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CHAPTER TWENTY

V elina…

I was sick to death of the roach-infested La Chiquita on Veterans and didn’t want any of my shit anywhere near it to pick up any hitchhikers, so I was glad when Saint offered to store it at his place until we could figure out where I was going and what I would need.

This undercover shit was a pain in the ass, especially when you didn’t have a whole alphabet soup of bureaus to finance it.

It had been easier than I cared to admit to find a job cleaning in New Orleans. I’d hired on at one of the fancy-pants hotels in the French Quarter, and it’d given me a couple of advantages. One, I was making some money, and two, after I got off work, I was already in bar central.

Finding housing was proving to be more difficult, but the club was helping me at least stay put here for the time being.

I’ll tell you what, after doing biohazard cleaning, cleaning a hotel room was easy. Know what wasn’t easy? Cleaning forty of them, one right after the other, especially considering some people were fucking savages.

The downside was having to do biohazard cleaning without any of the proper personal protection gear, which sometimes had to happen.

I had no idea why anyone would shit in a shower.

Fucking. Savages. I tell you.

As soon as I got in from my night with the Bayou Brethren, I texted Saint with fish on , to let him know I’d made contact and that I had wormed my way in. Probably a little too well, as Carver had so graciously given me a ride back to my hotel.

My car was here, so it was fine. The bus line was helpful in that it was pretty much a straight shot to where I needed to go in the heart of the Quarter for work, and the Quarter itself was imminently walkable.

There had been another thing I hadn’t taken into consideration when it came for my bid for revenge, and that was I hadn’t expected any of the Bayou Brethren to be any sort of likable .

Carver wasn’t half-bad. An asshole, sure, but no worse than Saint in that regard. Still, he lacked Saint’s innate charisma.

As for the women of the Bayou Brethren? I liked Singer, and I couldn’t find any fault with Midnight yet. Vixen wasn’t terrible , Candy held my pity, but Sativa? Sativa could fuck allll the way off. I couldn’t stand her. If anything, she was going to be the hardest thing about the Brethren to deal with. Good fucking God , the drama!

I didn’t expect a text back from Saint. I’d traded numbers with Carver, and had him saved in my phone as such. Same with Singer. I’d expected Singer to be the first one to text me, but I’d barely shut the door to my hotel room and latched it after sending the text off to Saint, when my phone buzzed in my hand.

I half expected it to be Saint with the timing of things, but no, it was Carver.

Be seeing you real soon, Louie. Tonight was a lot of fun.

I rolled my eyes.

For him, maybe, but it’d be a while before I could get Sativa’s grating and annoying hollering out of my head.

Instead, I texted back the same thing I would have texted my brother, Louie, if I’d been talking to him.

You shouldn’t text and drive!

I tossed my phone onto the made bed and went in to use the bathroom, brush my teeth, and just generally get ready for bed.

By the time I got back to it, I had a text waiting.

I’m riding, not driving, and at a stoplight. It’s fine.

That made me smile. It was probably something Saint would have said, too, except Saint would have tacked on something insulting. Funny but insulting. It was one of the reasons I liked him. He didn’t treat me fragile like a flower. No, he had more sense than that. He treated me fragile like a bomb.

I flopped down on the bed and texted back.

Fine, riding, driving, whatever – don’t text and do it. It’s dangerous.

I sighed and set the phone down by my hip, and stared at the water-stained ceiling. I missed him. Saint, not Carver. I realized as I was lying there, that this was going to be harder than I’d expected for all of the reasons I hadn’t considered.

“Well, fuck me,” I muttered to the cockroaches. “Ain’t life just a fucking party all the time?”

“Hey, Louie!” Carver called out as I walked up. I’d been invited to a night out on him – just me and him. I didn’t know how to feel about that. I hadn’t realized how fucking weird it would be to play this other person. I was hoping that it would be a good way to get in with him enough to learn about the Bayou Brethren. At the very least, a good starting point would be to learn how he got in with them and just what the appeal was.

“Hey, you,” I said and let him hug me.

We were on Bourbon, and I didn’t know if any of the Voodoo Bastards lurked nearby.

Saint had said they were under a sort of de facto truce, but only because law enforcement was breathing down both clubs’ necks, just looking for an excuse. Unfortunately, the fact that the Voodoo Bastards were the longer living and known quantity to the NOPD, they were pretty much on their ass more than the Bayou Brethren’s even though it was one of the Voodoo Bastards who had died…

My brother.

My sweet, funny, kind, sometimes dopey, and all-the-time struggling little brother.

I forced a smile to my lips in spite of the fact that the emotions I was feeling didn’t even come close to matching.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” I asked, carefully trying to sound cautious and afraid.

