Thirty-Seven
Carter stared down the entire club, and to his great credit, he didn’t shrink, or duck his head, or slump his shoulders. He stood straight and looked each of them in the eye in turn, his focus centering on Ghost, as it should.
“Explain it to me,” Ghost said. “Because I’m angry enough to rip heads off with my bare hands.”
Without blinking, Carter said, “Yes, sir,” and launched into it.
Ava didn’t listen, because she couldn’t bear to hear it again. Let’s play Six Degrees From Mason Stephens. How close are you? Closer than she ever would have thought possible.
According to Carter, the Archer family had lived in Tennessee up until Ronnie turned eight, at which time they’d moved to Georgia so Mr. Archer could take a profitable job. Ava, not a part of Ronnie’s first or second grade classes, had never met him, and Ronnie had never breathed a word about living in Knoxville before his family moved to Atlanta.
Why would he? He’d been hiding so much from her, after all.
She swallowed against another wave of nausea. The urge to be sick came and went, stronger each time, tugging harder at her stomach. She leaned forward and put her head between her knees, took a slow deep breath and let it out through trembling lips.
Ronnie was Mason’s cousin.
Mason’s cousin.
She’d dated Mason’s cousin.
Slept with mason’s cousin.
Brought him home with her, into her family’s house, into this clubhouse.
Hadn’t she had any idea? Carter had wanted to know.
No, because of the club, she’d never jumped on the Facebook bandwagon. She’d never asked Ronnie about his extended family – and it was extended. Mason Senior and Ronnie’s father, William, were first cousins, which made the boys…some kind of cousins.
Hadn’t Ronnie ever done anything to make her suspicious?
No, because she didn’t know enough about non-club men to know what counted as normal.
The shame was relentless, washing over her again and again. She wanted to take a shower until the top layer of her skin had been scrubbed away. Wanted to cut off all her hair, because Ronnie had touched it.
She was up out of her chair and moving toward the dorms before she could register thinking it. Only when she heard the heavy footfalls behind her did she realize she was halfway down the hall, and that Mercy had followed her.
When his big hand closed around her elbow, she tried in vain to jerk away from him.
“Don’t touch me.” Her voice was high, strained, wavering. She turned, trying to twist loose, pushing at his chest with both hands. “Mercy, don’t touch me.”
He held her fast. “Why not?”
“Because how can you?” Her voice broke and she gasped, desperate to stop the tears before they got started. It wasn’t working; her vision blurred. “How could you touch me after you learned that I’d been with him, and that he’s…he’s…oh, God.”
He smothered her puny attempts to stave him off by tucking her into his chest, both arms tight around her, hand cupping the back of her head as the crying took hold of her and she started to shake.
“You didn’t know.” He rubbed her back, fingers delicate along her spine. “Hush, sweetheart, you had no idea.”
She couldn’t stand the sweetness, the acceptance. She hated herself too badly. With a firm shove, she managed to get loose of him, still crying, wiping at her messy face with inefficient swipes of her hands. “I should have,” she whispered fiercely. “Don’t give me an out.”
“Ava, baby.” He smoothed her hair back, tilting her head in the process. “Fillette. You need to calm down.”
“I was sleeping with Mason’s cousin!” she burst out, a sob tearing at her throat. “He killed my baby, and then he put his cousin in my bed. Oh, God. Oh, God, oh, God.”
“Ava, stop.”
But she couldn’t. Just like she couldn’t bear the anguish in his eyes when she was the one who’d done something so unforgivable. She rolled away along the wall, into the open room of his dorm, and rushed into the bathroom, locking the door before he could catch her.
Mercy waited, listening to her cry, until the shower taps cut on, then he made his way slowly back down the hall to the common room, where things had progressed to the point of Carter sitting at Ratchet’s laptop, clicking through Facebook pages and digging into Ronnie Archer as much as was possible, Ghost and the others peering over the kid’s shoulders at the screen.
Only Maggie was uninterested in all this, and she came to meet him, halfway across the floor, her pretty face drawn up with concern. She laid a hand on his forearm, a light, familiar touch, seeking reassurance. “Where is she?”
“In the shower.” He heard the unsteadiness in his voice, and realized the rage was in danger of spiraling inside him. “She…” He shook his head. “How did this happen, Mags?”
