Christopher Golden - Sons of Anarchy - Bratva

“I’m sorry,” she said.

In the backseat, Gavril’s head banged the window. They hadn’t hit a bump or a pothole.

Outside the car, the moon and stars made a ghost land of the desert, and Trinity thought that was only right. It felt to her that they were all ghosts out here, that there was no real difference between the living and the dead.

Pretty soon that might not be far from the truth .

They hit a bump and something rattled in the trunk. The corpse of their friend wasn’t the only thing back there. They had the guns.

Trinity would have thought the price they’d paid for those guns was too high, except without them they would all have been dead soon enough. Now, with the weapons and ammunition they’d taken from Oscar Temple, they had a chance.

In the distance, she could see what remained of Storyland. Built in the 1980s, it had been a minor amusement park aimed at small children, full of shoddy attractions based on fairy tales and nursery rhymes. Mother Goose and Hansel and Gretel figured prominently, and, from what Trinity had learned, the attractions had included a track for antique cars, spinning teacups, a flying carpet ride, and other rides that would be eclipsed by even the least sophisticated modern theme park… all of this a relatively short drive from downtown Las Vegas.

The headlights picked out the shape of the Wonderland Hotel. Oleg tapped the brake and guided the car around the back of the building. The Wonderland had one tall wing and one short one, which met at the two-story lobby structure. Another section of the hotel stuck out the back in a T shape, which allowed for the rooms along the rear leg of the T to be invisible from the few cars that made their way along Jackrabbit Ridge. Gravel crunched beneath the tires as they pulled up in the midst of the five other vehicles parked there.

The door to one of the abandoned hotel’s rooms opened, and Kirill emerged with a pistol and a bottle of beer. Perhaps forty-five years old, Kirill had skin so leathery that its lines seemed more like scars. He kept his remaining hair buzzed tight to his scalp, and he had icy, blue-white eyes that never smiled, even when he himself might laugh. Louis Drinkwater—who’d told Trinity everything she knew about the area—was a local real estate agent who owed Kirill Sokolov many favors and owed the Bratva tens of thousands of dollars. He’d given them the keys to the Wonderland Hotel. Sokolov didn’t trust Louis, but Trinity did. The real estate man had more than his share of sorrow, but he didn’t strike her as a coward.

Still, they kept watch. Someone would have been on guard in the front, hiding behind darkened windows. Kirill would have known they were coming, but still he had the gun. It was impossible to be too careful.

They should have been more careful with Oscar Temple.

Kirill watched them as they climbed from the car, his brow furrowed. He said something in Russian. Trinity heard Feliks’s name and knew what he was asking.

“In the trunk,” Oleg replied.

Kirill swore and cast his beer aside, striding toward the car as Oleg went around to the back, keys in hand. Trinity refused to look, marching toward the room she and Oleg had been sharing. She halted before she reached it and forced herself to turn and watch as they opened the car trunk and Kirill clapped his hands to the sides of his skull.

Grieving for his brother.

No one brought up the fact that they’d managed to get the guns. It was important—it might give them the edge they needed to survive, maybe even win—but Kirill Sokolov didn’t care about guns just then. He leaned against the car, lay his head back, and stared at the stars.

Trinity wasn’t close enough to see if he cried.

The Wonderland Hotel had been their refuge for weeks, but none of them had expected to be buried there.

On long rides, Jax couldn’t help thinking about his little brother Tommy. With the sky spreading out in front of him and the road whipping by beneath him, he could hear Tommy’s laughter. There’d been many times when Jax, six years older, had been appointed guardian and protector for his brother while JT had worked on restoring a vintage Harley he’d picked up somewhere.

Gemma would be making dinner. Jax would take Tommy out to the small yard or to the concrete basketball square next door, the one with the dingy, torn net hanging from the hoop… and they’d run. They never had a destination, the Teller boys—they just ran. From the time Tommy could walk, they would run together. Sometimes they would put out their arms and fly together, or pretend they were astride a Harley when they were far too young to ride. By the time Jax turned eleven, his urgency had faded a little and Tommy tended to take the lead, even though he was only five years old.

At six, Tommy had died of a congenital heart defect. It was the family flaw—Gemma had it, too.

Jax didn’t do a lot of running these days—not unless there was trouble. But on these long rides, he remembered what it had felt like to fly with his little brother. Those memories should have caused him pain, made him grieve, but instead they made him happy. For a little while, Tommy was with him again. He wondered if his sons, Abel and Thomas—named after an uncle he’d never known—would run together. Jax hoped that they would.

Three headlights cut the darkness out on that ribbon of highway. Jax, Opie, and Chibs had been riding for a couple of hours already, and they wound along two-lane blacktop that curved through pine forests, up hills, and into canyons. Later, they would ride through desolate badlands that had a rugged beauty all their own, but long after dark in the middle of a workweek, these roads could be just as desolate. Quiet and peaceful.

He felt the weight of the gun at the small of his back and knew that quiet and peaceful were good. Less chance of trouble.

Opie rode on his left and Chibs on his right. When a car or truck appeared coming the other direction, Opie dropped behind them, but vehicles had been few and far between for the past three quarters of an hour or so. Opie had been his best friend pretty much all his life. He had a gentle soul and a savage heart, able to find mercy where others could not and to be merciless when a line had been crossed. Jax worried about Opie—the loss of his first wife had broken something inside him—but when shit turned ugly, there was no one he’d rather have at his back. Chibs had survived ugliness and tragedy, too. A son of a bitch named Jimmy O had given him the scars on his face, stolen away his wife and daughter, and made it impossible for him to stay in Ireland and keep drawing breath. Jimmy O was dead now, but somehow betrayal had made Chibs understand loyalty better than anyone else.

Jax had unwavering faith in both men. Out here, flying, these guys were his brothers now. He trusted them with his life.

Kirill asked Trinity to say a prayer over his brother’s grave. They stood there, nineteen Russian men and this one Irish girl—no longer such a girl—and lowered their heads. In the moonlight, the dirt on the arms and faces of those who’d dug the grave made them look like orphans out of some grim, modern Charles Dickens tale. They didn’t have much use for God. They were gunmen and leg breakers. Since the moment Oleg had begun introducing Trinity around to his Bratva when they’d been in Belfast, she had tried very hard not to wonder what their worst crimes might have been. Drug smuggling, certainly. Murder? Some of them, she was sure. They were hard men, and some of them seemed like cruel men, but to Oleg they were family, and if she wanted him, she knew that they were part of the package.

Quietly, her voice carrying in the reverent hush that the small hours always created, she said the Lord’s Prayer. When she’d finished, they all said, “Amen,” almost as if they meant it. Most of them were godless, but she’d found that even those without faith still wished their loved ones a safe journey through whatever might come after life.