Thirty-Five
Jenny
It seemed an eternity that she knelt in the dirt and retched. After it was empty, her stomach kept squeezing tight, terrible dry heaves that burned her throat. Just as they started to subside, she sat back and saw the blood on her hands, and it started all over again.
She was still gagging and gasping for breath when a shadow fell across her. Pup knelt down at her side and carefully slit the tape at her wrists with a knife. He had flecks of blood on his face, and his eyes were serious. Meeting his gaze was finally what allowed her to take a huge breath, stop puking, and sit down hard on her butt.
“You’re not dead.”
He shook his head. “They shot at me, alright, but I slipped past ‘em.”
“And you came back,” she said, stupidly. Her throat was so raw it hurt to talk.
Pup shrugged. “Wasn’t gonna let my VP’s sister get killed, was I?”
“Shit,” she said, because there were no other words, and flopped back, the loose soil of the yard catching her.
The sky arced blue and hard as a marble overhead, dome-shaped from her vantage point. Cloudless. Infinite. A sign? A reflection of her conscience?
No. Not that. Because she’d just killed the man she’d shared her life with for twelve years. Whether or not he was a monster had no bearing on the situation.
Crockett’s face appeared above her suddenly, eclipsing her view, his broad features touched with an almost childlike grief.
Jenny sat up, and he sat down, so they were both cross-legged and shoulder-to-shoulder, staring out across the featureless stretch of his backyard. Pup watched them, but it didn’t feel awkward, all of them too exhausted for propriety.
In a slow, careful voice, Crockett said, “Candy came home…came home…a while back.”
Jenny knew he meant seven years ago, so she nodded. “He did.”
“He was in New York.”
“He was.”
“And you…you…” He took a deep, shaky breath. “Riley hurt you, didn’t he?”
The tears in his voice caused her own eyes to film, and she turned to face him, biting back the sob that welled in her throat. “He did. Every day.”
“God, Jennifer, how did I forget?”
She put an arm across his wide shoulders and pressed her face down into his shirt. “It’s alright, it’s not your fault,” she whispered, as the tears slipped down her nose.
~*~
Colin
An early autumn night was stealing over the landscape when Crockett’s house came into view. The driveway and front lawn were full of cop cars and county vans. The street was lined with bikes. Whatever had happened…it was just that: happened. Past tense.
His stomach cramped, and worry cycled through his bloodstream, hot and furious like adrenaline. Since the news had come through, they hadn’t stopped long enough to check anyone’s phone for an update. Candy had gone white when he’d taken the call from Talis a few truckstops up the highway.
“Something’s happening with Jenny.”
There was no more impotent a feeling than being a hundred miles away from your woman when she was in danger. Unable to help, unable to put himself between her and whatever threatened her. His child. Jesus Christ.
He’d prayed and cursed alternately the whole way here.
What if she…
What if someone…
And what if he…
He scrambled off his bike at the end of the driveway and ducked under the crime scene tape, Candy hot on his heels.
“Hey!” someone shouted. “You can’t cross the line!”
Candy intercepted. “Try to hold us back, asshole, just try it!”
“They’re relatives,” someone else called. “Let ‘em through.”
So the local cops weren’t anti-Dog. Good to know.
The front door was open and flashbulbs were going off inside with bright flares. Men in black windbreakers crowded the living room – techs. But he glimpsed a shimmer of blonde hair through the doorway of the kitchen, and that was where he headed, breathing frantically, heart pounding against his ribs.
The sight of Jenny nearly took his knees. She sat in a chair with someone’s jacket draped across her shoulders, her face streaked with dark, dried blood. It was on her shirt, in the ends of her golden hair, traces of it caught in between her fingers.
“Jen!”
Her head lifted, and he watched the tears come up in her eyes, saw the rapid flit of a whole spectrum of emotions move through them. “Baby,” she said, voice trembling. Then she took a deep breath and stood. “It’s not mine,” she said when he continued to stare at her, vision blurring at the edges. “Colin, sweetie, it’s not my blood.”
“You–you’re okay?”
She nodded.
“And the baby?”
“I think so. Hopefully.”
He reached her in one stride and crushed her in his arms.
The familiar shape of her pressed to his chest, the silkiness of her hair against his face – it was home. It soothed him, replaced all the fear and worry with a bone-shaking relief. She smelled like blood. When she tucked her face into his neck, he felt the warm wetness of tears.
“What happened?”
Pup answered him, and that was the first time he noticed she wasn’t alone in the room. The prospect and old man Crockett stood on either side of her chair.
“Her ex,” Pup said. “She killed him.”
