Stone Cold - Ashby Crime Family

“No word from ol’ Ronan yet?”

“Nope. It’s been two fucking weeks and not a goddamn word. Can’t be good, right?” Virgil shook his head, patting his pockets in search of the cigarettes he’d given up more than a year ago. “I’m worried they’re planning to hit us. Here. At Ashby Manor.”

“Really?”

“Hell yeah, really. Why else have things been so quiet when we’ve got the Rhymer fucking Princess in our possession? Keep your shit locked and loaded.”

“Always, brother.”

Eventually Jasper appeared, followed by Ma and then Lance, all three looked pissed off. And exhausted. “Little bitch didn’t give up a damn thing. If it wasn’t so fucking inconvenient, I might be impressed.” Despite her words, the smile Ma wore said she was more than a little impressed with Savannah’s tenacity.

“So what now?” I asked.

“Now,” Virgil said and dropped a heavy hand on my shoulder, flashing a wicked grin, “we get back to the original plan, which means that you get to do a little wandering.”

Wandering, my ass. I was the low man on the totem pole, relegated to driving around in a nondescript black SUV as the decoy while Virgil and Lance took Savannah Rhymer to parts unknown. The Crusaders were an ongoing problem, but between the death of Brendan and Savannah’s kidnapping, war was imminent.

I drove through the streets of Glitz, stopping to park once in a while before merging into traffic and winding through Las Vegas, Mayhem and then Henderson before heading back to Glitz, my mind focused squarely on Bonnie, rather than the problem at hand: an upcoming war with the Crusaders. A more important question to me: I wasn’t sure if helping Bonnie was the right thing, for me or the family. But, damn it! I wanted to help her.

In her current state, Bonnie was a damn liability for herself, Maisie and everyone connected to them, which meant she needed to be contained. Protected. But as the scenery changed from the over the top lights and neon dazzle of Vegas to the more subdued glamour of Glitz, another thought crept in, one that was insidious and haunting.

Maybe my need to help Bonnie had more to do with the passing of my old man than I wanted to admit. I didn’t remember him as clearly as Jasper or Virgil. I didn’t even have the scraps of memory Kat described, but I remembered enough. His wide smile and big booming laugh, the slight Irish lilt he brought out when he was being especially charming. The booze. The beatings. The gambling. All those details. They’d stuck with me. Hard.

Colm Ashby lived his life hard, balls to the walls. Drinking and gambling, probably even screwing around, though in his own twisted way, he loved Ma. He couldn’t stop drinking to save his life, not even when Grandpa threatened to take everything away. In the end, wasn’t it just fucking ironic that it was his gambling addiction that had ultimately ended his life?

Helping Bonnie couldn’t change my past, couldn’t change the fact that I’d been so high the night Da died that the news hadn’t hit until the next morning and it devastated me. Took me a long time to come back from the brink of the same kind of disaster.

I knew a shrink might have a field day trying to figure out my motives with Bonnie because hell, I couldn’t even figure it out. All I knew was that Bonnie needed a friend and she needed help. The question was, could she be helped. Was she a full-fledged junkie already, doomed to a life on the streets that ended brutally or was she just a girl struggling through having her life turned upside down?

My black SUV passed the Welcome to Glitz sign, and I blinked at the figure standing between a stop sign and one of those old green postal deposit boxes. Brendan fucking Rhymer. As sure as I was that it was him with one side of his face horrifically burnt, I was equally sure it couldn’t be him. He was dead. There hadn’t been a funeral for the fucker yet, but I figured that had more to do with the absence of Savannah than anything else. Now, I wasn’t so sure.

“Fuck!” I couldn’t go home without checking this out even though it wasn’t, technically, part of my responsibilities to the family. Jasper and Virgil were busy, and Lance was too, which only left me. Just me. I flipped a U-turn to get closer to the figure who still stood there, staring into the distance, at everything and nothing all at once. Pulling up to the curb across the street to get a better look, my attention was snagged by the appearance of blue and red flashing lights behind me.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me!” The last thing I needed was to deal with the goddamn cops.