“Fucking Christ, man,” Vader shakes his head.
“This was senseless,” Moneybags adds his input, and I nod.
This wasn’t needed whatsoever. These people weren’t hurting anyone, and if you ask me, they were some of the kindest people in town . . . and now they’re dead. For what? To be some pawn in a sick bastard’s game? To be used as payment for all of his anger? It’s bullshit, and it’s fucking pissing me off that Hermoine’s lost her parents because of him.
I fish my phone out of my back pocket and call the only person I know who is going to need to handle this. The blade is right there on the ground, and while the gun isn’t here . . . I know who it’s going to track back to—someone in the Lucifer’s Heretics MC.
“Falcon, it’s been a long time since you called. Everything okay?” Callahan, a man I went to school with, asks me. He also happens to be the sheriff of our town.
“I’ll be honest with you. It’s not. I’m at 136 Wilkinson Street. You need to come here, and I’d bring a crime scene unit as well. It’s my girlfriend’s parents’ house, and we were told her parents were dead. My club came here to check on them . . . and they’re dead, Callahan. Her father was shot in the head, and it looks like her mother was stabbed. There’s even a bloody knife a few feet away from her body.”
“Fucking hell. I’ll be right there, but I think you know I have to ask you and whoever is with you to stay and give us statements,” Callahan tells me, and I know the drill.
Most officers would assume my club or I had something to do with it straight off the bat, but Callahan knows me. He knows my character, my integrity, and that my men or I aren’t capable of gruesomeness such as this.
“I do. We’ll wait for you until you get here and do whatever you need,” I tell him, and we say our goodbyes.
Moneybags begins walking around the house. I figure he’s doing a sweep to make sure there isn’t anyone else lurking around, and Vader begins doing the same thing. All I can do is stare at Hermoine’s parents’ lifeless bodies, thinking about what a waste this act of violence was. In my book, there are people who deserve to die and people who don’t. Hermoine’s parents definitely didn’t deserve this.
As I’m in my own internal thoughts, I’m glancing around the home, noticing a blinking red light flashing at me. It’s in the corner of the living room, pointing right down at me. Sure enough, I head into the kitchen and find another one, and head into the foyer and find another. Thank God they have cameras throughout this whole place. It not only corroborates that my club isn’t involved in their deaths, but it will pin the blame on the Lucifer’s Heretics MC.
But I’m not simply going to hand Geno over to Callahan. I’ll hand over Sandman and Coe with no hesitation, but Geno is mine to deal with and mine alone. If Callahan asks me what happened to Geno, I’ll tell him he slipped through my fingertips or I never had him in the first place. I’m not above lying to an officer of the law, especially when it hits this close to home.
Within ten minutes, Callahan and his crime scene unit are in the house. He even has two other officers here, and they pull each of us into separate areas, asking for statements of what we saw when we got here. I let Callahan know about the cameras, and he asks me if Hermoine has any login information. I didn’t even think about that . . . but I’m sure she does.
Fuck, if she logged in, she would’ve seen everything.
Callahan tells me he has everything he needs, but if I can get him the login information to do that as soon as possible. So, I will . . . but first, I need to get back to the club and check on Hermoine.
I ride faster than I ever have, and I’m sure if a cop had pulled me over, they would’ve given me a misdemeanor or maybe even a felony, if that’s possible in the first place. I get to the clubhouse safe and sound, and as soon as I push the doors open, I’m looking around the joint for Hermoine. Only, she’s nowhere to be found.
“She’s in your bedroom,” Hawk tells me as my fear starts to go over every part of my body. I head into my bedroom and find her on the bed, crying her ever-loving eyes out.
“Hermoine, I’m so fucking sorry, baby.” I know what I’m saying isn’t going to make a difference right now, but I have to let her know I’m here for her. This is awful, and it’s downright painful. There won’t be any way around any of that, but I will never let her feel like she’s alone.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Hermoine
I shouldn’t have done it.
I never should have logged on to my parent’s home security system and watched the tape of the last twenty-four hours, but when Falcon banned me from going with him, what other choice did I have? Hawk brought me back here to the clubhouse, and Geno’s words kept blasting through my head like a freight train. How could I just sit around and do nothing while Falcon went over to their house to check things out? How could I avoid getting the answers I so desperately needed when there was such an easy way for me to obtain them. God, I should have, though. I’ll never be able to scrub the image of Geno plunging a knife into my mother’s body over and over again while my dad watched. Or the image of him putting the gun to my father’s forehead and pulling the trigger.
My parents are dead.
I am an orphan now, and I have no one.
And this day will haunt me for the rest of my life.
“Hermoine, I’m so fucking sorry, baby.” Falcon’s voice pierces through the haze I’ve been content to wallow in, and I turn toward the door, blinking up at him as he stares back at me. There is wariness and pity in his brown eyes as he takes a tentative step toward me. “Baby?”
“I already know,” I tell him. My voice . . . it doesn’t even sound like my own, but that’s of little concern to me at this moment as I turn back to stare at the wall on the other side of the room, losing myself in the chasm that used to be my heart.
My parents are dead, and I’m all alone.
Above all else, that’s the one thing I keep thinking about again and again. And I know I should be feeling something right now, but there is a certain bliss in the nothingness. The numbness blanketing my body is infused with a sense of peace that makes it easy to let myself get washed out to sea.
I know it should hurt.
It’s going to hurt eventually.
But right now, I just want to enjoy the void.
“What do you know, Hermoine?” Falcon asks. I’m vaguely aware of him closing the distance between us as he moves into my peripheral vision, but then he kneels next to the bed, right in my line of sight, and forces me to meet his gaze. Our eyes meet, his so full of concern, and it feels like a hot poker in my chest.
Ah, there it is.
The pain.
As I suck in a stuttered breath, the image of Geno stabbing my mother as my father sat, tied to a dining room chair, unable to do anything to save her, flashes through my mind once more. The moment her body fell to the floor, and he opened his mouth to let out an agonizing silent scream, he followed closely behind it as the nothingness abandoned me completely.
“They’re dead,” I whisper, a sob ripping itself from my body and contorting my words as pain blooms in my chest before spreading outward through the rest of my body viciously. It’s an insidious weed, choking everything else in its path to consume me.