To that, I just let my gaze cut to him, full of all the violence and darkness. And, damn if he didn’t know me well enough to be able to read the look.
Still, I felt like answering.
“Continuing the family legacy.” Sort of.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why would you do that shit?”
“Why not?” I shot back, turning away.
“Because you could have done anything. You had the whole world in front of you.”
“So did you. And yet, here you are.”
“It’s different.”
“Why? Because you’re a guy?” I shot back.
“Oh, fuck off with that. You know I’ve never thought like that.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever actually known what you thought,” I said, wincing at myself.
“Lulu…” Valen started, voice a familiar kind of soft.
He’d used that same voice on me so many times in the past.
The past, I reminded myself.
“That’s not my name,” I snapped, straightening.
“You used to like it,” he said, coming up behind me.
“I used to like a lot of things,” I agreed. “Including you. Funny how shit changes over the years,” I added, jerking away from him.
I’d miscalculated.
It wasn’t going to be as easy to keep the upper hand as I’d expected.
Mostly because there was still a part of me that was drawn to him, that was reminded of all those times we’d had together.
Before he’d gone and fucked it all up.
Fucked me all up.
Shit.
No.
Nope.
Absolutely not.
I couldn’t let my mind go there.
I was here for one reason, and one reason only, to make Valen’s life a little harder for a while, which I hoped was going to give me the closure I needed to move on with my life.
On that note, I dropped the sponge back into the bucket and grabbed the hose, washing off my hands and arms.
“Where are you going?” Valen asked.
“Anywhere else. I don’t need to be doing your jobs,” I said, pulling the trigger on the hose and spraying him full blast for a second. “Whoops,” I said as he let out a curse at the frigid water.
Was that mature of me?
Absolutely not.
But it made me feel a little bit better, so I was going to call that a win.
I was going to need all the wins I could get in the coming days and weeks of close contact with a guy I thought I was well and fully over, but some part of me still felt drawn to.
And I was never going to get the closure I needed if some stupid, sappy, ridiculous part of me was maybe just a little bit… still in love with him.
Damnit.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Valen
The next few days sort of melded together. Thanks mostly to the grueling days of work Brooks was putting us through because Louana was showing us up.
I hadn’t exactly known Lulu at school per se, but it seemed like she and Vi were on the same sort of level. They pulled decent grades, but were never anyone’s teacher’s pet or valedictorian.
I think not knowing what she was going to do with her future made her not really apply herself as hard as everyone else who was going off to college for sure did.
The only thing I remembered her working her ass off on was going to the gym with her friends.
That said, she had always been busy. Always on the go. Never really the type to sit around and binge TV or anything like that. She liked doing shit.
I guess that was the work ethic she was applying to prospecting. She was always up first, always doing shit first, always showing us up.
Which, in turn, made Brooks harder on us, because she was doing so much.
I really rarely even got time to talk to her, thanks to the differing schedules.
When I did, though, I kept fucking up that whole apologizing to her thing that I’d been planning to do.
She was quick to anger, as she’d always been.
But what had changed—at least with regard to me—was that the anger that I’d always known to be hot and burning was now cold and frigid. I swear to shit, I felt frostbit when she walked away at times.
“Keep looking for her,” Voss said, snapping me out of my swirling thoughts.
“What?”
“Keep looking for her,” he repeated.
He wasn’t wrong, as much as I hated to admit that.
We’d finished our work a good hour before.
But Louana still hadn’t rolled back in from whatever babysitting job she was doing for Carey and Carey’s girl, Abigail, who was in some sort of trouble with some cartel or something.
She was over at Abigail’s new apartment with Seth and Finn, doing some sort of painting or some other decorating shit like that, but mostly just hanging out with Abigail while Cary and Dezi—her usual guards—were at the club, doing some shit with the other guys, the kind of shit we weren’t allowed to do because it was actual business. Like gun business. We weren’t in on that yet. It had to be earned. And Brooks was making us earn it for sure.
Though, luckily for us, he was off with Dezi and Cary as well, so no one was seeing us sitting around, not doing shit for five minutes.
“Talk to her yet?” Voss asked.
“Anytime we get two seconds alone to talk, she starts an argument,” I told him. Though, admittedly, the arguing was a two-way street.
“She does?”
“We both do,” I admitted.
“Did you always?” he asked.
“Always fight? No. I mean we both always had a temper, but not toward each other. Usually. And it was different back then. She was all fire. Now she’s all ice.”
“She grew up,” Voss said, shrugging. “We all do it.”
That was fair. And if her life was as violent as I was imagining it to be, then it made sense that she needed to tamp down her anger, to not be so explosive because it wasn’t as safe for her to be like that outside of the relative safety of Navesink Bank.
Coldness was likely more of an asset than the heat.
It was wrong of me to miss that fire.
“Why’d you leave her?” Voss asked, but suddenly, there were feet storming up the steps.
Voss and I both shot up, knowing running was never a good thing. Cary burst into the room with his phone to his ear as Fallon and Danny came through from the kitchen.
And then he said words that had my heart freezing in my chest.
“Finn and Louana are shot.”
I swear I almost blacked out at those words.
But then Dezi was rushing through the living room, barking out an address.
Then I was running too. Out the door. Across the yard. To my bike.
I wasn’t even fully aware of driving through town.
My mind could only process one thing right then.
Louana was shot.
I probably should have been freaked out about Finn. He was practically a cousin to me. I’d grown up with him. He was my biker brother too.
But my mind was only on Louana, at the idea of a bullet wedged in her.
It seemed like forever, though it was only a few minutes across town.
And as I drove down the street, there it was.
Blood on the cement, steadily drying in the sun.