Thirty-Six
“Your ride’s here!”
“Coming!”
Ava checked her reflection one last time. Skinny jeans, boots, purple V-neck shirt, leather jacket. She ducked into her over-the-shoulder bag, securing the strap across her chest. “Well,” she said with a hitch in her breathing, “I’m back.”
“Ava!”
“Coming!”
Maggie was alone in the kitchen, dressed similarly – because she hadn’t gone off to college and had a dress code identity crisis – pouring coffee in a travel mug. “Your father’s still in the shower. I thought you’d like to leave before–”
“Ah. Yep.” She grabbed a granola bar off the counter, zipped it up in her jacket pocket, and snagged her black matte helmet off the peg by the back door. She’d wrestled the thing out of the depths of her closet last night, once Mercy had decreed her mode of transportation until they could figure out who’d slashed her tires.
“Bye, Mom,” she said, and breezed out the back door, helmet swinging by its strap as her elated, bouncy steps carried her around the side of the house.
She hadn’t been on the back of a bike in years, and the idea was adding to this golden, fizzing sensation that wouldn’t stop building inside her. She had Mercy back, and she wanted, more than anything in the world, to believe him. So that’s what she chose to do. She’d awakened that morning and thought to herself, Stop wondering and asking and worrying. Accept it. Bask in it. You’ve got your man back.
He waited on his ’95 Dyna behind her truck, sans cut, in his plain leather jacket, sunglasses making his face seem narrower, sharper, more sinister.
Littlejohn straddled his own bike alongside Mercy. The question of what Mercy planned to do while she was in class for three hours was answered in part: he was going to prowl around, and Littlejohn would stay with the bikes.
Lord, no one at UT wanted him on the loose on campus.
He gave her a wolf whistle as she approached, and she felt the color come up in her cheeks, a fast press of heat beneath her skin. His grin, the bright flash of his teeth, chased away any doubts she’d had about greeting him in front of the prospect. She laid a hand on his shoulder, leaned in and kissed him.
He tried to go deeper when she pulled back, shaking her head, barely evading him.
“Nuh-uh,” she said with a laugh. “We’re on a schedule.”
“Good morning to you, too,” he said with obvious mock exasperation.
“Morning.” She kissed the slick surface of his hair as she swung onto the bitch seat behind him and buckled her helmet in place. “Morning, Littlejohn.”
He gave her a nod. “Ma’am.”
“You guys sure you don’t mind being up close and personal with education this morning?”
“Careful, fillette, you don’t want to challenge me about education.” His dark chuckle left little to the imagination.
She rolled her eyes.
“You ready?”
“Yeah.” A thrill chased through her.
He reached back, quickly, and squeezed her knee. And then he started the Harley and it leapt to life beneath her, reminding her that she’d been born for this.
Working the register at Leroy’s wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t the worst job in the world. Old Leroy, comfy enough with cash to be able to hire out employees and rest his rheumatoid arthritis at home in his easy chair, was a generous, kind-hearted employer. He loved Knoxville, and he loved giving kids a chance to make a buck. “Just returning the favor given to me,” he’d told Carter when he’d hired him. “Young people deserve to be given a chance to do a good job.”
The job itself had its perks. Discounted sodas. Free subs from the deli for lunch every day. The occasional tit show when a drunk woman on her way home from a party stopped in for smokes and lottery tickets and was too intoxicated to notice her strapless dress had slipped down in front.
But mostly, Carter’s life was a study in failure these days. Not only had he failed to make it pro, earn enough to provide for his father – maybe send him to rehab – but now he was back living with the man. High school all over again, with fewer friends, and zero notoriety.
He closed the cash drawer with a ding and handed Leah Cook her change.
“Thanks,” she said, distracted. She pocketed the coins and opened her Snickers bar right there in front of the register, taking a bite too huge for a girl so little. “So I talked to Ava about it, but she hasn’t gotten back to me yet.”
Carter checked his automatic frown before it could get too deep. “Ava’s worried about other stuff right now.”
“Oh, what, like she doesn’t care?” Leah propped a hand on her hip and lifted her brows as she chewed, challenging him.
