Saving Dancer (Savage Brothers MC #2)(7)

“Carr…Princess is too young to know what love is, f*ck I’m thirty-five and I don’t know what that shit is.”

“Way I figure, women have a better handle on this crap. Red’s just a few years younger than Nicole and I don’t doubt my woman one f*cking bit. Now if we’re done with our Dr. Phil moment, we got shit to discuss, first being Red.”

I sit watching him. I’ve got nothing to say to that. I shouldn’t want to know. Anything and everything to do with this club and especially Carrie, has nothing to do with me. It doesn’t bother or affect me in the least. At least that’s what I tell myself. Still, here I am waiting for what he has to tell me.

Shit.

“Your mom asked us to pick up Carrie.”

“No f*cking way.”

“Shut up and listen,” Dragon returns. I bite my tongue to keep my retort from coming through. I don’t know if I could take Dragon, we’re pretty evenly matched. I do know he’s my brother; I owe him everything. So, I shut the f*ck up…for now.

“When you first…” Dragon pauses and I know he blames himself for everything. It’s not his fault, but there is f*ck-all I can say that he’d listen to and I don’t really want to talk about that shit anyway. “When you first got put in the can,” he continues, “Carrie came to see you. Do you remember?”

Fuck yeah, I did. I was pissed at the world, at her for causing this mess, at me for making the mistake, at the way I wanted to hold her and kill her at the same time…at everything. My head stays a f*cked up mess. It’s much worse around Carrie. I am NOT telling Dragon that, so I nod my agreement.

“You sent her away, but after that I guess, things started happening.”

“Things?”

“Started small from what I understand. She’d get notes taunting her with things no one should know. There were a couple of breakins. Her shit was tossed, notes left on her car, different kinds of shit.”

My jaw tightens and that uneasy feeling in my gut gets worse.

“And,” I prompt because I know there is more.

“There were accidents. At first it wasn’t recognized. Don’t know why, you would think even being f*cking idiots, given the history of the case, that the cops would piece together what was going on. Some sick f*ck definitely has it in for the girl.”

“What accidents?” I ask, feeling even more on edge.

“A bus she was riding had a blowout, food poisoning, equipment short circuited at the library where she worked. She was nearly electrocuted. Each time something bigger, something more obvious would happen, until the night of the wreck.”

“Wreck?”

“Yeah, some motherf*cker ran her and her parents off the road. The car went off a mountain and down a cliff. Red was thrown out, escaped with a broken arm and a concussion. Her parents were trapped in the car. It caught on fire, she lost them both.”

“Fuck,” I said before I could stop it. Carrie came from money, and she never should have been friends with me or my little sister. Still, her parents were descent people. Hell, I don’t know if I’m a good judge, but they had been kind and they loved Carrie.

“Dance, Red’s been through the ringer. The last f*cking thing she needs is your smart ass.”

“Why did you and the club get involved?”

Dragon puts his hand over a plain manila folder and pushes it towards me. I look down at it, shore up my courage and open it. Instinctively, I know I will not like what I find.

I sift through it, pictures of Carrie’s room with her clothes scattered everywhere and her underwear laid neatly on the bed cut in pieces, pictures of notes threatening to rape her and kill her afterwards. Each picture is worse, each note more damning. Then there are pictures of the accident. Only these aren’t police photos, these are pictures the sick pervert must have taken while Carrie lay unconscious. They are pictures of her parents burning alive.

I do my best to keep my hands from shaking, even with my anger and confusion I know that Carrie…is special to me. She always will be. The fact that she almost died while I was rotting away.

Christ.

“Your mom called when Carrie was released from the hospital and I put her under club protection,” Dragon said.

Mary isn’t my mom, not really. I grew up on the streets with Dragon. My life was shit, until I was placed in the care of Mary and her husband Walter. They were a nice, older couple who had always wanted a kid. For some reason, instead of adopting a baby or a young child, they took a chance on a wilder than hell teenage boy, who was mad at the world. I had been in their home for a year when Mary got pregnant with Jazz. Walter passed away shortly after Jazz’s birth with a heart attack and I stayed around and helped out any way I could. When I went into the service, I sent money and always came home on leave to visit with them. Jazz was special. She was all sunshine and completely untainted by the world. I cherished my time with her. Had I known she would die so young, I would have cherished it more. Carrie was my last connection with Jazz, something pure and innocent in my world. I tried to take care of it and protect it too, just like I did with Jazz. Apparently, failure was all I managed with both.

I shake my head, trying to ignore the emptiness of not having Jazz and the memory of her death. I have enough on my plate, no sense in bringing even more ghosts to life. I take a deep breath and look at Dragon.