Twenty-Four
Five Years Ago
Getting drunk wasn’t as easy as it used to be. At seven the next morning, Mercy had a window stool at the bakery below his apartment, some black coffee he spiked with leftover Johnnie Walker, and half a loaf of fresh sourdough, sliced, toasted, and buttered. On the TV mounted behind the counter, a reporter was describing the scene at St. Mary’s Hospital in Powell where former gubernatorial candidate Mason Stephens’ son had been dropped off last night anonymously, stabbed and near death.
Mercy felt a prickling up the back of his neck when Ghost walked in. He heard the bell above the door, and he knew it was his VP, before Ghost came around the table and rested a forearm on the back of the opposite stool.
Mercy was full to bursting with guilt, with remorse, with the kind of raw, familiar pain of Louisiana, but none of that was connected to Ghost in any way. He didn’t feel anything as his vice president fixed him with a freezing look, his jaw locked. He sipped his coffee with lifted brows, waiting, refusing to even hint at an apology.
The shock moved slowly through Ghost, first as he realized Mercy wasn’t going to speak, and second as he realized there was no regret to be found here, at least not the kind he was looking for. Something subtle passed across the table: master realizing his dutiful dog wasn’t so easily kept on a chain, as he’d always thought.
“Come with me,” Ghost finally said.
Mercy finished his coffee first.
Maggie, exhausted and red-eyed, left the hospital at nine-fifteen the next morning. When Aidan walked into the room at nine-eighteen, Ava had elevated her bed and was sitting up against the pillows, finger-combing her hair and full of plans. She could feel strange whirrings and clickings in her head, some insanely strong, detached logic picking up the pieces of her fractured heart and churning out ideas that seemed too commonsense to have come from inside herself at this moment. She didn’t care. She was thankful for the override, and she was leaping aboard.
Aidan paused in the act of setting a greasy bagged breakfast on the bedside table. His expression was so unlike him, careful and bland. “You’re up.”
“And surprised to see you.”
He opened the top of the bag and started pulling things out: hash browns, fragrant biscuits wrapped in paper. Two cans of Sprite came out of his inside cut pocket. “Your mom didn’t want to say anything to your grandmother.” Every so often he said “your mom” and reminded her that they were only half-siblings. Normally it bothered her. Today, she didn’t care. “So I said I’d come sit a while so Mags could shower.”
“How nice of you.”
He lifted what smelled like a sausage biscuit in offering. “Food?”
“Not hungry.” She pushed the covers down to her waist and frowned at her hospital gown. “When are they going to release me?”
More of that careful look from Aidan. He took a biscuit for himself, put the first on the side of her bed, and dropped into Maggie’s abandoned chair. “Probably when you’re ready to be released.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m fine. I have so much schoolwork still to catch up on. I can’t afford to take any more days off.”
Aidan paused with breakfast halfway to his mouth. “Um…you know what happened to you, right?” He cringed, like he hated the thought. “Or did the bump on the head - ?”
“I know exactly what happened to me.”
He took a bite, chewed slowly. “Okay.”
“You’re the one being weird about it.”
He swallowed. “I expected–”
“Crying? Screaming?”
“Yeah.” Some of the usual snark came back into his voice. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you how to be a girl?”
She twitched a thin smile. “No. I was raised by Dogs and the women who take care of them.” She glanced at the door, the freedom that lay down the hall. “I want to see Mercy.”
Aidan snorted. “Yeah. That’s not happening.”
She didn’t have any patience for him this morning. “Since when do you give a shit who I do or don’t see?”
There was a flash of some new aggression, something truer and meaner than his usual bad boy swagger, something more like Dad. “Since a member of this goddamn club forced himself on my kid sister.”
Anger boiled inside her, burning through the haze of painkillers, throbbing against the bruises on her head and face. “He’s never forced me to do anything in my life. Don’t you dare start rumors about him. It isn’t like that, and if you didn’t have your head shoved up your own ass all the time, you’d see that.”
His handsome face set at terrible angles, the temper churning behind his eyes. “You don’t get to talk to a member like that–”
“I’m not. I’m talking to my no-account asshole brother.”
They glared at one another, the cold room bristling with Teague energy, that restless heat and anger they’d both inherited from their father.
“I want to see him,” Ava said, finally.
