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Private. Secrets. Neglect.
Feeling suddenly like something every one of these men wanted to scrape off their boots, Lyra said, “We don’t need to take it anywhere.” She pushed off the counter and stormed from the room.
Zach didn’t stop her.
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~oOo~
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Pop and Reed didn’tstop her, either. She walked into the living room, picked up her bag, and headed for the door, and her father and brother simply watched her do it, like all the other guys.
She got all the way to her car and started it up before she let herself think. Had she and Zach just broken up? The day after he’d finally gotten back to Laughlin and they could really be together?
It hurt. Badly. But her head felt too full and loud to let that feeling get far enough in to do damage yet.
Sitting behind the wheel, her Cube running at the curb, Lyra watched the front door for a minute, hoping it would open.
It didn’t, and she didn’t want to be seen sitting here waiting for something that clearly wasn’t going to happen, so she pulled away.
So close. Love had been right there, in her hands.
When she got to the stop sign at the end of the street, the pain hit its mark, and Lyra began to cry.
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~oOo~
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Sobbing at the wheel, Lyra drove around Laughlin for a while, not knowing what else to do. She and Mom still weren’t really speaking. Michelle was working. Pop and Reed were part of the problem. And Lyra didn’t have anybody else she was close enough with to cry at. Laughlin wasn’t big enough to support a lot of aimless driving, so she finally headed into the desert and stopped in what would look to the untrained eye like nowhere, but was one of her favorite spots. Just a big flat rock in the dirt. But it was dark, and when she stretched out on that rock and looked up at the dark, the heavens exploded above her.
That was the best place she could think to go. So she left her car at the side of the road, hiked the short distance to said flat rock, stretched out on it, feeling the last rays of heat from the sun wrap around her shoulder blades, her hips, her spine, and looked up at the brilliant light show of desert night sky.
Home would have been the wrongest place to go, because she couldn’t deal with the fight she needed to have with Pop and Reed while she was dealing with what had happened between her and Zach.
Whathadhappened? How had they broken up, like, out of the blue? He’d been making her feel beautiful and sexy and so hot for him she might well have done him right there in the kitchen, and then all of a sudden, they were fighting? How? More to the point, how had she never thought to ask incisive questions about the Bulls while he was in Tulsa?
Because she thought she’d known. She’d been raised by a biker, even an occasional outlaw, and she’d thought she’d understood.
But Pop hadn’t been in a club since before she was born, and only now was she beginning to really comprehend, to internalize, that a motorcycle club—anoutlawmotorcycle club—wasn’t just a grumpier fraternity.
Soul Reaper or Righteous Fist, whatever euphemism they used, they were killers.
Popwas a killer. Now, all at once, that notion resonated as more than a story. It was a fact.
Zach was a killer. Reed would be a killer.
Brady Everdeen had been a killer.
No. Stop.
Lyra sat up abruptly and slammed the heel of her hand against her head. What a fucked-up thought that had been. The men she loved—and she included Zach in that short list—were nothing like the monster who’d torn a hole through the Strip a few days earlier. He had been a murderer. Amassmurderer, obliterating random people, innocent people minding their own business, women and children and men, vacationers and workers, for no reason but the killing itself. He’d killed his own family, too.
If Pop had killed, if Zach had killed, she knew they’d killed someone who’d earned the death. She didn’t understand the rules of outlaw life—obviously—but she thought of it maybe likeThe Sopranos, or, more obviously,Sons of Anarchy. The guys on those shows were deeply unlikeable, in her opinion, fuckups more than anything else and insanely violent, but when they went off to do the ultraviolence, it was aimed at other people like them—soldiers on the other side of some metaphorical battlefield.
In fact, that was how the Bulls thought of themselves, wasn’t it? Zach had mentioned ‘soldiers’ several times, referring to himself and other men in the club. He spoke of his father having been the ‘Sergeant at Arms.’