Maggie pulled her lip between her teeth and her eyes glittered with unshed tears. “She…” She blinked hard, staring into near space over his shoulder somewhere. “She didn’t seem to want anything to do with romance for the longest time.” She shrugged. “But I’d imagine, at Georgia, without anything to compare him to, Ronnie was charming. And most importantly” – her eyes snapped into focus, shimmering, hazel and furious as they locked onto his face – “he was nothing like the jerkoff who tore her to bits.”
The truth of her words fell like lead in his gut. It all came back to him, didn’t it? He broke Ava; he left her, and she’d sought comfort somewhere else, with someone else…who’d been nothing but a plant all along.
The self-loathing was too terrible to take, so he redirected his hate, sent it where it truly belonged: toward Ghost.
He glanced over at his president, and felt the tension begin to wind through him, curling around muscles, strumming bowstring tendons. “Is he happy?” he said quietly, through his teeth. “Does he like what his little girl brought home?”
Maggie’s hand tightening to a claw around his wrist was all that told him he’d taken a step forward. “No,” Maggie hissed, low so no one around the computer could hear. “Don’t let this one thing turn you against your president.” She’d pulled the tears back, composed herself when he glanced at her face. “That solves nothing.”
“Then tell me who I have to decapitate” – he gestured toward the dorm hall – “to make her stop crying.”
Maggie’s expression tweaked, a fast flash of sympathy. Then her mouth settled in a firm line. “She’s got to work through it. All you can do is be there, and sometimes, that’s the hardest part.” Her brows plucked, accusatory, hinting at a warning. Don’t hurt her again, she wanted him to know. Don’t break her this time.
When he didn’t move, she gave him a little shake and released him. “Don’t make things worse for yourself with Ghost,” she whispered. “He’s on your side this time around.”
He managed to nod. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been this furious and without an outlet for it. “I’ll keep her here with me tonight.”
“I think that’s a good idea.”
She scrubbed her skin with Irish Spring until it was pink, and the water began to sting. She stayed in the shower until it grew cold, and her teeth started to chatter. It didn’t even make sense – Mercy had been the last one to touch her. But she still felt so dirty. Soiled, deep in the most hidden parts of her heart, so betrayed and wounded and lost.
When she could stand it no longer, she shut off the taps and slicked her hair back off her face, wrung it out over her shoulder. Then it was just the drip-drip-drip of the leaky faucet and the cold humidity pressing all around her.
Mason’s cousin. She’d let Mason’s cousin inside her, literally and figuratively.
She toweled off and found one of Mercy’s t-shirts hanging off the counter. It swallowed her up, soft and warm, Mercy-scented, hanging almost to her knees, the short sleeves ending beneath her elbows.
He was waiting on the bed when she stepped out of the bathroom, a reverse of two nights before, him with his legs stretched out, her with the damp towel.
She tossed it over the desk chair and finger-combed her wet hair, studying him.
He’d hung his cut on the doorknob and was in his t-shirt, the ink on his left arm black and clear-edged against his golden skin in the lamplight. It was evening, and a blush glow came through the high window, but not enough to light the room. Amid the lamp-cast puddles, there were shadows, pockets of dark, like the dark under his eyes and in the taut clenched line of his jaw. He looked distant, removed from her, though only two feet separated them.
“What?” Ava asked, feeling a cold lump settle in her stomach. She was sick already; she couldn’t take his censure or rejection, not even if she felt she deserved it.
He braced his elbow on his thigh, brought his fist up and rested his chin on it. “It’s my fault,” he said, voice weary. “If I hadn’t left, you never would have…” He trailed off, gaze dark and sad as it lingered on her face.
It hit her like a fist, his self-recrimination, and it made her furious. “No.” She shook her head, hand clenched tight in her hair. “You don’t get to feel sorry for yourself about this. If it disgusts you, that I was ever with him, then you can get the hell out.”
“This is my room.”
