Twenty-Six
When she woke next, she was in a regular room, and the bed was elevated so she had a view of the flower arrangements displayed on the window ledge, the counter by the sink, the bedside table. Michael was with her, in an uncomfortable-looking chair. And a bright glimmer lay against her chest, over her gown. A necklace. A silver cross.
Battling the drugs that made her limbs heavy, midsection thumping with pain, she lifted an IV-laced arm and touched the cross at her neck, eyes going to Michael in silent question.
His poor face was haggard. He looked like he hadn’t slept, the lines pressed deep around his eyes and mouth, the shadow of a beard tracing his jaw. His shoulders were stooped and his clothes were rumpled, and all she wanted was to sit him down in front of a hot meal and rub the tension out of his back.
She was in a hospital bed, though.
And here he sat.
It was easy to think that she’d imagined his tears and his brilliant smile. So stern and unforgiving now. But she wasn’t imagining the dedication; his presence proved that.
He cleared his throat. “It was my mother’s,” he said of the cross. “She gave it to me right before she…died.” Unsmiling twitch of his mouth. “Said she named me after St. Michael, wanted me to be the protector. Lot of good it did her.”
Her throat was so dry it hurt to swallow. “I’m sorry you couldn’t save her,” she said, aching for him, the pain igniting with hot flares in her wounded abdomen.
She felt the penetrating passage of his eyes, as they moved across her face. Neither of them needed to say it: No, he hadn’t saved Camilla, but he’d saved her, and maybe that was the universe setting things to rights.
Or, Holly thought, maybe angels had to earn their wings.
“Delilah’s due any day now,” Wynn said, ensconced in the hospital-provided recliner like any good Southern storyteller. Michael had been sleeping in the chair at night, laying it almost flat. “You’ll have to come out and see the pups,” Wynn continued. “You’ll love ‘em. Little sausages when they’re born, and just a’ squallin’.”
Holly smiled. “I’d like that.”
“You can even pick one out, if you want. A little pup all for yourself.”
“That’s a nice offer, but I don’t know. I’m not sure I could keep one of those in Dog Chow.”
He laughed. “They can eat.”
The room door opened to admit a bobbing spray of white lilies, and behind them, Ava, laughing as she heeled the door closed and set the flowers on the counter alongside the others. She was dressed all in black, a red scarf wrapped tight around her throat to fight the cold, her high glossy ponytail swinging as she settled into the plastic chair on the other side of the bed.
“I passed Michael in the hall on my way in,” she said, still chuckling. “And he gave me this awful look” – she did a decent impression of one of his darker expressions, ruining it with a grin – “and said, ‘She won’t eat.’ And when I said you’d eat when you felt like it, he ordered me to shove something down your throat.” She smiled. “So if he hasn’t told you himself, he’s super worried about your eating habits.”
“I eat,” Holly said, rolling her eyes. “I had Jell-O and Corn Flakes this morning.”
“I told him nobody gains weight in the hospital. That it’ll take you a while to bounce back.”
“I’m sure he listened,” Holly said with a wry smile.
“He didn’t say anything and walked off.” Ava looked amused by the whole situation. “I think he was on his way to the cafeteria to get you a sandwich. Wait till he bumps into Mercy. That’ll really brighten his day.”
Holly smiled. She couldn’t remember a time when she’d smiled so much. Stuck in the hospital with a painful line of stitches crawling down her belly, eating Jell-O and having to give bowel movement reports to the nurse, and yet she couldn’t stop grinning.
The Lean Dogs had been wonderful.
Ava came to visit every day, bearing more flowers and chocolates and paperback books, gifts addressed from the other old ladies and their spouses. Mercy had popped in a time or two to say hi, when he’d brought Ava. And Uncle Wynn had thumped in on his crutches every chance he could, chatting with her about how muddy the farm was as the snow melted, how Delilah’s pregnancy was progressing, how he’d gotten an extraordinary amount of milk from Daisy the cow that morning.
There was no equal to the force of Michael’s care for her. He made her feel as no one ever had. But with his club family, she felt human. Like a regular person. She almost felt like she had friends.
“Those are from Jackie,” Ava said, pointing to the lilies. “You haven’t met her yet.”
“They’re real pretty,” Wynn said.
“Whose old lady is Jackie?” Holly asked.
Ava made a face. “Collier. He’s…well, he’s incarcerated right now.”
“Oh.”
“And Jackie seems to think…well, I wish she’d come around more, so we could show her that she’s not been abandoned. She’s family, whether he’s inside or out.”
How nice, Holly thought, and for the first time in her life, she knew there was something she wanted to be a part of. A family. Yes, they were a family, even if they were a little more dysfunctional than most. And without one of her own, Holly wanted desperately to join.
She prayed Michael wanted it too.
“The girl talk drive you out?”
Bleary-eyed, so tired he was weaving down the hall like a drunk, Michael didn’t see Mercy until he was almost on top of the man. Running into him would have been about as fun as running into a closed door. People just shouldn’t be that big, he thought sourly. It wasn’t decent.