Carter thought of Ava in here last week in her skirt and heels, posh boyfriend waiting out by the truck, her bachelor’s and her eventual graduate degree. “Things are going well for her,” he said. “And people don’t tend to worry too much about other people when that’s the case.”
“Ugh. Don’t be an ass.”
“I’m just being honest.” He sounded patient, but was really just tired. He was weary, down to his bones, of everything. “You know I like Ava, but if you’re expecting her to do something about your dad’s shop–”
“Hey.” Leah was growing more defensive by the second. “The Lean Dogs have a lot at stake here. Helping my dad would be helping themselves, too.”
“And they love to do that,” he muttered.
“Dude, bitter much?”
“Realistic.”
“You used to be fun to hang around.” She pulled her orange juice and bagged sandwich off the counter. “What happened to the guy who said ‘bro’ and high-fived, huh?”
He grew up when he tore his knee to shreds, he thought. But he smiled tightly at her. “Fun’s overrated.”
“So say you and my grandmother,” she said with a sigh.
The bell above the door jangled, catching both their attentions. The guy who entered wore pressed khakis with center creases, tasteful plaid oxford, and some sort of gel or paste that shellacked his hair into a side-parted helmet of shiny brown. He smelled like money; he looked like a thoroughbred, one of those carefully-bred Southerners who could trace his ancestry back to colonial times, without a single drop of Irish or Scottish blood in the whole family tree.
“Ronnie,” Leah said, voice taking on that high, bright edge that Carter knew meant she was thrilled about something. “Hi. How’s it going?”
The guy hesitated, and then came forward, his expression cautious. “Hi. It’s Leah, right?”
“Right,” Leah chirped. “This is Carter.” Grand gesture toward him behind the counter. “He went to high school with Ava and me. Carter, this is Ronnie.” Her dark almond-shaped eyes cut over, bright with mischief. “Ava’s boyfriend.”
So that’s why he looked familiar. Carter had only glimpsed him through the window, as he stood at the end of Ava’s truck and played with his phone, but the hair was unmistakable.
Carter’s first reaction was to laugh. Rude, stomach-clutching, howling laughter. He checked that impulse and said, “Hi. Good to meet you.” But he couldn’t rectify this pretty boy as Ava’s boyfriend. How had Ava Teague, club daughter to her bones, who’d stabbed Mason Stephens in the leg and miscarried Mercy Lécuyer’s baby on the floor of Hamilton House, ended up with some country club tool like this. He himself had been too preppy for her, back in the day. And here she was now with the captain of the lacrosse team, or whatever the hell rich-boy sport this dick played.
Ronnie grimaced in a delicate way and fiddled with the change in his pockets. “I’m not so sure ‘boyfriend’ is the word for me anymore.”
“Oh?” Leah’s crestfallen expression belonged on a stage somewhere. “You two broke up? How awful!”
Ronnie studied the toes of his loafers. “I don’t know what you want to call it. Ava’s going through…some stuff, right now.”
Carter didn’t miss the quick wink Leah shot him. He didn’t misinterpret it either; he’d seen Mercy among the ranks of Dogs on bikes that kept parading through town. Ava wasn’t going through “stuff”; she was going through Mercy-withdrawal.
He almost felt bad for Ronnie. Poor dumbass, he thought. She’ll only ever be in love with that walking nightmare.
Ronnie seemed to shake himself off. “I need to get some gas,” he said, a silver money clip coming out of his pants pocket, a fifty peeling off a roll of others just like it. “Can I get thirty on pump two?”
“Yeah.” Carter noted how crisp, green, and new the bill was as he put it in the register.
“Carter, huh?” Ronnie’s voice had that awkward, forced-conversation quality to it. “You played football for KHS. Quarterback, right?”
“Right.”
“Didn’t you get a full ride to Texas A&M?”
Carter nodded. “And lost it, too.” There was a prickling up the back of his neck, an uneasiness. “How’d you know all that?”
Ronnie’s mouth trembled; his eyes widened. There and gone again, anxiety tweaked his face. But then it smoothed over and he shrugged as he accepted his change. “Ava told me.” He looked at Leah, nodded. “Nice to see you both.” And out he went again, bell chiming.
