Calm & Storm (The Night Horde SoCal Book 6) Read online

  He crouched at Riley’s side and put his hand on her shoulder. She was so small, almost like a child herself.

  Her eyes rolled to him. “Lex…help Lex…Lexi…please. Lexi.”

  Ian, kneeling near his mother, holding his sister’s head in his lap, lost his struggle to be strong and began to sob.

  Veda looked up, tears streaming down her face. “Lexi’s gonna be okay, Ri. It’s her leg. The fright made her pass out is all. She’s gonna be okay.”

  Faith reached with one bloody hand and grabbed Ronin’s arm. “We have to get her to a hospital, Roe. Please.”

  Ronin turned to back to Lonnie, who already had his phone in his hand. “There’s a hospital on the rez. Ambulance’ll be two minutes.” He looked down at the bodies of the men Ronin had killed. “And we’ll get this cleaned up as soon as you’re all out.” Putting his phone to his ear, he went out of house.

  Riley didn’t have two minutes left. And she knew it, too. “Ian,” she gasped. “Deck.” One hand lifted weakly, and Ronin knew what she wanted.

  So did Ian. Still sobbing, he leaned forward over Lexi’s head and laid his head on his mother’s bloody shoulder.

  Ronin looked down the hallway and called, “Deck. C’mere, little man.”

  The small blond boy unlocked himself from the scrum of terror around Sadie’s legs and came forward to Ronin. His eyes wide, sucking his thumb, he inched around his mother’s legs. Ronin picked him up and sat him at Riley’s side. Her hand flopped out and grabbed for his.

  Faith took the pistol out of Lexi’s hand. Then she lifted that small, slack hand and laid it in Riley’s.

  Tears slid down Riley’s temples, but with her children all around her, she smiled. “Tell Bart…”

  She didn’t finish her sentence.

  Less than a minute after Riley took her last breath, the night air filled with the wail of ambulance sirens.

  ~oOo~

  The events of the night had, of course, drawn the attention of law enforcement, but they were on the reservation, so Lonnie Little had handled the law. Ronin had been preparing himself to take point on answering questions and breathed a small sigh of relief that he’d avoided that. He wasn’t good at talking. He wasn’t slick, didn’t know how to say the right thing to close off an interview like that.

  The rest of the Horde arrived at the hospital about three hours after Ronin called them. Now the entire Horde family had filled the waiting area at the reservation medical center.

  Not the entire family. Not Riley. And not Lexi, who was in a patient bed. Not her father, who was with her. Not Stuff, in surgery to repair damage from three bullets.

  Bart had been stoic when the rest of the club arrived, but his face had worn the ravages of crippling grief. He’d been led through locked double doors almost immediately upon arriving, and he hadn’t been seen since.

  From his seat in the corner of the waiting room, Ronin sat quietly and observed the Horde family.

  Trick, his arm in a sling, sat with Juliana and their daughters. He’d been shot in the shoulder, a through-and-through, and had refused to be admitted. So they’d stitched him up and discharged him. He had his good arm around Lucie, their oldest, and she had his kutte clutched in tight little handfuls. Like all the children old enough to understand, her face was red and her eyes swollen, the visible aftermath of sorrow and fear. Juliana sat on Trick’s injured side, holding baby Callie. Juliana’s face, too, showed the signs of weeping, and she kept leaning carefully over to smooth a hand over Trick’s beard.

  Demon had baby Jude on his shoulder, Tucker in his lap, and his free arm around Faith, who held a soundly sleeping Lana.

  Muse had Sid in his lap, her head on his shoulder, and she held Ezra, also sleeping.

  Sherlock had taken Sadie and Noah across the hall to a smaller waiting room, where her sounds of distress were still audible. Once Sadie had laid her eyes on her man, that last gossamer thread of strength she’d had had broken.

  J.R. and Veda leaned arm in arm together in the corner nearest Ronin’s own.

  Hoosier and Bibi had charge of Ian and Deck. Deck was sleeping in Bibi’s arms. Hoosier was leaning close to Ian and talking to him. Ian, of all the children in the waiting room, looked the most damaged by the night’s events.

  Connor and Pilar stood near the entrance, locked in a tight embrace. Not talking, not even moving. Simply standing together as close as they could be.

  Fargo, Keanu, and Big Nate sat clustered together, sitting silently. They were the only other Horde besides Ronin who didn’t have families of their own.

  No—Ronin wasn’t part of that group. Not anymore. He had a family. One that could never know trauma like this.

  As he sat and surveyed the scene, in this dazed calm, he realized something important. Something potentially devastating.

  All the men with women had separated from each other and bound to their own families. No one was even acknowledging their brothers in the room. They had not come together in this tragedy; they had broken apart.

  The Horde wasn’t a family. Not now, not on this night. Maybe not ever again.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Tillie answered the door holding a martini glass filled with dark brown liquid with a creamy top. Before she even spoke a word, she handed Lorraine the glass with a flourish.

  Lorraine took it as she stepped into the entryway. “Espresso martini?”

