“Come on,” he said, voice thick with regret as he stared at the lifeless body of his child. “Y-your mother’s waiting in the car. She wants to get to the cemetery before everyone else. After that, everyone is coming to the house. Gonna be a long afternoon.” Holly couldn’t help but notice the trembling in his hands and the agony written all across his face.
More socializing. All Holly wanted to do was curl up with Joy’s childhood stuffed giraffe and hide under the covers for the next week. But instead, she had to spend the day schmoozing people who pitied her.
Holly rose and started for the exit. Each step felt like she was leaving her sister behind and the urge to turn back, run to Joy, and hold on with everything she had was nearly impossible to resist.
“Hol?” her dad called out.
She turned to see him still staring at Joy, silent tears on his cheeks. Her heart softened. She knew she’d been difficult over the past two weeks. Angry at them, angry at herself, angry at the whole world.
“When we get home, you stay inside the house. Preferably within sight of your mother or I the entire time, you hear?”
A sense of foreboding overtook her as she stared at her father’s sunken eyes and haggard face. The man seemed to have aged ten years in the past seventeen days since Joy had been kidnapped. Everything was about to change. Her life was in the midst of a dramatic shift. The transformation went beyond learning how to live without her best friend. Ever since Joy had been abducted, her parents acted as though Holly would also vanish at any point in time. She was watched like a hawk. Questioned every time she left the room about where she was going, who she was going with, when she’d been back. Hell, she couldn’t even go to the bathroom without an interrogation about her plans.
This would become her life moving forward. She could sense her parent’s obsession with her whereabouts wasn’t a passing neurosis due to recent circumstances. No, Joy’s death had altered the way her family functioned from here on out.
Holly was about to enter her teenage years, and they wouldn’t be anything like she’d expected.
As she stepped outside, her father at her back, Holly squinted and lifted a hand to shield her eyes from the harsh glare of the afternoon Florida sun. Didn’t make any sense how the sun could shine so bright and beautiful while she suffered from such intense darkness and heartache on the inside.
A rumble from somewhere to her left had her father tensing in an instant. As the noise grew, she had the urge to cover her ears. Holly’s jaw dropped as ten giant motorcycles rolled down the street, stopping in front of the funeral home.
“Fuck,” her father bit out. With a crushing grip, he snagged her arm and dragged her behind his body. Holly gaped in shock as his hand fell to the gun resting at his hip.
“Dad!” she whisper-yelled. “They’re not going to do—”
“Quiet, Holly! You have no idea what these men are capable of. They killed your sister, for Christ’s sake.”
A stare-down ensued between the president of the local motorcycle club and her father. To Holly’s frightened mind, the standoff seemed to last for hours.
Joy’s kidnapper, and ultimately her murderer, hadn’t been identified as of yet. Holly didn’t have a clue what evidence the detectives were working with, but her father was one hundred percent convinced the MC was to blame. More than to blame, he believed they were directly responsible. Or so she’d overheard when she’d been unable to sleep and snuck into the kitchen for a late-night snack. He’d hated the gang since as far back as Holly could remember, and now made it his mission to see every one of them behind bars for Joy’s murder.
Holly wasn’t so sure. About six months ago she’d had a run-in with the president of the MC. Curly was his name. He’d helped her when she’d gotten herself in a sticky situation, something she’d never told her father. That was until the lead detective on Joy’s case questioned her about the day Joy went missing. He’d flat out asked if she’d ever had any interaction with someone from the MC and she’d been unable to lie. It was hard to imagine the man who’d saved her bacon kidnapping and murdering her sister. He’d actually been kind, calling her Little Miss and helping her despite knowing full well who her father was.
But what did she know?
Holly peeked around her father’s side. Her gaze met Curly’s. The old man gave her a sympathetic smile and a nod. “Little Miss,” he mouthed.
“What the fuck?” her dad growled. “Keep your fucking eyes off my kid.”
Curly made a production of skirting his gaze.