“Okay, what the hell was that?”
Leah shook her head, mouth drawn up tight in excited surprise. “I dunno. She’s totally back with Mercy. I really can’t believe any guy would stick around once he realized he was competing with somebody capable of turning him into a human pretzel.”
Carter frowned as he watched Ronnie pump gas into his slick Lexus. “I swear he looks familiar. What’s his last name?”
“Archer.”
Ronnie Archer. He swore he knew that name. Then again, it wasn’t that unusual; there could be fifty Ronnie Archers in Tennessee.
“Poor Ronnie,” Leah said. “He has no idea that he was the stuff she was going through.”
“Did you see your mother yesterday?”
Aidan took the toothpick in his mouth between thumb and forefinger and flicked it up onto the dash. “For a sec.” He retrieved his smokes from the center console between them, shook one out and lit up, needing that first draw of nicotine before he was willing to go into any detail. “She’s setting us up with a booth at the yard sale?”
Behind the wheel, Ghost nodded and sipped his travel mug of coffee. Aidan knew Maggie had packed that coffee, had made the breakfast sandwiches of toasted rye, sausage patties and cheese, had included napkins and shiny green apples and a fresh Bic lighter for their cigarettes. Just like Maggie, at seventeen, had packed his ham and cheese sandwiches, Oreos and chips and little boxes of raisins in his sack lunches when he was in third grade. Only eight years older than him, and his stepmother had hugged him and done cartwheels across the yard with him and argued with his teachers for him at parent-teacher conferences.
The woman who’d birthed him had bowed out of all that. And yesterday, when she’d approached him outside the bike shop, hands clasped in front of her, keeping her distance like she was afraid he’d get motor oil on her pristine clothes, she’d greeted him with a stiff nod and said, “Aidan. You look…healthy.”
“Do we need her for that?” he asked, taking another deep drag and watching the dead street through the windshield.
“If we applied for a booth, we’d never get accepted. Olivia can set one aside for us, and no one has to know until we’re all set up. We need this,” Ghost added, a heavy, paternal look cast across the cab of the truck at him. “It’s not personal. It’s just damage control.”
“Right,” Aidan sighed, sinking lower in his seat, blowing smoke up at the headliner.
“Hey, here we go,” Ghost said, and the energy in the truck changed completely.
A Knoxville PD cruiser slid past their parking place along the curb and continued down to the charcoal heap of sticks that had once been Milford Mattress, across the street from the Carpathians’ clubhouse. It came to a halt in front of the ruined building, and Sergeant Fielding climbed out to join the loose knot of Carpathians who sorted through the charred remains, looking to salvage God knew what.
“The bastard,” Ghost muttered. “He always was too stupid for his own good.”
They watched, stretched tight and waiting, anticipation building, until Fielding finally got back in his cruiser, turned around, and headed back toward them.
Ghost climbed from the truck and Aidan scrambled less gracefully after him, so they were both standing in the middle of the road as Fielding was forced to come to a halt, nose of the cruiser dipping down toward the asphalt.
“A word, sergeant,” Ghost said, when Fielding rolled the window down.
The cop sighed, but he humored them, parking across the street and coming to sit in the back seat of the truck, elbows on his knees, expression weary.
He’d been busted, and he knew it.
“What?” he asked, not willing to sit in suspense. “You’ve been following me?”
“Nah,” Ghost said. “I’m too busy for that shit. I just figured you’d turn up, since you like to do that so much: only, I’m guessing it wasn’t unannounced in this case.”
“You hate us that much?” Aidan said. “You’d actually work for these dipshits?”
“I don’t work for anyone but the city of Knoxville,” he shot back.
Ghost smiled. “And the man who runs Knoxville. Are you the one who’s been threatening shop owners? Or does he have someone better-dressed than you do it?”
Through the rearview mirror, Aidan watched Fielding’s shoulders slump. “No, it’s not him,” he said to his dad. “He hates it, what’s happening. Don’tcha, Vince?”