“You don’t have a room!” she snapped. “Or a house, or an apartment, or anywhere, because you–”
“Left,” he snapped back. “Yeah, I left. We covered that already. You think I wouldn’t have done it different, if I could?” His scowl was thunderous; a small part of her knew that to anyone else it would have been terrifying. “You think I don’t want to go snap that little bastard’s neck?” He rose off the bed, his full height unfurling in one smooth, impressive flexing of bone and sinew. “Is that what you want?” He gestured to the door. “You want me to bring his head back to you in a shoebox?”
She let her head fall back, hands going limp to her sides. In this moment, she hated him, herself, Ronnie…the whole world. “Would you do it? If that’s what I wanted?”
He closed the gap between them, stepped in until her head had to press back farther in order to maintain contact with his black gaze. His eyes flashed, face tightening to fierce angles, razor-edged planes.
“With a red ribbon around it,” he said. “You know I would.”
The trembling started in her fingers, moved into her hands, migrated up her arms. She sucked in a huge breath and the tears came. “I can’t believe I was so stupid,” she whispered, shutting her eyes. “Mercy, I let him…”
He gathered her up in his arms like a little doll, lifted her off her feet. She tried to resist, pushing at his chest, but he would have none of it, sitting down on the bed, cradling her in his lap. He spoke to her softly in French, lips moving against her temple, and the tears overtook her. She needed to cry. She needed to press her face into his shirt and let it all out of her system. He stroked her hair and whatever he said sounded like poetry, his Cajun butchering of the language of Paris.
She cried until her head ached, until she was breathless and dizzy. And then she blinked and willed her vision clear, drawing in deep, rattled breaths as she let the hard wall of his chest support her.
“You didn’t know, baby,” Mercy said. “You had no idea. Everyone knows that.”
“How could I not, though?” she whispered. “How could he have…touched me, and I didn’t…God, I’m so disgusting.”
“Hey.” He eased her back so he could look into her face. “You’re not the first person in the world to sleep with the wrong jerk. It’s not the end of the world.”
“He’s not just a jerk, Mercy. What Mason did to me…what if Ronnie had got me pregnant, huh? What then? What if I’d had a baby related to the man who murdered my first child?” She shuddered at the thought and tried to glance away from him.
Mercy caught her chin in his hand, held her fast and forced her to hold his gaze. “That didn’t happen, though. It didn’t happen, Ava.”
“But it could have. I can’t forgive myself for being that stupid and weak.”
He leaned in and kissed her, but she wouldn’t respond, her lips closed against his, the awful grief building inside her again. That’s what it was: grief. The loss of a part of herself she’d thought untouchable: her loyalty to her family.
“Fillette,” he breathed against her lips as he pulled back a fraction. “You think I don’t want you now?”
She sniffed. “How could you?”
“Because you’re my girl, and I’ve wanted you since it wasn’t legal. And I won’t lose you over the ghost of some motherfucker I’m going to kill anyway.”
She smiled, despite the awful lump in her stomach, smiling against the threat of more tears. “Because you love me.”
“Je t'aime, Ava Rose.”
His hand left her chin, stroking slowly down her throat, fingers massaging the back of her neck. “Don’t worry about him anymore, okay? You let me worry. This is my problem now.”
She sighed, and pressed her forehead against his jaw, trying to absorb the feel and smell and immeasurable comfort of him.
My man, she thought. Hers, since she was eight, always hers. And those five years, just a nightmare, one that was haunting her now.
She woke in the black dark, as the sheets rustled and his warmth drew away from her. “Merc…”
He kissed her forehead. “Go back to sleep. I’ll be back later.”
She let her head fall back against the pillow and gathered the blanket up under her chin, cold without him pressed against her. Fear stole over her, directionless and fuzzy with exhaustion. She wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep, she thought, as she listened to his bare feet go across the carpet.
But she must have drifted off, because she tumbled into a nightmare. The old dusty boards of Hamilton House, smell of damp and blood filling her nose. Ronnie and Mason, standing over her, their voices faraway and brimming with laughter. Pain, shooting through her, stabbing deep into her stomach. The blood between her legs. Ronnie’s face dropping down close over hers. “You didn’t even know,” he laughed. “Stupid bitch, you had no idea…”
“Ava.” Mercy’s voice tore her from the awful dream, slammed her back into the bed in the dark dorm room.
She gasped, shoving up on her elbow, willing the phantom pain, the images away.
