Read Online Burn Down the Night by M. O'Keefe - Free Book Online Page A

it.
    “Calm down,” she said.
    “Rabbit—”
    “He got away.”
    “The rest of the guys…?” They’d all been in on it, all those “brothers” standing there ready to mow me down.
    “I don’t know. But they’re far away. You don’t have to worry about them.”
    The redhead—wearing some kind of tennis getup, with the little skirt and everything, came at me with a syringe.
    “The fuck!” I cried, lifting my leg like I would kick her. “What is that?”
    “Serious antibiotics to fight the infection which is causing the fever.”
    The gunshot. All of this came back to the gunshot. Some memories settled down around me and I put together the pieces. Crazy fucking Joan with the bombs had saved my life.
    And tennis star over here was helping.
    I could thank them. But I wouldn’t.
    Not while I was chained to a bed.
    “What’s with the handcuffs?” I asked giving them a rattle.
    “You tried to kill me,” Joan said. Tennis star jabbed me with the needle but I still had Joan’s hand.
    “I still might.”
    She grinned with half her mouth and I felt the dark echo of how badly I’d wanted her. That was powerful shit if I could still want her as fucked-up as I was. Trouble. She was so much trouble.
    “Then the handcuffs stay.”
    “I need to get back to the club.”
    “They tried to kill you!”
    “That’s why I need to go back.”
    “I’m not even sure there is a club left.”
    I shook my head, because there was always something left. That’s how we were…that’s who we were. Cockroaches after the nuclear blast—guys like me. Like Rabbit. We come scurrying out of the destruction when you think the world has ended.
    And I was going to find him.
    And kill him.
    I felt a sticky fog coming up around me—some kind of poison from that needle she had stuck in my thigh.
    “There’s nothing there for you,” she said in the way women had when they couldn’t quite understand the insanity of my world.
    There was always something there for me.
    Revenge.
    I made a fist around the idea and I held on as tight as I could.
    Revenge.
    They wanted to kill me and they couldn’t.
    So I would take them all down. Every last one of them.
    Joan
    Aunt Fern followed me out of Max’s room, surrounded in a dark cloud of all the things that Max had said.
    I wanted to fuck you. What a charmer.
    “I should have taken the bullet out in Atlanta,” I said, before she could start with whatever uncomfortable questions she had piled up in her head.
    “You couldn’t have done it.” She shook her head, pursed her lips. “You would have made it worse. And he’s going to be fine. The antibiotics will knock that infection right out.”
    Her dismissal was comforting, absolving me of guilt. And familiar.
    She shoved her medical kit back together. “He’ll be himself by tomorrow.”
    “Lovely,” I joked. It was safe money that Max doped up on pain medication and out of his head with fever was a whole lot easier to handle than Max as he usually was. Healthy and whole Max was a straight up killer.
    And now he had revenge on the brain.
    She didn’t smile and I was reminded of how not funny she’d found me as a teenager. They’d been awful years for both of us, which made her kindness now seem miraculous.
    “Why is he calling you Joan?”
    “Because that’s the name I’ve been using for the last few months.”
    I knew she was dying to ask me more questions about why I was living under a different name, but then I saw her put all those questions away. Just roll them up and tuck them out of sight.
    “Should I call you Joan, too?”
    “That would be helpful.” The less Max knew about me the better. And, frankly, I’d grown used to not being Olivia. It had been a sweet fucking relief not being Olivia.
    “Aunt Fern,” I said. “I…don’t know how to thank you. What you’ve done—”
    “Stop.” She held up her hand and my words died on my lips.
    From the inside of the tennis shirt she pulled out a wad of money that had