Charlie squeals like a pig, drawing my attention away from Smoke and his attempt to put out the fire. With my gun still poised I make my way toward him and stand over him as he slithers across the floor like a snake.
I arch my shoulders and pull the trigger again. His body stills and I bend over to stare into his eyes and watch as the life spills out them. He hangs on by a thread, suffering through his death. I sling the gun over my shoulder and turn around. My eyes struggle to search through the smoke for my brother that deserves to take this man’s life and fade him to black.
“Pipe,” I shout, pulling the utility knife from my belt. I hear his boots creep up behind me and I straighten my back and hand him the knife as he stares at Charlie.
“He’s going to die, make it be from your hand,” I tell him. Pipe diverts his eyes to the knife I’m offering and then he looks back at me as his hand takes the weapon.
After Christine died I struggled for years, let my temptations become my demons all because I was desperate for retribution. I got mine and now it’s time for Pipe to get his.
I watch as he kneels beside Charlie and presses the blade against his cheek, the sharpened point touches the outline of one of the teardrops inked beneath his eye.
“Your tears belong to me now,” he seethes, as he traces the drops of ink, carving the tattoo from his cheek. Charlie’s body jerks but he can’t fight. He can’t scream. He can only lay there and be at the mercy of the knife.
Like Oksana.
Pipe flicks the pieces of bloody skin off his fingers before he drags the knife across Charlie’s neck and slices it wide open.
Retribution.
It has a color.
Its color is black.
Chapter Fifty
Three days feigning off the sadistic voice inside my head that tells me the long languid kiss Blackie gave me before he slipped out of our bed, was the very last one he’d ever give me, has left my heart in a million tiny shattered pieces. I did everything I was supposed to do. I woke up and routinely took my dose of lithium, replayed his promise over and over in my mind but nothing worked.
I’m coming back for you, girl.
In a last ditch effort to pull my sanity from the ruins Blackie’s departure left me in I went to my father’s house. My father knew I was being worked over by my treacherous mind the moment he opened the door. Either he spotted the familiar signs reflected in my eyes that he sees every time he glances in the mirror or I am more transparent than I thought. Whichever the case may be he was trying his hardest to pull me from the depression dragging me down.
He didn’t need my stress added to the mountain sitting on his shoulders but he took it, anyway. He acted as if it wasn’t severing his soul that he wasn’t with his club or that they were on the road facing peril without him. And after he cooked me and Reina dinner he and I went upstairs and painted the nursery.
“He will come back, right?” I ask, rolling the green paint on the wall. I couldn’t avoid the question anymore. I know I’m not supposed to ask, that a better, wiser old lady would just sit idly and wait for her man to come home, but I couldn’t help myself.
He doesn’t answer me straight away and for a moment I wonder if he heard me, forgetting his ears were still on the mend. But my father heard my words, maybe not as loudly as I spoke them but he heard my question. He thought before he actually answered, not something Jack Parrish usually did. The man doesn’t have a filter.
He places the roller into the tray and turns to me taking a deep breath as I continue rolling the paint on the wall.
“Careful how you answer, Bulldog, wouldn’t want to make a liar out of you.”
The roller falls from my hand as that deep voice vibrates through me, awakening all the dormant parts of my body and finally ending the torment.
My dad’s face comes into view first, the cocky smile, wide and proud on his face. My eyes follow the direction of his and I see Blackie casually leaning against the frame of the door. His smile matches my fathers, arrogant and victorious. But everything else about him screams exhaustion, everything except his eyes. Those bad boys are feral, primal, outright hungry.
“Whatcha waiting for, girl?”
Pushing off the frame, he crooks his finger and beckons me.
“Jack, with all due respect, you might want to get your ass out of this room. Pipe’s downstairs waiting for you anyway,” he says, his long legs swallowing up the space between us.
“Wish I lost my fucking vision not my hearing,” my father grunts as he pats Blackie on the back and disappears out the door.
“Get over here,” Blackie whispers.
He doesn’t have to say it twice. Like so many times before, I jump straight into his waiting arms and throw mine around his neck. The familiar smell of gasoline assaults my senses and I bury my nose in his neck, breathing in his scent. My fingers slide over the leather covering his shoulders as his slide into the back pockets of my jeans and squeezes my ass.
Blackie’s back.
I lift my head from the crook of his neck and stare into his eyes.