“Hey.” His hand was on her hip, rubbing slow circles through the blankets. “You alright?”
She sat up, wiping at her eyes. They were sore, her whole face puffy and swollen from crying earlier; she felt her pulse throbbing in her cheeks and temples and eyelids. “I…what’s going on?”
She blinked and saw the faint panel of light coming in through the open door from the hall. Someone stood framed in silhouette in the threshold. Mercy sat on the side of the bed, hand still on her hip, just a hulking shape in the dark.
He reached up and pushed her hair back off her face, swept her cheek with his thumb. “It’s three in the morning,” he said, voice as gentle as his touch. “I’ve been out hunting with Hound and Rottie.”
She drew in a deep breath.
“We thought you might want to see them, before…” He didn’t have to say the rest. Before he went to work on them.
It was her father in the doorway, his voice floating toward them. “Just if you want to, Ava. You don’t have to.”
Adrenaline flooded through her veins and she was wide awake in an instant. “I want to,” she said, squaring up her shoulders. It felt like someone else possessed her body, someone certain and ferocious. “Let me get dressed.”
“Right,” Ghost said, and stepped back.
Mercy patted her leg and then went to join him, flipping on the lights and closing the door on his way out.
She tossed back the covers and was amazed how clear-headed and sure-footed she was. Her breathing was regular, her pulse slow.
She pulled on her socks, jeans and boots, pulled her jacket on over Mercy’s t-shirt and zipped it closed over top of the running black dog silkscreened on the front.
Ghost and Mercy were holding up opposite sides of the hall when she stepped out, hands in their pockets, both drawn and visibly tired, both electrified from the inside out by the promise of justice. Whatever animosity still lingered between them about her, it had been shelved indefinitely; they were galvanized and brought together by this singular purpose.
“How’d you find them so fast?” she asked as they shoved away from the walls.
Ghost led the way; Mercy fell into step beside her.
“Hound and Rottie can find anyone. They were together, freaking out because you had the phone,” Ghost said.
In the common room, Carter lay asleep on one of the sofas. Someone, most likely Maggie, had thrown a blanket over him. Maggie, still dressed, sat at the bar with a tumbler of whiskey, legs crossed, beautiful even while exhausted.
Ava shared a look with her mother as she passed through the room, a silent give and take of support for one another. Then she was following Dad out into the utter blackness of predawn.
The air was cool and clean-smelling, the usual taint of river pushed down by the sharp cut of clouds and sky and slumbering autumn grass. It was too dark and too early for the fog to have set in, the usual rolling-in of thick low banks of it off the water. The stars had all winked out. Only the security lamps on the Dartmoor lot evidenced life.
Ghost led them into the dark office of the bike shop, pausing at the door that connected to the garage bays, turning to give her a measuring look through the gloom. Faint light filtered through the front windows, making him look sharp and ageless.
“Ready?”
She understood the things he didn’t say: that he shouldn’t be doing this; that this was club business now, and she had no right to it; that he felt like a shitty father for inviting her to step into more pain; but that this was a way he was trying to make up for all those other shitty-father things he’d done. He was giving her a chance to gain some closure, because that was the only way he knew how to love her.
Mercy’s hand landed at the small of her back, supportive and reassuring.
“Yes,” she said, voice steady. “I’m ready.”
Inside the working area of the garage, all customer bikes had been removed, each half-finished project shoved to the side and draped with oil cloth. The benches and tool chests had been lined up along the back wall. The roll-top doors were cinched tight, their narrow, rectangular windows covered with garbage bags and duct tape. In the middle of the cleared center bay, two plastic lawn chairs had been set up, side-by-side, right over the drain in the concrete floor. And there were Ronnie and Mason, in rumpled clothes, duct-taped hand and foot to the chairs, strips of the silver tape over their mouths. Ronnie had a very obviously broken nose, its shape distorted, the skin purple and broken, nostrils crusted with blood.
Walsh stood with one foot braced against the wall, a yellow legal pad in one hand, pen lodged behind his ear. He’d be taking notes for Mercy, a record of everything the cousins had to reveal to them.
Walsh gave her a small nod of greeting as she stepped into the bay.
Ghost moved to stand against the closed doors.
Ava stopped three feet back from the two captives, folding her arms, not wanting to be close enough for them to even breathe on her.