  “Absolut-ly. Debra brought the most decadent chocolate beetroot cake, and we are going to gorge on chocolate and spiked espresso, and you are going to spill your beans.” Tillie smirked. “By ‘spill your beans,’ I mean talk. I don’t mean puke.” She closed the door, and the two walked into Tillie’s downtown loft.

  “Got it,” Lorraine laughed. “There is not much to spill, anyway.”

  “That, my love, is a double load of horse crap, and you know it.”

  She did know it. Tillie had called her earlier in the afternoon and demanded that she come over for girl time. It hadn’t taken long to ascertain that Cameron had called Lorraine’s closest friend and told her that she needed said girl time.

  After a few minutes of acute irritation at her interfering son, she’d relented and acknowledged that he was right. She needed a respite.

  He’d done something like this shortly after she’d moved out of the house and separated from Douglas. She’d been unmoored and lost. It had been her idea to leave him the house—if they were divorcing, then she wanted a fresh start, and that monster of a place had always been his taste more than hers. But unlike Douglas, she hadn’t been planning a different life, so she’d had nowhere to go, hadn’t even known how to think about what she wanted next.

  She’d rented a little apartment in Hollywood, on a month-to-month basis, and then sat in her teeny living room on the castoff sofa from their storage locker and wondered what the hell she was supposed to do.

  Tillie, Debra, and Miranda had gathered her up and shaken her awake then. ‘Book club’ had started about that time.

  Tonight wasn’t ‘book club,’ which had grown in size since the core of four had started it. Tonight was just old friends supporting one of their own.

  But this was different. She was depressed, yes. But she wasn’t unmoored and lost. She hadn’t been sitting alone in a room, dazed, for the past week or so since Ronin had disappeared. She’d been working, going about her normal routine.

  Inside, though, with every passing day without any contact with him, she was losing more and more of her sense that he had ever even happened. Days without any contact. He’d said that there was trouble and he’d be out of touch for ‘a while,’ and then he’d completely disappeared. He’d turned off his phone. He was simply gone. She didn’t even know if he was alive.

  Cameron was in the same boat, struggling for different reasons with the same abandonment. He’d even ridden his new Ducati to Ronin’s house in Madrone, but had come back reporting that it was buttoned-up and quiet.

  He hadn’t tried the clubhouse beca
use he was too intimidated. Lorraine thought that would have been a non-starter, anyway; no one in the club knew about them, Ronin had said, so it was unlikely they would have shared any information with seeming strangers. Even if they’d been around to deny him.

  Cameron suggested that she needed to talk about Ronin with someone, someone other than him, someone who wasn’t dealing with his own odd feelings about the missing biker. She’d been contemplating calling Minerva, who’d at least met Ronin and had had something resembling a conversation over drinks, when Tillie had called—Cameron had already talked to her.

  So she’d taken the night off and was here, walking into Tillie’s glamorous rented loft, pouring an espresso martini down her throat as fast as she could swallow.

  They walked into the kitchen, and Tillie took the empty glass from Lorraine’s hand. Miranda and Debra were standing at the island, dipping strawberries into ganache. At the center of the island was a beautiful chocolate cake, just as advertised. Debra was the head pastry chef at one of the most famous Beverly Hills hotels. She was always in charge of dessert when they got together.

  They greeted her in a crush of hugs and kisses, even though she’d seen each of them within the past few weeks. They hadn’t been all together in a while, though, and this felt something like a homecoming.

  The ‘core of four’ had become friends through their work, not because they all worked together, though Lorraine and Debra had for a few years in San Diego, but because they had jobs in the same field, and the high-end hospitality industry in Los Angeles—in Southern California, really—was quite intimate. They all went to the same trade shows, they all bid for the same jobs, served the same clientele, had similar experiences to dish about.

  For some, maybe even most—those who styled themselves culinary ‘artistes’—that meant ‘frenemy’ relations, or outright hostility. It could get nasty. But in that storm of competition and suspicion, Lorraine, Miranda, Tillie, and Debra had bonded. It likely helped that they held positions that were rarely in direct competition—not never, but rarely.

  Miranda had started out working in a kitchen but had moved into administration after grad school. Tillie had always been a sommelier, until she’d opened her own place, where she was still a sommelier, actually.

  Debra had been on the prep line when Louis and Lorraine had moved in to take over the kitchen she’d been working in. She’d hoped to move up and had been among those whose ambition was thwarted when Louis had brought his own sous-chef with him: Lorraine. Rather than indulge in spite, Debra had focused on developing her best skill and standing out in the new regime. Baking was her art. She’d moved to Los Angeles and up in the industry before Lorraine had.

  They simply were the kind of women who’d found it better to be friends than enemies. They supported each other, in their careers and in their lives. Over the five or so years they’d all been friends together, they’d supported each other through heartbreaks and shared joys. The past six months was the first time that they’d all been single at the same time.

  Lorraine wasn’t sure whether that was still true or not.

  Debra cut shockingly large wedges of chocolate beetroot cake and laid them out on plates with strawberries and espresso beans for garnish. They always garnished. Tillie refreshed everyone’s drink, and they all went to sit in her living room, with its sparkling view of the city at night.

