure goodness. She didn’t belong in this fucked up world. She should be living with the goddesses in Greece we got told about in school. Fuck, she looked like half the fucking murals that use

d to be painted on our walls in the clubhouse, before it burned down. The only wall that remained was the one of Hades and his wife. The one Styx had stared at after the fire for endless minutes, signing fuck all, breathing as if in sheer relief.

“Ash?” AK called my name. I wiped my face and forced myself to my feet. “Ash?” It sounded like his voice was coming from inside the cabin. Pushing my fucking numb limbs to move, I ran into the forest. I ran until I hit the path that brought me out at the barn, which Styx and the Hangmen had used to use for torturing our enemies in the past. Right now, it was our temporary bar.

Fuck, I needed a drink. I didn’t give a shit if Styx never wanted me as a prospect again, I still needed a motherfucking drink. Stopping by a tree, I wiped at my face and blocked out all the shit that was trying to possess the last of sanity. Lighting another smoke, I walked to the barn and threw open the door. The fucking place went silent as I entered.

I looked up and all the brothers were watching me. AK was back at the cabin, and Viking wasn’t in the barn either. They both wouldn’t leave Flame. It meant I wouldn’t have them on my back as I drank until I passed the fuck out.

“Fuck, baby Flame. You got any skin left?” Rudge asked. He walked over to me and handed me his bottle of Jack. “Shit, mate, I think you need this more than me.” I took the Jack from him and caught Zane’s eye behind the makeshift bar. I walked over to him, downing as many mouthfuls of whiskey as I could in one go. He came around the bar.

“Ash, fuck,” he said, relieved, and hooked his hand around my neck. I gritted my teeth when his arm pressed on a snake bite. “Shit. I’m sorry,” he said. He moved aside and pulled out a barstool. “Sit the fuck down. You look like you’re gonna fall over.” I slid on to the stool. Zane sat beside me.

Beau slapped Zane on the back. “I got the bar. Stay with your brother.”

“Thanks,” Zane said. Beau met my eyes, nodding once, before getting Tanner a shot. Beau never talked much, but he was fitting in just fine.

“AK told me what happened,” Zane said. I drank more whiskey, feeling the heat flood into my chest. “Flame…” he trailed off. I looked down at the dirt floor. “AK mentioned they aren’t sure he’s gonna be okay.” I breathed deep. I wanted to speak, but I fucking couldn’t. Zane must have realized it, because he didn’t push. Instead, he changed subject. “You’re my fucking brother, Ash. You know that, right?” That fucking tightness was back in my throat again, including the stinging in my eyes. The gulps of whiskey I kept knocking back just making it bearable.

“Yeah,” I rasped. “You’re mine too.”

Zane nodded, and his elbows hit the table in front of us. He pushed his hands through his dark hair. “We got no parents,” he started. I worked hard not to picture my mama’s hanged body in my mind… again. “You’ve got Flame and I’ve got AK. But they got their own families. They’ve got their own shit to deal with. You’re my fucking best friend, Ash. You and Slash both were. The first real friends I ever had. The only thing close to brothers I ever had.” Zane looked me square in the eye. “Now there’s only you and me.” Zane looked at my stomach, which was full of wounds. “Don’t you get fucking killed too.” Zane glanced to the door, staring at nothing. “I won’t lose you too. Yeah?”

I swigged a mouthful of whiskey, and then gave it to Zane. He exhaled in relief, knowing it was my silent promise to him that I was going nowhere. He handed me back the bottle. “You’re staying with us? At AK and Phebe’s?”

“Looks that way,” I replied. I picked at the label on the Jack. I thought of Flame on the bed, Maddie waiting for him to wake up… then we’d all know whether he had crossed into Madness County once and for all. “He fucking broke,” I whispered, not taking my eyes off the Jack’s label, keeping my voice low enough so that no one else heard. “He fucking broke, Zane. Fell to the ground, thinking he was hanging with his dead brother and our poppa.” I shook my head. “I saw his fucking eyes. I saw that Flame was disappearing and whoever the fuck he turned into was taking over.”

It was several minutes before Zane spoke. “I’ve heard some about last time. About when Maddie managed to save him when he broke down before.” I had too. I’d never seen Flame break before. They’d found me when he’d been better. I’d heard rumors about it. Of course, Flame never spoke about it and I never asked Maddie. I thought It was in the past. I couldn’t have been more wrong. “He’d asked AK to kill him. His head had become so bad he’d asked Uncle AK to kill him. And he was going to, AK had promised Flame years before that if he ever broke, fully mentally broke…” Zane trailed off. I knew why. This could be that time. This could be the time Flame had gone to a place in his mind that he couldn’t return from.

This might be the time I lose my brother.

The room began to spin faster, the more whiskey I drank. Zane got a bottle too. I handed him a smoke. Took another bottle of Jack for me. “Saff has been having panic attacks,” Zane confessed about an hour. Every part of me froze.

