Page 3 of Rogue

Why is it that the most merciless killers are usually the biggest whiniest weaklings?

I’ve stopped asking that question too.

But I’m glad he’s in pain and I’m glad he’s shaking and yelping as I drag him away from the house and through the gate. I lay him against the first sun-scorched boulder I come to. Here he is far enough away that the flames his home is about to go up in won’t reach him.

I changed my plans for his death. Fire is too good for him. Too cleansing.

“She screamed your name in the end, when all hope was lost,” he stammers, blood leaking from his nose and spraying as he speaks. “Did you know that?”

His eyes are still mean and cold. Old age, loneliness and infirmity hadn’t changed that.

“I didn’t hear her then, but I hear her screams almost every night,” I tell him. “I’ll never forgive myself for letting her go after you alone.”

A part of me still wants to cut him up into little pieces and watch them all burn.

But a weight seems to be lifting off my shoulders with each second that passes now that I’m finally taking Angel’s revenge. A weight that’s been driving me into the ground for the last ten years. The wind’s picking it up. The same wind I promised my revenge to all those years ago.

Or maybe it’s Angel, finally able to take it with her to Heaven.

I take her knife in my hand and feel her touch against my palm. Soft, warm and so real it makes my breath catch in my throat.

I feel as though we’re guiding the knife together as I slash open his belly. Not deep enough to kill. Just deep enough to bleed and call closer the beasts that are his kin. The beasts that will come with the night to feed on him.

I take a few steps back.

“What the hell are you doing?” he croaks at me. “Kill me. Get it over with.”

“You have some time yet, before the coyotes come and rip you to shreds,” I tell him. “And once they’re done, you’ll have the eternal fires of hell to warm you.”

“No,” he whines. “Kill me. Kill me like I killed that Angel of yours. I took her beautiful ocean blue eyes, you know. I took them with me. I still have them in the hut.”

I figured he might. He liked to take trophies.

The words are meant to get my blood boiling so I’ll kill him, but they just bounce off me.

Because Angel is with me now, holding my hand, whole and just as beautiful as the day I fell in love with her, her dark golden hair swaying in the hot wind, her beautiful sky-blue eyes sparkling.

She’s with me as I light the hut on fire. Stands with us as we watch it burn. Ghost is shrieking, begging for death, but I hardly hear him.

The house collapses into itself sending a shower of bright orange sparks into the night. Goodbye, the winds seem to be whispering now.

“Goodbye,” I say as I throw the lock of her hair into the fire.

The weight of guilt, regret and pain I’ve been carrying for ten years is gone. And Angel is no longer holding my hand.

I used to think I’d walk into the flames and be with her.

But that’s not what Angel wants. She wants me to keep on doing what I’ve been doing.

Since her death, I’ve devoted my life to making sure psychos like the shrieking mess behind me get their due.

And the job’s not done.

2

Melody

In a week, I’ll be starting my residency at one of the best hospitals in LA—the Los Angeles County General hospital. And with that, I will have left behind my life in Pleasantville, a town in Northern California and home to Devil’s Nightmare MC. The Devils have been my only family for the last ten years. Leaving them is the only fly in the honey of my plan to start a new life, turn the page, open a new book. But after watching so many of them die in the battle they fought two nights ago, I now know without a shadow of doubt that I cannot watch any of them die ever again. A decade ago, I lost my real family and I can’t bear to lose another.

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