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Jay didn’t know the man, but that hit him. He’d buried tortured bodies. Burned bodies. Bodies a dozen bullets had torn through. He’d once had tounbury a three-week old body and move it because he’d made the first hole in the wrong place.
This was worse than any of those.
He stepped back. “Don’t touch anything.”
“No,” Simon agreed. “This is a 911 call.”
“I asked her to think of anything she doesn’t want cops to find. I need to talk to her before I call.”
Simon’s brow creased and he stared at Jay for a long moment. Jay didn’t know what that was about, but eventually Simon said, “Yeah. That’s good. We’ll help if we need to do some cleaning.”
“Thanks.” Jay made a wide berth around the dangling body of Petra’s father and headed to the stairs.
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~oOo~
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Long, fraught hourslater, Jay unlocked the door to Petra’s apartment and led her inside. She stopped short a couple steps in and stared at the space around her.
Stopping and staring were her most frequent activities since he’d found her lying in the grass behind her father’s house.
When he’d gone back out to her after coming up from the basement, she’d roused somewhat and was sitting on the steps leading to the sunporch. She’d been stunned and quiet but communicative, and he’d been able to ask if she needed anything in the house removed before they brought law in.
She’d actually laughed, quietly, and said no, the only laws her father broke had to do with drinking and driving.
So Jay had brought her onto the sunporch, sat her down on one of the fancy patio sofas, and called 911. The dispatcher had sent a patrol car, a paramedic truck, and an ambulance to the scene. Jay had sat beside Petra on the sunporch while a cop asked her questions about her father’s circumstances, his state of mind, their relationship, how she’d come upon the scene, what she’d touched, why there were three Brazen Bulls at the house with her.
Petra had answered every one. Sometimes she’d cried, and sometimes she’d needed to lean on Jay for a minute before she could speak at all, but she managed to answer the questions.
There had been questions for Jay, too, mostly about what connection the Bulls had to her father, because of course they didn’t easily believe that they were there only for Petra. Eventually, the cop had let it drop.
When the body was gone and the interviewing cop closed his notebook, hours had passed and dusk was settling over the neighborhood. They couldn’t start cleaning yet because, despite the overwhelming evidence of suicide, law wouldn’t release the scene until after an autopsy.
‘The scene.’ ‘The body.’ Cold replacements forhomeandfather.
Jay was a Brazen Bull. He was no stranger to violent death. He was no stranger to grief and loss, either. Even so, the violent death of Petra’s father, a man he’d never met, had his heart twisted and stomach inside out.
Really, though he would never admit it in the clubhouse, the death and killing that surrounded the Bulls’ work, the constant danger and occasional floods of blood and death—Jay still struggled to get right with that. He’d been born to this life; it was the only one he knew, the only way he knew to be. He loved his family, he loved the club, and he understood why sometimes killing was ... necessary, he guessed. At least unavoidable. But he wasn’t like his old man in this way. He’d heard plenty of stories—from Pop himself and from every OG Bull—about how Pop sometimes had to be pulled back from violence. It was his first answer to club trouble. That was the reason he’d always maintained he shouldn’t go higher than SAA.
Even Zach, for all his supposed perfection, was more violent than Jay. Zach had killed—he’d killed for Jay—and he didn’t take it lightly, but Jay didn’t think it reallyweighedon him that he’d killed people. Just like Pop, he said it was ‘the life.’AllBulls said it was ‘the life.’ Even Jay said it; it was the story he’d been told from the cradle. Being an outlaw meant violence. They had a code, they kept to the code, and as long as that was true, they had space to consider themselves honorable men. Good men. Despite the field of bodies planted a ways west of Tulsa. Despite the many Bulls who’d died in their kuttes.
It was why they called themselves soldiers: they shared a similar morality about killing.
Jay understood all that. He even believed it. But sometimes it rubbed up hard against something inside him. He had a rep for fighting, and yeah, he earned that on the regular. But there was a wide swath of distance between provoking a bar brawl and that fucked-up shit the Nevada Bulls had done to some assholes in Vegas—burning them alive. Necklacing them like a fucking drug cartel. Santaveria shit.
Most of his brothers coveted the ‘Righteous Fist’ flash—the one given to patches who’d killed in the service of the club—if they didn’t have it and were proud to wear it if they did; Jay hoped he never got one. The top honor in the Brazen Bulls MC, and he didn’t want it.
It probably made him a pussy, and he was lowkey ashamed of his lack of bloodlust. Another way he didn’t measure up to his father or brother. Another way he was less. If he were totally honest with himself, he could maybe see that his compulsion to start shit at the Dawghouse had a direct line to his squeamishness about club violence. Like,See? I’m tough, too; I took out three big dumb assholes all on my own just last night.
Petra had told him once that she saw him putting on a ‘persona’ of toughness. He’d been offended at first, but it had come in a rush of words about how much she cared about him, how she saw past the surface and foundhim.
She was right, about the persona. He’d never thought about it like that before, but yeah. There was a part of him that had to put on more than his kutte to be a Bull.
He saw Petra putting something like that on now, as she stood in her dim living room. Standing behind her, Jay saw her shoulders lift and set, then rise a bit as she took a long, belly-deep breath and settle again as she let it out slowly.
“I need to make arrangements.” Her voice sounded tired, but otherwise close to normal. “I need to make calls.”
