Page 13 of Grave Curse

“Ginger was my whipping girl. Long ago, before you and I met and Ginger and I were just kids, Hades would hurt her in order to keep me in line.”

“Holy fuck.” Clearly stunned, Romeo blinked. “I didn’t know that.”

“We don’t exactly advertise it.”

“Jesus.” He shook his head. “That’s almost too twisted, even for Hades.”

“No, it’s exactly who he is. Making Ginger hurt is his go-to play because at his core, that bastard is the world’s biggest coward. He was too scared to go after me directly back in the day, and I can’t imagine he’s any different now. I’ll bet every dime I have that he’s going to fall back into his old habit of gunning for Ginger in order to get to me.”

“Fuck me.” Looking like he didn’t know whether to simply shake his head in shock or put a hit out on Hades, Romeo’s expression hardened. “Behavioral patterns like that are things I need to know about, so I can anticipate where he’s going to strike next. I need specifics. What would Hades do when he targeted Ginger?”

I had to consciously unlock my jaw to answer. “There was that time I was sent to deal with some working girls H had stabled in the Barracks back in the day, when it was still a no-tell motel. I laid down the law, loomed a lot, and in my opinion I completed the task. The one thing I didn’t do was take a hand to any of them, because I’m not a weak-ass limp dick who hits women. So when we got back, Radar ratted on me—”

“No surprise it was Radar, the cocksucker,” Romeo muttered.

I nodded. “When he ratted on me to H, my uncle brought Ginger in. For some reason I remember she was still clutching a chemistry book because she’d been quietly doing her homework, not bothering anyone. He went right up to her and without any warning, he showed me how to ‘properly’ hit a bitch. He did it so hard he knocked her front teeth out. She was sixteen.”

“Motherfucker,” Romeo snarled. It summed up my own feelings perfectly.

“Ginger doesn’t like blood for a reason,” I went on, hating how looking back into the past had opened a floodgate of hellish memories I couldn’t stop. They were drowning me, and I had no fucking way to stop it, except maybe to run to Hades’s compound and burn it all to the ground. “Something happened the night before Ginger’s mom OD’d, something that changed everything. By this time, you and I had finally met, and I was starting to think I needed to break away from the Chicago Gravediggers and make my own chapter. It was becoming obvious Hades wasn’t going to let anyone survive if they showedany sign of being strong enough to overthrow him, so that put a target on all our backs.”

“I remember Hades didn’t want to let me join the Chicago Gravediggers, because I was ‘too famous’ and would bring unwanted scrutiny to the club.”

“You weren’tthatfamous, or that fast.” Actually Romeo had never lost a race from the time he’d been a little kid on a baby BMX bike, which meant he’d been born with mad skills and nerves of steel. Exactly the kind of charismatic magnet Hades would have hated having around.

He gave me a mild glance. “Says the second-fastest guy in the room.”

Yeah, yeah. “To this day, I don’t know if Uncle H heard about my plans to form my own chapter, or if he just sensed I’d been pushed so far I was ready to either kill him or jump ship. All I know is that Hades summoned me to the clubhouse one night. Before I left the house I told my brother and sister that if I didn’t return by morning, Loki and Hel had to get themselves out of Chicago and not stop running until they hit ocean. But once I got to the clubhouse, everything seemed chill. Hades and I had a relatively civilized conversation about how grateful he was for my presence in the club, because I had a way with calming the troops.”

“I smell a setup.”

And that was why Romeo was the Gravediggers’ chief of security. His suspicious mind was usually right on the money. “He walked me into the Rumpus Room, and there was Ginger and her mom, Audrey.”

Romeo’s let out a low growl at the mere mention of the Rumpus Room. That had been the same room where his ol’ lady, now his wife, had been tortured by Hades’s son, Marvel.

I nodded, no doubt confirming his worst fears. “For once Ginger’s mom wasn’t nodding out on heroin. She was jittery,verging on dope-sick, and terrified out of her mind because she was tied to a chair. Ginger was also tied to a chair. Unlike her mother, though, it was like she’d turned to stone. She was absolutely silent, not moving a muscle, but her eyes… When Ginger looked at me when we came in, it’s like they were screaming at me to save them.”

“Jesus,” he said faintly. “What’d you do?”

“What do you think I did? I tried to save them.” I felt my mouth twist bitterly as the night unfolded in front of my mind’s eye. “I swung at Hades, thinking that if I could put his lights out fast, I could get Ginger and her mom out of there before anyone grew a pair big enough to stop me. But then Marvel and one of Hades’s lieutenants by the name of Popcorn jumped me and forced me to watch as Hades crossed to Ginger. He untied her and pulled her to her feet so that she stood in the middle of the room. I could see she was shaking. Then he gave her this pearl-handled straight razor and announced we were going to play a game called Obey Hades Or Else.”

“That piece of shit.”

My sentiments exactly. “Since Popcorn and my cousin Marvel had me, I couldn’t do anything but throw cuss words at him, so that’s what I did. That was when my uncle gave Ginger the order to choose.”

“Choose what?”

“Someone had to be punished for my insubordination, but since I was seen in the club as such a great guy—Hades’s words, not mine—he couldn’t punish me directly. But my insubordination still had to be punished, so he told Ginger that she could either cut herself, or her mother, thanks to my bad behavior.”

“That is so fucked up,” he snarled, looking as furious as I’d felt all those years ago. “H had already tied them up long beforeyou cussed him out. This was just Hades being fucking evil for the sake of being evil.”

“It served a purpose, at least to an extent,” I couldn’t help but point out. “If he hadn’t pulled this stunt, I probably would have hit the eject button on the Chicago Gravediggers a helluva lot sooner than I did. As it was, another year or more went by after that horrible night before I felt strong enough in my power base to get out from under that madman’s rule.”

Romeo took all that in before nodding. “What happened with Ginger that night in the Rumpus Room? I’m guessing she refused to make a choice?”

“Oh, Hades had that angle covered.”

“How so?”

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