Page 78 of Eden's Joker

“No one can give you your family back, Tyler,” she says quietly. “But I will try.”

I pause in the act of pulling on my boots and glare at her. Her eyes are full of sorrow, but open to me again. More than they’ve ever been. This is possibly the greatest promise anyone’s ever given me. In this moment, I want nothing more but to have her deliver on it.

“But not if I go through with this?” I ask anyway.

She nods and turns away, her long dark haircascading down her back and her glow somehow dimming. Even as she stands here, right in front of me, I feel her fading into memory. So I look away. I have to. She doesn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. I saw her answer.

Today will be a long and hard day. But what must be done must be endured. I’ve had a lifetime full of days when I’ve had to do things I least wanted to do. My whole life, more or less.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” she says softly as I exit the bedroom.

But her voice is faded too. I think even she knows that’s a lie, just a bullshit dream. One of many.

So I don’t answer. Just leave. Just start pretending again that what we have hasn’t been over since it started.

41

Ice

I was more beast than man when the Devils freed me. A monster. Satan’s Spawn MC made me into that monster by killing my family and forcing me to fight in a cage for seven long years. To live in a cage too. After the Devils freed me, I became an even bigger monster as we hunted them down and killed them one by one.

I didn’t stop being a monster until the day I first held my daughters.

But the monster didn’t go away. It just slept somewhere deep inside me.

Eden’s abduction woke it. Seeing her scared face on camera and hearing that bastard’s threats made it more ferocious than it ever was. It won’t sleep again, not until I tear Joker apart with my bare hands.

But each time I think we have him, he slips further away.

I haven’t been sleeping, I haven’t been eating, I definitely haven’t been thinking straight. All I see every time I close my eyes is Eden’s face. Bloody and bruised and lifeless. Turning into the face of all the women we’ve pulled from sexual slavery over the years. Women who have no hope of being whole even after they’re saved.

Even my social worker sister Roxie stopped trying to convince me such women can be saved after the first week of Eden being missing. She knows as well as anyone it can’t be done. Eden as she was is lost to us.

And nothing will ever be all right again. Not even the slow and painful death I have planned for Joker. Imagining that is what has kept me going. The only fuel I need.

The men who didn’t know me back then, know the monster I was now.

We’ve been camped out at one of our safe houses in the desert. It’s basically just a bunker filled with guns and ammo and guys and gals giving me a wide berth whenever they see me. I’ve taken to sleeping outside, under the starry sky, like I used to do for months after I was freed. It’s not helping much now.

Our Prez Cross exits the bunker and looks around. Then his piercing gaze zeroes in on me. I’ve clashed with him so often these last few weeks that it’s a miracle he’s still letting me ride with them on thesesearch missions. A lesser man would’ve kicked me to the curb a long time ago, or worse. Even in my messed-up state, I know that and respect it.

He strides towards me. I can’t read anything off his face, but that doesn’t mean he’s not coming to tell me bad news. He’s the only one who would dare deliver that kind of news to me these days. I try to feel fear. But the truth is, I don’t feel much at all these days. Just like I didn’t for years in my old life.

“Hawk’s got new intel,” Cross says. “Come.”

I don’t move from my perch on a fallen log in the shadow of some bush that grows tall, spindly, and thorny.

“It’s not that kind of intel,” Cross says. “We’d know if she was dead.”

Even in my feeling-less state, that word, and the image of my daughter’s lifeless body, bruised and battered, it brings, pierces me like a knife.

“Would we?” I ask. “Because we sure as hell don’t know a whole lot lately.”

Since the day she was taken, we’ve searched for Eden and Joker and his Lost Sons MC relentlessly, going everywhere where there was even a whisper of a hint that they might be. All dead ends. For weeks. Nothing but dead ends. I don’t know if I can take another one of those. I don’t know if my sanity can.

“We’ll get her back, Ice,” Cross says.

I don’t understand how he can still speak with such certainty about that. And yet I do. He’s lying to me tokeep me calm. Like I’m some damn woman who needs reassuring.

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