He smiles back, holding her face in both of his hands. “What happened to you, Mother?” he asks. He genuinely looks like he wants to know, though there’s a touch of madness to him. “Something fucking terrible must have happened to you.” She looks up at him, not even attempting to speak, not even attempting to answer his question.

He tilts the water canister, and we begin our adventure.

No matter who you are, no matter how strong your will, if someone pours a gallon of water into your mouth when it’s stuffed full of rags, you’re going to choke. You’re going to splutter. You’re going to half drown. Maria Rosa does all of these things as Rebel pours and breaks, pours and breaks with a grim efficiency.

Predictably, she doesn’t tell him a fucking thing. Eventually she loses consciousness. Rebel straightens, glaring down at her limp, soaked body, and shrugs his shoulders. “Well. I guess that was a pointless exercise.”

He sounds way too calm. Frankly, it’s a miracle that he’s functioning on any rational level at all. “You’re not gonna wake her up?”

Rebel grunts, tips his head back, closes his eyes, and then draws in a deep breath. “No. No point. If I carry on with this shit, I won’t be able to stop until she’s fucking dead.”

At least he knows this. That in itself means he’s keeping his shit together. Kind of. “Can you stay with her?” he asks. “When you leave, have Carnie come sit down here and watch both rooms. Make sure Mother and Dela Vega are behaving themselves. In the meantime, do what you have to. Find out what she’s doing in New Mexico, and why the hell she thought it was a good idea to come here.”

“Has to have something to do with Ramirez, right?”

Rebel slowly shakes his head. “Maybe not. Remember that DEA agent she wanted me to sort out for her?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it took me a while to put the pieces together, but the DEA agent that picked me up yesterday…?”

“Lowell? She’s the same agent? No way.”

“Way.”

“What are the chances?”

“Pretty high, actually.” Rebel rolls his neck, opening his eyes. He looks at me, the cold blue of his irises almost the color of ice. “She’s in town because of Ramirez. He and Maria Rosa are the two biggest drug importers into the United States. It’s normal that the same unit would be investigating them both. She must be the big, swinging dick, this Lowell. She’s a viper for sure. Find out what you can about her from Maria Rosa when she wakes up. In the meantime, perhaps you could dig the bullet out of her, please? I don’t feel like finding her dead tomorrow.” He cocks his head to one side, surprise chasing across his face. “Weird. I actually mean that.”

TWELVE

SOPHIA

I don’t go to Bron’s funeral.

I didn’t know her, and besides…if I were to look at her oddly shaped figure, wrapped up in layer upon layer of white sheets, I’d know it looked odd because the poor woman is without her head, hands and one of her feet. I’m doing my best not to recall the image of her hanging by her one remaining foot as it is. And the club still doesn’t know or trust me. A funeral is a deeply personal event. I don’t want to intrude.

I spend my time reading in the cabin instead. Pretending to read. Really, I’m trying not to be hyper aware of the fact that Raphael is so close. It does not feel safe with him no more than a hundred feet away. Rebel assured me he was tied to a freaking chair, that there’s no way for him to get to me, but the hairs on the back of my neck keep standing on end every time I hear the cabin settle.

Later, when Rebel returns from mourning with his club, he tells me to grab a coat and follow him. For the first time since he came and collected me from Julio’s compound, he tells me to climb on the back of his Ducati and hold onto him tight.

When I was a kid, maybe about seven or eight, Dad took me to see Santa Claus at Christmas. He took me to an expensive department store, the kind that hire genuine white-haired old men with real beards—men who didn’t feature on any sex registers. My father sat me on Genuine Santa’s knee, and he told me to tell the old man everything.

Santa had gentle brown eyes, the eyes of a Labrador or a Golden Retriever. When he asked me what I wanted more than anything in the world, I told him I wanted to be just like my big sister. My parents loved her more. She got all the best presents. She was really smart, so she understood what our father was talking about half the time. I wanted to be just like Sloane.

I felt that way for a long time. I was about sixteen before I realized that the eternal quest to Be Like Sloane was a futile one, and it was just as well being Alexis as it was being anyone else. Better, in fact, because being myself required very little effort, and being Sloane took so much concentration that I couldn’t concentrate on anything else.

I think about what Sloane would or wouldn’t do a lot, though. I’m think about what she would do now, as Rebel places his hands over my mine, wrapping his fingers around the trigger of the gun I’m holding. The gun he told me to take hold of back in the storage room in the bar.

In the distance, somewhere out toward the highway and civilization beyond, all that remains of the daylight is a hazy pink band, burned orange where it meets the horizon. The sky overhead is darkening with every passing minute, revealing a deep, rich blue, scattered with the pinprick of stars.

“Hold it like this. Make sure you keep your finger straight along the length of the gun up here. Don’t curve it around the trigger just yet,” Rebel tells me.

“This what they teach you in Motorcycle Gang 101?” I’m full of snark, since he dragged me out of his cabin in the dusky night air and refused to tell me where we were going or why. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he would lead me out into the middle of nowhere and want to teach me how to shoot a gun.

Little does he know I can already fire a gun perfectly well. Dad taught me when I was a teenager, the same way he taught Sloane. I keep this information to myself. Having Rebel’s chest pressed up against my back, feeling his warm breathing in my ear, is too nice to pass up. It feels wonderful, actually. I lean back into him, feeling him tense and then ease at the contact.

“No,” he tells me. “Not motorcycle gang 101. Military School. Very different organization, I assure you, sweetheart.”

It slips my mind from time to time that Rebel even went to Military School. And then I remember the dozens and dozens of pictures on his father’s wall, and it seems entirely normal that the man standing at my back fought for his country and defended his people. Being a protector is second nature to him.

“Now, when you fire,” he tells me. “Don’t pull at the trigger. Don’t jerk it. Squeeze it softly. Don’t hold your breath. Just inhale…” He removes his left hand from over mine and places it over my sternum, above my belly, making a satisfied sound at the back of his throat when he feels my ribcage rise. “Good. Now, nice and steady. When you breathe out—”

The report of the gun fire shatters the silence in the desert. Fifty feet away, the rusted Budweiser can Rebel balanced on top of a round fence post jumps into the air—a direct hit. No more than two seconds later, the echo from the shot comes back to us, weakened by the distance it’s traveled but still bracingly loud. Rebel grunts. He sounds more than a little bemused. Using the index finger on the hand resting over my chest, he digs me in the ribs, burying his face into my neck.

“Cheat,” he growls.

“I didn’t cheat. I did what you told me to.”

“But you’ve already done it before, haven’t you? And you had me thinking you were completely ignorant to the workings of a gun.”