~*~
Candy
“I wanna see him.” Candy put his hands on his hips and silently dared the scrawny uniform to make him move.
“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to either go in the kitchen with the others, or be escorted outside.”
“Who’s gonna escort me? You?”
The kid gulped, petrified by the idea.
An older officer pushed past the techs and into view. “Leave him be, Derek. You know how this has to work. Go wait with Jen.” Officer Jaffrey, veteran of the force and a realist who understood that the Lean Dogs were a part of life in Amarillo.
“This was self-defense,” Candy said, firmly, giving the man a hard stare. “You know it was. Riley’s a sick fuck, and whatever my sister did, it was to protect herself.”
“We gotta go through the process,” Jaffrey said, but nodded. Yeah, he knew the truth here: It was only a matter of time before someone put a bullet or two in Riley.
Riley who, to Candy’s satisfaction, lay sprawled at an awkward angle on the rug, the coroner’s people poking, prodding, and recording things on notepads.
“Anyone let his brother know?” he asked, jerking his head toward the corpse.
Jaffrey snorted. “That’s none of your business and you know it.”
“Yeah.” He grimaced. “Alright. Thanks.”
In a feat of restraint, he’d let Colin go to Jenny first, had been snooping after the body to give them a moment. The guy might be kind of an idiot, but Jenny was having a baby with him, so they probably wanted to…hug or some shit.
When he propped a shoulder in the kitchen doorjamb, he saw that the hugging was still happening, Jenny’s face hidden in Colin’s throat, both of them shaking. Candy wanted badly to hug her himself, but he was the brother here, and not her lover; he would wait.
Crockett spotted him. “Candy! There you are! Where you been, boy?” His grin was wide and genuine, his gaze lost somewhere inside his memories, the way Candy had come to expect.
Jenny lifted her blood-streaked, tear-stained face from Colin’s shoulder and said, “He was only lucid for a little while, but it was long enough. God bless him.”
~*~
Colin
He cranked the hot tap as far as it would go and checked the temp of the water again. Steaming and just about perfect. He turned to Jenny.
She stood in the center of the bathroom, studying the dried blood beneath her fingernails.
The fallout. It didn’t matter what Riley had done to her, or how she’d felt about him at the end, she’d killed someone she’d loved once. There was trauma there; deep layers of it that would wear away in patches, new scales revealed when she least expected them.
“Jen,” he said, softly.
Her eyes came to him, distant with wonder. The blood on her face looked like war paint, and he recalled, for some reason, that he was part Cherokee. Some dim unconscious reasoning that they shared that now, he and his woman, the warrior legacy.
“He didn’t even suspect, you know?” she said. “That I could do that to him.”
“He didn’t? He must not know you as well as I do,” he joked, but it fell flat.
She didn’t respond. “The last night, before Candy got back,” she continued, “before he got put away. That last night.” She shuddered. “He knocked me out. When I came to, I was on the floor, and he was holding me down…while…while his prospects took turns at me.”
His lungs seized.
“I kicked one of them in the face. Broke his nose. God, he screamed…And Riley slammed my head into the floor until I blacked out again.”
He didn’t want to hear this. Couldn’t. “Jen…”
“I stabbed him.” She put a finger up under her jaw to demonstrate where the blade had gone in. “And I shot him.” She closed her eyes and exhaled in an exhausted rush. “And I’m so glad. God, Colin, I’m so glad…so glad…”
“Shh. Hush.” He went to her and put his arms on her shoulders, gave her a little shake. “Let’s get cleaned up, okay?”
She nodded, distant, doll-like, and compliant. “Okay. Yeah.”
He’d intended to leave her to it, but realized now that he couldn’t. He stripped off his clothes as she undressed, eyes searching her skin for bruises or signs of abuse. Instead he found the slight curve of her stomach, the first physical sign of the baby growing.
“Come on.” He put his hand at her waist and steered her into the shower stall, stepped in and closed the door behind them. It was cramped with both of them, but the hot water felt delicious and he was glad to see Jenny turn her face into it, slicking her hair back, wanting Riley’s blood off her, finally.
He stood behind her and reached for the shampoo in the rack. He squeezed a dollop onto the top of her head and massaged it into her scalp. He thought she might reach to swat him away, but braced her hands on the tile instead, sighed deeply and leaned into his ministrations.
It spooked him. His feisty girl didn’t like to let him in, see her vulnerable. But he would take whatever she gave him, even if it was given in the aftermath of something terrible.
He lathered her hair, worked at her scalp with his fingertips, and her neck went weak. She tipped forward, and let him massage her nape, then her shoulders.
