Page 65 of Lost Soul

Yeah, I’ve checked.

Jessie still looked wickedly beautiful in his, and his offenses had only been minor—well if you call GBH and carrying a firearm minor.

“So, you can really make him disappear with just a click of a button.” I follow the voice up to the cabin deck on my right, it’s been empty since I arrived. Brax moves to sit up on the railings that separate the decks, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.

“Brax… I didn’t see you there. You made me jump,” I laugh nervously, pulling my laptop screen down just a touch.

“You should read that file before you delete it,” he tells me, holding in a breath that keeps his lungs filled with smoke, then his eyes crease together as the thick cloud releases from his mouth. “You don’t know how long you’re gonna be sticking around here, and you should ask yourself if that’s the kind of man you wanna to be living in the company of.” He points his head towards my screen.

“He’s part of this club. I thought you all had some unbreakable bro code,” I remind him, curious at his difference of opinion to the others.

“Tobias Saunders has been hiding out behind this club for years. No one here knows who he really is, not even his real brother. How many of them down there do you think have read those offenses?” He draws his teeth back over this thick bottom lip.

“They’ve asked for me to do this for them. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I kinda owe them,” I explain sarcastically, hoping the guy has a sense of humor as well as the ability to make fear tingle at the base of your spine.

“I’m just asking you to take some time out to read that file. If you’re as good as they say you are, you can make that file disappear along with all the people he’s hurt. You should know what you're burying, Maddy.” Brax slides off the railings and steps back inside his cabin. It leaves me conflicted over what I should do next. If I read the file and find out what horrors truly do lie behind those eyes, will my conscience let me wipe his slate clean for him? If I don’t, I’m putting myself at risk. Jessie tells me the club are protecting me and I’m too afraid to doubt him. Clunk made it clear he would kill me if I didn’t do as he asks and that was before the Dirty Souls became involved. If I fail to do what they ask me, these men could turn on me too.

My head aches coming up with all the scenarios. I need time to think. So, without reading it, I leave the file where it is. For now at least. No one apart from Brax knows that I’ve already accessed the file and I get the impression he’ll want to keep the conversation we’ve just had private.

Brax seems to know a lot about Tobias Saunders, and it makes me wonder if he’s shared his concerns with the others. He’s wrong about one thing though, even if I could bury the file again it will never vanish entirely, there will be a paper trail. Whoever made this disappear before had to have been working on the inside.

I shut everything down and decide to go to bed. I hope Jessie comes home tonight, and in a better mood than he left.

Getting into his bed, I snuggle myself into his sheets. Sleeping in his bed makes me feel close to him. He keeps me distanced but I like to pretend two people like us could be together, even in a world like his. It’s with that beautiful delusion that my mind finally stops running circles and I drift off.

Cameron never expected what I had for him, and I’m confident that after what he’s just endured he’ll never work for the Bastards again. I’d chosen well, he was the perfect target for what I needed tonight, he’d even put up a little fight to start with.

Adrenaline is still surging in my blood, I could easily have taken out another name on the list, but instead, I choose to go home to her. She’ll be asleep by now, that makes it a little easier. It’s crazy how sharing space with her can soothe me and fuck me up all at the same time. When she’s sleeping, at least I can enjoy watching her without fucking anything up.

This time of night the club is quiet. Everyone’s either passed out or fucking by now, leaving only the sounds of crickets and the breeze whistling around the trees. I pull up outside my cabin and open the door quietly so not to disturb her. I know I shouldn’t care, I am who I am, but I don’t want Maddy seeing me like this.

It’s surprising how much, when hit in the right spot, a nose can bleed, and the top half of my body is pretty much covered from where Cameron’s exploded all over it. My T-shirt is ripped from where he desperately clawed at me while I held him in a choke hold and warned him what would happen to him if he ever so much as looked at a Bastard ever again.

I could have left it at that, he had the message loud, but I didn’t, it was about more than a list tonight. I was proving who I am, what I do. The more time I spend near Maddy, the more I seem to be forgetting. There’d been a time during the onslaught that I hadn’t been sure If I was gonna stop. All the frustration that had been mounting up for so long became easier to handle when I’d been kicking him in his ribs and bending back his arms until they cracked.

I’d punched the son of a bitch until my hands were tacky with his blood, and luckily for Cameron, that’s when she’d managed to make her way back inside my head. Her pretty, pleading eyes begging with me not to go too far, not to take someone's life just because I couldn’t get a grip on my own emotions. It was Maddy who Cameron had to thank for his life tonight.

It’s dark inside the cabin, and completely silent. I creep my way through to the kitchen and open the fridge searching for a bottle of bud or anything that might help me wind down enough to attempt some sleep. I’m all out, and as I move to swing the door shut, I feel a hand land on my shoulder. Spinning round quick I realize just in time that it’s her and lower the fist I’ve risen.

Fuck, the girl crept up on me in the dark like a fucking panther. Her eyes grow wide and I know the light from the open refrigerator is illuminating the room enough for her to see me. I haven’t seen the state of myself yet, but I know it’ll be bad.

“Jessie, my god, are you okay?” Her hands lift to her mouth with concern when she sees the blood.

"Ain’t mine," I tell her, watching relief I don’t deserve calm the panic from her face.

What reason have I ever given her to give a shit about me?

Her hands move slowly reaching out towards me, but I can’t let her touch me, not like this.

"Don't touch me," I warn, quickly shoving past her making a gasp for air. She remains standing in the kitchen while I storm into the bathroom. Pulling my T-shirt over my head, I stare back at my reflection in the mirror that hangs above the sink. My face has a few splats of blood across it, and there’s a scratch under my eye where Cameron had caught me while I was throttling him. It’s nothing too major, but scary enough to someone like Maddy. Now in brighter light, I can see that my hands are a complete mess. I look down at my scratched up torso and when I look back up again her eyes met mine through the mirror.

"What are you doing?" I manage to soften my tone for her this time, none of this is her fault. Maddy shrugs her shoulders, unable to pull her eyes from the reflection of evil that’s standing right in front of her.

"I just wanted to…” She looks down at her feet like she’s ashamed. “I want to help you," she whispers. I turn around to face her, resting my ass against the sink and I let her see me, all of me. Raw and fucking uncensored. I want her to see what she should be running from, then turn and fucking sprint.

But she doesn’t. She stays, keeping her pretty eyes connected to mine like helpless bait.

"Yeah well, I'm a lot past helping, Maddy. So you’re wasting your time." I do a shit job of holding back the weakness in my voice. I need her to stop looking at me like that, to crush any hope she has of making something decent out of me.

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