Page 47 of Vengeance (Ruthless MC 4)
I swallow. Audibly. Oh my goodness. Will I be able to withstand this punishment?
Hyena steps forward to loom over the bed’s right side, his eyes glittering in the dim light. “So here’s the thing, Doc.”
He leans forward menacingly. Then he…
Lies down.
What the…? I wonder as I watch him stretch himself out on the bed beside me. Like one of the White women at Rydell going out on the campus’s main lawn in their bikini to soak up some sun in the spring.
But in Hyena’s case, instead of pulling out a Marie Claire magazine, he crooks both arms behind his head and starts talking.
“I don’t like speaking about how I grew up. None of us do. I had an alcoholic father who used to pride himself on beating my mom and me because he was batshit religious. Keeping us in God, he called it. Wouldn’t let me play sports or even have friends outside our church because nobody who wasn’t a Southern Baptist had good enough morals, in his opinion. But he got so bad, they ended up kicking him out of the church. The pastor said he was making the other God-fearing males uncomfortable with his loud judgments about how they let their daughters and wives dress and act.”
Hyena shrugs. “So that left Mom and me as his only audience—the two people he took all his anger out on. But then, when I was twelve, my mom passed away from cancer because my dad tried to pray it away instead of taking her to a doctor, like he should have.”
Hyena stops there, his voice giving out. The memory might be old, but I can tell it still upsets him. And as scared as I was before he lay down, I find myself saying, “I’m sorry. That’s a terrible loss.”
“Yeah, it was,” Hyena agrees with a nod. But then he continues on with a wry smile. “Anyway, my first set of muscles came from working out in my backyard—not sports. First, I got big enough to make him think twice about trying to keep me in God with his fists. And no college for me. I got on the first bus out of our Mississippi Delta town less than an hour after getting my high school diploma. Rode that bus all the way to New Orleans, and after a month or two of partying like my dad never would have allowed, I ran out of money and decided to enlist.”
Hyena perks up a little. “Met Des-E in basic training. I liked to talk because I never got to do it growing up, and he felt just the opposite for his own reasons—so, obviously, we had to become best friends forever. Before getting shipped out, we discovered we liked fucking girls in the same room. Sometimes the same girl in the same room. Then we got assigned to Vampire’s unit in the Middle East.”
He glances at the man, still standing silently with his arms behind his back at the end of the bed.
“Des-E and Vampire got along from the jump. But if we’re speaking truth, I didn’t care much for Vampire. I thought he had a stick up his ass, and I was pissed when they stuck him with us for a five-man recon mission—until we got ambushed and Des-E and me caught a few AK-47 slugs. The two other guys died in an instant from shots to the face. And Des and me were all torn up, but Vampire refused to leave us behind even though he caught a bullet too.”
My eyes widened. So that explained the old gunshot wounds they all had on various places on their limbs. I’d assumed it was Reaper business gone wrong.
“Vampire dragged us back to the Humvee—real Rambo shit—and drove us like a bat out of hell back to the base,” Hyena explains. He pounds a fist against his chest and points at Vampire. Still so obviously grateful after all these years. “We became inseparable after that. Brothers like no other. Began living together, taking girls together. Even joined the Reapers together when we were all out. And you know, we were very good at our Reapers job. We understood all the assignments before TikTok was even a thing. I figured we’d go on like that—maybe forever. Killing and dealing until we got too old for that shit and joined the Reapers construction service.”
Hyena glances at me and explains, “That’s what happens when Reapers get too old for the life. They assign them to construction jobs. But anyway, fucking, killing, and dealing was my whole personality until we walked into Nestor’s roadhouse one night about six years ago, a few minutes before it was set to open, and who do we see behind the bar?”
My heart speeds up a little because I know this part of the story.