She put her back to the spray to rinse, pale throat exposed, breasts thrust toward him, and trauma or not, his thoughts turned lascivious. Her face hovered just below his, skin pebbled with water droplets, flushed from the heat. Rivulets trickled down her neck, across the generous swells of her breasts.
Desire lanced through him. The sudden, overpowering urge to join with her physically and remind himself that she was alive and whole, that she loved him.
As if she sensed it in him, her hands came to his chest. Her eyes opened. “It’s okay. You can. I want you to.”
He kissed her and tasted a faint soapiness of shampoo residue. Cupped his hand against her belly, where the baby was, right where she’d shown him before he left for Knoxville.
She sighed against his mouth. Tucked her hips in tight to his thighs.
“I missed you,” he whispered, and the hot water coursed over them both.
~*~
Jenny
Show woke with a start, the smell of fresh blood hot in her nose. The room was dark, and for a moment, she panicked. Then it came back to her in a rush: Crockett’s house, Riley, the knife, the police arriving, Colin taking her into his arms.
She lay on her side now, facing him, swaddled in her robe, clean, warm, and only smelling blood in her memory.
Colin snored softly, the force of his great ribcage expanding sending tremors through the mattress.
Careful not to wake him, Jenny slipped out of bed and went barefoot out into the main living area of the sanctuary. As she’d expected, Candy was in his chair, smoking, glow of the TV catching the shine of Scotch in his glass.
He gestured to the TV. “Need me to turn that off?”
“No, it wasn’t what woke me.” She took the chair opposite. “Can’t sleep either?”
He raised his glass and swallowed down the Scotch.
“God, I could use some of that,” she sighed.
“But you can’t.”
“He told you?”
“Yeah. Then I punched him in the face.”
“Candy!”
“Not that hard. I didn’t even leave a mark.” He snorted. “I had to do something.”
She grinned, and it felt wonderful. “Am I gonna get the big bro lecture?”
“No.” Seriousness in his voice. “Not after…no.”
The brief flare of humor died in her chest. “Derek.”
“I should never have gone away and left you here.”
“You thought he was out of the way.”
“And I was a dumbass for thinking that. I knew better.” He found the bottle somewhere on the side table and it clinked against the rim of the glass as he refilled it.
“You couldn’t refuse Ghost.”
“Wrong.” He made a buzzer sound in the back of his throat. “Could have, and should have.”
“He’s the president of the mother chapter. He’s the president.”
“And you’re my family,” he shot back. “Do you think any member of this club is more important to me than you?”
She sucked in a breath. “Candy,” she said quietly.
“No. Fuck it. Is that not real presidential? Give a shit. I let…”
She stood and moved to sit on the arm of his chair, arm lying along his shoulders. “Stop,” she said, and thought of their mother for a moment. Her beautiful blonde head bent over Jack Snow’s as she kneaded the tension from his neck. “Stop, baby,” she’d always said. “You’ll drive yourself insane.”
God, she missed her parents.
“I don’t care about presidential,” she said. “You can tell me whatever you need to. You can ease the burden.” He needed, more seriously than he even realized, an old lady. There were some burdens you could only share with the person who shared your bed, and Candy had gone forty-four years without that in his life. “But there’s no sense talking about what you could have done differently. It happened. We’re okay. That’s what matters.”
He grunted his disagreement. Then grew contemplative. “I still don’t know how I never saw it, back when we were kids.”
“Saw what?”
“Riley’s evil. It had to be there.” It had been; behind every smile, every seemingly sweet touch, something dark and foul, overtaking him like a vine, choking whatever good there was. “Why didn’t we see it?” He tipped a look up to her, nothing but shadows and shiny eyes in the dim light, and Jenny’s heart grabbed for him. Riley had been his best friend once. She wasn’t the only one who’d been betrayed.
“Nothing traumatic ever happened to the guy,” Candy said. “I mean, look at Mercy. If anyone ought to have been a murdering, wife-raping son of a bitch, it was him.”
“But he’s not.”
“No.”
“He had too much good in him. And something to live for.”
His gaze narrowed. “Riley had something to live for too. And he put it in the hospital.”
She sighed and rested her chin on top of his head, his hair prickly on her skin, his breath warm against her throat. “Are you sorry I did it? You kept him alive for a reason.”
“I’m not even a little sorry. Don’t worry about that. Things might be a little tricky now, with his brother, but we’ll get through it.” It smacked of an overconfident lie, but she let him tell it. “But I’m glad he’s dead, honey. I wish I’d done it a long time ago.”
Silence tightened around them, easy and comforting.
“Are you excited about being an uncle?” she asked.
“Absolutely.”