Calm & Storm (The Night Horde SoCal Book 6) Page 4

  The house was small, with nothing about the exterior to dazzle the eye. A single story, midcentury modern design, with a nearly flat roof. Truly, it looked as much like a crate as it did a house. Its appeal to Ronin had been its many casement windows—the top half of nearly every exterior wall was mostly glass.

  Inside, he’d made the most of that light, keeping the window coverings white and plain, the wood floors bare, and the furniture spare and pale. It wasn’t slapdash or cheap, he was too old to live in a house full of hand-me-downs and castoffs, but he preferred a clean and simple look. He wanted his personal space to be a respite from a life that was usually loud, often chaotic, and all too frequently black with grime and red with blood.

  For the same reason, Ronin valued routine where he could find it. Much of his life was unpredictable; in his home, then, he wanted—needed—distance from that. Living alone gave him that quiet space. He was rarely lonely; he preferred his solitude.

  To every extent it was possible, he started his days in the same way: rise with the dawn, a hundred pushups, then into his backyard retreat.

  He had left the front exterior of his house as it was when he’d bought it—a small stretch of lawn, a row of juniper bushes lining the house, a neat sweep of sidewalk from the driveway to the house—but in the back, he had devoted hours and hours of both work and rest. Here, snug in the privacy of a yard enclosed by a tall redwood fence and taller cypress trees, Ronin had made his sanctuary.

  He’d always been drawn to the quiet, simple aesthetic and philosophy of Asian cultures, and his garden reflected that. His kitchen, dining room, and master bedroom all opened onto a simple patio. He had changed out the paned sliders for full-lite French doors, so he had a graceful, nearly unobstructed view to the garden from any room at the back of his house. From the patio, he’d constructed meandering stone paths to a variety of different, Asian-inspired features: a koi pond; a rock garden; a meditation circle, complete with stone Buddha; and other areas for sitting and contemplation. In the center of it all he kept a bare, flat, grassy area. Here, every morning that he was home, he continued his routine with tai chi.

  Standing on the cool grass in nothing but a pair of black karate pants, Ronin moved his body through all the forms. Tai chi was, to Ronin, an expression of self and a means to be strong and powerful. In that way, perhaps, it was spiritual. The same could be said for his meditations—self-reflection was about knowing and sorting the workings of his mind, not communing with a spirit greater than his own.

  He wasn’t a Buddhist or a Taoist, or any particular ist, but he had found features of many systems of spirit and faith that resonated with him. He’d been born into a family of lapsed Mormons, and his childhood understanding of God and faith had been spotty at best. He’d considered himself agnostic, once he was old enough to consider himself anything. He still considered himself agnostic. But after Iraq, he’d gone looking for ways to manage his mind and body. He’d been an angry, angry man when he was younger. Not because of the war, but for the way his life had slid sideways while he’d been away fighting it.

  Already a fan and a practitioner of martial arts, he’d found meditation for his mind, and he’d homed his physical attention in on tai chi and judo.

  His brothers preferred to lift weights and work the heavy bag—and he enjoyed those, too. But they didn’t understand the profound strength that came from pulling power inward, controlling it completely, feeling—understanding—the movement of every fiber and sinew in one’s own body. The term tai chi, he’d learned, translated loosely to ‘supreme ultimate fist.’ All that calm quiet was stored energy.

  It was because he understood his own body so well that he could, as his brothers often joked, bring knives to a gunfight—and win.

  It was because his brothers didn’t understand that they were all of them beholden to their guns.

  Perhaps choosing the MC life, a brotherhood, seemed an unusual choice for a man like him, but it hadn’t been, not really. That brotherhood gave him the kind of community he wanted: it was steady and true, and it made room for companionship and solitude both. The life might be chaotic at times, but the family was not. Finding that brotherhood had been the thing that had moved him forward again after he was out of the service.

  Though the brotherhood was important to him, Ronin had remained a loner through two decades of club membership. He wasn’t a partier, and he wasn’t a talker. He hadn’t found a need to bond personally with anyone. Not after the Army.

  Of all his brothers, across two clubs, he had been personally closest to Lakota West, and that friendship had risen up unexpectedly, when they’d been on a job together shortly after SoCal’s return to the dark side. He’d come out of the motel one morning looking for a place to go through some forms, and found his brother sitting on a rock, shirtless, his black hair flowing behind him, watching the sun rise, in a kind of meditation of his own. On that small but deep ground, they’d built a sincere friendship. He’d even gone with him to his family home on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota and had gotten to know his people.

  There was only one person in the world he’d ever been closer to. Lorraine Milligan.

  His Rainy.

  Who’d torn his heart out of his chest before he’d even put a boot onto Iraqi sand. Whom he hadn’t seen or heard from in twenty-five years.

  Who was now back. Back in his life?

  No. He didn’t want that.