That earned him a sharp look, but it was followed by a deep sigh. “It’s not Stephens.”
Aidan felt his brows go up, saw Ghost’s do the same. “How could it not be?”
“All the shops on Main and Market are leased storefronts,” Fielding said, tone defeated. He was, at his core, an honest man, and the subterfuge was taking its toll on his conscience. “Someone came in with some muscle and bought them all up. Not a big deal, on its face: what buyer wouldn’t want to keep on business that paid the rent on time? But whoever it is, he’s squeezing the owners, all of them, telling them to cease doing all business with the Lean Dogs, or he’ll evict them.”
“Can he do that?” Aidan asked.
“Technically, no. But someone with that kind of money could steamroll any local if anything ever went to court. This guy’s attorney would know all the tricks. Someone like Ramona Baily doesn’t have a prayer of fighting someone like that.”
“How could Stephens not be involved?” Ghost asked.
“I didn’t say he wasn’t, I just don’t have anything concrete,” Fielding said. “I tried talking to Ramona, and Alan Cook, but they won’t say anything.”
“They’re scared,” Aidan said.
“Wouldn’t you be?”
They both nodded in the front seat.
“So that turns the city against us,” Ghost said. “And the Carpathians are here to clean us out.”
Aidan felt a shiver deep in his belly, something a lot like fear.
“Who’s backing them?” Ghost asked. “All their bikes and the cash and the cuts – who paid that tab?”
“Nothing ties Stephens to it,” Fielding said. “So my guess is that whoever’s buying up commercial space is footing their bills too.”
“Does Larsen know he’s somebody’s bitch?” Aidan asked.
“My guess would be yes, but he doesn’t care.”
“He wants revenge,” Ghost said. “And he doesn’t care whose hand’s up his ass while he’s getting it.”
Fielding nodded.
“What were you doing here?” Ghost asked, tone sharpening. “Are they paying you off?”
The cop bristled again, insulted. “I’m trying to convince that stupidass Larsen that burning down his own buildings as a way to frame you guys is an idiotic move.”
Ghost smiled faintly, and glanced over at Aidan. “See? He does care about us. Huh, Vinnie?”
Fielding tugged in vain at the handle of the rear suicide door. “You guys need to lay low. There’s no way to help yourselves right now. Just keep out of the headlines and this’ll blow over.” He sighed. “Let me out.”
Aidan opened his door, allowing the sergeant to exit, and smiled broadly in response to the final look of warning sent his way before Fielding headed back across the street to his cruiser.
He closed the door. “Next move?”
“You up for a little espionage?”
Every time Ava let her mind wander, her thoughts went back to Mercy, to the picture of him in the slanted morning sun, one boot on the pavement, long legs holding up his matte black bike, little smirking smile under his black shades. He was gorgeous to her, mostly because he was hers, because she knew that when she walked out of this last class, he’d still be sitting there, waiting for her.
She was in serious danger of dissolving into a smiling idiot right here in her plastic chair.
Never had she been so glad to stow away her writing before. When her professor dismissed her, she left the AC-chilled meat locker classroom with a skip to her pulse and went outside to meet her man.
But the figure leaning against the bike rack, who straightened as she appeared and came toward her, was decidedly not her man.
He was the man she’d given up.
“Ronnie,” she said, startled and hearing it reflected in her voice. “Wha…what are you doing here?”
He was painfully pretty in her eyes this morning, every hair and khaki crease in perfect place. So cosmically different from everything she’d ever found sexy. “You wouldn’t talk to me,” he said, his smile almost sheepish, “so I thought I’d come run into you. You can’t hang up on me this way.”
Her headache was instant, throbbing in her temples and eyelids. “Jesus,” she whispered.
He stepped in closer, blocking the light. “What?”
“Nothing,” she sighed. “Look, Ronnie, to be honest, I don’t know where all this…passion, for lack of a better word…is coming from. I’m sorry about the way things happened, but I didn’t think you would be that upset.”
He frowned. “I’m not upset. I’m confused.”
“You didn’t seem confused the other day, when you were telling me how unbearable you find me.”
