Page 3

CHAPTER THREE

V elina…

I wanted to take him. I wanted to pluck that urn from its shelf, rip the photo from the wall, and take him with me. I didn’t know what the fuck these assholes had gotten my brother into. How could he have considered them his family? I was his family! Me ! And now I really was alone.

“Hey, come back! Don’t go like that!”

The man at the bar called after me as I turned on my heel and marched back out into the oppressive heat outside. I put my hands on my hips, closed my eyes, and tipped my face to the sun. It blazed fire through my closed eyelids, and I swallowed hard.

I would not cry anymore. I could not cry in front of these motherfuckers!

I took in a deep, harsh, cleansing breath as the pressure in my nose and at the backs of my eyes receded.

You didn’t cry in my family.

It wasn’t the way we were raised.

You cried, and Dad would give you something to cry about. I’d stopped crying about shit a long fucking time ago. There wasn’t any point. It didn’t fucking fix anything.

“Hey.”

I turned sharply at his voice, the hulking form of the long-haired bastard filling the darkened doorway behind me.

“What?” I snapped. His jaw tightened with consternation and I stood there, waiting him out while he swept me with deep, dark, brown eyes that were honestly just enough brown in the light to keep them from being black.

“You know what?” He held up his hands. “Never mind.” He backed into the doorway and, dropping his hands, turned to go back in the direction of the bar.

The other one, the one with his close-shaven head a lighter brown than the other big bastard, leaned a shoulder against the doorway and crossed his arms, squinting into the bright sunlight in my direction.

He was big and built like the first guy, with one exception. His neck was almost wider than his head – like wildly disproportionate to the rest of him.

I scoffed as he threw me some chin and pecked a kiss in the air, winking at me. Frowning, I went back across the street and opened my car door. I got in, fishing my keys out of my shallow hip pocket and sticking it in the ignition, and turned her over.

Click!

Nothing.

I drew in a long, slow breath, closed my eyes, and did what any red-blooded American woman fed up with the patriarchy would do.

I screamed long and loud and beat on my steering wheel until the shock of the blows radiated up my arm and rendered my hand achy and numb at the same time.

Did it fix anything?

No.

Did it make me feel any better?

Also no.

Did it keep me from bursting into tears or making an absolute embarrassment of myself?

Yes, that , but come to think of it? No , on that last part.

“Pop the hood, Cher. Sounds like your starter.”

I blinked and turned my head to the shadow that’d fallen over me. It was the thick-necked Cajun leaning his arm against the sun-scorched and peeling clearcoat of the roof of my car. He turned his head and spit brown tobacco juice on the ground, and I felt my stomach roil.

Ugh.

Wordlessly, and with honestly nothing better to do at the moment, I reached for the lever and pulled it, the hood jumping an inch or two with a not-so-satisfying deep metal thrum.

Fuck my life.

“Name’s Cypress, ma cherie . Welcome to Louisiana.”

“Thanks,” I said, non-plussed. I looked across the street at the doorway where the long-haired bastard stood, arms crossed over his chest, looking impassively on.

“What’s his name?” I asked as Cypress fiddled around under my hood.

“That there is Saint,” he called back.

Saint and Cypress…

“Garnett talked about you two,” I said, hanging wearily onto the top of my steering wheel with both hands, leaning forward some, gaze fixed on Saint, who stared impassively back at me.

“Did he now?” Cypress asked, sounding only mildly interested.

“Yeah,” I said.

“An’ what ol’ Louie have to say? Huh?” he asked.

“That you guys were the only family he ever knew, even if you put the fun back in dysfunctional.”

Cypress barked a laugh and said something in Cajun-French that I couldn’t understand.

Living in California, Spanish had been a higher priority for me, and my grasp of that language had honestly eluded me from even the most basic conversation. I think I could effectively ask where the bathroom was, call something black or white… and maybe say “thank you.” That was about all I’d retained out of that.

“Try it now,” Cypress called out.

I turned the ignition.

Click!

Nothing.

“Aw, yeah. No connections loose. Pretty sure it’s your starter. Lemme go grab some tools, yeah?”

“Why?” I asked.

“Why what?” he asked.

“Why are you helping me?”

“That all depends,” he said, coming back around to lean over my window and look me in the eye. “You really ol’ Louie’s sister?”

I raised my chin defiantly and said, “Half-sister, older by seven months,” I said. “We shared the same father.”

Cypress gave a nod. “Thought so.”

“Oh?” I asked.

