“Car bomb,” I told him, looking down at my hands to see what they were fashioning. It was, unsurprisingly, a tombstone. I had a habit of carving them and anointing them with the name of the victim I was going to murder. There was peaceful satisfaction in burning them after the deed was done. “Make it seem like there was a malfunction in the exhaust. It’ll blow out the windows, the engine, and then, finally, explode.”
“Not even a body to bury?” Wrath surmised with mild respect. “That’ll send a fuckin’ message.”
I didn’t respond because that was obviously the point.
“You gotta hand it to the Irish fucks, they’ve got balls,” Wrath mused as he shifted from foot to foot and cracked his knuckles. He was always moving, overfilled with restless, angry energy. The air around him buzzed like static and made my skin itch.
“The Irish usually do.” I had no loyalty to my Irish kinfolk. We may have originated in the same place, but I left for a fucking good reason and put that version of myself behind me.
Wrath’s eyes were hot on my cheek as he studied me, but I didn’t flinch or flap my gob just because his stare asked a question he was too chickenshit to give voice to.
“You ever get nightmares, man?” he ventured finally. “You ever mourn the people you’ve killed?”
“No,” I said flatly.
Silence and then, bitter as coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup, “Never lost someone as a consequence of your violence. You do, you’ll dream of horrors.”
“You need to sleep deep for dreams.” My voice was metallic, the clang of my robotic heart sharp in my speech. “I skim the surface of sleep, and I never fuckin’ dream.”
“Lucky you,” Wrath muttered just as the sky opened up and rain began to float down.
If I’d had a metaphorical heart, the kind poets and artists wax on about, I might’ve felt a pang in my chest of something like sympathy for my newest Fallen brother. He’d loved a woman who had been ripped away from him ruthlessly by his enemies. They’d tried to kill them both, but only succeeded with Kylie.
It was a waking nightmare I doubted he had to sleep to dream of.
I could understand this, but I couldn’t feel it.
Simply it had nothing to do with me so I couldn’t bring myself to care very much.
“It’s been a year and a half,” I said blandly as my ears caught the faint rumble of a vehicle barreling down Everett drive. “You should get over it.”
Wrath startled slightly, his muscles flexing with a surge of fury, the instinct to pummel me to release some of his angst. Then he stilled, logic dousing the inflammatory response.
He would not win if he tried to fight me and I would never forget that he’d tried.
So he froze beside me and chewed through the surge of passion until it passed.
“You’re a fuckin’ asshole,” he mumbled finally before letting loose a ragged sigh. “Shits me, I like you anyway. Every other fucker treats me like a rabid beast or beaten dog. You? You just don’t give a fuck about my past.”
I shrugged a shoulder, mind trained on the car I could now see glinting orange down the street.
“Show me how you detonate the device,” Wrath asked, and I could tell he was trying to bond with me, reach me on my own level.
It made me smile, even if it was a small, tight curve of my mouth and a minuscule flutter of good humour in my chest. I tossed him the burner phone. “Tried and true. Hit send when they stop at the sign.”
It was my olive branch. My attempt at recognizing his friendship and accepting it.
Wrath stared at me again in that way he had, stripping away my skin like a scalpel to discover the contents of my blood. He nodded curtly, massive hands cupping the phone gently, like I’d given him a gift.
I was glad he understood that I had.
Killing people was my joy, and I’d passed it over to him. In my world, that practically made us best mates.
The rumble of the old Camaro engine grew louder, taking up the entire airspace of the sleepy neighborhood. I turned to watch the car drive to its demise.
The target was Brett Walsh, twenty-two years old, just a kid really.
But that was the point.
We’d warned Patrick and Brenda Walsh twice, which was one too many times, to stop their operation from seeping into Entrance.
We’d heard even Javier Ventura, the mayor of Entrance and head of the Mexican cartel on the west coast of Canada, had issued his own warning.
They’d made the conscious decision to die by not obeying.
It was bad enough they were dealing their designer crap on our turf, but Brett had also sold to King and Harleigh Rose Garro’s half-sister, Honey. She was just eighteen, and the club had been trying to keep her safe and get her clean for the last year.