Page 68 of Virago

Dom pulled his phone out and tapped at the screen. He handed it over to Badger first. “Danvers had these on his camera roll. Looks to me like crime scene photos, not something he did, but they’re still fucked up.”

“Fucking hell!” Badger said and threw his head sideways like the images on the screen had actually struck him. He held the phone out to Double A, but Zaxx grabbed it before the VP could.

He would have said he was at max capacity for fury, but he would have been wrong. These images, and the thought that Zelda could have ended up in photos like them, sank his rage so deep it might have changed his DNA.

Nine images, and yes, they were obviously crime scene photos, with evidence markers in view in some of them.

Dead women. Some had been strangled, some stabbed, one asphyxiated with a plastic bag still on her head. Three had bite marks all over their flesh. All badly beaten, bloody and bruised. All naked or nearly so. All lying so they were completely exposed. They had all been raped, that was horrifically obvious.

They’d been taken at different times of day, and it looked like they’d been taken over a span of many years. Danvers might have been a cop on some or all of these scenes, but it seemed more likely that he’d gone looking through case archives for photos for his spank bank.

It was like he’d been trying to reenact the photos on his sister.

Tommy caught the phone as it fell from Zaxx’s hand.

“Motherfucker!” Tommy grunted after he saw the photos.

Dom had had those images on his phone for weeks without saying a word. Zaxx’s fists curled up so tightly his nails bit into his palms. “Why did you keep those? Why didn’t you tell anybody what they were?”

Guilt drained the blood from Dom’s face as he answered, “I kept them for leverage if we needed it later. I didn’t bring it up because I didn’t want to make him a target again over something that wasn’t about us.”

“It’s about us,” Zaxx snarled.

Tommy handed the phone to Double A. “Boss, I know you wanna keep clean, but this guy ... he’s gotta go. He hurt one of ours, and he is a sick motherfucker. Maybe he was just gettin’ off over old pictures before, but now he’s acting out his shit on real girls. On our girl.”

Zaxx didn’t know how he felt about Tommy calling his sister ‘ours,’ but that was something to think about later.

Badger dragged his hand through his greying hair. “Okay. Yeah. He goes. We need a way to clean up after, and—wait.” He turned to Zaxx. “You said two guys. Do we know the other?”

Tommy answered, and his voice had changed dramatically. Gone was the beefy good ol’ boy. In his place was a vengeance demon. “We will by the time Danvers takes his last breath.”

Badger nodded. “Okay. We do this smart, and this does not fucking mean we’re gonna talk about working dark again. This is taking care of our own. Only that. And whatever we do, I’m in. I’m going. Understood?”

The others nodded, but Zaxx focused on the president. He needed some assurance before he agreed to do this the club way. “It needs to be tonight. Zel’s sleeping at the clinic. When I go back and she’s awake, I need to be able to tell her she’s safe. It has to be now.”

Badger regarded him for a long time, and all the men stood quietly, waiting for their president’s word. If that word were no, Zaxx would turn and head out on his own. He didn’t give a fuck what happened to him, he didn’t give a fuck if it meant his kutte, or life in prison, or the death penalty. He didn’t give a fuck what happened to the club. He was killing that son of a bitch tonight.

The president must have seen all that in Zaxx’s eyes, because he nodded. “Then we best get busy and come up with a way to do this.”

Chapter Eighteen

Gia eased open the door to the procedure room. It was dim, lit only by a work light over a side counter. Zelda slept on the gurney, curled into a ball, buried under several thin, white hospital blankets. The bloody cover she’d come in with sat on the counter, sealed in a plastic bag.

Tasha stood beside the gurney, checking the drip on the IV bag.

“Everything okay?” Gia murmured.

Looking over her shoulder, Tasha gave her a closed-mouth smile and nodded. Then she held up a finger, silently asking for a moment. Keenly aware of Zelda’s privacy, Gia stepped back and let the door close. She’d wait for Tash here in the corridor.

Zaxx had stormed off more than an hour earlier. Tasha had called Len right away to update him, so no doubt the club was involved now with all this. Gia had decided not to call home herself yet. It was the middle of the night, so calling home would only wake her family and, now, maybe pull her dad into this mess. She’d wait until everybody had gotten their night’s sleep.

Meanwhile, she was doing what she could to help Tasha take care of Zelda.

What she could do was not much; the kind of doctor she wanted to be was not this kind of doctor. So she’d scoured the break room for supplies, then made a fresh pot of coffee and tossed some Pillsbury cinnamon rolls into the fancy toaster oven. While they baked, she opened and made up the pullout sofa in the office so Tasha could get at least some sleep.

Gia didn’t need a bed; she couldn’t imagine being able to sleep again in the near future. This night had wrung her out, and she felt guilty for that, emotionally overwhelmed herself when it was Zelda who’d endured a horror.

Damn, she was tired of always feeling emotionally torn apart. Since she’d come home in May, she was constantly pulled in opposite directions. Her parents’ extravagant gift, the brief but powerful connection she’d had with Zaxx, her suddenly lackluster interest in the research she needed to do for her dissertation, Zelda’s trauma and the way it brought Zaxx back into her orbit, all of it, no matter if it started with a good thing or a bad thing, everything that came her way since she’d been home somehow brought with it a big helping of guilt.

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