And Mercy…Mercy transformed into the talkative, delighted caged tiger playing with his prey.
“Did you boys behave yourselves while I was gone?” he asked, cheerfully. He paced in front of her, and ripped the duct tape from both their mouths to the sounds of muffled yelps. He wadded the tape and chucked it into the trash can off to the side. He was all loose-limbed and juiced-up, a manic blend of tightly wound and completely at ease. This was his wheelhouse, his talent, his contribution to the club.
He came to stand behind her, both hands settling on her shoulders. “I told the lady here that you’d be happy to answer any questions she has. Don’t disappoint me.”
Ronnie looked petrified. Ava tried to dredge up some sympathy for him, but there was none.
Mason, idiot that he’d always been, had a scrap of resistance in him. He glared at her with undisguised hatred, a sneer tugging at his split lower lip. “How’d you stand it, Ron? How was anything worth having to put up with this bitch every day?”
Mercy’s hands left her. She heard him step back, boots scuffing against the concrete. Then he moved into sight, moving around her toward Mason with a pipe wrench in one large hand.
Ava didn’t glance away. She didn’t even blink when Mercy’s arm swung back in a great arc and the wrench crashed into Mason’s knee.
His scream was terrible, echoing in the high, steel corners of the garage.
As it died away to noisy gulps and hiccups, Ava looked at Ronnie. He was pale, face slicked with nervous sweat. He wet his lips and swallowed like he might be sick.
“When I was seventeen,” she said, “Mason abducted me, assaulted me, and when I told him I was pregnant, he kicked me in the stomach. You being his cousin” – she swallowed – “will know all that. Just like you knew exactly who I was, where I came from, what kind of history I had. And you pretended to care about me, pretended we were both strangers, when you knew everything about me.
“You can tell them” – nod toward Mercy – “who you work for, who you report to. I don’t care about that. I just want to know why, Ronnie. Why me?”
His eyes went to Walsh, to Ghost, to Mercy, coming to her with a feverish pleading.
“It’s over,” she said softly. “And you’re going to tell me.”
He took a deep breath, glanced over at Mason, whose head had fallen forward onto his chest, tears rolling down his nose as he shivered and gasped and wrestled with the pain. “Because…” He looked at her again, going limp with defeat. “You ran away from the club; you were angry. You were the weak link.”
She hadn’t thought there was any way this could hurt her anymore, but she’d been wrong. Yes, she’d run away. So furious and wounded, she’d been the vulnerable, the broken, the weak spot in the armor of the club.
She turned away from him, breath catching. She hugged her elbows and willed herself not to tremble.
“Why don’t you go on back, sweetie,” Ghost urged. It was an order, but he phrased it like a request, and that warmed her. “There’s nothing left for you here.”
She nodded, and moved toward the door.
Mercy caught her briefly, tipped her head back and let the extractor bleed out of him a moment, just Felix shining in his dark eyes for her. “I don’t ever want you to worry about these idiots again. Okay?”
She nodded.
One squeeze and he turned her loose. “Love you,” loud enough for everyone to hear and not caring that they could.
Ava paused at the door and turned back, one last look at the two men who’d tried to ruin her life. “I want you both to understand that none of this had to happen,” she said. “It isn’t like in the movies; evil always has consequences.”
Ronnie closed his eyes.
Ava looked at Mercy, at the admiration shining in his eyes, the love. “Make them hurt,” she said, and left the garage.
She heard the music fire up as she let the door to the shop swing shut behind her: Metallica, “Master of Puppets.” Heavy metal to cover the screams.
They didn’t hold onto their secrets. Foolish children never did. That was the thing Mercy had always found most beautiful about the array of knives he carried with him in a black canvas case – blades had a way of parsing a man down to his most basic, human parts, stripping away the buffers of money, power, pride. There was no ego under the edge of his knife. Nothing too private, too guarded, too precious to hold onto. Ronnie and Mason were no exception. They came apart at the seams like hand-stitched dolls, but still, Mercy pushed them, because he wanted their blood on his hands.
