As the pieces of the puzzle slowly fit together, all the breath left my body, and I momentarily wheezed before I could speak. “Lacey.”
“Yes.”
“Jesus, what was she thinking?” I murmured. Since the day Willow had been brought to my door, I’d been searching for information about who could have killed Lacey. I knew she had been involved in some deep shit, considering how no one connected to her would talk, regardless of the amount of money I offered them. The person closest to her, Willow, sure as hell wasn’t talking, and even if she could, she was too young to understand who the people were in her mother’s world. In the end, I’d been led to believe it was a drug deal gone bad—she or her boyfriend hadn’t coughed up the money they owed.
“Deacon, there’s more,” Case said.
“More than finding out the mother of my child took up with some Knights scum and then turned rat?”
Rev shook his head. “Maybe she needed immunity to stay out of jail for Willow’s sake.”
“Knowing Lacey, I have a hard time believing she was thinking of anyone but herself,” I argued. Feeling Case’s intense gaze on me, I glanced from Rev to him. “What?”
“He said there were a lot of mentions of a guy named ‘Seagal.’”
I bolted forward in my chair as Rev sucked in a harsh breath. “He just overheard all this shit, right? What if what he’s hearing as Seagal is really Sigel?” Rev asked.
Case grimaced. “Yeah, it is. He’s out. Been out for five months for copping a deal.”
“How the fuck are we just now hearing he’s out? I thought we had eyes and ears all over the jailhouse,” Bishop demanded.
A tense silence fell over the table. Just the mention of the name “Sigel” hit me, Rev, and Bishop especially hard. Frederich “Freddy” Spears, or Sigel, as he called himself now, was the president of the Nordic Knights. Sigel gave the Raiders far too many fucking reasons to want him six feet under. There was the racist bullshit he spewed about being the son of an actual former Nazi soldier, but there was also the fact he was once one of our own.
Of course, he was just Freddy back then. Most of the time he was known as Fucked-Up Freddy because of his heroin addiction. Like the legendary Hells Angels, the Raiders had a bylaw about no needles in the club. You might snort crank or smoke some crack, but shooting up rained a whole different type of shit down on you and your brothers.
Preacher Man tried to intervene to help Freddy, but he finally had to kick him out of the club and take his cut. It wasn’t too long before Freddy adopted a new road name, Sigel, after some sun bullshit in German mythology. It was a nod to his ties with the Aryan Brotherhood. He then formed his own club, the Nordic Knights, and did everything he could to fuck with us, including trying to move drugs in our territory. Regardless of some of our less-than-legal business dealings, we never dealt in drugs or women. Preacher Man worked tirelessly to push Sigel and his Knights out of Raiders territory.
Our true hatred of Sigel came from the fact he had our father’s blood on his hands. And not metaphorically from some hit he’d put out. He’d pumped Preacher Man full of holes at point-blank range when the two were meeting under a truce flag. My fists curled in rage as I remembered cradling my father’s dying body. As his sergeant, I had gone with him to the meeting.
Growing up on the streets had hardened me to where the death of a man could be swatted from your memory the same way as ridding an annoying fly from your face. The quicker you desensitized yourself, the better. I’d witnessed all manner of ugly deaths—torture scenes with bodies flayed open like cadavers on a med-school table, the charred, blackened flesh of burned bodies, the cross still wrapped around the neck of a decapitated head that had been blown off in a car bomb.
But no matter how hard you’ve worked to turn yourself off, nothing compares to the death of someone you love—someone who was your savior. Those emotions you’ve buried so fucking deep in the ground come bursting out of their grave like it’s the Second Coming. In a way it is—it’s the Armageddon of your soul. As the emotional torment claws at your skin, you wish for your own death. Anything would be better than the agony consuming you. If only you could find atonement by switching places—their life for your own. But instead, you find an emotional immortality that places you in a private hell on earth.
Almost three years had passed since the night we’d lost Preacher Man. I’d tried to put as much space and distance as I could between me and the memories that haunted me in the dead of night, the ones that woke me in a fit of screaming and clawing at the sheets. But just hearing the name Nordic Knights ricocheted me from the present back into that night. Like a movie reel on repeat, I watched Preacher Man’s body contort as the bullets entered his chest and gut. I’d made it to his side just in time to grab his collapsing body before it hit the grimy pavement.
I shook my head to try to rid myself of the memories. But no matter how hard I tried, the harsh, metallic smell of blood entered my nose. My hands tightened on the armrests of the chair—the muscles felt stretched and weighed down the same as that night. Like a flash of lightning cutting across the night sky, I was once again back in that alley with my father dying before my eyes.
I’d struggled to keep my hold on him as the blood, mixed with pieces of flesh and intestines, made him slippery. Each time I tried to get a better hold on him, he screamed from the pain. Finally, we had gone down on the pavement together. Flailing, I had scrambled to my knees, cradling Preach’s head in my lap. Trying to channel my fear, I’d focused my eyes on Preach’s. The acceptance in his gaze told me that death was close. All the words of gratitude and love that I wanted to express wouldn’t come from my mouth, no matter how hard I tried to speak.