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Startled, Zaxx looked up. “You’re light on your feet. I didn’t hear you coming.”
Geoff smiled wisely. “It’s a superpower. Are you looking for a gift?”
“Yep!” Zelda called from the other side of the room. “It’s Gia’s birthday tomorrow, and Zaxx in loooooove.”
Zaxx sent her the dirtiest look he could put on his face. She smirked back, unmoved by his toothless threat.
“Oh, yes! I’ve heard talk that you and our Gia are seeing each other. She shops here sometimes, so I have a sense of her taste—if you need some suggestions, that is.”
Zelda had turned out to be a terrible personal shopper, so Zaxx took Geoff’s offer at once. He pointed to the bracelet. “I was thinking that one—but I don’t want to go too hard and freak her out. Is it expensive? Are the stars diamonds?”
Geoff set a velvet display board on the glass before Zaxx, then opened the case and withdrew the bracelet. He laid it on the board with an elegant flourish. “The cuff and setting are sterling silver. The stone is lapis. The stars are lab-created diamonds. As clear and vibrant as natural, but much less expensive.”
He turned the little white tag up: $250.
That wasn’t so bad. He hadn’t really had a number in mind, just ‘not so expensive she freaks out,’ but two-fifty seemed like a decent number. Not so cheap it was an insult, but not so expensive it said too much too fast.
“Peach?” he asked, because he needed another point of view.
His sister returned to the display case, cradling a taxidermized crow in a top hat and tails. She took the bracelet and finally gave it a good look. Then she rocked her hip into his leg.
“Jackpot,” she said as she set the cuff back on its velvet bed.
There was an odd tone in the word. Zaxx looked over and saw her watching him, her eyes sparkling in a way Zelda’s never did. She was on the verge of tears.
“Y’okay?” he asked softly.
Her expression cleared at once. “Obviously, dork. Why wouldn’t I be?” With that, she spun and trounced back off into the dark reaches of this strange room.
This was neither place nor time to chase her down and question her, so Zaxx turned back to Geoff. “I’ll take it. Can you wrap it for me, too?”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Showdown reached over and grabbed Shannon’s hand protectively. “That’s enough, Gia.”
Both sympathetic and impatient, Gia tapped her phone and paused the recording. “We can stop, Aunt Shan.”
They could stop for now, but Gia needed this interview. This week of being trapped in the house with a bum leg had given her lots of time to think about her work. She was finally getting her dissertation rolling, and she’d set a deadline of the end of October for all of her Signal Bend interviews. After the holidays, she could focus on planning what travel she needed to do to get the rest of the story, and getting Dr. Santana’s approval. But first she needed to get the foundation established.
The focus of her diss was outlaw culture in general. She was prepared to narrow her focus to bikers if she had enough to say about that (and she was pretty sure she would), but even then, she had no intention of focusing only on the Night Horde. However, the Horde and her life in the club family were the reasons she’d followed this path of study, she had a unique and important perspective, and its history was therefore the foundation of her project. It was also relevant to her project that the Horde had, for the most part, left that life—and why.
She needed to know all the dark corners, the nooks and crannies, the cracks and leaks in the Horde story. And she needed that story from everyone affected, so she could find the edges and the overlaps, the points of convergence and divergence, and excavate the whole truth. The point was that this culture was far wider and deeper than simply the men with the patches on their backs. Their families had their versions of the stories, too.
Obviously, there were things she could never mention, even obliquely; some of the things the Horde had done, or been involved in, were crimes with no statute of limitations, and she made it crystal clear at the beginning of each interview that she would absolutely not incriminate or otherwise endanger her subjects. She would be using proper-noun replacement (names, locations, etc.) for everything she included, and she would not include anything that she couldn’t sufficiently anonymize.
With her free hand, Shannon caught tears on a careful finger swiped along her lashes and said, “No, no. It’s fine. I’m fine.”
Show grunted grumpily. “I don’t know why you gotta rehash this old shit, G. You know all this. You been hearin’ the stories all your life.”
Gia did have stories of her own, but hers were mostly about the consequences of the Horde’s outlaw days. The story Shannon had been telling, about the terrible night the heart of the club had come home after being caught in the clutches of a maniacal drug lord, was one Gia had virtually no true memory of. She’d been very young, and at this point she had no idea if any of her ‘memories’ of that night were real at all, or merely impressions from the scattered versions of the story she’d heard over the years.
Of course Gia felt bad for asking questions that made Shannon cry—yay, more guilt—but she held her ground. She couldn’t do anything else. “Stories I was told as a kid, stories I overheard when no one was paying attention, those aren’t sources. Actual interviews, with answers to questions I’ve developed carefully, those are sources. I know this dredges up painful shit, and I’m truly sorry about that. We can take it in pieces, if that’s easier, Aunt Shan.”
For the most part, Gia no longer called the older members of the Horde family ‘Aunt’ and ‘Uncle.’ She was an adult herself now, and the honorific felt a bit childish. But it still rolled off her tongue sometimes, usually when she was feeling especially emotional or nostalgic, or simply connected to whoever it was. Show, for instance, her godfather, was still Uncle Show most of the time. He was her giant teddy bear, a font of gentle wisdom and warm hugs, and the best parent whisperer around. Any time she had a conflict with her mom or her dad, Uncle Show could be counted on to make it make sense.
He was angry with her now, and it made Gia want to back down. But she couldn’t.
Shannon patted her man’s knee and did a little sniffle-shake that showed her reclaiming her composure. “I really am fine. It will always be hard to talk about that night, but your questions don’t hurt, Gia. Go ahead.”