Ronnie, it turned out, was the ambitious of the two cousins. He wanted to study business law for the time being, sure, but he had greater aspirations. He had a taste for adventure. He wanted to be involved in corporate espionage. He’d had a meeting, after graduating from Georgia, with the CIA, wanting to learn as much as he could about getting into the intelligence game. His father, moneyed, entitled, had connections at the FBI. It was them Ronnie was working for. His cousin Mason Sr. wanted the Lean Dogs out of Knoxville, a takedown that would fuel his eventual run for senate, his climb toward Washington, and God knew the FBI would look kindly on anyone who could get the alphabet agencies into the inner circle of an outlaw organization fifty years in prosperous existence.
So Ronnie had taken initiative; an informal mission to gain intelligence on the Dogs through, as he’d phrased it, the “weak link,” cozying up to an officer’s daughter. The plan had been his idea, one encouraged by his cousins Mason and Mason. The elder, because he wanted to wipe out the Dogs. The younger because he hated Ava Teague’s guts.
The entire relationship had been a lie, down to the seemingly coincidental meeting at the tennis match almost a year ago.
For almost a year, Ronnie had pretended to be Ava’s boyfriend, reporting back to his cousins, father, and some agent named Grey with any tiny bits of club intel he gleaned.
Not that all that pretending hadn’t had benefits. Ava was a pretty, smart girl, wasn’t she?
It was Mason that Mercy made squeal the loudest. Mason, who’d killed his unborn child. And then he’d ended it, and Harry and Littlejohn had come to clean up the garage.
“Spotless,” Ghost told them, and they nodded.
Walsh had written it all down, expressionless throughout. He’d put on paper the revelation that it was Ronnie’s father, William, who was buying up Main Street real estate in Knoxville. He wanted to come back to his home town. He planned to run for mayor once his cousin Mason had moved on to a senate race. Together, they would aid one another in their political endeavors. They would use the Carpathians to do the dirty work of putting any straggling Dogs in the ground, and then they’d wipe out that club too. A gang war ended, a city free of organized crime at last.
A beautiful plan.
Two dead boys, hanging limp against their duct tape bonds, “Ride the Lightning” screeching above their corpses.
A narrow fissure of deep orange lay along the tops of the trees against the predawn sky when they began the walk back to the clubhouse. Ghost halted Mercy halfway there, his face lined and tired in the lingering shadows.
“The feds will come looking for him, when he doesn’t check in,” he said with a deep, bone-weary sigh. “And they’ll want to talk to Ava.”
Mercy had been thinking that, the knowledge growing heavy against the back of his mind. As the bloodlust faded, replaced by an awful fatigue, a painful thirst for a strong drink, and a lust of a very different kind, he accepted the consequences of Ronnie’s death. “Not if they can’t find her,” he said, brows lifting, pressing home his point.
Ghost tilted his head. “She won’t want to take time off from school.”
“She’ll get over it.”
Ghost looked like he almost smiled. “That sounds like my line.”
“That’s the thing,” Mercy said grimly, “I can play father, if I have to. If that’s what it takes.”
Ghost’s eyes rested on him a long moment, studded deep in the centers with a hatred that was going to take years to wear down. It was nothing but paternal, that awful knowledge that his little girl was grown up and that any man saw her in a sexual light. He would have hated anyone in this instance, and Mercy knew that; he thought maybe Ghost was starting to know that too.
“Do you trust me?” Mercy said.
Ghost sighed. “You’re the only one I trust, bad as I hate it.” He scratched at his scalp, down his neck, like his skin was as exhausted as the rest of him. “They’ll expect her to hide, and they’ll expect it to be within the club.”
“They won’t find us in the swamp. You can’t navigate those bayous unless you were born in them.”
Ghost nodded. “Yeah.” He looked at Mercy with unmasked pleading. “And here I asked you back because I needed your help with the Carpathians.”
“What’s more important to you?”
“My daughter,” he said without missing a beat. “Always my daughter. Nothing can happen to her, Merc. I won’t tell my wife I let her baby get hurt.”
“Whiskey for breakfast,” Ava said, bringing her glass to her lips and taking another sip. The golden liquid burned all the way down, a welcome pain that kept her in the present, and kept her mind from spinning back to black places.
“Nothing better,” Maggie said, refilling her own glass from the bottle of Jack on the coffee table in front of them.