“Too fucking bad.”
There was a sharp rap at the edge of the open door, and Ghost half-stepped in, looking drawn up and taller than he was, and about five years older, too, the lines and gray hairs prominent in the harsh light.
Ava waited for the girlhood fear to hit her, that high-resolution respect that had haunted her every misstep growing up. But it didn’t come. Her pulse was an unchangeable tattoo against the soft inners of her wrists as she met his gaze unflinching.
“You’re up,” Ghost said, mirroring Aidan’s words and guarded expression. “You feeling alright? How many fingers am I holding up?” He didn’t move his hand.
“I don’t have brain damage, Dad,” she said with a sigh.
He grunted. “Good for you. Too bad I can’t say the same thing.” And he stepped into the room, gesturing with a wide sweep of one arm, and Mercy walked in behind him.
Ava wasn’t sure if she stopped breathing, or if all the air in the room rushed to Mercy as he took a deep breath and let it out through his nostrils in a great, horse-deep sigh that did nothing to hide how rattled he was. His eyes landed on her, deep, dark wells in his shattered face. Ava wanted, needed to be touching him, and she didn’t care if her father and brother were there for it. She wasn’t the same girl who’d walked up to Carter’s front door yesterday; she was a wrecked shell all filled up with give-a-damn at this point. She was the girl who’d almost wanted the knife to go into Mason Stephens again. She was the girl who’d called off the beast, when Ghost hadn’t been able to. She was powerful. She was devastated.
Ghost and Aidan slid out of the room, something she noticed only once the door was shut. Then she could give all her attention to Mercy.
She held out her arms to him. “Come here.”
What Maggie needed was an Irish coffee. She settled for a cup of black from the McDonald’s drive-through on her way to the Stephens’ mansion.
The driveway was jammed-up with cars: Volvo SUVs, Lexus SUVs, BMW SUVs. The standards for this crowd. Maggie gave herself a grim smile in the rearview mirror; her plan had worked, and all the DAR members she’d called that morning had rushed to the rescue, here to swig Chardonnay alongside their fallen comrade, the embarrassed mother of the week: Carina.
Carina held court in her living room, a cavernous space done up in shades of cream and gold. She was in a cream dress, the exact shade of the sofa on which she sat, ropes of pearls dripping down the front. Her friends were in Friday night finery, shellacked and powdered.
Maggie pushed a hand through her tangled hair and touched up her lipstick before she stepped into the room, the proper amount of concern plucking her brows together.
“Maggie!” Vanessa Partridge looked no less than shocked to see her.
“Good morning.” Maggie pushed a worried smile across her face, played up the anguish. “I wanted to lend whatever support I could. How’s Mason doing?”
There was a rush of babbling voices as they all began describing Mason’s injuries, his blood loss, the beaten state of him. His father was, apparently, “raising hell,” at the Powell hospital.
The women, they didn’t like or trust her, but her efforts in the last week had gone a long way toward granting her some sway. They were fascinated – she was so different from them – and she knew things, had access to circles they’d only heard about via urban legends. When she said she could help, they believed her now.
The Daughters of the American Revolution: it had sounded like something she could get behind. It brought to mind images of Martha Washington, the brave spy wives, the sisters, battlefield nurses. The Revolution: taking on the meanest, toughest nation in the world and winning. That was rebellion, that was victory, that was blood on the hands and blades in the teeth, stitching flags by lamplight and hiding minutemen under floorboards when the redcoats came knocking through houses. That was something Maggie loved.
The DAR, though? Bunch of snobs sipping spiked coffee and talking about their summer houses and organizing charitable events whose proceeds went Godknewwhere. Lame. It was just an excuse to socialize, as if these women didn’t have enough of those.
“I’ll tell you something that none of you can repeat,” Maggie said, sinking down gracefully to a tufted ottoman. Every eye in the room fastened to her. “The boys are thinking this was an attack from the dealer who sold Mason those pills…”
They leaned toward her.
Like candy from a baby.
He wouldn’t look at her. His arms were folded on the side of her bed, his forehead resting against one wrist, her hand trapped inside of his, her fingers starting to go numb from the strength of his grip.
Ava stroked his hair with her free hand, slow smooth passes, curling over him, trying to block out the obscene fluorescent light, close enough to smell the Scotch on him.
