Charity For Nothing: The Virtues Book III Read Free Page A

Like something Katy would have said which just drove the knife that much deeper.
    “You ain’t the only one to have dealt with loss, Nothing. Fuck you for suggesting otherwise.” Radar said coldly and I wanted to punch myself in the face. He wasn’t wrong.
    “Sorry, man.”
    He got to his feet with his beer and his plate, “Get over yourself,” he shot back over his shoulder and moved off to a different small grouping of us. I hung my head and gripped the back of my neck.
    “Two points,” Lightning said coolly.
    “Yeah, batting a thousand,” I groused.
    “That’s on you, Man,” he said getting to his feet.
    I swore softly under my breath… and then there was one. Just me, all alone, which is pretty much all I fucking deserved in this life.
    I rolled my neck and shoulders and finished my food and beer, figuring I could go help Trike with the girl’s stuff. It’d give me something productive to do without having to be around the rest of the guys in my fouled mood. They didn’t deserve it, and I wasn’t entirely sure I could rein it in. So what if I had the ulterior motive of digging into what kind of person she was?
    Charity had knocked me off balance with one look and that scared me some. No one had ever been able to do that before. No one except Corrine, and I didn’t want to go down that road again. I really didn’t. It ended on a lonely stretch of highway over near the glades. It ended with a lot of screaming, broken glass and loads of pain.
    It ended with two dead bodies and left me behind with no way to pick up the pieces or to stitch the wound left by my guilt.
    It left me what I was.
    Nothing.

 
    Chapter 3
    Charity
     
    The party moved down to a little bar in the leading edge of town called, not surprisingly, The Plank. I had to laugh at the sign above the door; it read The Plank in burnt in big block letters and below that, it’s beachy, it’s manly, it’s made of hard wood, in a gilded script.
    “Who came up with that? ” I’d asked and someone had launched into the story of Mac, the bar’s previous owner and the club’s old president.
    We, and by ‘we’ I meant Faith and I, had been driven there in an old, beat up, green Subaru wagon full of paint in the back. Marlin had done the driving and it’d been nice to watch him hold my sister’s hand as he’d taken the two or three turns, refusing to let go, compensating for his lack of grip by using his knee to hold the wheel while he repositioned his one hand to follow through. He really loved her, and it showed.
    The bar on the outside was unassuming, even nice to look at, fitting with the rest of the town with its white clapboard sides and royal blue trim. It didn’t have windows in the traditional sense, but rather old, reclaimed portholes edged in bronze, and really rather huge, were set into the building’s side. The glass was thick and discolored with age, and one of them was cracked, appearing to have taken a B.B… or bullet.
    Neon beer signs glowed from within one or two of them and when we went through the door into the loud, dimly but warmly lit interior, it was to the rain just beginning to patter down outside. Marlin led us into the back, past a front room filled with tables and chairs, and off to one side, pool tables and dart boards. The alcove he led us back through opened up into a smaller room, a raised dais directly across from the opening against the back wall, similarly set with portholes to the outside.
    On the raised little stage was an electric chair, and on the electric chair, Cutter held court, my sister Hope in his lap. I blinked at the near absurdity of it all. The portholes to either side of the chair lit up blue, the thunder crashing in time with the lightning and I jumped. Laughter ensued at my expense and I couldn’t help but laugh nervously in turn.
    Marlin took a seat at a four person table to the right of Cutter’s oddball throne, and tugged Faith, similarly, into his lap. He curved his arms