The black leather sofa in the common room was soft, warm from their body heat. If she leaned her head back and closed her eyes, she could probably go back to sleep.
She glanced over at the still-sleeping Carter. “Dad’s going to offer him a job,” she predicted.
“You think?” Maggie asked, true note of curiosity in her voice.
Ava felt weighed-down with wisdom, like contemplating the horrors of her social life had lent her a foresight. She knew it would fade, this inner calm and sense of knowing. But for now, the whiskey was fueling it. “I think he’ll offer for him to be a hangaround. Carter’s proved himself more than once in the last five years. And he obviously doesn’t have anywhere to go or he wouldn’t be asleep on our couch.”
“Hmm.” Maggie sipped her Jack slowly, with the grace of a practiced drinker. “Maybe so.”
They both tensed at the sound of the door opening.
Walsh came in first, with his notepad. He went to the bar, climbed onto a stool and leaned over to nick a bottle of warm Smirnoff from among the extra stock waiting to be refrigerated. He broke the seal and took a sip straight from the bottle, settling in to tidy up the notes he’d taken, pen in one hand, the other curled around the vodka.
Then Ghost, who stopped just inside the door and waited until Maggie got to her feet and rose to go meet him.
And then Mercy, traces of blood down the legs of his jeans.
Ava sat forward and put her glass on the table as he came to sit beside her, her stomach tightening, nerves clenching.
He sat close, so they were almost touching, but not quite. His face, she saw in the artificial light, was flecked with tiny dots of blood, across the blade-sharp bridge of his nose and the ridges of his cheekbones.
For a long moment they merely stared at one another, Ava disturbingly fascinated by the blood on him. She glanced at his hands, but they were clean, of course. He’d take a shower and wash his jeans, and then there’d be no traces of the gore. When she lifted her eyes, found his again, she wasn’t surprised to see the desire in them, the crackling warmth. He’d committed unspeakable violence for her, and now he wanted to bury himself in her, his reward for ruthlessness. Like a Viking. First the pillaging, then the…Well, it wouldn’t be rape, no, never, because she wanted it too.
Mercy cleared his throat and made a visible effort to compose himself, gaze sliding away from her so he could concentrate. Ava slid her hand inside of his and squeezed, encouraging.
“You won’t like this, but you’re going to have to take some time off school. A few weeks, at least.” Fast flicker of his eyes, full of apology. “We’re going to have to get away, fillette. They’ll be looking for both of us.”
She took a deep breath and nodded. “I was afraid of that.”
His grin was slender, halfhearted. “Guess I get to take you home after all.”
Her heart throbbed. Home to New Orleans, to the swamps of Louisiana that had bred and reared him. It was the most inappropriate thing – given what he’d just done, and how devastating that should have been to both of them – but she wanted so badly to ask about his father. Will you finally tell me? If you take me home, will you turn that secret loose?
“When?” she asked, instead.
“As soon as you can pack a bag.” Ghost said from behind the couch.
Ava turned and saw her father with hands on hips, stern gaze moving between the two of them. The understanding man from the bike shop minutes ago was gone, replaced by her father once more. A different version of him, though, because this version wanted her with Mercy.
“This afternoon, if possible. I’m on my way to call Stack in Atlanta, and Bob in NOLA.”
Mercy nodded. “Yeah.”
“Come on, baby,” Maggie said, reaching out a hand for Ava. “Let’s go get you ready.” There were tears glittering in her eyes.
Carter woke, and for one panicked minute, didn’t know where he was. His eyes struggled to focus. His face was on something soft: a pillow. A table in front of his face: bottle, glasses, ash tray, smoke curling from its crystal center, boots propped on the edge.
He pushed up, wiped at his face, and remembered he was in the Lean Dogs’ clubhouse, in their common room, sleeping on a leather sofa. On the matching sofa across from him, Ava’s brother Aidan and his best friend, Tango, sat having a smoke and a beer, a box of Dunkin’ Donuts between them. Tango had powdered sugar on his chin.
Aidan licked rainbow sprinkles off his thumb and said, “Sleeping Beauty waking up. And I didn’t even kiss you or anything.”
“Ha.” Carter swung his legs to the floor and massaged the stiffness from his neck. “What’s going on?”
