Chasing Claire (Hells Saints Motorcycle Club) (3 page)

“Damn it, Prosper.” Dolly pushed him out of the way and started to walk toward me. I guess what she saw on my face made her stop.

I stared hard at my family. One by one. “You think I’m doing blow, Prosper?” I pushed those words out and sent them to swarm around their heads like angry wasps. “Is that what all of you think?”

At least they had the grace to look embarrassed.

Well. Not all of them.

Prosper was coming right at me. Fast.

When he linked his tattooed arm around mine, I stiffened in protest. But he just held on tighter, pulled me right out the door and
dragged me across the wide expanse of grassy field. Then he sat my ass down hard on a big boulder.

Damn him.

Not only had he just humiliated me in front of our entire family, but now the big man made me wait. He slowly pulled out a fresh pack of smokes, tapped them lightly against his palm, unwound the thin cellophane strip, dragged one out, and lit up.

Then Prosper drew deep.

Twice.

“Jesus, Claire, you look like shit,” he said, one eye squinting as he slowly exhaled a thin streak of white smoke.

“Yeah, heard that the first time.” My voice shook with anger and my eyes burned bright. I thought about the concealer, the mascara, and the In the Midnight Garden effort that I had put forth just a short time ago in hopes of avoiding a scene exactly like this.

Game. Over.

I brought a hand up to smooth my hair.

Prosper took it and covered it with his own.

“What the fuck is it?” Prosper’s words were harsh, but his tone was gentle. The touch of his big, callused hand on mine warmed me.

“It’s not coke,” I whispered raggedly. The accusation sat heavy on my heart.

Prosper was the hero in my story. In my eyes, he was everything a man should be: a provider, a protector, and a teacher. Prosper was everything that my birth father, Jack Winston, had not been. Long before my father’s death he had become nothing more than a sad shadow to me. Prosper was my dad by choice. Having his love and respect didn’t mean just a little something to me. It meant everything.

Despite everything I had fought my way through. I could not believe that it had come down to this.

Was I that girl to him now? The ex-junkie daughter living on borrowed time?

Great. Just fucking great.

“So tell me, Prosper, is relapse the family go-to now? Is this where it lands every time I lose a few pounds or spend a couple of restless nights?” I looked at him hard and felt the sting of unshed tears.

I didn’t deserve this.

Not even a little bit.

Prosper took a full minute before he answered me.

“No, Claire. It’s not. If you tell me it’s fucking not, then it’s not.” He looked at me, assessing.

“It’s not.” I met his gaze straight on.

When my father moved to pull me into his big strong arms, I let him.

Sighing against his chest, I inhaled the clean, soapy scent of his skin. I settled into him like a child, taking strength from the raw power that radiated from deep within this man.

He was my safe place. I wanted to blow out a wish that would find me small enough to be tucked into his pocket, nestled tightly and close to his heart.

“Is it that bad, honey?”

“Yeah, it’s that bad.” I breathed it out. Finally, finally releasing it.

“Give it to me, honey. Give it to your ol’ Prosper. You need to talk this shit out. It’s eating you up. I can see it. We all can see it. Open up and let it out. There’s nothing you can’t tell me. Nothing I can’t fix.”

I sighed, knowing that Prosper was right.

There was nothing he couldn’t fix.

I knew that he would take whatever I gave to him. Then, he would twist it, turn it, and stomp all over it, just to make sure it all came out for the good.

I knew that Prosper would do whatever he had to do, or needed to do, to protect me.

I knew that Prosper was the
lay down your life for the ones you love
, kind of guy.

I knew that he was the kind of guy, definitely the kind of guy, who would lie to protect the ones he loved.

And I knew that he had lied to me.

CHAPTER 6

T
he man I considered my father pushed me away from him then. But he kept a tight hold on me with both his hands, and he looked straight into my eyes.

“You not letting it out to Raine or Glory, I get. Maybe you don’t want to lay whatever this is at their door. But shit, Claire, it’s me you’re talking to now. Yeah?” He spoke from his heart.

“Yeah,” I said. My heart answering his.

“So talk to me, honey. Let’s get rid of this shit today and move the fuck on.”