“Why?” he asked, looking me over.

“I heard the girls talking and they said something about the Voodoo Bastards. I’ve seen them riding through here like all the time,” I said, casting my line in hopes of hooking some information.

Carver barked a laugh and said, “Those fuckwits?” He shook his head. “Nah, we’re fine. They’re too pussy to do shit.” His confidence was misplaced, and because I knew what I knew about the cops and the current situation, which I wasn’t supposed to know – it came off more like bravado. Still, I played along, nodding and smiling.

I stayed silent, afraid to push too hard or too much on the subject too soon.

We walked along the street, and he said, “Let’s go this way. There’s a great café. Are you hungry?” he asked.

“Starving,” I admitted.

He slung a leather-clad arm over my shoulders, and we struck out on the cracked and uneven sidewalk.

You had to be careful down here for more than a few reasons. The main one, it was the French Quarter and inherently dangerous just for that fact. Situational awareness was a must. There were tourists, sure, and roaming PD that you caught a glimpse of every once in a great while. But if you were paying attention, there were men like Carver out here, and headcases, and drunks, and worse than drunks – druggies.

The French Quarter had a totally different vibe during the day than it did at night, and you could feel the transition take over as the sun set behind the buildings and the shadows rose from the gutters and crept out of the tight alleyways.

It was like the darkness was more than just dark like something salacious and even malicious crept out of the sewers and alleyways with it.

I was no shrinking violet. I’d been through violence before – enough to know how to, and that I would like to, avoid it if I could.

Despite the dangers all around and the fact that I was essentially cozying up with a fucking mountain lion in Carver, I was glad for his presence and escort. As we walked, it only took a glance at the vest he wore for several onlookers to part like the Red Sea. If I looked behind us, those same onlookers looked either surprised, confused, and, in some cases, dubious at the patch on Carver’s back. Likely that it wasn’t Voodoo Bastards.

There were all sorts of MCs and riding clubs that went through here. I’d seen them a plenty during the day. All from parts unknown or far away – but always, always in packs of three or more. Never solo.

The only ones I’d seen who dared to walk around on their own were the Voodoo Bastards, and it made me wonder what Carver was playing at. Was he crazy, stupid, or was he making a statement walking through their territory bold as brass, a girl on his arm, like he owned these streets? I had a feeling it was the latter and that he was looking to piss some of Louie’s brothers off.

I didn’t know how I felt about being a prop in his peacocking charade. It told me one thing – these guys did not give a fuck . Not like the Bastards. They at least were keeping their women somewhere away from all of this madness. I’d had yet to meet more than just Alina, but from what she had told me over dinner that one night, she, Corliss, and Jessie-Lou were tight, and Sandrine was being brought into their little fold of opening up a witchy metaphysical gift shop in the Quarter.

From everything I’d gathered reading between the lines in the Bastards’ presence – they were really trying to turn to more legitimate and less dangerous ventures.

Meanwhile, the Bayou Brethren were taking that almost personally, as though it somehow made the Bastards weak and thus the potential power plays for the Bastards’ territory.

That was the explanation I’d been given in short, but the traded looks and glances between my three dinner companions made me suspect there was something more to the story. I’d been brazen and I’d asked. LaCroix had been the one to confess that there was something, but even the Bastards didn’t know exactly what. Just that something about how things had been playing out with the Brethren had seemed way too personal to be just a power play for territory.

That was partially where I came in.

I was to keep my ear to the ground, report movements, and anything else I heard that could be pertinent.

It was a daunting task because I didn’t know what was what and felt like no matter how big or small, I was going to have to remember and report just about everything that I heard. To that end, I had an empty stack of journals waiting back at the hotel.

I guess Louie writing letters long hand and sending them through the mail had sparked some ideas with Saint, except instead of snail mail, we would use a courier service. Faster that way and not out of place. Couriers came to and left the big fancy hotel I was working at all the time.

It was starting to feel like real covert spy shit, but if it brought some sense of justice or revenge for Louie’s murder – I was all for it.

Nothing would bring him back, I knew that – dead was dead… but damn… I don’t even know.

“Louie?” I came back to myself and realized I’d been staring vacantly at the menu. I looked up, over the top, and found Carver staring at me intently with eyebrows raised. I realized with a bit of startlement that the waitress was standing by our table, pen poised over her notepad expectantly.

“I’m sorry,” I apologized with a shaky laugh. “It’s been a long day, and I zoned out for a minute there. What’s the question?”

“Drink, what would you like to drink?” Carver asked with a wry grin.

“Coffee?” I hazarded.

“We have all kinds, honey. Hot or iced?”

“Bless you,” I said. “Iced.”

