Because I knew.
I knew not that King was dead, but that Bat was going to say it.
A part of me swiftly moved into denial because I hadn’t felt his death, and it seemed important that I would have. He was the bone of my bone, an intrinsic part of my soul. If he died, shouldn’t there be a seismic shift in my universe? A crack in the crust of the earth at my feet, at the very least? A red sun, a swarm of locusts, a fucking cataclysmic apocalypse?
Not nothing.
Never nothing.
But I knew.
King was dead.
And when Bat moved through the crowd to crouch at my side and place a hand on my knee, I didn’t even hear the words through the roar of blood in my ears. I only saw his mouth move and form the words.
King is dead.
And then?
Well, I didn’t remember anything after that.
Zeus
* * *
She came to me like a ghost, a spectre of herself as if she was the one who died that day. Didn’t help she still wore her gown, once fuckin’ gorgeous but now tattered at the hem and streaked with mud, the flowers in her hair as dead as the look in her eyes. Never seen misery so personified, not even in the mirror when my Lou was sick and probably dyin’, not even when I told my own daughter she was no longer any kin’a mine, not even on all the many grievin’ faces of the folks at Mute’s funeral.
Nothin’ in all the hard years I’d spent on livin’ could’a prepared me for the sight’a Cressida Garro come to tell me our boy was dead.
She said it straight, voice strong as cold steel.
“King’s gone. He’s left.” As if he’d just upped and abandoned us. Seein’ my frown, she’d sucked a sharp breath in through her teeth and squared her shoulders so straight they must’a ached. “He’s dead.”
Each word was a bullet in the chamber of her despair-slackened mouth, and they hit me with such fuckin’ force I flinched ’fore I could even begin understandin’ what the words could mean.
’Cause there was no way in any kinda hell that God’d take two sons from a man in a single lifetime.
No way He would join two soulmates, give ’em a taste of bliss, then condemn one to death and the other, worse, to a life without their other fuckin’ half like some twisted version of Adam and Eve with their apple.
But I believed it even though every cell in my body rebelled against it ’cause that was the look’a her sittin’ there across from me in a provincial penitentiary.
The look of a woman who’d had half her soul ripped away. The look of a woman made inhuman from loss. The look of a woman, I knew in my fuckin’ bones, would never again be more than a ghost.
“Danner Senior,” she went on in that hollow voice, each word an empty shell casing. “He did it. Lured…” Her first hiccough over his name, the name I’d given ’im in the manner I’d given ’em to my other children, a name he could grow in to. “Lured King to the cliffs and shot him in the back.”
Rage swallowed me whole like the mouth of some great and awful beast, sharp teeth shreddin’ through my guts, crunchin’ through my bones till they dust on the back’a my numb tongue. Couldn’t move ’cause my skin would split with the force of the demolition roaring through me.
If I moved an inch, I’d be locked behind bars for fuckin’ life ’cause the next person I saw, I’d kill out of pure black fury.
“Danner killed my boy,” I echoed, and my voice wasn’t dead like hers ’cause my heart was temporarily shielded from the misery by the wholesomeness of my wrath. My body sent the message to my brain; I only had to find and murder Danner to right this egregious fuckin’ wrong. Like some kinda magic, Danner’s black blood on my hands, drippin’ wet to the ground, would resurrect my firstborn like Adonis from Apollo’s tears.
“They’re going to arrest him––Danner––for what he’s done. He fled after the shooting, but every single Canadian Chapter of the club and the cops are looking for him, and when they find him, he’s done. Hutchinson tipped off the Internal Affairs Department to Danner’s previously sketchy track record, and they’ve opened an investigation into his past…including the murder of Riley Gibson. Paula Jones is willing to testify that she was the one who stole your gun from the clubhouse and a few of the cops Priest got cozy with before… well, before have also flipped on Danner.”
She dragged in a deep breath like a drowning man, gulping it down to fill the empty void inside ’er.
She’d been a wife for only a matter’a hours before she’d become a widow.