Page 46 of Kodiak

“Demi with Luna?” Xavier asks as he meets me in the equipment room. It’s a private room that not all brothers have access to. It’s located in a hidden closet behind a swinging panel that sits directly behind the bar, the wall swings open if you insert the correct PIN number. The keypad for that has to be located too. Only officers know the placement of it. It’s not visible to the naked eye.

“She is,” I answer, pulling out a few of my favorite torture tools. Most of them are for intimidation tactics, but not all. Today is Peaches’s final day breathing.

Since meeting Luna I’ve tried to reel that side of myself in, but it’s been bobbing right below the surface, ready to snag its prey. The fact that she dared touch someone who isminemeans it’sraring to go and I won’t stop until Peaches is nothing but a memory. I still can’t believe she had the audacity to try and hurt Luna as well as kill the baby thinking that I’d turn to her. It’s positively mind-blowing.

“Think she’ll give Demi all the details?” He asks. At my shrug, he continues, “because I’m thinking we may need to station one of the guys outside of the door if she does. You know how impulsive and quick tempered Demi can be. Especially when it comes to Luna.”

“Why do you think that is?” I question him. “Because people don’t just go off script like she does. It’s like she has a trigger, or possibly even several. I’d like to know what they are so we can help her.”

“Hello. Pot meet kettle,” Xavier grouses.

I snort before saying, “Life is a trigger for me, Xavier. You know this.”

“I do,” he acknowledges. “But since meeting Luna, you’ve settled somewhat.”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” I confess. “She makes me want to be a better man. My first intuition isn’t to maim or kill.”

“Next thing you know, we’ll all be sitting around the firepit singing Kumbaya,” he teases. Always the jokester determined to lighten the mood. That is unless someone lightshismatch which I don’t bother to point out to him.

“Did you secretly want to be a Boy Scout or something, Xavier? You’re always talking about campfires and other bonding bullshit.” He snickers but doesn’t respond to me. Our formative years weren’t exactly amenable to what ‘normal’ kids experience,so there was never a snowball’s chance in Hell that either of us would’ve been Scouts.

My eyes light up when I find my Bowie knife sitting on the shelf. It went off to our cleaner to be sanitized and all traces of DNA removed from the blade, bolster, and handle. The gleaming metal has me near drooling.

Xavier shakes his head, mirth dancing in his eyes, so I know he’s fixing to say something ridiculous. “The way you’re looking at that weapon has me waiting for you to coo, ‘Come to Papa’.”

“Don’t talk about my baby like that. You’ll hurt his feelings,” I joke along with him. If you can’t beat them, join them—or so the saying goes.

“Peaches is nice and nervous,” Stixx tells us as he swings the panel open and marches in. “She’s begging us to let her go. Promises she’ll never show her face in Texas again.”

“Oh, her face will never be seen in Texas again. I guarandamntee that,” I reply.

“Let's get this done and over with,” Xavier mumbles.

“What has a thorn up your ass suddenly?” I probe as I tuck Bowie, the name I’ve given my dear friend who’s been with me for going on ten years now, into my hip sheath and pull out one of our sets of brass knuckles from the drawer we house them in.

While none of uswantto hurt a woman, Peaches signed her own fucking death warrant the second she concocted her fucked-up plan to betray not only me, but also the club.

We walk as a unit out of the clubhouse and meet the others who’ll be joining us on this session’s endeavor in the middle of the yard.

“Is everything in the shed ready to go?” I ask both Risk and Hemi.

“It is,” Risk stoically responds.

Hemi gets a gleam in his eye when he replies, “You should’ve seen the look on Peaches’s face when she saw me getting the straps attached to the eye rings.” We have it rigged so we can string up our perpetrator to the leather bands and have them dangling from the ceiling.

I don’t want them completely immobilized, that takes the fun out of the chase. All predators want to have a little bit of entertainment as they take out their target. And since I won’t ever take the chance that someone can run and escape, we don’t allow ourselves to have a scavenger hunt—even if the thought of hunting them in the woods behind our clubhouse gets my blood pumping.

“Well, she’s really gonna get a kick out of things when I start laying my tools out on the metal table, huh?” I tease, a maniacal laugh accompanying my words.

“Are we gonna stand here gabbing all day, or are we going to do this?” Rev asks.

“Anticipation is part of the long game, brother,” Xavier exclaims, smacking Rev on the shoulder. “We gotta build this shit up so she’s quivering.”

“She pissed herself, does that count as quivering?” Rev asks Xavier.

“No, that’s someone who doesn’t have control of her faculties,” Xavier replies, a large grin spread across his face. “When shequivers, you’ll know because she’ll be a blubbering mess. I’m talking snot, shivers, incoherent speech as she begs for mercy.”

“No mercy,” I declare. “I had even thought about prolonging it by finding herbs and shit we could force on her soshecould experience some of what Luna did, but truthfully, I don’t want to waste that much time on her.”

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