A few more leading questions from her, and we had a whole order in – coffee for me, and a beer for Carver. Now all that was left to decide on was food.

This place specialized in breakfast all day long, and since I’d gone with coffee, I decided I might as well go all in. “Bananas Foster French Toast,” I ordered when our waitress had returned.

Carver had ordered a burger – at a place famous for their all-day breakfast – but hey, to each their own.

The meal was alright. I learned a little more about Carver, who was refreshingly honest if, dare I say, proud about his outlaw four-time-felon status. Red flags, of course, went up when one of those felonies was casually revealed as an aggravated assault with a domestic violence enhancement against an ex-wife who I was assured deserved it.

Apparently, she’d been cheating while he’d been in jail or prison – that part was unclear – as even though he clearly knew the difference, he used them interchangeably. Of course, that made perfect sense if he didn’t expect me to know the difference.

If he were talking to Velina, I would have been out of there so fast because I recognized it for the manipulation tactic that it was. Calling prison “jail” and the minimizing language he used over his offenses, which were all pretty much possession and possession with intent to distribute right up until the domestic.

The college-educated real me knew he was posturing. Talking himself up to look like a badass and a bad boy to appeal to who he thought he was talking to – a barely high school graduated, innocent little Louise Whittier who led a nomadic life, cleaning fancier hotels with a start in Los Angeles as she moved south to where she really wanted to be – New Orleans, or St. Augustine, or Savannah, or Charleston – she didn’t know. She was just trying them all out, moving along in order as she pushed east. She planned to spend six months to a year in each city before moving on to the next and ultimately deciding which one suited her best.

That had been calculated to appeal to this lot – a woman with no family, innocent and moldable. It was as low-hanging fruit as it could get. Maybe too low if any of the Brethren had half a brain to see it, which is why I was treading carefully.

I laughed at some of his jokes that I would never actually find funny in a million years – at least no one with any actual empathy or smarts would, and agreed to accompany him to a bar further into the Quarter for adult beverages and to continue our talks and trading jokes, etc.

He actually would have been charming to me if he expressed any actual remorse for any of the things he had done. If he showed any actual desire to work on himself and to do or be better, but he was too narcissistic for that. Charming and sweet with his actions enough that if I’d been one iota less than who I was, I wouldn’t so easily feel like he smelled like bad decisions.

He held doors, he wasn’t too handsy, but he wasn’t shy about touching me, either. A hand on the waist or on the back guiding me through doorways or around broken pieces of the sidewalk. He was gentlemanly in walking on the side of the street and mean mugging anyone who dared get up too close or in my business. Be it bumping into me rudely, to begging me for change.

He played white knight – but just like every woman knew, it was placating. It was a show because the more comfortable he became, the lower his hand would wander, the more familiar the touches, the closer he stood, and the tighter the space between us became, all signaling one thing. He wanted to bone, and he was overtly imposing his desire in such a way as to gaslight me into thinking it was what I wanted, too.

It didn’t matter if I was ready or not.

Thing was, I would never be ready. Would I do it if I had to? Yes. If it managed to shoe-horn me into getting what I wanted and where I wanted to be – which was into their inner circle, then absolutely I would. I would loathe every damn second of it, though, and I would probably need to shower for days after to scrub the ick out from under my skin.

I wasn’t looking forward to it, in case that wasn’t clear, but I was expecting it.

I would have been stupid or na?ve not to. This was the real world, not some episode of Gangland Undercover.

The bar wasn’t what I had expected him to choose, and I wondered briefly as we passed through the stucco and exposed brick of the old structure that housed it, if this wasn’t more of him trying to piss on Voodoo Bastards territory. It just sort of had that kind of vibe.

Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop was one of the oldest, if not the oldest, bars in the French Quarter. I didn’t know the veracity of its claim to fame of being the site of the actual pirate Jean Laffite’s blacksmith shop at one point in history. But you could feel the history here as though you peeled it back like a cloth over a doorway upon entry and stepped into another world.

“Wow,” I said to Carver. “This is like its own cozy little world apart from ours in here.”

“Oh, yeah?” he asked, as I did the insipid girly thing to do and wrapped both my arms around his one arm, threading my fingers through the spaces between his and cozying up to him even though every fiber of my being was trying to get me to put more distance between us, not less.

“Yeah,” I said. “Do you think it’s haunted?” We drew up to the bar as I asked, and the bartender must have overheard me, because he barked a laugh and answered before Carver could.

“Welcome to Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, and yeah, sugar, it’s haunted,” he said in a thick, Louisiana drawl.

“What’s the story?” I asked, thinking about my brother’s brush with the supernatural down here.