“Okay…maybe I was upset then. I had a moment. Not like you haven’t had a few lately.” He lifted his brows, encouraging her to agree with him.
She was suspicious, suddenly. “No. Two days ago, you were done. What changed your mind? You could do way better than me.”
“Ava–” He reached for her arm, a move she evaded with a quick step back. His expression hardened, making him look like a polished statue come to life. “You don’t want to throw away what we have. You’re just trying to punish me for what I said. I’m sorry. Let me–”
She took another step back, folded her arms across her middle. “Why are you acting like this?” Fear crawling down her arms, up her neck. “You don’t like my family, you don’t like the club, I’m not even sure you like me. You can’t spend ten minutes with me without being on your phone. You’re texting another girl, aren’t you? Whatever,” she said, not letting him answer. “I don’t care. Just like you don’t care. So what are you pushing for?”
When she reached to flip her hair over her shoulder in mindless irritated twitchiness, his eyes followed the movement. They latched onto the side of her neck. Too late, she remembered the tiny mark there, the little dark place where Mercy had pressed his mouth and sucked at her skin last night, in the side yard. They hadn’t taken things too far, but she’d delighted in the kissing, the reckless teenage pawing at one another. She’d never had that with him, not a true teen romance, but something heavier and more high-stakes from the first.
She clapped her hand over the mark, but it was too late, a grim smile blooming on Ronnie’s face.
“So that’s it then. You went running back to your biker.” His smile widened in a nasty slice, teeth gleaming white in the sunlight. “Here I am feeling guilty, and you’ve been throwing yourself at that Neanderthal. You bring me home to meet your parents” – he took an aggressive step toward her – “and you fuck some other guy? Once a slut, always a slut, huh? You just can’t rise above bad breeding, can you?”
Ronnie’s shadow seemed to grow; Ava tipped her head back. No, it hadn’t grown, it had been covered, by a taller, larger shadow: Mercy’s.
“Ronnie, Ronnie, Ronnie.” At the sound of his voice, Ronnie went rigid, expression frozen, fear flashing in his eyes. “You really shouldn’t have said that, my man.”
He made an evasive move, but Mercy was too large, too quick. He grabbed him by the collar and lifted him up off his feet, turning him, bringing his other hand up to grasp Ronnie by the throat.
A passing group of girls gasped.
“Whoa!” someone shouted.
“Oh my God!”
“Dude, check that out.”
“Mercy,” Ava hissed. “You have to put him down.”
Mercy wasn’t paying attention. He grinned into Ronnie’s face, tendons standing out in his arms as he lifted the shorter man up so they were on eye level. “Let me explain something to you, Ron,” he said, voice low and velvet, dark and Cajun-flavored. “That girl over there? She’s too good for you. She’s too good for me, too, but I’m smart enough to know that, and thank God she gives me the time of day. You? You’re stupid. So try to get it through your skull what I’m about to tell you. If you dare insult her ever again – you so much as give her a dirty look – you’ll be in a wheelchair. You touch her, and you’ll be in a pine box. Do you understand? I will fucking end you. Leave her alone.”
Then he threw Ronnie, tossed him backward onto the sidewalk so he landed with a sharp yelp sprawled on his back across the concrete. Ronnie, as it turned out, wasn’t stupid. No defiant look, no saving face; he scrambled, gasping, onto his hands and knees, crawling, then running away as he finally lurched to his feet.
“That wasn’t necessary,” Ava scolded as they earned dirty, startled looks from the passing crowds. But her heart was thumping in her throat, the hair standing on end at the back of her neck, and she really wanted to dive into his arms and feel his solid strength against her.
Mercy’s jaw could have cut glass. “Oh, yeah it was.” He was staring after Ronnie, brows tucked low over his eyes.
Something shiny on the sidewalk caught her eye. “His phone,” she said, stooping to pick it up. “You knocked it out of his pocket or something.” She scowled. “I ought to look through it and see who the hell he’s been texting so much.”
As Mercy came to stand beside her, she did just that.
And the bottom dropped out of her stomach.
