Page 16 of Bram

I looked at her. “You recognized the patch?”

She nodded. “Desert Scorpion. New blood. Didn’t say a word, just ran at me.”

The lines at the corner of her mouth deepened. She didn’t blink. “First hit dropped him,” she said, a little softer now. “Second hit made sure. Third was for me.”

She looked down at her hands, flexing them. “Not as hard as it used to be. But it hurts longer.”

I wanted to reach for her. I wanted to ask if she was okay, but the words dried up in my mouth. Instead, I looked at the skillet, then the body, then back to her.

“You want a lawyer?” I asked, finally.

She smiled. “I have one.”

We sat, with the dead man on the floor and the whiskey between us.

“I won’t be used,” she said, the words slow and heavy. “Not by those men, not by anyone. You understand me, Julie?”

“I understand.”

She tipped her glass and watched the way the liquid curved along the rim. “I raised you harder than this. Raised your sister the same. They thought I was leverage. They thought wrong.”

My voice came out smaller than I wanted. “They came for you.”

She shrugged, as if that made them less dangerous. “Let them come. I’ll bury every one of them myself.”

Had they followed her to my house? No, that didn’t make sense. They came for me. The bar wasn’t an accident. Again, I considered calling Bram, considered getting help from the Jackson Brothers MC.

The light above the sink flickered, then steadied. The blood on the floor gleamed wet and unreal. I told myself to keep looking, keep breathing. The anger settled in, slow and sour.

“You should go upstairs,” I said, standing.

She didn’t. I knew how this was going to go down. Mom was a raw woman. She’d seen things. Done things. Things she’d never elaborate on. That’s why she pushed me to be something more. “Don’t you call the cops.”

I didn’t. I dialed Ruiz directly. The phone rang twice.

He answered with a voice that sounded as tired as my own.

“Cleanup at my place,” I said. “One body at the back door.”

“Need a statement?”

“Not tonight.”

“I’ll bring a couple of guys. Be there in twenty.”

I hung up. Set the phone face-down on the counter.

The silence returned, thick as the blood on the floor.

My mother drank. The corpse bled. The world outside was still dark, but the kitchen glowed warm and ugly.

I looked at the bottle on the table: Blanton’s, half empty.

The only thing between us now.

She set the glass down, leaned back, and let out a breath. “You going to sit, or you going to stand there judging me?”

I sat.