Page 18 of Banshee's Lament
“Well, we’re not far from the Dallas chapter, actually,” the guy by my window says. “Pretty sure they could get what we needed out here, then help us fix it for the lady.”
He looks at me and nods. “I’ll make the call, see what I can find out.”
A meow has me glancing to my passenger seat where I see Sassy standing up, her head poking out of her carrier as she looks around with apparent fascination at the men currently standing off to the side near her. “Yeah, they’re pretty to look at, aren’t they, Sassy girl?” I ask, my gaze never straying far from the man who is currently on his phone.
* * *
Within an hour, I’m in a tow truck with Sassy settled back in her carrier at my feet. We’re heading to the clubhouse, or so the taller one, Banshee, told me when he came back to my window. Apparently, it ‘wasn’t safe’ for them to try and swap out my radiator while on the side of the highway, so we were headed there where he and his brothers were going to take care of that for me.
“You don’t talk much, do you?” the man driving asks.
“Sorry, this is just a little surreal for me,” I admit. Because when the tow truck showed up, several more bikers who were wearing the same cuts as the men that’d initially stopped came along as well. The only thing was, they had ‘Dallas, TX’ at the base of theirs, while Banshee and his two friends had ‘Roanoke, VA’ on theirs.
“You mean, a bunch of bikers showing up to help out a woman in distress?” he teases, smirking at me.
“Something like that,” I mumble. When my phone rings, I glance down and groan, seeing it’s Patrick once again. “Wish he’d leave me the hell alone,” I grind out, forgetting again that I’m not alone, which has me blushing when the man laughs.
“Who won’t leave you alone, darlin’? I’m sure we can convince him to do so,” he states, a gruffness now in his tone that wasn’t there a few minutes before.
“My ex and the reason I’m on this road trip to begin with,” I reply. At his nod, I continue, glad to be able to unload everything. “About two months ago or so, he hurt my cat, then he hurt me when I went after him for throwing her. Took me a bit, but I got the hell out of dodge and haven’t been back since.”
“How bad were y’all hurt?”
My laugh is dark, with no humor in it at all when I say, “We both had broken bones, and I had some stitches as well.”
“Sounds like a pussy, putting his hands on a woman. His house?”
“Fuck, no. It’s mine now that my grandparents are gone!” I exclaim. Then my shoulders fall when I recall his last message, that was little more than sinister laughing, as he told me to check out the local headlines. “What’s left of it, anyway.”
One lone tear escapes and I feel the air in the cab of the tow truck go even more electric than it already was when he barks out, “What the fuck did he do?”
“They can’t ‘prove it was him’, but he burned the house to the ground,” I retort, my hands moving as I use air quotes to express how I feel about what the local sheriff told me. “He was gone by the time I was able to actually get Sassy and leave, but friends have been keeping an eye on things as well as on him. He came home, went around town and of course, made noises that I was on a trip, but when a month went by and I hadn’t come home, my friends grew more suspicious. Anyhow, my attorney served him with eviction papers last week, something I was told I had to do since he got mail at the residence and apparently, he decided to burn my house down out of spite.”
“You weren’t married, or anything were you?”
“No, but not because he hadn’t asked. It’s just… dammit, this is hard,” I sniff. “Okay, here’s the thing, I don’t know you from Adam’s house cat, but for some reason, it’s easy to tell you all of this shit.”
“Sometimes, it’s easier to tell a complete stranger because we’re likely to be more objective.”
“Maybe so, I don’t know,” I reply. “My grandparents pretty much took me in when I was six, but I’d spent a lot of time with them beforehand. My mom, well, she wasn’t much of one. But my grampy and my grams? They never once complained at all. Anyhow, I wanted what they had, you know? And I knew pretty early on that my ex didn’t have that ability, at least not with me.”
Which had stung, because initially, Patrickhadsaid all the right things, and done them as well. Only, it was all for show, to get me to drop my guard so he could take over the farm.
“Sounds like he was a douche,” the man replies, making me laugh.
“Yeah, I guess he was. But since I’ve been gone, he hasn’t stopped calling and the messages have gotten increasingly worse.”
“How so?” Even though it’s an innocent question, I can hear the edge to his tone.
“He keeps threatening me, saying that what happened before will look like a cake walk compared to what’ll happen to me if I don’t come back home,” I finally admit, a shiver coursing through me.
“Does he know where you’re at?”
“I don’t think so.”
Another worry of mine; I do everything online and of course, through emails and phone calls, have been able to start the procedure of having him removed from my home. Still, that doesn’t mean hecouldn’tfind me or hell, even know where I was at any given time.
He doesn’t answer, just grunts before pulling up at a gate that is now opened, seeing as all the bikers have already gone through and are busy backing their bikes up. Seeing all the bikes lined up, as well as multiple men coming through the huge door has me realizing I may be in over my head right now.