Page 367 of Hell Hath No Fury
SWAN SONG
A FALLEN MEN CHRISTMAS SHORT STORY
GIANA DARLING
PROLOGUE
Finnegan Ramsey
I’d never liked Christmas.
A bullshit holiday if there ever was one.
The idea that a jolly plump man in a red suit flew through the sky deliverin’ presents was so fuckin’ ludicrous I’d never believed it, not even as a kid.
Of course, it didn’t help that my mum died on Christmas mornin’.
I found her partially under the tree like an unwrapped present, pale as the snow crustin’ the livin’ room windows and just as cold when I bent to touch her smooth cheek. Beneath her, red the same color as the tinsel on the tree congealed on the old carpet. The front door was open, icy wind whistlin’ through the crack, stirrin’ her hair. The scent of pine and my mum, sweet like peppermint candy, stung my nose.
Someone had killed her.
And the fuck of it was, even at eighteen years old, I knew there were too many suspects to pin down.
Her boyfriend, Guy, who worked at the paper mill after an injury ended his amateur fightin’ career. Even though he’d been retired for years, he still liked to practice on mum.
Her brother, Rufus, who stole from us whenever he was in town to pawn shit for his drug habit. Last time, he’d taken mum’s weddin’ ring and she’d told him he was a dead man the next time he came sniffin’ around.
Mum’s ‘boss’, Mr. Murphy, who owned the local strip club in our blue-collar town, but also encouraged his girls to take on clients virtually where he claimed the real cash was made. She was a cam girl for criminals and lowlifes. It wouldn’t be the first time one of ’em had backtraced her IP connection and tracked her down. Murphy had been angry at her that week because she’d taken time off to tend to me while I suffered through a bout of the flu.
He wasn’t the kinda guy you wanted angry with you.
There were a lotta men in Crystal Ramsey’s life and not a lotta ’em were good.
I guess I had her murderer to thank for where I ended up in life.
Her death was the reason I became obsessed with technology.
A distant cousin in Vancouver with a fuck ton of money and the inability to have children himself took me in for the rest of grade twelve year and gave me everythin’ a kid could ever need and more. He tried to burrow my sorrow in riches and his perpetual absence on work trips in endless material goods.
It didn’t work, not really.
But the laptop, phone and tablet opened up a whole new universe for me.
One mired in plain script and code.
It was my domain, a virtual, anonymous space where I ironically felt most myself.
No one was bigger than me, badder than me,in chargeof me on the dark web.
Not even the man I’d willingly pledged my fealty to years ago. The man at the head of the only family I had left, The Fallen MC.
Prez Zeus Garro never ordered me to do the unscrupulous shit I did for him on the web.
He didn’t have to.
After what he and the club did for me when I was introduced to them a year after Mum’s death, those dark, dreary days of misery and relentless searchin’ for justice, I owed them everythin’.
Becomin’ a criminal and joinin’ up with the most notorious motorcycle club in North America wasn’t exactly a typical happily-ever-after, but for me, it was better than anythin’ else I’d ever known.
