Page 51 of A Murderous Crow
“I didn’t know there was a next line.”
“There is,” I said. “’Satisfaction brought it back.’”
He chuckled and nodded. “Touché.”
“So…” I smiled a little wryly, and he shook his head.
“Relentless.”
“I mean, if I’m the cat, I have nine lives, so ‘you only live once’is out the window.”
He laughed then, and I couldn’t help but smile. His laugh was rich and robust, and I liked it when it was genuine.
“Fair, Kitten. Fair. But you don’t want to use them up too quickly, so best let this one lie for now. You’ll meet them sooner or later.”
“How many are there?” I asked. “Or is that off-limits too?”
He said, “Thirteen. If you count the prospect, fourteen, but he’s not exactly one of us, per se. Not yet anyway.”
“How does that work?” I asked.
“So full of questions,” he admonished, but it was jovially. He looked me over and said, “This is something Icananswer and should – so here goes.”
He took a deep breath before launching into it. “Once upon a time, the core of us all went to the same boarding school. We were a bunch of dumbass rich kids displaced or pretty much disowned from our families and stuck somewhere off to the sidelines to grow out of being inconveniences to the family lines. At least, that’s what it felt like anyway. Synister was sort of our de facto leader when it came to school. We all just sort of fell in under him.”
He paused, letting memories wash over him, and I could tell by how the muscle in his jaw ticked that they weren’t particularly fond ones. I didn’t think that had much to do with Synister or his classmates, but rather his family, which the Prescotts wereoldmoney here in Savannah. Like clear lineage dating all the way back to the Oglethorpe days. Fresh off the boat and ready to colonize the Americas from England.
“Syn and I became fast friends, and the rest just sort of found themselves in our gravitational pull. You know how it is.” He shrugged, and I simply pursed my lips and nodded, continuing to eat and listen because… no. I absolutely didn’t know how it was. I mean, I had a bit of an inkling, I guess. My family was firmly middle class, which made my brother and me pretty much the upper echelon in our respective schools, but we didn’t let the fact that our family owned the farm where most of the other kids’ parents worked go to our heads. Our parents raised us humble and, lord, I wouldn’t want to disappoint Nana or Pop-Pop.
The type of dynamic Corbett spoke of was… I mean, I could feel theCruel Intentionskind of vibe from it, but I didn’t think that was necessarilyreal. That was just a movie… but I guess in some places and on some tiers above even my family’s, it was as real as it got. I mean, I knew that coming here and working my ass off and faking it until I made it had risks, but… this? All of this? Being complicit in a murder and watching how casually these men covered it up and just went back to business as usual was intense, and beyond anything I thought it could be.
It was definitely too late to tell the truth of my origins now, though. I was afraid that if I did, well, it might just be the thing to makemedisappear too, which I did not want to do.
“Before we knew it, we grew to become enough in numbers that we formed the Iron Wraiths. At first, it was a sort of rich-kids’ school secret society sort of thing. But as we got older and ended up in the same shop class, we all fell in love with motorcycles at the same time, and things sort of just naturally evolved from there.
“It became a rite of passage when we each hit eighteen to get our first bikes, go for our motorcycle endorsements, and thus be grandfathered into the club.
“Certainly not how most motorcycle clubs formed, but we were like, ‘fuck it,’ it was our club, we could form and do things how we wanted.
“Some of us went to college, some of us went to war, some of us got into family businesses, or got the startup money from family to go do our own thing. Some of us were successful, some of us weren’t, and some of us got caught up in drugs or what have you and struggled along the way. But you know what none of us ever did?” he asked.
I shook my head silently because I couldn’t fathom.
“We never gave up on each other.”
His gaze was intense, the way it bored into mine, and we sat perfectly still, the weight of the moment settling onto our shoulders and sinking into our beings.
He was telling me something without coming right out and saying it, and his message was crystal fucking clear.
The men of the Iron Wraiths were his ride-or-die friends. More than friends, more than family, if there was such a thing.
“Ever hear the proverb ‘blood is thicker than water?’”he asked.
“Yes, but I know that’s not the whole thing. Something about covenant or something, something,” I said.
He smiled and he said, “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb,”he quoted.
I nodded.