“Breakfast,” Tango said helpfully. “Doughnut?”
What the hell. He reached for the box as it was handed to him across the table. There was a maple frosted in there – his favorite – and he speared it with a finger through the hole and took a huge bite, passing the box back. He was starving, he realized.
“What I meant was,” he said as he swallowed, “what’s going on with…” Did he dare say the name? “Mason.”
Aidan made a dismissive gesture. “Nobody wants to talk about him.”
Tango wiped the sugar off his face with the back of his hand. “What about you? What’ve you got going on today?”
He shoved in more doughnut, even as the first bite hit his stomach like a rock. “I’m ‘sposed to be at work at eight. What time is it?”
Aidan said, “That’s a suckass job. What do you do? Ring up cigarettes and lotto tickets twelve hours a day?”
“Pretty much, but that’s all I got. Seriously, what time is it?” He held the doughnut in his teeth as he reached for his sneakers under the coffee table. “I’m probably late. Shit, and Val doesn’t have a key to get in…”
“Untwist your panties, Gertrude,” Aidan said. “It’s six.”
Carter relaxed a fraction, chewing more slowly.
“Do you like your job?” Tango asked. He had one of those pleasant, soft, almost-bright in a subtle sort of way voices. He was the oil, and Aidan was the vinegar. The salad dressing needed them both, the smooth coating and the abrasive acid.
Carter shrugged. “No one likes jobs, I don’t guess.”
“Really?” Aidan’s dark brows went up. “I love mine, man. I get to play with bikes all day.”
“I’m not a mechanic,” Carter said, shrugging again. He shoved his feet in his shoes, licked frosting off his fingers and bent to do the laces.
“You could learn,” Tango said. “Or not. Dartmoor’s diverse. There’s lots of different things you could get in to.”
Carter froze, head lifting. His pulse pattered in the ends of his fingers, high in the tops of his ears. “Are you guys…offering me a job?”
From the back hallway, Aidan’s father, the indomitable patriarch of the whole club with that gaze that could bend rebar, stepped into the room, arms folded loosely across his chest. “I’m offering you a chance to mop the floor for me for the next couple of months, take out the trash, go on beer runs.”
Carter felt his hopes sink.
“And if you do that worth a shit, then I’m offering you a job…and a chance to prospect.”
The hope took a U-turn, one he’d never expected to mean anything to him.
“I appreciate what you’ve done for my family,” Ghost said, “twice, now. I’m not just offering you a paycheck, kid. If you play your cards right, I’m letting you join that family.”
Aidan almost smiled, seeing the wonder steal over the kid’s face. Carter Michaels, star of Knoxville High, fallen so far he couldn’t even see the old ladder to the top anymore, was listening to Ghost, and he was wondering if he could allow himself to love the idea of prospecting this club.
Carter’s blue eyes slid over to land on them at the couch, silently asking if this was legit, or some sort of trick.
“Think about it,” Aidan said, as his phone rang and he fished it from his pocket. “Not like you’ve got anything else to look forward to.”
He pressed the cell to his ear. “Yeah?”
Breathy, quick, frightened voice: “Aidan. It’s Greg.”
Aidan sat up, tension tightening his limbs. He kept his voice low and controlled, though, as he got to his feet. “Greg. Hey, man, what’s up?”
Tango sat up straighter.
Ghost’s eyes came over, sparking with interest.
Carter watched, still wondering.
On the other end of the line, Greg took a deep breath and let it rush back out across the phone. “Can we meet? I’ve got some things I want to tell you.”
Bingo. Fucking jackpot. Intel, hand-delivered, and all of it Aidan’s doing. This was good for the club, sure, but this was a personal win for him, too. This was him proving useful to his brothers. Taking initiative.
He resisted the urge to pump his fist in the air and said, “Somewhere we won’t be bothered. Tango and I’ll see you at the high school in a half hour. The parking lot by the practice fields.” Where no one would expect an MC rendezvous to take place. Neither law enforcement nor the Carpathians would be looking for them there.
“Yeah. Sure.”
When he hung up, Aidan looked at his father and heard the pride ringing in his voice. “Our rat’s feeling chatty.”
Ghost nodded. “Good job.”
High praise coming from the boss man.