Page 10 of Bitter’s Sweet

“You know what I mean.”

“No, Nevermore, I surely do not. Use your words. Say what you fucking mean, mean what you fucking say.”

“You gonna keep using women like a damn shovel?”

My smile thins. “Careful.”

“I’m careful. You’re the one acting like if you screw enough strangers, eventually one of them will take the taste of Lena out of your mouth.”

The name lands between us with a sound only I can hear.

Lena.

Five letters.

One funeral.

A woman can ruin you in ways a bullet only dreams about.

I turn away and grab my shirt off the edge of the coffin. “You don’t say her name to me.”

“She’s been gone six years.”

“Then she can stay gone.”

“Not if you keep dragging her ghost around by the hair.”

I step close enough that most men would step back.

Nevermore doesn’t.

That is the trouble with brothers. They know which parts of you are real and which ones are decoration.

“I said,” I tell him, quiet now, “do not say her fucking name to me.”

His eyes hold mine. “Fine.”

“Good.”

“But Hyde needs you straight. We all do. Weeklong festival starts tomorrow, and this town is gonna be crawling with tourists, cops, vendors, drunk locals, and every weird bastard within three hundred miles who thinks coffin racing is a family activity.”

“It is a family activity.”

“Our family is mentally unwell.”

“That ain’t news.”

“And we got a shipment coming through.”

I stop buttoning my shirt.

There it is. The real reason he came looking.

The Grave Prowlers MC started with death and figured out real quick that death pays twice if you know how to invoice. My granddaddy’s generation built boxes and burned bodies in Virginia. Took cash from men who needed the dead to stay quiet. Then somebody figured coffins roll in and out of places nobody wants to search too hard, and the club found a second business packed under the first.

Guns in custom builds.

Cash in urns.