He sighed deeply, his eyes dark with worry.

Prosper was throwing me a lifeline. But I couldn’t find the words that would lift me up out of those dark waters. I didn’t know how to describe the fear I felt. I didn’t have a name for what happened when I closed my eyes.

I sat for a minute, my mind searching for those words. Then, having found them, it took some time before I gathered the courage to reach down and pull them out.

Prosper gave me that time.

“They’re dead because of me.” I fought the urge to clap my hands over my ears at the sound of my own voice.

Prosper’s gaze grew hard.

“Who is dead, Claire?” Prosper asked.

“You know who’s dead, Prosper.” My gaze grew hard in return.

“That’s what it is? You’re burning daylight worrying about that piece of shit and his murderous she-bitch?” Prosper growled.

Yep, that was it. That sure as hell was it.

How could that
not
be it?

I nodded while images of eternal damnation played out in my mind.

“I killed Manny, didn’t I?” I forced my voice into steadiness.

And there it was.

The sum of all my fears.

When Raine and I had left Manny Rieldo, he was lying on the ground with his balls pinned to the top of his thigh by a nail gun and his head dented in from a claw hammer. In a desperate attempt at escape, my sister and I had attacked him the minute he had opened the van door.

My plan had been to save our lives. And it had worked. We were alive. But in the process of saving our own lives, had I cost Manny his?

I hadn’t known for certain. Not until the night after the big meet. Prosper had come to tell me and Raine that all was well. He had assured us that Manny had been taken care of.

He had assured
us
without looking at
me.

Prosper had delivered his
all is well
message without a glance in my direction.

And that’s when I knew.

In my heart, I knew.

Manny had been taken care of all right.

By me.

CHAPTER 7

P
rosper looked at me for a long time.

“I need to know,” I whispered. Even as the words came out of my mouth, I felt that cold black shadow move over me again.

He sighed deeply and put his hand up to smooth my hair.

“It’s done, Claire. What does it matter who did it? It needed doing, and it’s done.”

“It matters,” I said, desperate to make him understand. “I can’t stay in this dark place of not knowing, Prosper. It follows me, like a monster that I can’t get away from. I need to face it to move on. I need to face it to somehow move past it and into whatever light there is left for me.”

Then simply:

“If I killed him, Prosper, if Manny was dead when you found him, then I have a right to know.”

Prosper’s eyes met mine with such searching intensity that I had to force myself not to look away. After what seemed like forever, he nodded once, then lit up another smoke. He drew deep three, maybe four times before he spoke.

“Yeah, honey. That claw hammer cracked the sonofabitch’s skull open. And so fucking what? He was going to kill you, your sister, and the baby she was carrying. Manny Rieldo was a piece of shit who had a death wish,” Prosper growled.

“No one wishes for that, Prosper.” I could feel the beat of my own guilt-ridden heart.

“That’s bullshit.
Bullshit
, Claire. Men like Manny Rieldo make a decision to die every day. He marked his fate the minute he got involved with that psycho snatch, Ellie,” Prosper said.

“He had a life, Prosper,” I countered. “He had people that he mattered to. He had a mother.”

Prosper glared at me.

“
Everyone
has a mother, Claire. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Saddam Hussein, they all had mothers. This cocksucker, Manny? His mother’s name is Luisa Sievas. Bitch is meaner than a junkyard dog. That whole family is crazier than a bunch of shit house rats.”

“But still, Prosper.” A tear escaped down my cheek.

“But still nothing,” Prosper growled and he wiped that tear away. “Jesus, Claire. You have got to stop doing this to yourself.”

A pause from Prosper, and then:

“Did you mean to kill him?” Prosper drew deep from the cigarette, his eyes squinting over the curl of smoke.

“What? No! God no! We had to get away. From him and that crazy woman.” I took a deep, ragged breath. The pounding of my heart would not let me speak.

I tried again.

“Raine and the baby . . .” my voice grew weak and trailed off.

Thinking back to that night, I honestly had never been so scared in my life, and I had a long list of scared to choose from.

