“Hush,” I told him. “You’re being rude in front of our guests.”
As if defending him, Delilah cooed from her cage.
My unfinished braid fell into disarray around my face as I bent to carefully peel off the black wrapping paper. My fingers encountered a little note taped to the box beneath it.
“‘And when he was come into his house, he took a knife, and laid hold on his concubine, and divided her, [together] with her bones, into twelve pieces, and sent her into all the coasts of Israel,’” I murmured, reciting the quote from Judges 19:29.
I looked up at my biker babes to gauge their reaction, but they all wore the same look of suspended disbelief. The air in the room was taut but still, like the calm before an ocean storm.
My fingers trembled slightly as I slowly sliced through the tape with the tip of my nail then dislodged the lid. It fell away to reveal delicate tissue paper, dark at the center.
The only sound was breath and a slithering hiss from Sampson that seemed to be a physical thing, a serpent baring its fangs.
My hand shook, my breath stuttered, because somehow, I knew that whatever lay inside the box was not going to be a gift.
“Wait, Bea,” Harleigh Rose whispered because we were all caught up in this frightening moment. “Let me call Lion.”
But I didn’t wait, because the paper was already parting and inside lay something that made hesitancy impossible.
A woman’s hand and forearm, the skin around the fingers chapped and tinged yellow from smoking.
I knew before I began to scream exactly whose arm it was.
Someone had killed Brenda Walsh and sent me one of the pieces.
Priest
I was distracted.
Which wasn’t completely uncommon.
Club meetings in the Chapel at the clubhouse were never exactly riveting unless we had serious shit at our doorstep. Since Irina Ventura was killed and Staff Sergeant Danner went down for killing Officer Gibson among a slew of other crimes, life had settled into a boring kinda routine most people equated with happiness.
I was just bored.
My gaze fixed to the stained-glass window behind Zeus as voices droned on around me. I’d put it there. That window. When I started making serious cash with the club, I’d had someone ship it all the way from arsehole, Ireland. It’d been cracked, the glass mottled and faded in places, but it was easy enough to get fixed. Now the window that had haunted my youth in a completely different kinda church hung in my safe haven, a Chapel only to the rebel bikers who preached brotherhood and loyalty, who prayed to no god but themselves.
It was another form of blasphemy that got me hard.
So, I was bored, but boredom was a harbinger of peace, and I told myself to enjoy it.
The truth was, it wasn’t antipathy that had me uncharacteristically disconcerted. No, I was distracted like a crow with a fucking shiny object, that shiny object being the crown of Bea Lafayette’s shining golden hair.
It wasn’t exactly the first time I’d been occupied with thoughts of the girl with the pink ribbon in her hair. In fact, I calculated—because I was bored and, admittedly, obsessive—the first time had been two years, three months, and twenty-seven days ago.
It happened one day when she was eating a peach. It was such an innocent, innocuous thing and she, such an innocent, relatively innocuous girl. Nothing about the situation called for my attention. We were celebrating some birthday. The women brought the cake, and we brought the booze. Everyone was happy, talking and laughing as classic rock pumped through the speakers of Z’s oceanside home. I was even enjoying myself, talking to Smoke and Bat about the new advances in gun technology.
But then, something about the way she endeavoured to eat that piece of fruit drew my gaze from across the crowded kitchen of the Garro’s house. There was a knife in one hand, a sharp-edged paring knife with an ivory handle, and the swollen fruit in the other. Lower lip between her small, square teeth, Bea methodically cut into the fragile flesh and segmented it into clean sections that fell from the stone center into her palm. It was a shade too ripe, the seam of the skin splitting easily, juice splashing across her fingers to run down the slim, pale underside of her forearm. I watched raptly as she finished decimating the peach, then brought the blade to her full mouth, a small pink tongue flashing out dangerously close to the edge to gather the sweet liquid into her mouth. Greedy for the taste of it, she held her sticky hand bearing the fruit aloft and carefully dragged the knife up her arm, collecting the juice so she could once more lick it, kittenish, from the steel.
I wanted to be the knife.