Vengeance. I’d be lying if the word hadn’t frequented the establishment of my brain a lot in the past few days. But this time it appeared like an epiphany. Blood red and backed by the most destructive emotion of all: rage. I would find out who did this to my cousin and I would take from them what they had taken from Isaac.
I stared straight ahead. My head full of memories. My heart full of pain. My entire body consumed by an overwhelming need for revenge. And somewhere in that church, during the service for my slayed cousin, my grief turned into a seething and unrelenting obsession for vengeance.
Dire Straits “Brothers In Arms” played as I helped Maverick, Caleb, Bull, Vader, and Abby carry Isaac’s coffin out to the awaiting hearse. Wind whipped around our legs and my heart goddamn broke as they lowered my cousin into the ground. It was too much to bear. Filled with agony, I walked away, unable to watch Isaac’s cut disappear into the ground with his coffin. I climbed on my bike and gunned the engine, riding off into the storm.
INDY
Cade had changed. He’d turned cold with hate. Despondent with grief. Quietly simmering with rage.
I hoped it would get better in time. But I’d seen the look on his face today at the funeral. I’d seen the cold, hard darkness in his eyes and the tightened tick of muscles as he clenched his jaw. He was consumed with rage. Overtaken by grief. Mad with whatever darkness was taking control of him.
When he’d walked away, I had let him go. I’d gone to the wake at the clubhouse and spent the next four hours keeping myself occupied by serving food and cleaning up paper plates and cups. I was cleaning up outside on the patio when Isaac’s mom, Peggy, cornered me. She was smoking and taking angry sips of wine from a plastic cup, followed by angry puffs on her cigarette. I hadn’t seen her in twenty years. She had walked out on Griffin not long after he went into a wheelchair.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t little Indigo Parrish. Haven’t you grown up to be somethin’,” she said, her over-made-up eyes rolling over me with something close to resentment.
“Peggy,” I replied with a nod. I had never liked Isaac’s mom. She was loud and brazen, and she had a sharp tongue.
“I heard you left town,” she said, her tone accusatory and challenging.
When I thought about Peggy Calley, I automatically recalled the memory of her and Garrett Calley having sex on the washing machine while her husband, Ronnie, and other club members were outside having a barbeque. I had come inside for a drink of water. Hearing a giggle and some muffled voices down the hallway, my eight-year-old curiosity had gotten the better of me and I had snuck down the hallway and peeked through the slatted laundry door. Peggy had been sitting on the washing machine and Garrett Calley was standing between her parted legs, his jeans around his ankles as he fucked her.
“I came back for my father’s funeral,” I replied, reminding myself that this was her son’s funeral and I should probably be a little more tolerant of her than she deserved.
“And you stayed?”
I busied myself with picking up trash left on the barbeque table and putting it into the garbage bag in my hand. “Looks that way.”
I heard her scoff and looked up. Peggy Calley would be in her early fifties, but she looked like a woman in her sixties. The biker life and whatever cesspit she had fallen into after abandoning her family had taken its toll on her.
But she had just lost her son, and my heart felt for her. We all had each other. The club. Me and Cade. While she had nothing and no-one.
“I’m sorry about Isaac,” I said, that familiar sting of pain twisting in my chest.
Cold eyes paused on me. “Yeah, well, can’t say I’m surprised. You live by the sword, you die by the sword. Isn’t that what they say?” She drew heavily on her cigarette and blew the smoke toward me. “I always told him that nothing good would come of him joining this stupid fucking club. Told him to stay clear of the lifestyle. I said, ‘Isaac, look at what that club did to your daddy. Look at what it did to your Uncle Garrett. Ain’t nothing good is going to come from you becoming a King.’” She scoffed and drew on her cigarette again. “Of course, he didn’t listen to me. Damn fool. Just like his goddamn father.”
Peggy had walked out on her family when Isaac and Abby were nine years old. She disappeared for years. No one knew where she was or what she was doing, or whom she was with. Birthdays came and went with no word from her. No card. No phone call. No letter. Milestones were missed. Isaac could be forgiven for not listening to his mother when she finally turned up all those years later.