They waited almost two hours for anyone to leave the Carpathians’ clubhouse, both of them having to go into the Chinese takeout place they were parked in front of to take a leak and buy sodas. Finally, three bikers left, headed into town, and it was more promising than they’d hoped: Larsen, his VP and sergeant.
Ghost dropped his cigarette out the window, started the truck, and followed at a careful distance. In their 2002 nondescript Ford, they went unnoticed, sliding around the corners in the heart of the city as the three men in wolf cuts drew the alarmed glances of pedestrians.
Larsen and his boys led them into a transitional neighborhood, where tumbledown bungalows were being renovated into posh city dwelling for the hipster elite and the moneyed college students, to a small khaki-colored house with brick-red trim and a lawn company-maintained yard of tidy round shrubs and cropped grass. There was a BMW parked in front of the single-bay garage, so Larsen and company parked on the street, making a big show of taking off helmets and gloves. Larsen shook out his blonde hair with obvious relish, loving the way the woman next door was watching them goggle-eyed as she watered her veggie garden.
Ghost parked behind a Subaru across and down the street a hundred feet or so. “Camera,” he said, opening his hand for it.
Aidan pulled the Canon from its bag in the floorboards, ensured the telephoto lens was in place, and passed it over.
Ghost put it to his face and the lensed clicked and whirred as he adjusted the focus.
The front door of the house opened as the three Carpathians approached, and out stepped a young man in real Polo everything, face screwed up in a black scowl.
“Mason Junior,” Aidan said, and cranked his window down, leaning toward it to see if he could catch a hint of conversation.
Turns out, it wasn’t hard.
“What the fuck are you idiots doing here?” Mason asked, hands landing on his hips as he took a stance on his front stoop. “I told you not to come around here.” He made a sweeping gesture to the street.
“Then answer my calls sometime,” Larsen shot back. “I’ve been calling you all morning.”
Mason sneered at him. “I don’t have time to babysit you, Jasper. I told you to leave a message with my secretary, and I’d get back to you.”
Larsen stepped in closer and their voice dropped, just aggressive murmurs and hisses from this distance. The massive meatnecked sergeant at arms folded his arms and took up a guarding pose at the edge of the yard, scanning the street with slow head turns.
The camera fired, a volley of rapid shutter snaps.
Ghost said, “Like I needed another reason to want this kid dead.”
Ava was glad to hand the phone over to Collier. The weight of it burned her hand, sent rippling numbness up her arm. She shuddered as she passed it into the VP’s hand and then rubbed her palm against the leg of her jeans, trying to work some feeling back into it.
Collier frowned as he scrolled through the outgoing texts she’d discovered on Ronnie’s dropped cell.
She closed her eyes, and discovered, to her horror, that they were tattooed in white against the insides of her eyelids:
Sleeping with F. Lécuyer again. Will try to make contact with her again, but not optimistic. Unreceptive last few times we talked.
That was the first, the most recent, and from there, moving backward as she’d scrolled down:
No go. Dogs came to repair tire. Ava not alone. Will try something else.
M took care of tires. Will buy me some time to talk to her. Will let you know.
Fine.
I can’t do this anymore!!! I’m pulling the plug. Fuck this. I can’t deal with her. She wants Lécuyer, let him have her. I hate the bitch.
At some point between that message – sent the morning she’d stopped by his apartment – and the following, either a phone or face-to-face conversation had taken place, in which Ronnie had been reassured and put back on course.
The texts were unending, dating back months, in intervals, and regular, almost every ten minutes, since she’d arrived back in Knoxville. Ronnie had been reporting her habits, schedules, moods to someone labeled Chief in his phone. Interspersed were tidbits of club history and goings-on, things he’d observed or benign things she’d told him. He’d texted news of Andre’s stabbing the night of the party, as well as a threat she hadn’t known her mother had made to Ronnie, that first night, telling him to watch himself. Ronnie’s fear had been evident in the texts, as well as his reluctance to continue reporting.
“Christ almighty,” Collier whispered, and Ratchet and Tango crowded at his shoulders, trying to read the tiny phone screen type. The VP glanced up at her ashen face, his own paling. “Do you have any idea who this Chief is he’s talking to?”