  “Your beautiful boy reports that you need the cure only we can provide. I think I know why. If I’m not mistaken, though she’s being typically mysterious about it, I think Miranda knows, too. Poor Debra is sitting here without a clue, and we’ve been making her wait so you could say—which is killing me. You know how I love gossip. Ergo, drink up, Lorraine, my love. You’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do.”

  It was Cameron’s argument that talking about Ronin made him present in their lives, and that no matter what happened next, he was important. He had been in their lives, if only for those few weeks. Cameron had told Douglas about Ronin for that very reason. To assert his father’s importance.

  Lorraine wasn’t sure he was right. Talking about him couldn’t make him more important than he already was. And she’d liked having him to herself; it was an old habit, to keep the man she’d known as Eddie close to her heart, only for her.

  But Tillie and Miranda had met him, and Miranda knew who he was. And she needed to talk about it. For the first time in twenty-five years, she needed to talk about all of it.

  So, sitting with her dearest friends, she did.

  ~oOo~

  She’d been right: a Donovan Winter sighting at Mythic had put the restaurant ‘on the map.’ Philip’s skills at managing the crowd were being sorely tested every day, and weekends had become chaotic. They’d already changed to a ‘reservations only’ policy for Fridays and Saturdays, and it appeared that they’d need to change the policy to cover the rest of the week as well. Lorraine’s vision of the restaurant as a regular haunt for neighborhood locals was going dark. Mythic was becoming a ‘celebrity destination.’

  And that didn’t even necessarily mean success. If they mismanaged this sudden explosion of popularity, then they’d have a few weeks, possibly months, of high receipts and then something else would become the new ‘It’ place, and they’d be left as has-beens, having alienated the locals who might otherwise have kept them steadily in the black.

  This new popularity had nothing to do with the quality of the food or the experience, and everything to do with who was being seen with whom. It was not at all what Lorraine and Cameron had wanted, and they’d done all they could, when they’d selected the location and designed the restaurant, to prevent it from happening.

  They were a step off the beaten path, in a residential district. They didn’t have the parking to be the ‘It’ place; only street parking and the smallest approved lot in back. The street wasn’t wide enough for the traffic of an ‘It’ place. Neighbors wouldn’t tolerate all this upheaval for long. They were already getting restless.

  It was all really stressful.

  On the plus side, it took her mind off of missing and worrying about Ronin.

  Spending the previous evening with her friends, off-loading her anxiety while consuming far too much chocolate and far too many espresso martinis, had helped, too. Her friends’ bawdy commentary had put things in perspective, as had their sincere support. She’d always found that the best, most supportive friends let you cry, then made you laugh. At the end of the evening, when everyone was reeling drunk, Tillie and Miranda, with stomach-cramping hilarity, gave Debra an appreciative and extremely inappropriate description of Ronin. They had both noticed, and apparently memorized the exact dimensions of, the bulge in his jeans.

  Remembering their laughter had her smiling in the middle of the bedlam that was her kitchen as she plated an order of the night’s top special: a bison filet in a shallot confit and port sauce. Peter’s night off was the only night she had true, full charge of her kitchen these days; there were too many responsibilities of ownership for her to actually do the cooking every night.

  She thought of artists and their studios and schools: the greats like Rodin, who imagined, designed, and modeled his pieces, but whose actual work was crafted largely by his assistants and students.

  Lorraine wondered if Rodin had missed the crafting as much as she did.

  Cameron came through the doors from the dining room and plopped on a stool in the safe corner, out of the way of the carefully observed patterns of movement around the prep and cooking area. He’d been outside studying their new traffic control problem. One of the neighbors had called LAPD because he’d been blocked from his driveway.

  “It’s a zoo out there, Mom, and it’s not even the weekend.”

  She resisted the urge to remind him that he’d been the one pressuring her to ‘increase their profile.’ He was two years out of college. She had spent more than a quarter century in the industry. Any mistakes were hers. “What did the police say?”

  “
They were cool. Not their first rodeo—that’s a quote. The cop said it at least four times.” He did a voice. “Not our first rodeo. He suggested we hire off-duty cops for weekend traffic and start valeting. And he said we should contact the optician down the street and see if we can rent his parking lot for valet parking.”

  Good ideas, both. “Did we get a ticket or anything?” Tomorrow, she was going to send wine and cheese to every house on the block to apologize.

  “Just a warning. I’ll make the calls tomorrow and get the parking straightened out. Do you want me to put in an ad for valets, too?”

  She washed her hands and came over to him. “Yes. How’s the floor? I need to do a turn.”

  Cameron smiled, and as always, she saw his father take over his face when he did. “Philip is a wizard. It’s crowded, and the bar is full, but it’s not obnoxious, and even the Faces that want to be seen have been discreetly seated so that they don’t draw insane attention. It’s a weekend crowd on a weekday, so we need to get parking and traffic squared away before Friday, but otherwise, we’re okay. I think we need to go ahead and do reservations-only all week, though.”