Page 5 of Cinder (MC Fables #2)

L ars

After leaving Eugene to rot in the shit and the piss and the rain, I don’t head for home right away, despite being bone tired. Instead, I go for a ride along the cliffs that fringe the town because I need the kind of soothing only a night ride can give me.

It’s close to two a.m. when I ride back to the Knights of St. Boniface clubhouse.

It’s an old castle on the hill overlooking St. Boniface.

Most of the castle is in ruins, but we make it work—we have for more than a hundred years, when the very first Knights of St. Boniface chapter was formed.

They rose out of the ashes of World War I and bought the abandoned castle as their clubhouse.

Tonight, with the full moon shining behind it, the clubhouse looks majestic. Resilient. Like home .

I pass through the tall wrought-iron gates and along the winding driveway, still feeling the effects of tonight with every breath I take.

Which isn’t like me.

After a kill, I’m usually buzzing. Every nerve and fiber fizzing with wild energy.

Ridding the world of one more asshole brings a bag of mixed emotions and creates a frenetic energy in me that takes time to ease. I like to help it along by fucking it out of me.

Usually, I reach for one of the club girls, and we spend the night in mutual gratification. There is no shortage of them in our clubhouse. Beautiful, nurturing women who are soft and gentle, with hands that know how to soothe.

But not tonight.

I’m too fucking haunted by Carina and Beth to go looking for anything like that. Instead of feeling high, I feel a different kind of energy.

One of remorse and rage mixed with sadness and regret.

Fucking it out of my body doesn’t seem right.

Almost disrespectful.

After turning right at the end of the driveway, I pull into the underground parking garage beneath the clubhouse. It used to be an old boat slipway leading down to the beach. Now it’s where we keep our Harleys and club vehicles.

I park my bike next to Beast’s gigantic black and chrome monster and kill the engine. Tonight I don’t need pussy, I need a bottle of Jack and some alone time.

But Beast is waiting for me at the bottom of the stairwell leading into the clubhouse.

He’s an enormous man. Seven feet tall with tattooed-covered muscles and a fierceness about him that can only come from true grit.

Scars twist across his face, the markings of a woman who wanted revenge a long time ago.

He’s our club president and a damned good one.

He used to be a moody sonofabitch until he met his wife.

Now the fucker smiles all the time. It doesn’t take a genius to see he’s crazy in love with her, and why wouldn’t he be.

She’s gorgeous and feisty, and the moment I saw her I could see why he was obsessed with her.

If I sound like I’m jealous, I’m not. I’m a realist. There’s no point wanting something I’ll never have.

What they have is a once-in-a-lifetime love.

All-consuming and written in the stars. A love like that isn’t waiting for me, and I’m not going to lose sleep over it. I like my pussy with no expectation.

“I was starting to wonder if you were coming back,” Beast says, his big arms folded as he leans against the stone wall.

“I needed to ride.”

He nods. If anyone knows how I’m feeling, it’s him. He carries the weight of this club on his shoulders and has taken his fair share of nighttime rides to quell the lingering rage of a kill.

“Eugene taken care of?” he asks .

“I left him to the birds,” I say, walking past him and into the stairwell. He follows, and we climb the stone steps to the castle foyer.

“The authorities are at the gravesite.” His deep voice echoes along the stone walls.

I don’t tell him that I already know. That I rode out there and watched from a distance as the flashlights of the authorities moved through the trees, and the medical examiner set up his lights and tent around Beth’s grave.

I don’t tell him that I was there when they excavated her remains. Or that I stayed until they loaded her into the back of the medical examiner’s van and drove away.

Because he would ask me why, and I’m not ready to admit that this whole thing has hit me harder than anything else that has come before it.

I don’t tell him I could have ended Eugene’s life with a single bullet, but I didn’t, because those girls needed him to pay for what he did to them, and I was the only person who could do it.

So I did. I made him pay. Limb by limb. Tooth by tooth. Second by second. Until I felt a knowing inside me that the girls were avenged.

And I sure as fuck don’t have it in me tonight to explain to my president what this has done to me.

How I couldn’t leave Beth. That the least I could do was to watch her remains being pulled from the lonely, dark earth and sent back into the light where her parents could bury her so she could rest in peace .

Fuck.

I need that bottle of Jack.

“What are you doing awake, anyway?” I ask. “Wait, don’t tell me that gorgeous bride of yours has been keeping you up for all the right reasons. Because I might just shoot myself in the face right here. You’re an ugly sonofabitch; doesn’t seem right you got the best girl in the world.”