She shook her head, unable to speak, throat clogged with bile and tears and the bitterest disgust.
Collier shook his head and kept reading, thumb scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. “Is there any chance your boyfriend’s a cop?”
“Ex-boyfriend,” Mercy said firmly. His hand was heavy and warm at the curve of her waist, and possibly the only thing holding her up on her feet. “And no.” His voice sharpened, threaded with insult. “Of course she didn’t think he was. She’d never have brought him around here if she did.”
His defense of her gave her something to focus on. She laid her hand over his and managed to swallow. “No,” she said in a choked voice. “He majored in marketing at UGA. He’s not a cop.”
Ratchet sent her a sympathetic smile. “Honey,” he said, tone gentle, “that’s what this looks like, though.”
She shook her head, at a total loss. Yes, that’s what it looked like. It looked like the man she’d been sleeping with for almost a year had been reporting on her, like he was an undercover agent, infiltrating her life.
Beside her, Maggie rubbed her arm, the numb left one that had held the phone. “Ava, what grad school program was he applying to?”
She thought…thinking was hard. All she wanted to do was throw up. She wanted to vomit until her insides were clean, until every meal and look and laugh and touch she’d ever shared with Ronnie Archer had left her for good. “He…he wanted to get into law school. Business law. He wants to go into business law.”
Tango hissed, his grimace telling.
“Damn,” Collier said. He switched off the phone and let out a huge breath. “I’ll have to show this to your old man,” he said, almost like an apology.
Ava nodded, swallowing at the emotion lodged in her windpipe. “I want you to. Whatever he was doing – whatever this means – I want Ronnie to pay for this. I trusted him, I…”
She really was going to be sick.
She broke away from Mercy and her mother, fleeing out the front door of the clubhouse, swatting at Ares as he tried to follow her. She slammed against the door and fumbled the knob, staggered out into the sunlight drawing in huge gulps of air. She tasted salt on her tongue, felt the cold sweat break out down her back and under her arms.
“Oh my God,” she breathed, letting her head fall back, fighting the nausea, staring up at the bright ball of the sun. Burn it away, she pleaded. Burn away all the evil he touched me with.
Slowly, the wave passed, and her breathing evened out. She shivered hard, chilled down to her bones, and rubbed at her arms as she opened her eyes.
The last thing she expected to see was Carter Michaels standing in front of her, white envelop clutched in one hand, in his Leroy’s shirt and slip-resistant work shoes.
“Hi,” she said, because it was the only word that popped into her head.
He lifted the envelope. “I need to show you guys something.” Small frown. “You’re not gonna like it.”
“Par for the course,” she muttered.
“Ava?” Mercy was coming for her, his footfalls rapid as his long legs brought him up behind her. She could tell when he recognized Carter; he gave a blowing snort like a horse. “What do you want, QB?”
Ava elbowed him. “What is it, Carter?” she asked.
He pulled something from the envelope – it was a large legal envelope, eight-and-a-half by eleven. What he handed to her was a photograph, a class of students arranged in kneeling, standing, chair-standing rows in the elementary school library, the teacher and para-pro framing the class one on either side. The children wore bright colors and straight-leg jeans: kids in the nineties.
“What is this?”
“My second grade class,” Carter said, stepping in closer and pointing to his seven-year-old self, tow-headed and adorable in elastic-waist Levi’s and striped t-shirt. “Your boyfriend came in the store today–”
“Ex-boyfriend,” Mercy said.
Carter nodded. “And Leah was there. She said his name was Ronnie Archer. I knew I knew that name.” His index finger shifted, moving to the upper right among the rows of students. “He was in my second grade class.”
Ava’s eyes flipped wide as she took note of the small, baby face of the little brunette boy Carter pointed out to her. Softer and rounder in youth, there was still no mistaking Ronnie’s face. She checked the bottom of the photo, the list of names, just to be sure. There it was: Ronnie Archer.
“How…?” She glanced helplessly at Carter, reeling.
He gave her a gentle non-smile. “We were part of the same circle of friends that year,” he explained. “Him, Beau, Mason and me. Ava…Ronnie is Mason’s cousin.”