Cruz (Dark and Dirty Sinners' MC #5) - Serena Akeroyd Page 0,51

already sent me a bunch of messages about this topic. My phone wasn’t on silent, which meant that it had been pinging away and I just hadn’t heard it.

That wasn’t like me.

But then, it wasn’t every day you learned this level of shit about your mom, was it?

Scraping my hands over my face, I rasped, “I need a minute.”

No one argued, no one said shit, and I was grateful for that because I didn’t know where my head was at and I needed to be on the ball. For close to a decade, we’d been in a kind of stasis, and all without knowing it.

Inadvertently, we’d just set off a timer that could only end in a blast, and my ears were the only ones that could hear the ticking of the fucking clock.

I didn’t look back. I didn’t stop to shoot the shit like I usually did when I headed past the bar. I went straight outside and headed for my bike.

One second I was in my office, the next I was on the adjoining road that led to the only place I’d ever found any peace.

Rachel’s.

I wouldn’t be welcome. I never was. But she was the only one who’d be able to help, who I’d ever let see me like this.

I’d never stopped needing her, but I’d shoved that need aside because I knew she deserved better than a criminal like me. But today, I wasn’t a biker. I wasn’t a one-percenter. Nor was I a Prez.

I was a fucking son.

Rene’s son.

And that was the only Rex Rachel had ever loved.

Cruz

A few days later

With my calculations made, I grabbed the burner I’d rigged up and shoved it under the cast iron bath. It’d take a fucking lifetime for the solution to get hot enough, but I had plenty of time.

So did Donavan Lancaster.

Wasn’t like the fucker was going anywhere.

Link and Lily had managed to make a real mess of a man who made a pile of rotten trash look fresh and ready to eat.

The past couple of days had been difficult.

What with visiting my mom, then Dog and Sarah’s funerals… I’d admit, I’d been wondering if Lodestar would come for me, especially as I knew what she’d done. But she didn’t.

Hadn’t.

She’d left me alone.

In fact, she’d been tucked away with Maverick on the top floor of the clubhouse, and I’d never been happier about anything in my fucking life.

Dog’s death, the subsequent investigation, all of it had felt like a waiting game where I was the one left wondering if Lodestar would come and end me.

Maybe a cold-hearted bastard would have taken her out first, but I didn’t have a death wish.

I wasn’t the kind of man who took lives easily—I cleaned up after those who did, which was what made me a monster.

Hence the vat of lye I was currently heating up in an old bathtub. The tub acted as a Dutch oven, and once optimal temperature was reached, I’d be dumping Lancaster’s piece of shit body into it for the base concoction to do its work—disintegrate him into viscera.

With the burner on at full blast, it’d still take a while for it to heat up, so I went back to the room that had seen Lancaster’s final weeks on this miserable planet, and dragged his corpse out of there.

Once his bag of bones was on the floor, with the stench of lye slowly starting to fill the bathroom, I closed the door, then I reached for some PPE, set the mask over my mouth and nose, shoved on a pair of goggles then dragged on a Haz-Mat suit, and started on cleaning up the rest of the Fridge.

Hauling in a power washer, I didn’t sit around. Hosing it down, the initial sweep only got rid of the surface layer. Next came bleach, and then, my own personal blend. The bleach was only my being cautious, because where DNA was concerned, caution was wise. Once I dumped my own chemicals into the power washer, I let the solution disperse into the water before I hosed it down.

Twice more.

Caution favored the brave, after all.

Once the place stank like a lab, even filtering through my heavy-duty mask, I hummed with satisfaction once I’d given my boots the same treatment, before I returned to the bathroom where the large bubbles breaching the liquid’s surface told me the job had taken longer than I’d hoped.

But Lancaster had subsisted in the Fridge for a helluva long time, and even though I’d made