  But seeing her—even two weeks later, the renewed vision of her persisted in his head. She was so unchanged. Her beautiful red hair, still the same, long and straight, gleaming. Her hippie clothes and funky jewelry. Her green eyes, so full of color they seemed faceted. Her smile, that little overbite. Her creamy-pale skin. Those damn freckles. Over her face, her shoulders, her arms, her chest. He had always loved them best of all.

  Whatever she’d been doing, she’d been living well. He knew his face, his body, showed the hard, violent life he’d lived. No amount of meditation or stored power could smooth the scars and wear of that life. She wasn’t that much younger than he was, only six years, but she looked like someone had set her on a shelf, leaving her untouched by worry or pain for a quarter century.

  It made him envious. It might have made him angry, too, if he allowed anger to settle over him any longer. But he did not.

  More than envy or anger, though, what he’d felt sitting across from her at that chichi bar was loss. He had loved her with his whole heart. After all these years, he had come to understand that he would never love anyone else. Twenty minutes again in her presence had confirmed to him what he’d already known: he still loved her. Perhaps a lot about his life now might be explained by that love and that loss.

  But she had left him and moved on. Had a marriage, a child. Loved again. Made a successful career doing something she loved. Been happy and complete.

  Ronin stopped in the middle of ‘carrying the tiger over the mountain’ and stood straight. Had he not been happy and complete throughout these years?

  He looked around his garden retreat. He loved this space. He loved his house. This was a sanctuary to him. Solitude was something he wanted. The club had in no small part saved him from bitter stagnation. He enjoyed his stunt work. There was no shortage of women willing to sate his body’s needs. His life was good—even now, with the club caught in a vortex of blood and violence, he knew he had made the right life for himself. He didn’t need more. He didn’t need romantic love.

  The love he’d felt seeing Lorraine again had been nothing more than memory. Nostalgia. A phantom ache.

  Maybe she hadn’t changed, but he had. He was a very different man now. She had known Eddie, young and impetuous. He hadn’t been Eddie in decades. Eddie was dead.

  ~oOo~

  That afternoon, the Night Horde SoCal buried their brother, Antonio Diaz. A longstanding member, he was buried with full club honors, and representatives from clubs from all over the country were present to escort him to his rest. Six members of th
e Night Horde Missouri mother charter, and all eight members of the new Night Horde Montana charter, had arrived early in support of their brothers.

  His casket was set up in the Hall, and the SoCal members circled it and performed a ritual that had been started by the mother charter years ago. The Missouri Horde, almost all of its members, past and present, from the same small town, and almost all of Scandinavian heritage, claimed Viking traditions. Though SoCal was more diverse—and now so was Montana, with three of their eight patches claiming membership in the Crow or Cheyenne tribes—the whole club adhered to the club traditions of the mother charter.

  So they added their mementos to his casket, and Hoosier said the Viking prayer. Together, they all called out “Brother, ride swiftly home,” and they drank, pouring one out for their fallen brother.

  They closed his casket and carried it out to the hearse. Then they rode in formation to the cemetery to lay him down. Even though Diaz had no living blood family in the States, the funeral procession coiled and roared through town, trailing over many blocks. Never was the bond of club life more obvious than when they said goodbye to one of their own.

  They had followed different rituals to bury Lakota, less than a year before. He’d died in South Dakota, and they’d escorted him home, to the Pine Ridge Reservation, where he was buried as a tribal member rather than a member of the Night Horde. The rituals, while different, were also the same. They rang with the same truth. And the Horde had been there to see him home.

  Back in the Hall, Ronin sat at the far end of the bar, on the sidelines, where he was most comfortable. His reputation for reticence, he knew, preserved a space around him. No one tried to start a conversation with him. They all knew he did not chat. He said the words that were necessary, and no more.

  Thus, when he did speak, he had his audience’s complete attention.

  He didn’t begrudge his brothers their loquacious ways or judge them for it. In truth, he enjoyed the buzz and din of the crowded Hall. Even on a somber day like today, there was laughter. Old friends reuniting, good remembrances of their brother—all of that made for joy of a kind. The mothers had taken their children home, and the brothers were drinking now in earnest; it wouldn’t be long before this wake was a party like every other.

  Ronin never stayed long past the point of revelry. There was a word he’d heard somewhere—dissolute—that meant something like wildly drunk, as he understood it. He thought it a good word, because it had the sound of something dissolving, not holding together. That was how he felt about parties. There was a point at which the good spirits and camaraderie lost cohesion. People lost themselves and lost the connection to each other. The bond dissolved.

  There had been a time in his life when he’d happily participated in that dissolution, as though there were a prize to be won in being the one who lost the most of himself, but now he found it depressing, and he wanted to be away from it.

  On this night, wrapped up as he was in somber thoughts of loss in the club and beyond it, Ronin left even earlier than usual.

  If anyone noticed him leaving, none stood in his way.