How strange, she reflected, that it was her comforting him in this moment, that it was Mercy struggling, and her doing the petting.
“It’s okay,” she whispered, pressing her lips to his temple.
She felt his lashes flicker as he blinked. “No it’s not,” he said. “Oh, fillette, no it’s not.”
**
Maggie watched the storm build in Ghost, all day, in their snatches of shared time, when their paths crossed; saw the thunderheads behind his eyes and felt the electricity in every casual brush of his gaze.
The storm broke around midnight, after Ava was released and they took her home, once she was dosed with prescription pain meds and tucked in bed, once Mercy had disappeared and the old ladies had gone home, having left casseroles and heating pads and flowers and books for Ava.
Maggie was brushing her teeth when she heard Ghost say, “How long?” behind her.
She glanced up and saw his truly awful expression in the mirror, and glanced away. She spit, rinsed her toothbrush, and took her time stowing it away in the drawer. “You suck at asking questions.”
Clearly, he wasn’t playing that game tonight. “How long did you know?”
“I didn’t know.” She moved past him, out into the bedroom. “I suspected.”
“Same fucking difference.”
“No, it’s not.” She pulled her robe down out of the closet and draped it across her shoulders, using it as a veil as she shucked her jeans. She didn’t feel like being in her underwear in front of him when he was like this; she didn’t want to feel vulnerable. The sweater came next, trickier, but still doable. She’d been too rebellious as a teen to not know how to ditch her clothes in an efficient hurry. She let the robe drop to her waist as she pulled a cotton nightgown over her head.
Ghost approached her slowly, with predatory grace, so by the time she’d straightened the straps and belted her robe, he was at her side, watching her with undisguised fury. “Let’s just recap here: you suspected our teenage daughter was fucking around with a thirty-year-old member of my club, and you forgot to mention it or interfere in any way?”
“I talked to Mercy.”
“You didn’t think that was my job?”
“No.” She met his gaze with a frosty one of her own. “It wasn’t. Because you only see things two ways: club, and not-club. Ava’s been not-club her entire life, and you don’t even bother to interact with her in any sort of meaningful way–”
“You saying I don’t love my kid? That it?” His tone was solid steel; it vibrated a warning. Be careful, it said. I’m the fucking boss here, it said.
Fuck him.
“I’m saying she’s a girl, and you don’t put a lot of thought into her day-to-day life, until, suddenly, her life is tied up with the club. Well guess what, baby, the club raised her. Every thought that goes through her head is run through the filter of Club. Did you honest to God think she’d have a crush on some kid in math class and go to prom with him? Every man in her life belongs to your club,” she shot his words back at him. “And she grew up dogging Mercy’s heels. He’s a bigger part of her life than you are. Of course she fell in love with him. Of course he loves her back. Of course it went too far. That’s natural – even if this whole mess is fucked up, it was unavoidable. So stop acting like it blindsided you.”
“She is seventeen–”
“So was I!” She threw her hands up in helpless supplication, letting them slap back against her thighs. “And you were almost his age and I seem to remember your hand down my jeans in back of the liquor store about twenty minutes after we met!”
His face was all planes and angles. He folded his arms and stared across the room, at the turned-down bed. “That was different.”
“How?” Maggie demanded. “Please, for the love of God, Kenneth, explain to me how that was even a little bit different.”
“It just was,” he growled. “You knew what you were doing. You–”
“I was a slut? Is that what you’re reaching for?” She slammed the closet doors and went to flounce down on the end of the bed, arms knotted across her middle. “I’d been pawed at by two boys” – she held up two fingers – “in my class, and you knew exactly how much I didn’t know. Age didn’t seem to slow you down then.”
“It’s different,” he insisted, but she could see some of the fight bleeding out of him.
Maggie softened her tone. “Because she’s your daughter, and it’s always different with daughters.”
He swallowed hard, Adam’s apple punching in his throat. “After everything I did for him…”
“There’s two different kinds of bodyguards,” Maggie said. “The ones who care, and the ones who don’t. You picked one who ended up caring…and now you want to crucify him for caring too much. You can’t have it both ways, baby. If I’ve learned anything from club life, it’s that.”
Ghost shoved away from the wall and left with his shoulders set at high angles.