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Hurt and guilty, angry and guilty, uninspired and guilty, sad and guilty. Never in her life had she spent so much time marinating in fucking guilt.
Probably that was why she couldn’t get focused on her dissertation. Wasting weeks doing little but reorganizing her Post-Its and books, or sitting back with a beer in her hand and her phone on her lap, listening to and recording stories she’d heard her whole life, not asking the questions that would dig deeper and get to the shit she actually needed, had a fun bonus feature of anxiety. She still had lots of time, but every day she didn’t get good work done was a divot in that block of time.
The procedure room door swung inward, and Tasha stepped out and closed it. “She’s still deep under. I think she’ll sleep through the night.” Hooking her arm around Gia’s, she headed toward the break room. “Are you sure about staying?”
“Yeah. There’s no need to wake my folks up, and honestly, I don’t want Dad involved in whatever Zaxx is kicking up.”
“I think we both know what Zaxx means to kick up.”
Yeah. He meant to kill the men who’d hurt his sister. Gia understood that impulse on a cellular level, but she also worried about the consequences. Zaxx didn’t seem overly concerned about consequences.
But when Tasha called Len, she’d gotten the club involved. “Do you think Badge will sign off on that?”
Heading to the coffee pot, Tasha sighed. “You want a reheat?”
“Sure.” Gia had sat down at the table. She pushed her half-empty cup toward Tasha. “Thanks.”
As Tasha poured hot coffee into Gia’s cup and then filled a cup of her own, she said, “I think so. Almost anything but this, I’d say no, he’ll sit Zaxx down and redirect him. But this—what happened to Zelda? I don’t see any one of our guys pushing him back very hard. They’d all want the same thing if it were you or me or Adrienne, or any family, and they’ll all back him, even if they hate what it could mean.“
Gia nodded because she agreed with Tasha—and she also agreed with the Horde mindset. She felt extremely strongly that Zaxx should have waited to hear that it was the answer Zelda wanted. She fucking hated the way men like him, like all the men in her family, thought it was their responsibility—and more importantly their right—to be the Avenger, the Punisher, name your superhero, as if the attack on Zelda was an attack on them. But she understood the need to hurt anyone who’d hurt someone she loved.
She understood vengeance the way most people understood their religion, and she had a deeply cynical view of the value of the legal system to provide anything remotely resembling justice. In addition to being raised by a bunch of outlaws, she had done mountains of academic research that shaped and supported her jaundiced perspective. Law served the powerful and fucked everybody else.
But the truly hurt party should determine the shape of vengeance. This was Zelda’s pain, and her right to shape its answer.
The Horde did not think about it that way. They saw everything and everyone in their world through the lens of their own strength.
Actually ...
An idea poked her brain, and she pulled out her phone and opened her notes app. The Justice League: The Superhero Mythos and the Role of Vengeance in Outlaw Culture, she typed. Pretty solid chapter title. Then she started a bulleted list of the thoughts currently pinballing inside her skull.
As Gia typed, Tasha said, “Just ... fuck. I hope this doesn’t start something big with the club.”
“What do you mean?” Gia asked, still typing.
“Something like this—if they do end up killing these guys—it could start a ripple that ultimately puts the club back in the dark. You don’t remember those days—”
Gia set her phone on the table and cut in. “I remember enough. I was five when Dad and Len went away and thirteen when they came home. I remember visiting Dad in prison, seeing how he suffered. I remember when Len and Show and Badge came home so hurt, and Havoc’s funeral, and I remember not having my dad all those years. And I’ve heard lots of stories.” Most of the stories she’d heard were stories, told for an audience, with the harsh points of reality smoothed away. But she’d also overheard plenty she wasn’t supposed to hear, and those versions had spikes.
Tasha’s smile was condescending and a little chilly. “Yeah, okay. Not the same, but okay. My point is that it was bad, Gia. Looking back on those years, it’s hard to remember a time when we weren’t in turmoil, when we weren’t all in danger. The whole town. So many people died. And those who survived all bear scars, inside or out or both. I don’t want to bring those days back.”
Len had lost an eye in those days. It had been pried out of his head while he was tortured. All the bones in his hands and feet had been broken as well, on the same terrible day. “You think what they do about this could bring back the one-percenter thing?”
Tasha picked at a cinnamon roll and thought for a goodly while before she answered, starting with a shrug. “She said a cop was one of the men who did this. What if the other attacker was a cop, too? If they kill a cop? Or two? That can’t help but ripple. The question is how big and how far.”
Could it ripple far enough to swing the club around, a storm pulling a ship off course? Gia began connecting dots to see how one led to the other—and then she didn’t have to, because Tasha had already plotted that course.
“They kill these guys,” Tasha said. “Say they’re both cops. Now they’ve either got to do a miraculously excellent job of arranging a scene that tells such a good story about how these guys died that nobody ever looks the club’s way—and we both know Zaxx will not be happy with a clean kind of death, so he’s going to make it difficult if not impossible to make it look like an accident. So say they just leave the bodies, erase as much evidence as they can that they were there, and wait to see if they got away with it. Either way, we’re all on tenterhooks, waiting to see if the club gets away with it or maybe loses so many patches to the judicial system it’s gutted—and that waiting, the only way it ends is if they get caught. Otherwise, it looms over the club forever. I don’t see Badge or any of the officers—or any of the patches, period—being okay with sitting around and waiting, maybe getting blindsided ten years from now. So what’s option number three?”
Gia had an idea where Tasha was going. “Leverage or bribery.”
Tasha’s smile was grim. “Exactly. And then there they are, making dark deals again. Trust me, I’ve known this world my whole life. The first dark deal makes the second easy, and the third unavoidable. Each one a little bit darker, until we’re all cowering in the Hall again, waiting to see if people we love come home on their own feet.”
She shoved the plate full of dismantled—but uneaten—cinnamon roll away and laid her head on her arms. Gia sat beside her, feeling sick. And sad. And angry.
And guilty.
~oOo~
