Wild Like the Wind (Chaos #5)(60)
He nabbed his keys off the kitchen counter and he was the first out.
She followed him.
He went down the stairs first too.
She followed him again.
At her car, so he didn’t have to tell more lies, eat more shit, he took her mouth in a kiss that was a fuckuva good-bye.
She just had no idea that was what it was.
But it worked. Her pretty eyes were hazy, her face soft, her body plastered to his when he finished it.
“Get home, babe. I’ll see you tonight,” he murmured.
“Okay, honey.”
She rolled up on her toes to give him one last lip touch.
Her good-bye.
And she didn’t know that either.
Then he waited until she folded in her car, closed her door for her and he was sure to stand on the sidewalk and watch her drive away.
When he went up to his place, he didn’t find his knife and slash the furniture to shit like he wanted to do. He didn’t yank the lamps out of their sockets and smash them against the walls like he wanted to do. He didn’t drag the stools and end tables out into the hall and send them crashing down the stairs like he wanted to do.
All that shit would have woken up Jean.
Instead, he got his phone, got his ear buds, walked to his bed, laid on his back and listened to “Use Me.”
Withers could write and sing a song.
But the motherfucker was fucked up if he thought that shit was all right.
The end of the end started thirty-eight minutes later.
It happened after he’d brushed his teeth. Taken off his shirt and splashed water on his face and in his pits. Toweled off, put his shirt back on and went over to Jean’s.
It happened after he let himself in.
It happened after he walked down the hall.
It happened after he knocked on her door and called, “Jean bug?”
That was when it happened.
Because she didn’t answer.
He pushed open the door and saw her lying on her side, her back to him, in her bed.
“Jean,” he called.
She didn’t answer.
She also didn’t move.
Dread and fear filled him. Dread that felt like a hand closing around his throat. Fear that built to terror that felt like a set of claws had sunk into his gut and was tearing up, splitting him open on a trajectory to his heart as he put one boot in front of the other on the way to her bed.
He had a moment when he made it to the side and he saw the covers up, her head on the pillow, her soft, wispy white hair framing her face, her eyes closed. A moment he thought she was just still asleep, like when he’d walked in on her napping in front of the TV.
“Jean,” he whispered, bending to her, reaching to her, his fingers out and searching.
They closed around her ice-cold hand.
He stared at his big hand around her little one, his knuckles scarred from fights, the veins standing out at the back, his calluses catching at her soft skin.
He didn’t need to look for her pulse.
He did it anyway.
But he got what he thought he’d get.
Nothing.
He moved his hand back to hold hers.
And then Shepherd “Hound” Ironside stood beside the bed of the old Jewish lady who owned his heart and he held her hand.
“I hope,” his voice came rough, raspy, tortured, “you knew even a little how much I fucking loved you.”
She lay there … sleeping.
Hound let her go.
He could only manage one step back before he fell right to his ass beside Jean’s bed.
He stared at her beautiful, peaceful face right there before his.
Then he cocked his knees, drew his wrists up to rest on them.
And he dropped his head in defeat.
Ride Free Keely
Just over two months earlier …
I sat in my car at the cemetery, staring at Bev’s text on my phone.
It was an address.
Hound didn’t live in a very good part of town.
I dropped the phone to my lap and looked out the windshield not seeing anything.
I’d seen it all before.
I’d been there a lot.
But Hound wasn’t bringing my checks anymore.
So today’s visit was going to be different.
I drew in breath and closed my eyes.
Things flashed in that dark.
Memories.
The first time I saw Black, over a barrel of fire, the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.
The time he had me against the wall, his cock buried deep, his fingers digging into the webbing of mine, cutting the ring he’d just put on me into my flesh, pressing it against the wall, promising me, “We’re gonna ride wild and burn bright, baby. We’re gonna tear this life up.”
The look on my husband’s face when I told him I was having his baby.
The look on his face when I told him I was giving him another one.
The look on his face on the slab in the morgue when, Tack at my side, Hop, Dog, Brick and Hound at my back, I identified him.
Hound at my back.
I opened my eyes but the visions didn’t stop coming.
Hound walking up the stairs from my basement carrying Jagger’s little mini-bike on Christmas Eve.
Hound sitting on my front steps with Dutch, not touching him except the side of his leg was pressed to Dutch’s and his shoulder was dipped, his neck bent, his head turned to Dutch, his lips moving, after Dutch’s first girlfriend dumped him.