“Louie had his daddy’s eyes. His mamma’s was brown. You got the same ones.” He straightened up and knocked on the roof of my car.

“Come on outta there and come have a cold one. I’ll see if I can’t get you sorted, yeah?”

“Why?” I asked again, getting out of my car.

“You’re family. We do right by a fallen brother’s family. That’s our way.”

He walked away, ahead of me, heading into the front of the club, stopping only when Saint barred his way, asking something. His voice floated toward me on the breeze, unmistakably masculine and deep – but the words unintelligible from this distance.

Cypress answered, and Saint stepped aside – sort of – more turning in the doorway for Cypress to slide past him like a human door.

“Leave your keys,” he called out to me. “Cy’s gonna need ‘em, and it’s not like that piece of shit’s going anywhere anytime soon.”

The fuck?

“It’s old, but it’s not a piece of shit,” I argued.

“The fact it won’t start and it’s left you stuck here to annoy the piss out of me suggests otherwise,” he said.

“You’re a fantastic host,” I said sarcastically, passing him by and rolling my eyes.

He snorted a slight laugh and shook his head.

“We don’t generally gather out here in any significant numbers anymore,” he said when I moved to clamber up onto one of the bar stools. “Grab yourself something cold to drink and follow me.”

I turned and looked at the plywood over the windows and let my gaze meander over the dimly lit interior of the bar space.

The smell of fresh paint and the dry tang of fresh drywall hung in the air with a faint underpinning of fresh mud.

“Don’t touch the walls back there,” he said over the fans circulating the air here.

“Everything’s still wet,” I said, and he nodded like I’d put a question mark on the end of that – which I hadn’t.

“What happened here?” I asked, reaching into the cooler and coming up with an icy can of Coke.

“Some rivals of ours shot up the place one night, only a couple three weeks back. We’re still working on fixing things up.”

I cracked open the soda can and looked back to my brother’s urn and mugshot behind it.

“Is that how my brother died?” I asked, putting two and two together.

“Right where you’re standing, actually,” the man said coolly as I took a drink of soda, which I promptly choked on, the searingly carbonated liquid coming out of my nose as I coughed uncontrollably.

Saint was suddenly just kind of there, smacking me on the back hard enough I swore my spine was going to shoot out the front of my body, and my ribs rattled together like ghoulish windchimes.

“Here, here you go,” he said, thrusting some of those blue shop paper towels into my free hand. I stuffed them against my face to sop up the worst of the cola and snot mixture evacuating from my nose and squeezed my watering eyes shut.

“You really need to work on your bedside manner for breaking bad news to a bitch,” I squeezed out of my aching, spastic lungs through my equally traumatized voicebox.

He threw back his head and laughed at that, but I was dead serious.

“What the fuck?” I demanded.

“If it’s any consolation to you, I believe you, now.”

“Again, and with all due disrespect, I say, what the fuck? ”

“Come have a seat,” he said and tried to draw me by my elbow out from behind the bar.

I obliged him, setting down my can of Coke on top of the cooler or whatever back here and dropping onto my ass right there on the dusty concrete floor. I put my hand to the warm concrete, a coating of drywall dust chalky against my fingertips and palm as I rubbed along the polish of it.

“Right here?” I asked. “Are you serious?”

He put his hand against the bar and leaned against it.

“Ah, yeah. Right there.”

I pressed my hand flat against the floor and closed my eyes, trying desperately to reach back in time, to feel even the smallest echo… which was silly and stupid, I knew, but I didn’t have anything else. I never would. Nothing but the sight of my brother's cold, impersonal, gunmetal gray urn sitting on that floating shelf. The eight-by-ten of him holding that plaque and the scrunched-up, disrespectful face he was making at the camera behind it.

That was it. That was all I’d driven all those many miles to find.

What the fuck?

“What happened?” I asked through numb lips.

“I told you—” he said.

“Don’t spare me the gory details now,” I said spitefully.

He shook his head.

“You don’t need ‘em.”

“And what if I say I do?” I asked.

“I say that’s too damn bad. Now c’mon. There are more people out back that knew Louie to meet.”

“Just gimme a minute,” I said. “Alone, if you don’t mind.”

“Suit yourself,” he said with a shrug, and pushing off from the bar, he disappeared around the corner and down the hall somewhere deeper into the cinderblock building.

All this way, and he was already gone.

That knot of dread I’d been carrying in the pit of my stomach all the way from California unfurled into a twisted flower of nausea and regret.

I should have come sooner.