Prosper’s eyes crashed and burned into mine. Then he nodded and inhaled deeply. He crushed the cigarette between his fingers, threw down the butt, and stomped it out. Hard.

“Goddammit, Claire. Look at you. You’re still so freaked, you can’t even say the words. Manny Rieldo and his bitch were going to kill you and Raine. Then that she-wolf, Ellie, was going to
straight-up carve that baby right out of your sister’s belly. Make no mistake about that.”

He paused to let that awful truth sink in.

“Why are you making yourself sick over that piece of shit? Do you ever lie awake nights thinking about what would have happened if you had
not
had the balls to lay that sonofabitch out?” he asked me. “That’s the kind of shit that should keep you up nights. Not putting that piece of crap to ground. Believe me when I tell you, you did him a fucking favor, Claire.”

“A favor?” I stumbled over the words.

“Yeah. A big one. Rieldo’s name was high on everyone’s shit list. Among the other desperate acts of random violence that the stupid fuck let himself repeatedly get talked into committing, he was a goddamn canary. He had just cut his time short by three years, and that was not for good behavior,” Prosper continued. “The Italians are all over shit like that. It was just a matter of time before Manny Rieldo’s wagging tongue flushed this whole uneasy alliance down the shitter. If that had happened, the body count would have been a lot higher than two. Claire, this was not Manny’s first time at the crazy snatch rodeo. Fucker was a magnet for desperate and disturbed. And everyone, including that mother of his who you are so concerned with, knew it. From what I hear, Manny Rieldo’s dick has been leading him on a merry chase of bad decisions since puberty. Because of that tendency and a whole lot of stupid, he has been living on borrowed time.”

Prosper paused, reached into his cut and pulled out a silver flask. When he offered it to me, I didn’t hesitate. I took a deep swallow and felt the burn hit my belly.

As my eyes began to water, I handed the tequila back over to Prosper and watched him take a long pull. His eyes didn’t water, and my guess was that not much burned in Prosper’s belly. He took one more hit, and he put it aside.

Then he continued on.

“Claire, I love who I love, and that shit goes deep with me. You, Raine, Pinky, and that baby in there, I’d take a bullet for any of you. No question. That makes me a good man in your eyes. I get that, and I’m glad for it. But, honey, I’m a mean, tough, murderous sonofabitch who shows absolutely no mercy when dealing with garbage like Rieldo.”

He looked at me long and hard.

“You and Raine were taken from a goddamn doctor’s office. You were thrown into a van and driven out of town by two crazy, felonious fucks who had murder on their minds. There was no way, no possible, conceivable way, that you were going to survive what the two of them had planned. Not once Ellie got down to business. And you know that, Claire. Deep down inside, under all the guilt and fear and fucking remorse for something you should feel no regret over, you know it. Manny Rieldo gave you no choice but to take that hammer to his head.”

Prosper took my hand in his and put it over my left breast.

“You feel that, honey? You’re alive. Raine and Willow are alive. Because of you. Because you are one brave, quick-thinking motherfucker yourself, you saved the damn day.”

Then my father finished with
this
.

And
this
scared the crap right out of me.

“Claire, you listen to me now, and you listen hard. As far as anyone outside this club knows, it was me. I took that sonofabitch out.
It was me
. From this day forward,
it’s still me
. You understand that? This thing ever,
ever
blows back, I handle it.
We
handle it. Me and my boys.”

He inhaled deeply and blew out the words sharply, punctuating every point. “You don’t talk about this to anybody.
Nobody.
You ever feel the need to share with big sister, or Glory, or anybody else, you think again. You get what I am telling you?”

If I hadn’t gotten it before, I sure as hell was getting it now.

Blow back.

“I got this, Claire. I put a lid on it and I am handling it. But I cannot do that if every jerk-off on the corner gets wind that somethin’ don’t add up. You understand me?”

Jesus.

“
Do you get what I am saying to you, Claire?
” Prosper ground it out, slower and louder. His eyes held mine, making sure that I got it.

“Yeah, I get it.” I nodded hard.

I worked to swallow the lump in my throat, because I absolutely did get it. And its name was retaliation. And retaliation could make the scary town of my nightmares look like a trip to the circus.