PROLOGUE
Alice
I’m nine years old. He’s older. Maybe twenty. Maybe thirty. Hard to tell. He brings me sweets and sits next to me in the pew as I wait for my brother to finish helping Father Victor so he can take me home. My brother is an altar boy. I’m a girl so I can’t be. That’s how my mom explained it to me and even though I didn’t like it, even though I wanted to be an altar boy too, there was nothing to be done. There are rules in the Catholic church and the rules are strict. And they must be obeyed.
That’s another thing my mom told me, and my dad, and every teacher in school since I can remember. So I didn’t doubt it, I didn’t question it. I didn’t doubt that the older man bringing me sweets and sitting next to me while my brother practiced in the choir with the other altar boys was someone to be obeyed, to be respected. Someone who would always take care of me and who had my best interests in mind.
He dressed like a priest, after all. Smiles like a priest. Spoke softly like a priest.
His name was Gael.
What a beautiful and strange name, I thought, and would repeat to myself quietly when he wasn’t around. And what a beautiful voice he had, and what a beautiful smile.
And the sweets he brought me were always my favorite. Soft jellies, some sour, some sweet, covered with a light dusting of crystal-clear sugar. The kind my mom would never buy for me because she said they’d rot my teeth. She was wrong. They didn’t.
I didn’t think there was anything wrong with the way he touched me. First my hands, then my arms, my legs, my face. Itfeltwrong though, in a way I couldn’t explain. But I thought that was just the same as with all those strict rules I didn’t want to follow, but had to.
I should’ve told my mom after the first time he took me into the basement of the church. To show me a beautiful white marble statue of the Virgin Mary, he said. And give me a whole box of the jellies to take home, he said.
He touched me in different ways down there. In ways that made me sick to my stomach. But I didn’t know it was wrong. I just felt like it was.
And by the time I knew it was wrong, and why, it was years later and Gael was long gone.
Probably molesting some other little girl somewhere else.
My mother never believed me that it had happened.
“Not in our church. Not under the watchful eye of Father Victor. Never,” she said.
I stopped trying to tell her what had happened after she spewed all that at me the first time I did. I was a timid and shy girl then. And I haven’t been able to trust men since. Or get too close to one. Not a priest. Not a friend. Not anyone. Not really.
It’s impossible for me to tell what is the right kind of behavior and what is wrong. Even though I’m a grown woman now. Father Gael took that ability from me in the stuffy, dankbasement of St. Peter’s Church on Sycamore Road. Abolished it over years of sweet words, delicious candy and touches that hurt and felt wrong in all ways.
I should’ve told someone. I should’ve made someone believe me. But I didn’t.
I will always carry that guilt and that shame with me.
But I know where he is now. And I know he’s still cornering young girls who don’t know any better. Still bribing them with candy and leading them into dark basements, making them believe he loves them and that they have no choice. Still molesting them and taking away their childhoods forever. Like he took mine.
But I’m no longer a shy, timid, clueless little girl.
I’m the Sarge of Rogue Angels MC–a biker club that deals out justice where all other means of getting it fail.
I will bring Father Gael to justice. I will give justice to all those girls who never got it.
Even if I have to do it all on my own.
Even if I have to kill him to get it.
Even if it costs me everything I’ve achieved so far in my life and all the friends I have.
Because some wounds need to be washed out with blood in order to heal.
1
Alice
The conference room of the Rogue Angels MC clubhouse is growing stuffy and hot, that’s how long this execs meeting has been going on. Our president, Rogue called it because it’s finally time that the club gets back to the jobs and missions we started this MC over ten years ago—finding justice for those that our justice system has let down in one way or another.
