I was standing, pushing back from the table so I could vault myself over it, one hand to the wood as leverage to leap over the bulk. Curtains and Blade shoved aside to make room for me to land with a jarring thud on the other side between their chairs.
Because that sweet voice was raised in alarm and it was calling me to her like there was some direct link between us, some line only she could reach.
I was throwing open the doors before anyone else could get there.
Bea stood just inside the clubhouse surrounded by the biker bitches, tears tracking down her cheeks, voice raised as she demanded Ransom and Carson let her into the meeting.
Quickly, I scanned her for injuries, but aside from the small splint on her left hand, she seemed unharmed.
The great knot in my gut, as complicated as the Dara, untangled.
“What the fuck is goin’ on?” Zeus demanded from behind me.
Instantly, Lou went to him and fit herself into his ready arms, but I ignored whatever she said softly in his ear.
Because Bea was there, and something was wrong.
Alarm bells were still ringing, blaring so loudly in my head I thought it might explode.
Tired of waiting, of not knowing what I was killing for frightening Bea so badly, I stalked forward until I loomed over and demanded coldly, “Tell me.”
Her lips parted, so pink and soft I was almost distracted, but she didn’t tell me.
She showed me.
She lifted the flower box in her arms and pulled back the lid.
Inside, a perfectly severed forearm.
There was swearing and gasps around me, but I just studied the dissected limb for clues.
It had once belonged to a woman, obvious because of the sparse brunet hairs dusting the forearm, the carefully cut nails and the silver ring on her middle finger. It had been severed cleanly so the murderer had used a hacksaw, the only tool that could do a decent if arduous job of dismemberment. On closer inspection, it seemed the gift-giver had even cleaned up the edges of the arm with a scalpel or clippers, removing the ragged ends of flesh and sinew, and that they’d taken the time to drain the majority of the blood so the box wasn’t a soggy mess.
“This is fucked up,” Curtains said about two seconds before he puked into his ball cap.
“Fuckin’ evil, is what it is,” Kodiak said from beside me, studying the limb with the same cold deliberateness as I was. “It’s not easy to cut up a body. You have to be fucked in the head to take the time and energy to do somethin’ like this.”
“It’s her,” Bea whispered softly, just for me. A single tear caught on the trough of her lower lid, amplifying the deeply saturated blue of her iris. I watched as it trembled on the edge, then fell down the soft slope of her pale cheek.
Even with everything going on, I wanted to lick that tear from her skin and taste her sorrow. She was even prettier when she cried.
“Brenda Walsh,” she continued with a slow blink, reluctant to break eye contact even for that second. “Brett’s mum.”
“Jesus Christ,” Boner mumbled somewhere behind me.
“Tell me everythin’,” Zeus demanded.
“It arrived at my house. Cleo answered the door, but she said no one was around and the box was just on the stoop. She brought it inside and gave it to me.” Bea hesitated, licking her dry lips. “She thought it was a gift from an admirer.”
And Bea thought it could have been a gift from me.
Silly, overly romantic Little Shadow.
I shook my head just slightly, jaw clenched.
She sighed softly in answer like an audible, bashful shrug.
“So you touched it and so did Cleo,” King confirmed, his phone pressed to his ear, his other arm around Cressida. Into the speaker, he said, “Yeah, Lion? You better get the fuck down here. We got a situation.”
I was too busy thinking to entertain any of the nonsense emotional talk that followed. Kodiak was right. This was as premeditative as it got. Whoever had murdered Brenda Walsh had planned not just the killing, but the aftermath. The intent was clearly to send Bea a gift, a token of their affection or protection. It was not the act of a stranger, but of an admirer.
Someone was watching her.
Someone else was watching her.
But since that moment I’d watched Bea beautifully dismantle a peach with the sharp edge of a blade, I’d been following her too. Gentle stalking, nothing harmful. Every night like clockwork, I ran down to her house on my daily jog, stopping to run in place while I checked in the wide picture windows, past the fluttering gauze curtains into the warmly lit house Bea made into her home. I’d watch her for exactly five minutes as she spoke with her little dove or chased her one-eyed cat, as she danced around that atrociously pink living room with Cleo when they had their weekly sleepovers, or when she made dinner like a dutiful daughter for her mother.