or beaten dog. You? You just don’t give a fuck about my past.”
I shrugged a shoulder, mind trained on the car I could now see glinting orange down the street.
“Show me how you detonate the device,” Wrath asked, and I could tell he was trying to bond with me, reach me on my own level.
It made me smile, even if it was a small, tight curve of my mouth and a minuscule flutter of good humour in my chest. I tossed him the burner phone. “Tried and true. Hit send when they stop at the sign.”
It was my olive branch. My attempt at recognizing his friendship and accepting it.
Wrath stared at me again in that way he had, stripping away my skin like a scalpel to discover the contents of my blood. He nodded curtly, massive hands cupping the phone gently, like I’d given him a gift.
I was glad he understood that I had.
Killing people was my joy, and I’d passed it over to him. In my world, that practically made us best mates.
The rumble of the old Camaro engine grew louder, taking up the entire airspace of the sleepy neighborhood. I turned to watch the car drive to its demise.
The target was Brett Walsh, twenty-two years old, just a kid really.
But that was the point.
We’d warned Patrick and Brenda Walsh twice, which was one too many times, to stop their operation from seeping into Entrance.
We’d heard even Javier Ventura, the mayor of Entrance and head of the Mexican cartel on the west coast of Canada, had issued his own warning.
They’d made the conscious decision to die by not obeying.
It was bad enough they were dealing their designer crap on our turf, but Brett had also sold to King and Harleigh Rose Garro’s half-sister, Honey. She was just eighteen, and the club had been trying to keep her safe and get her clean for the last year.
Brett had ruined any progress they’d made with his cock and his coke.
He had to pay.
And I was the happy debt collector.
The car was closer now, almost level with where Wrath and I stood veiled by the night dark and massive oaks. They were going fast leading up to the stop sign, passing in a streak of orange-like paint smeared against the nightscape.
Too fast, really, to see the interior of the dim vehicle.
But I was a human predator.
A clinical psychopath.
I blinked half as much as the rest and had instincts keener than a room full of psychologists.
So I spotted something bright and glinting like moonlight caught in a jar on the passenger seat of the rigged Camaro.
I opened my mouth as my hand snapped out to still Wrath’s fingers on the phone.
But that bastard, he knew death, and he didn’t just embrace it.
He ran toward it.
His thumb was on the trigger before I could slap it from his fist, and a second later, my shout was drowned out by the muffled boom and sharp tear of the car exploding.
For the first time in a long time, I felt my heart in my chest, beating too fast, too hard against its confines like a rioting prisoner.
Something was wrong.
Sound was distorted in my ears as I shoved Wrath and stalked toward the car. There was the hiss of gas leaking, the scattered pop of hot metal peeling off the frame and the tinkle of glass falling to the pavement.
But no human noises.
I prayed to a deity I hadn’t believe in since I was nine that my eyes had deceived me.
That my mind, broken and warped as it was, had only transplanted her at the scene. I thought of her often, at strange intervals, in odd places like a ghost haunting my thoughts.
That was it, I told myself even as I prowled toward the steaming metal wreck and rounded the front of the car.
It wasn’t her.
It couldn’t have been.
Beatrice Lafayette would never be seen with a motherfucking loser like Brett.
But there was no denying what lay before my eyes as I faced the car head-on.
The safety glass of the windshield was webbed with fractures, a gaping hole blown straight through the middle by the body of a woman. Her blonde curls caught in the wind, waving like a white flag over her prostrate form. Bizarrely, she was wearing wings, giant feathered white things affixed to her back that wilted brokenly over her spine, the left one crumpled and tangled in the glass hole.
My eyes burned, and my heart, it throbbed.
Thump, thump. Thump, thump.
I felt painfully alive the