Page 12 of Soulless Saint

See? I still had a half a brain, even if my brother was looking at me like I’d chucked the whole damn thing out with Saturday’s trash. I’d long since accepted my role as the family fuck-up. Why couldn’t he just let it go?

“Relax?” He threw the word back at me with enough venom to give a snake charmer necrosis. “We’re supposed to be keeping a low profile, Kale. What fucking part of that is hard to understand?”

Sometimes I wished my brother didn’t talk to me either, but alas my parents and I were the only ones he was more than comfortable mouthing off to whenever the mood struck him.

I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to breathe through the skull piercing ache just behind the flesh and bone there.

“What the fuck do you want me to say, Hardin?”

“It’s not what I want you to say,” he growled. “The Sons of O’Sullivan are—”

“You’re right. Is that what you want? Can we be done with this conversation? I can’t do this shit right now.”

I turned on my heel and went to the kitchen, leaving wet footprints all over the dark hardwood and even darker tile.

It wasn’t like I fucking planned to be out all night, but when I woke up covered in sweat with the taste of ash and blood in the back of my throat, I just…

I grabbed the coffee pot, dumping the remaining dregs of old java into a mug to shove into the microwave.

A shuddering breath left my lungs as I braced myself on the counter. I was only going out for a couple drinks. The last party we had here cleaned us out of liquor and I knew I wouldn’t get back to sleep without its sweet, sweet oblivion.

Hardin’s slow sure-footed footfalls entered the kitchen behind me. He didn’t speak.

“It won’t happen again.”

We both knew it was a lie.

I thought I was done with this shit. If anyone had the right to be angry about it, it was me. He suffered the worst of it when we were kids, why didn’t he still suffer like I did?

Why was his only scar the inability to talk to anyone he wasn’t bonded to through blood? And that shit wasn’t a fucking weakness at all, but a strength. Hardin had only to look at someone in that way he had and he could scare the literal shit out of them faster than anyone could with words.

He wielded his silence like a weapon, and whenever he did open his mouth to speak, everyone shut the fuck up and listened. A single word from him was like the drop of a guillotine blade. Final. Inarguable.

Like this conversation.

“We’re meeting Damien at the shop in an hour,” he grumbled, ignoring my false promise. “Clean yourself up and take some aspirin.”

I spied my phone next to the sink and lifted it, remembering I left it behind when I grabbed my bike keys and took off. Which meant that perky-titted brunette from the Crown had definitely not put her number in it. A waste.

“Hey, did Sam—”

“Yeah. He nicked your keys.”

My bike would be around back in his garage then, safely away from anyone who might mess with it. At least Hardin wasn’t giving me a hard time about driving that shit less than fucking sober last night. Though I figured that was only because he had bigger issues swirling in that thick head of his.

I tapped my phone and messages lit up the screen like I’d been gone a damn week instead of a few hours. Missed calls and voicemails from Hardin filled a page of notifications, along with nudes from the two freshmen I’d shared my bed with last week. Nice.

There were some new messages in the group chat with our cousins, The Crows. I scrolled past all the other shit and tapped them, licking my desert dry lips.

“Hey, Hardin, you find the girl yet?”

The microwave beeped, and I jerked the door open to stop it from squawking again, putting the piping hot coffee to my lips.

My brother’s back stiffened, and he paused in the living room, turning so I could only see the side of his face. “She found me,” he said in a low voice.

“What?”

“On the street outside The Crown. Watched me dump your ass into the back of the Bronco.”

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