I love Belle like a sister. And I love teasing Beast and getting him worked up.

But if anyone else spoke about his queen that way, he’d cut out their tongue and make them swallow it.

I only get away with it because he knows I would never disrespect him or his wife.

Tonight’s attempt at teasing is weak though, because damn, I don’t feel right.

I need to shake myself out of this mood.

“You know I’m not a kiss and tell kind of guy,” he says by way of shutting me up.

That’s when I think about another reason he might still be awake. “Lucy’s okay?”

Lucy is Beast’s daughter. Or, more importantly, my goddaughter . The gorgeous little monster loves her Uncle Lars. At nine months old, she already has great taste.

“She’s sound asleep. Which is where we should be.

” His dark eyes roam my face. He’s concerned because I’m acting weird and he can pick up on it.

He’s like some psychic bloodhound. “What you did tonight, that piece of shit got what he deserved. But if it runs deeper than that, then you and me should talk. ”

“I know he had to pay, and I was happy to be the one to do it.”

He doesn’t know just how much I made Eugene pay.

“Then what’s eating at you?”

They were two innocent sixteen-year-old girls.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m peachy.”

Beast gives me a pointed look. “The fact you just said peachy tells me something isn’t right.”

To ease his suspicion, I give him one of my shit-eating smiles.

The one that has gotten me out of a lot of situations in my thirty-four years.

“It’s two a.m. Your head is fucking with you, brother.

I’m feeling good. Feeling satisfied. We gave those girls justice tonight, and I don’t regret any of it. ”

He doesn’t look convinced. But that’s Beast. It takes a lot more than a couple of sentences to ease his suspicions.

But he nods and doesn’t press it. “Get some sleep.”

I give him a wink, and he walks off. I watch him bound up the grand staircase to the second level where the bedrooms are before I continue toward the clubhouse bar.

Inside, it’s empty and still, and lit only by moonlight. The silvery light cuts into the room through an ornate leadlight window on the back wall.

Once upon a time, it was the grand ballroom of the castle.

But now it’s where the Knights like to party.

Taking up one wall is a long timber bar with rows and rows of glass shelves behind it, every inch taken up with a bottle of liquor.

Whiskey. Bourbon. Tequila. You name it, we have it in abundance.

After taking a bottle of Jack from the shelf, I grab a glass tumbler from the drying racks and take a seat at the bar. I pour myself a decent shot, throwing it back and relishing the burn as it carves its way through my chest.

But it does nothing to calm the uneasy feeling in my gut. So I pour another. And then another.

I have a feeling it’s going to take a few tonight.

I remove my wallet from the breast pocket of my cut and flip it open.

Tucked neatly inside is a photo folded in half.

My guts twist when I unfold it and see the sweet smiling faces of Carina and Beth looking back at me.

I’ve looked at this photo a million times leading up to tonight. But this will be the last time.

There’s a half-full packet of cigarettes on the bar. They’ll be Sticky’s for sure. He’s always leaving his cigarettes somewhere and then wonders why he can never find them.

Stealing one, I reach for the Zippo lighter in my pocket and light it, drawing the smoke deep into my lungs as I look at the photo of the two girls, silently telling them goodbye.

Then, holding the corner of the photo over the lit Zippo, I watch the flame devour the photo and the cinders drop to the floor.

I was twenty-five when I became the enforcer of this club, and in that time, I’ve taken thirteen lives.

Lives of men who didn’t deserve to take one more breath.

Sometimes I wait for the guilt to set in, but it never does.

Maybe because the men were evil and deserved what they got.

Or maybe I’m just a psychopath and I don’t have a conscience.

I don’t know, I gave up trying to figure it out years ago.

I splash more whiskey into the glass and drink it down in one mouthful, finally feeling the calm that comes with too much alcohol.

I push up my sleeve and let my gaze drift over the twelve white lines etched into my forearm. They cut through the tattoo of Medusa and Zeus on my arm. Twelve little reminders of what scum I’ve erased from this earth.

On my chest, cut into the skin over my heart, are another four lines.

But I don’t let myself think about them anymore.

They were a very personal revenge.

Blood spilled, not for the club. But for me.

For them.

I remove my knife from my hip sheath and pierce the skin next to the twelfth scar on my arm, carving the thirteenth line beside it and feeling a high from the pain as blood rises to the surface.

I open and close my fist and watch the little rivers of blood run down my arm and onto my jeans before tugging my shirt back down.

I re-sheath my knife.

Number thirteen is done.

Another evil fuck I’ve taken from this earth.

But I know he won’t be my last.