Page 4 of Property of Shotgun
“I can’t let you see him like that, sweetheart. He ain’t whole, and that should not be the last memory you have of him,” Biggie says.
Those words break her, they split her in two, and she crumbles to the floor before any of us can catch her. Biggie drops to his knees, trying to gather her in his arms, but she fights him, thrashing, slamming her hands against the asphalt.
“Sweetheart, you need to breathe,” Biggie says. “All this…it ain’t good for the baby.”
Her fists go still against my chest, and she pushes off me, swiping at her tears with the backs of her hands before she turns to Biggie.
“You know what’s not good for the baby? Not having a father,” she snaps.
Regret flashes over Biggie’s features and he swipes a hand over his face.
“I’m sorry, darlin’. That was a poor choice of words. I know you’re hurting?—”
“You don’t know shit,” she fires back. “I trusted you.Hetrusted all of you.” Her eyes flit back to me, and she pushes her hair away from her face. “I want to see him. Ineedto see him.”
One thing about Jade, she doesn’t quit. Not when she gets something in her head, and not on her man.
A vision of Irish pleading with me before they came in and slit his throat flashes before me, and I push it to the back of my head, forcing a swallow.
“He didn’t want you to see him,” I say hoarsely. “Not like that. What they did to him… the way they tortured him, it was inhumane.”
“Tell me,” she demands weakly.
“No.”
“I deserve to know. I’m his wife. The mother of his children,” she cries. “Doesn’t that count for anything?”
“It counts for everything,” Biggie replies, pressing a hand to her back. “We can’t erase what happened. Losing Irish will stick with all of us until we draw our last breaths, but I give you my word, right here, right now, you and your children will always be taken care of.”
Her beautiful face contorts in agony, and her hands fall to her rounded stomach as she weeps.
“I can’t do this… I can’t do life without him.”
Those are the last words she says before she’s overcome by her grief, anything after that is intelligible. Biggie pulls her to her feet and wraps his arms around her tiny frame. She falls against him, and just cries.
She cries for the man she loved with every part of her being.
She cries for their children.
The two that will wake in the morning and wonder where their father is, and the one who has yet to be born that will never know him.
She cries and cries all through the night, mourning the only love she’s ever known.
It’s heartbreaking, and just when you think things can’t get worse, they do.
They always fucking do.
TWO
JADE
I knewfrom the moment I first laid eyes on Duke Callahan, he’d break my heart, but I was a young, impressionable girl, and try as I might, I couldn’t ignore his charms. I didn’t know how it would happen, though.
I guess that impressionable girl grew to be a naïve woman.
Ignoring all the warnings was easy, especially in the early days of him becoming a member of the Kings of Anarchy and taking on the persona of Irish. There was something sexy about the lifestyle we were entering. The long motorcycle rides that always ended with us tangled between the sheets, and the clubhouse parties that often ran on for days. Anywhere we went, people stopped and stared at us.
I think mostly out of curiosity but there was a certain degree of fear too, and with fear came respect. Don’t get me wrong, there were people who looked at us like we were the scum of the Earth, but they were in the minority. Most people bent over backwards when they saw anyone with a Kings of Anarchy patch, and I was one of the only women with a property patch, which resulted in me being viewed as a queen.