  ~oOo~

  At home that night, he sat at his dining table and cleaned and sharpened his blades: katana, wakizashi, and two tantōs. He had other blades, authentic, but they were collector’s pieces. These four were his weapons. He carried the katana and wakizashi together, as daishō, crossed on his back in the samurai way, only when the club was headed into known trouble. Though there was no law against carrying sheathed blades—not even something so large as a katana—he found it awkward to ride with sheathed blades across his back. Normally, he carried only the tantōs—and they were usually sufficient.

  It was quiet work in his quiet house. The metallic, rhythmic whisper of the blade over the water stones served as a mantra, and Ronin could play out the lead on his thoughts, let them graze and find their interest.

  Not surprisingly, they turned to Lorraine. He hadn’t been truthful when he’d told her that he’d found closure. What he’d found was a way to set thoughts of her aside, to move forward from the questions and the hurt, but he hadn’t closed the door on them. He knew that now.

  He wished he’d taken her card. Just to have the possibility of contacting her, to have that power in his hands.

  He could go to Sherlock, he knew, and find out anything he wanted. But he didn’t want that. He didn’t like the way the club dug into the lives of people they cared about. He understood it, saw the necessity, but he didn’t like it. For Lorraine, it wasn’t necessary. She wouldn’t come in contact with the club.

  The swords sharpened, he oiled them with choji oil, sheathed them, and set them in their stands.

  Then he poured himself a scotch and went out to sit in his back yard. The night was late, and the dark was deep and quiet. As much as he enjoyed a new dawn, he liked this time of the day even better: near midnight, when the world was finally falling asleep. He could hear the burble of his koi pond, the occasional creak of a cricket, the rustle of leaves in a low night breeze, but otherwise, back here, the world was quiet.

  Until his phone rang.

  He kept a personal phone, but that only rang for stunt work, and it was late for that kind of call. Ronin took his empty glass back into the kitchen and pulled the personal off the dock.

  The number was an L.A. exchange, but not one in his contact list. He almost let it ring through, and then he remembered that he hadn’t taken his card back from Lorraine.

  It had been two weeks. And it was midnight. Would it be her? Did he want to know?

  He did, so he answered. “Yeah.”

  “Ronin?” As if his thoughts had conjured her, it was Lorraine, and she had remembered his name.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s…Lorraine. I know it’s late. I’m sorry to call so late. I’m just closing up the restaurant for the night.”

  He said nothing. He waited.

  After a few seconds of silence, she said, “Um…okay. You left before we could really talk. I decided to let you be, but I can’t. There’s things…” She stopped, huffed a breath into the phone, and began again. “Can we try again? To talk, I mean.”

  “Why?”

  She didn’t answer right away. When she did, her voice was different, softer. It made him remember their closeness, the way she’d whisper in his ear as he fell asleep. “I can’t stop thinking about you.”

  It might have been remembered love that he was feeling, but the remembrance was strong. Loneliness closed over him, and he shut his eyes. “Lorraine…”

  “Rainy. Call me Rainy.” A pleading had entered her tone.

  “No. I…can’t.”

  Another pause before she answered, and her voice was changed again—back to the bright friendliness with which she’d opened. “Okay, I understand. Just…what do you say about coming to Mythic—my restaurant? Monday night? We’re closed on Monday. I can fix us a meal and show you around, and we can just…talk. See if we can be friends.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ronin. I know I can’t apologize and fix anything. But there’s something amazing about finding each other again, here, now, the way that we did, me cooking and you riding, that seems too important to let slip away. It feels…destined. Don’t you think?”

  Ronin thought about their kiss, how much like a homecoming that had felt. Did he believe in destiny?

  “I don’t know.”

  She didn’t respond, but then he heard a faint noise, like a sniffle she’d turned away from the phone. She was crying.

  Why not say yes? Was he punishing her? If he had given up his anger, then why would he punish her?

  No, he wasn’t punishing her. He was afraid. Afraid to feel the things he had felt with her in the past, the same things that had clamored to be felt again when they’d kissed.

  He always made a point to turn toward, not from, his fear. “Okay. What time?”

  ~oOo~

  Ronin had expected a place called ‘Mythic’ to be
in one of those neighborhoods where traffic was clogged with limousines and rope lines. The address she’d given him hadn’t seemed familiar, though, and he was surprised when he pulled up in front of an unassuming white building at the edge of a tidy, residential area. Upscale, but not obnoxious.

  He dismounted and locked his kutte in a saddlebag. He almost always wore it when he rode, but there was no reason to wear it to dinner.

  The profile of the restaurant was similarly subdued. Classic bronze letters spelled out the name above the door, and the ‘M’ was painted in gilt on the plate-glass windows.

  Warm lighting illuminated the interior, and he stood for a moment on the sidewalk and took a private moment to experience the restaurant unattended. The décor was cozy and golden: dark wood, brass fixtures, terrazzo tiles. The many pendant lights were covered in amber shades.