“Why?”

“School,” he replied. I must have frowned. After that first day, she’d barely been there. Kept calling in sick, calling AK to come and get her after only a couple of periods. She fucking hid in the bleachers, skipping classes, Zane finding her curled up on the ground, crying. Shit. She’d been there less than me and that was saying something. “She ain’t ready yet,” he explained. “Being out in the world, being away from home… it’s fucking her up. I hear her sometimes. I hear her break in the middle of the night. She screams. She fucking can’t breathe. Phebe has to calm her down. She has to restrain her.” Zane drank more whiskey. I knew he spoke to Saffie at their cabin. They were like brother and sister. I knew he was protective of her.

“Then why the fuck is she still enrolled in school?” I asked. I hadn’t been there for her like I’d promised. I hadn’t been there to protect her. I was dropping out. I was never fucking going back.

Zane kept his head down, until he looked up at me and met my eyes. I felt my stomach fucking plummet. I knew, of course. Or I’d guessed it was because of me. Zane didn’t have to say fuck all about it. He knew that, deep down, I’d known. “She doesn’t trust anyone. Go near anyone. Talks to hardly anyone…”

But me.

My heart fucking raced. I had to push the image of her panicking from my mind, of her being fucking restrained by Phebe for her own safety. I just couldn’t see that shit right now. I couldn’t deal with any of this shit. Why was everyone so fucked up? Why had everything gone to shit?

Clearing my throat, I said, “Well she ain’t got to worry about it anymore. I’m not going back.” I felt Zane’s eyes boring into me. I turned to him. “I’m gonna apprentice with Tank, at the bike shop. He already agreed.” I was so fucking over school. What was the point of even going? Surrounded by a bunch of rich pricks, who knew nothing of living a hard fucking life. A bunch of cunts, who judged us on belonging to Hades. They could all eat shit. I didn’t even have enough credits to graduate at this point and I wasn’t repeating the year. Not a fucking chance. “She’ll be better at home. Tell her she never has to go back. I’m fucking out.” Before Zane said anything, I got up at went out the back of the barn to take a piss.

“Baby Flame!” Rudge emerged from behind a tree. When he walked toward me, I saw a club slut pulling down her dress behind him. She walked past. He ignored her. “Just got my dick sucked. Is there anything greater in life than that! Well apart from fucking pussy, obviously. Or maybe fucking a peach of an arse while the bitch screams, losing her fucking mind.”

Rudge sought out a tree stump nearby and bent down. Reaching into his cut, he pulled out a packet and poured some white powder onto the stump. He cut it into lines with a razor blade from his cut and snorted the coke with rolled up paper he happened to have in his pocket. “Whew! Fucking snow! My fucking best friend in the world!” He sniffed, rubbing his nostril with his hand and I saw his eyes fucking light up as the drug hit him. He handed me the rolled paper. “Wa

nt some?”

I wanted to get this fucking shit from my head. I wanted the people I’d killed to stop haunting me. Wanted Slash to stop haunting me, blaming me for his death. I wanted Flame to be okay. Wanted Saffie to stop breaking the fuck down, because she was trying to do good by me. She needn’t bother. I was fucking damned, there was no redemption.

“Yeah,” I said, and took the rolled-up paper out of his hand. Rudge cut the coke into lines for me and I snorted. The moment it hit me; numbness spread like wildfire throughout my body. All my pain and the agony plaguing my mind disappeared. Finally, I felt was fucking free. I closed my eyes and felt nothing. Sweet. Fuck. All. I’d never felt this fucking good in my entire life.

“Fucking good snow, eh mate?” Rudge said, smiling wide. I opened my eyes. “Here.” He handed me the packet. “Take it.” He also gave me the blade and rolled paper. “I got more where that came from.” He nodded to the packet. “You need more, I got you. That’s grade ‘A’ fucking cocaine, my friend. My dealer is the shit.”

“Thanks,” I said, and just breathed in fucking fresh air. My lungs had never breathed so good. No pain. No tight throat. Just sweet fucking air.

“So, baby Flame, what’s your preference?” Rudge asked. I frowned in confusion. What the fuck was he talking about? “You like sticking your wick in the pussy or arse of a club slut?” I shrugged my shoulders, too busy loving the ability to breathe right, to not be thinking about anything but this sweet fucking feeling rushing through my blood. Suddenly, Rudge got in my face and shouted, “No. Fucking. Way!” He grabbed my arms. “Mate, please tell me right fucking now that you’re not a virgin, that your dick has at least been sucked or wanked off. That you’ve t-bagged the shit out of some whore’s mouth?” My silence told him everything. Rudge slapped my cheeks with his palms. “Then pull it the fuck together, baby Flame. Tonight you’re handing in your V card. I’m gonna find you the filthiest, dirtiest slut to ride your pole all the fucking way to come-dump heaven.”