“This here was the business front of one of New Orleans’ most infamous residents – the Pirate Jean Laffite. He and his brother, Pierre, owned this place as a legal front to all of their very illegal dealings. It’s said many a plan was hatched inside these walls to make those boys and their crew as rich as possible. Now, I ain’t seen him myself, but some say you can see Jean over there by the fireplace lurkin’ and plottin’ if you’re lucky.”

He pointed past us, and I turned to observe a very old brick fireplace, a cheery blaze crackling in its depths despite the heat wafting in from outside the open archways lined with hewn wood shutters.

Also behind us was another couple waiting to order. I turned back with a smile, and the bartender grinned and asked, “What’ll you have?”

Drinks in hand, we slid down the bar and sat on the stools. The bartender got busy with another couple, and Carver asked me, “You into all that spooky shit?”

“What, like ghosts and vampires?” I asked.

“Yeah.” He grinned.

“Nah.” I shook my head. “This place just has that kind of vibe, you know? I was just curious, that’s all.”

“I gotcha.” He winked at me, and I laughed a little nervously.

“So,” I said, trying to dredge up anything else to talk about. “Where are you originally from?”

His grin grew wider, and he said, “Well, I’m a Louisiana boy – born and bred.”

“Yeah?” I asked. He didn’t sound like it. If anything, he had the bland accent of nowhere, like I did.

“I know, I don’t sound like it,” he said.

I leaned back and smacked his arm lightly, saying, “Oh, my God! Get out of my head!”

We laughed, and he said, “No, I wanted to be different. I grew up in a place called Jennings, over there in Jefferson Davis Parrish. It’s close to two hundred miles that way.” He pointed in a vague direction and I just took his word for it.

“Small town?” I asked.

“Yeah.” He nodded. “You could walk up to just about anyone on their porch and ask after somebody, and they’d tell you, ‘aw yeah, I know ‘im. They live over on such and such street and go there to the Baptist church’ or whatever.”

“Oh, wow! That’s definitely small town!”

“It is,” he said, nodding. “I was about thirteen when the biggest thing to ever happen in Jennings started to go down.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The Jennings 8,” he said, and a chill went down my spine. “Bunch a girls who got themselves killed. Jennings’ very own serial killer.”

“What?” I asked and leaned back.

“Yeah. Doesn’t surprise me, really. There’s fuck else to do in that town except for the occasional cookout and a whole lotta Bible thumping.”

“Wait,” I leaned back and eyed him critically, “When did this all start?”

“Two thousand and five,” he said.

I did the math and blinked.

“You’re thirty-two?” I asked.

“Just turned thirty-three,” he said with a grin.

“Stop!” I cried.

How was he only thirty-three?

“What?” he asked and started to laugh.

“I thought you were around my age!” I lied.

“What?” his eyes crossed.

“Yeah,” I said, and he laughed for real then.

“I guess you’re only as old as you feel,” he said.

It was like the air was sucked out of the room the moment one of their booted feet crossed the threshold into the establishment from the street. You felt their presence before you had the chance to look in their direction. Their command of presence a powerful thing. The din of scattered conversations within the small bar dropped to a smattering of low talk and nervous whispers as the three men moved into the small room and bellied up to the bar beside us.

“What’ll I get you gents?” the bartender asked, and I twisted in my seat to look up into Saint’s brooding dark eyes.

“Tequilla, top shelf, neat,” he said without looking at the bartender, his eyes boring into mine.

I felt small in that moment. So incredibly small. I shrank in my seat with the feeling even as Chainsaw and Axeman put in their orders for an absinthe and a Sazerac Sunset, respectively.

Saint’s eyes flickered from mine to Carver’s and back to mine, a faint smile tugging at his lips.

“You ever want to hook up with a real man, you just let me know, sweetheart,” Saint said to me, and he flicked out one of those white business cards with just a phone number printed across its front.

I scoffed, took the card, and ripped it up, throwing the pieces like confetti into the air.

He barked a laugh, Carver stiff at my back, and I turned back around. Carver looked at me impassively, and I rolled my eyes.

“Rude,” I said, and he smirked.

The three Voodoo Bastards moved off to a table by the street, and I sighed.

“Guess that’s our cue to leave,” I said, and Carver shook his head.

“Finish your drink,” he said, and he sounded impressed but also… there was something else there. Something underneath. A hard layer of underlying steel to his tone.

“O-okay,” I stammered because that was what Louise would do.

He was trying to be hard, but it didn’t come as naturally to Carver as it did to Saint. Saint sent shivers down my spine and I couldn’t help but want to obey him when he gave an order like that. Carver, I almost wanted to laugh, but that wouldn’t do. That’s what Velina would do, and I wasn’t Velina right now. I was Louie…

Louie.

Louie.