Soulless (Lawless #2)(20)

I didn’t wonder where Rage was. She was always close by. I stopped talking to myself out loud because even though I didn’t see her all the time, she was usually close enough to answer me back. The first few times it scared the crap out of me, once I fell off the porch.

I really wish that bitch slept.

By the time I reached my room I thought that Pancakes would be long gone.

I was wrong.

Not only did Pancakes not wander back off into the wild, but he followed me into the house, and when I plopped down face first onto my bed, the mattress dipped slightly and a wet snout came to rest across the back of my knee. I lifted my head and there he was, looking up at me with big, yellowish-colored eyes like his behavior was perfectly normal. After a few seconds of staring at one another, he fell asleep, like he’d never been afraid of me at all.

“I guess I have a dog, now,” I muttered into the pillow, drifting into my own nap as Pancakes’ warm doggy breath tickled the backs of my legs.

He was a poor substitute for Bear.

Too hairy.

Too skinny.

No tattoos.

But he would have to do.





CHAPTER ELEVEN




Thia


Six months.

Six loooooong f*cking months with no end in sight. Not a word from Bear. What was worse was that each time Rage’s phone rang, my stomach lurched and my heart dropped. The world around me stopped spinning until she gave me the, “It isn’t that call” look and I could breathe again.

At least until the next call.

I felt nauseated at least three hundred times a day.

I became jumpy. Paranoid. My hands shook whenever Rage mentioned Bear’s name.

I couldn’t eat, and just like Rage, I couldn’t’ sleep. Afraid that at any moment I would lose the one thing in my life that ever brought me real happiness, I became someone I was really starting to hate.

Bear could have asked me anything else. Anything at all, and I would have done it. Rob a bank, become a flying trapeze artist, learn Japanese. At that point I would have gone to the MC and put a bullet in Chop myself if it meant that I could take a breath again without wanting to pull my own hair out strand by pink strand and DO NOTHING.

But no. He asked me the worst thing he could possibly ask me.

He asked me to WAIT.

He might as well have asked me to sit while someone removed my fingernails one by one with tweezers because waiting was a torture in and of itself.

“How many of them went in there?” I heard Rage ask in a whisper. I stopped in the hallway and pressed my ear to the door of my room. “Four? Shit, do you know anyone on the inside who can protect him? I know that one guy but anyone else? Yes, it is my f*cking business, because I’m here babysitting his old lady in little house on the motherf*cking prairie out here, so if you want me to protect her, you will tell me what the f*ck is going on.” There was a pause. “Really? Well, that’s something I didn’t know. No, of course I won’t tell her. She’s going to be f*cking pissed though. Yes. Okay, fine I got it.” She ended the call and I leapt into the kitchen. With my heart in my throat, I threw open the little cabinet above the refrigerator and searched through my mother’s prescription bottles until I found the one I was looking for. I poured two glasses of soda and when Rage came back out I was leaning over the counter, pretending to be interested in the cookbook I’d just opened. I handed her one of the glasses.

“Thanks,” she said. “Cheers.” Rage raised her glass to me and took a sip.

As much as I couldn’t stand the girl when we’d first met, I really started to like Rage. We talked. I mean I talked and she mostly gave vague responses back, but it was companionship nonetheless, and lord knows that being in that house alone would have driven me up the biggest cliff in crazy town until I was sailing off the edge.

Which is why I almost felt bad when I crushed three Ambien into her Dr. Pepper.

Almost.

Ten minutes later her eyes closed and her head fell back against the pillow. “Sleep well,” I sang as she began to snore softly. I quickly dressed in my best sundress. A short, light blue, spaghetti-strapped number with tiny white flowers that made my legs look a lot longer than they were and my chest a lot bigger than it was.

The serious nature of what had to be done required a serious dress.

I grabbed a bike from the shed that probably hadn’t been ridden since the seventies, pumped some air into the tires which were seriously lacking tread, and peddled into town with my constant companion, Pancakes, running close behind my back wheel for the fist mile before growing bored and running off behind some trees in search of better entertainment.

Trust me, his note had said. And I did trust him. I trusted him enough to know that he would die for me, and six months was pushing the limits on borrowed time. After hearing Rage on the phone, it didn’t sound like there was much hope for month seven.

I was done waiting.

There was a certain deputy sheriff I was going to see, and although the last time I’d seen him ended with him locking me in a cell, and Bear almost murdering him, I had to at least try.

And I hoped the good deputy would be agreeable to what I had planned, because I wasn’t leaving until I got what I’d come for.

I patted the messenger bag I’d slung across my chest that held the gun I’d taken from Rage.

No matter what.