He held me and my mind raced for a good long while. Finally, I asked, “Could you really do it?”
He chuckled and kissed my hair.
“Go to sleep, Raven. This conversation?”
“Yeah?”
“It never happened.”
I nodded against him.
“Okay.”
“You’re safe, you know,” he said. “As long as I’m around, as long as the club’s around… you’re safe now.”
I closed my eyes.
I so desperately wanted to believe that.
15
Mace…
Fenris was all business. We didn’t leave the farm until all the animals were fed, their water troughs seen to, and he checked on several of the fattest nanny goats, close to bursting with their kids. It was odd to see him like this, concerned about the animals.
We left the farm on our bikes and went to a place that I didn’t expect Fen to even know existed, a public library. The place was small and rough looking, and inside the terminals were scuffed and dated, but that wasn’t what we had come for. The woman working the desk had the same look as he did, blond hair, shaved on the sides, and she had a massive double-headed eagle tattoo piece across her chest. They spoke, and in a few minutes, she had more information on Parole Officer Massimiliano "Max" Bianchi than I could have found in a month. She also said strings of words I couldn’t follow, like tor, and dark web, doxing, and blockchain data.
It didn’t matter how, but I had the fucker’s home address, thanks to Kim, and the rest came later via Cipher. We had his phone number, home and cell, and even shit like his blood type and uniform measurements.
“We case the joint, but we do it quiet like. Looks like it is a nicer neighborhood, so we can’t wear colors or ride the bikes. We’ll stick out,” Fen said as we walked back to the bikes.
“So, what, we use the truck?” I asked.
“Nah, even that sticks out,” he said.
“We call an Uber to drive us through the neighborhood?”
“I was thinking about walking, but that might work too.” He laughed.
“Split the diff, take an Uber to the neighborhood, then walk the alley, check the place out like that?”
“Good plan, and we do it at dark,” he said.
“Because we won’t be noticed?”
“Because people aren’t as on guard, in their homes, when the sun goes down,” Fen said. “They think they are safe.” The way he smiled when he said it made my blood cold.
A very nervous man showed up and drove us from a popular night spot back to a house a few blocks from Bianchi’s house. The kid was really glad to have us out of his Maxima, but Fen gave him a good tip and a smile as he all but did a burnout leaving. Even without our jackets, the two of us were a pair of scary looking motherfuckers.
We walked a short distance from the house we had been dropped off at. The alley afforded darkness and a lack of attention, plus this place was absolutely the sort of place that hated us, and everything about it. Cookie cutter houses sat on postage stamp lawns, but each jagoff had an oversized riding mower, SUVs in driveways, and everything reeked of fake wealth.
These assholes were over their heads in bank loans and mortgages.
Fen followed a few turns and then stopped at a backyard. “This is the one.”
“Follow your nose?” I asked.
“GPS, man, get in the twenty-first century.” He tapped his phone.
“Well fuck me, then,” I said, and pulled myself up to look over the fence. Bianchi had a clean-cut backyard, but it was mostly empty. No toys, no bikes, no shit like that. That was good, no sign of kids. “Does this asshole have a wife or anything?”
“You don’t know?” Fen asked.
“No, man, I don’t.”
“You saw it all as good as I did. He isn’t married. Divorced, no kids, ex lives down in Fresno,” he growled. “So no, we don’t have to worry about women or children being here.”
“Or we do.” I gestured toward the sliding glass doors on the back of the house. I finally got my first look at Bianchi himself. He was what I expected, an average looking white guy, on the thin side, but in a decade or so he would hit the middle age spread and turn into one of those potbellied cops who nursed a coffee cup and a donut everywhere they went, shotgunning whiskey and blood pressure pills. Right now, he was probably still running miles in the morning, and spending time at the shooting range.
He wasn’t alone.
There was a woman with him, a bottle blond, fake tits, a little on the heavy side.
“Looks like he has company,” I said. “We aren’t ready, anyway.”
“Who said we aren’t ready?” Fen asked. He pulled a long-bladed knife from the top of his boot. The light caught on the blade, and there were Celtic knots etched in the steel.
“That’s all you brought?” I asked.
“Gun crime does real time,” Fen said. “Besides, when it comes to something like this, I would want to use just my hands.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Guns are for war, knives are for lovers, and bare hands are for your worst enemies.” I could almost feel the gleam in his eye. I could certainly hear it in his voice. “As long as no one comes down the alley, we wait.”
“For what?” I asked.
“When the time is right, you’ll know.”
“And if I don’t?”
“If you keep asking fucking questions, I’ll send you to go get some frozen yogurt and some hair ties, since you’re being a little girl about this,” he said. It would have been less intimidating if he had raised his voice or spoken harshly, but this was just matter of fact. Fenris was hunting, and I had to stop asking so many questions if I was going to go through with this.
It would be a lot easier to just let him handle it, just let the berserker loose, and then head back to the farm,