“Huh?” He tilted his head back, glancing up at Mercy’s alert, smiling face, his bright brown eyes alight with good humor.
“Holly and Ava. Talking. Girl talk.” He seemed to be enjoying Michael’s confusion too much.
It finally clicked into place, slow tumbling of the locks in his mind. “Oh. No. I was gonna go get Holly something to eat.”
Mercy snorted. “She’s not eating, huh?”
“It’s pissing me off.”
He laughed. “You might as well get over it, man. She’s not gonna eat till she gets home. She’s about ready to be released anyway, right?”
“Tomorrow, the doctor says.” Giving up pretension, Michael leaned sideways against the wall, let it brace his shoulder.
“That’s a good thing,” Mercy said, clearly reading the concerned notch between his brows.
It was, because it meant she was out of the woods. The doctor had said she’d make a full recovery. That the repairs were holding, she was free of infection, and that she’d be able to have children in the future. Children: that brought the reality of what was happening to the forefront. Holly was a free woman. Free of her family, free of the bargain she’d tried to make with him. Free to go and do whatever she wanted. She could start a whole new life. She could find some happy, smiling boy her own age, get married, have babies, leave behind every death-tainted detail of the Lean Dogs MC.
She had a shot at normal now. And even if she didn’t know it about herself yet, she had the strength to put the past behind her and walk out from beneath the shadows of memory.
“Did you fall asleep?” Mercy asked, jerking him back to the moment at hand.
Too tired to check himself, he blurted, “I don’t know what she’s going to want when she gets home.”
“What?”
“Her dragons are dead,” he said quietly. “And I think…I think if she wants to move on, and leave all of this behind, then I have to let her go.” That would be the noble thing to do. That’s what a true archangel would do.
Mercy sighed noisily. “Man…” He shook his head. “Can I give you a piece of advice? One fucked-up whackjob to another? We don’t get a whole lot of good things handed to us in this life. When a very beautiful girl is brave enough to actually want to stick around, you don’t let her go.”
Michael lifted his brows.
“You marry her, and you hope to God she never comes to her senses.”
The second floor office above Loving Embrace funeral home smelled tastefully of vanilla this afternoon. One of those scent-dispersing warmer things, Ghost saw, as his eyes skipped over its resting place at the corner of the heavy cherry desk. The piece looked antique, but well-kept. Maybe the English bastard had had it shipped over from the motherland.
“You gave them the address of my guy’s uncle,” Ghost fumed quietly, refusing to take the chair offered him, standing instead, hands on his hips as he faced off from Shaman.
Behind his desk, the man’s hair was seal-slick and glimmering auburn in the sunlight from the windows, brushed back as before, hanging straight behind his shoulders. His jacket was draped over the back of his chair, sleeves of his open-throated purple shirt rolled to the elbows. His forearms were freakishly long and white. What ever happened to a good old fashioned gangster? What was wrong with a blinged-out pimp? Ghost would have killed for one shred of the usual and familiar.
Shaman frowned, the expression seeming polite. “They asked for it.”
“You said you didn’t have use for them anymore!”
“I did say that, and I didn’t have a use for them. All I did was give them the address.”
“They were going to kill the man’s daughter, you asshole.”
“Did they?”
“Almost!”
“She’s alive then,” Shaman said with a mild eyebrow lift. “Good. She’s quite pretty. Would have been a shame.”
Ghost stemmed his explosion, leaving it poised on his tongue. Mags had spent twenty-three years trying to teach him patience; he managed to grab onto some now.
He glanced over at Walsh, the VP silent and contemplative beside him.
“You never promised them you’d help get the girl back,” Walsh said. Not a question. Not even a guess; an understanding.
“No.” Shaman glanced toward him, sharp-boned face warming, pleased. “Naturally, they assumed that I would, but no, I didn’t care about any of that. I’m a fan of many debauched things, but rape isn’t one of them.”
“But you sent them out to Wynford Chace’s farm,” Ghost said.
An elegant shrug. “You’re looking at this the wrong way, Mr. Teague. I don’t care. Not about any of it.”
There was an empty cold feeling growing in the pit of Ghost’s stomach. “You understand,” he said quietly, “that you sending them – giving intel that sent them – after innocent civilians in my care could be taken as an act of war, don’t you?”
“I do. But do you mean to tell me you didn’t think, for a little while, about handing that girl over to them to keep this meeting” – he gestured between the two of them – “from taking place?” He smiled. “We’re not so different you and me. It’s just that I’m a lot more honest about it.”
Ghost took a step back, scowling. “I don’t know what the hell you want, but you’re not getting my club. Hear what I’m saying, and know that. No chapter of the Lean Dogs will ever be in anyone else’s pocket.”
Shaman kept smiling, and nodded. “I hear you, Mr. Teague, I hear you. I’m not asking for that. Things still stand where we last left them. I owe you a favor.” The smile widened, all sharp canines and awful cheer. “And I look forward to delivering.”
The very last thing Ghost wanted to see when he got back from Loving Embrace was the police cruiser parked at a slant in front of the clubhouse. He knew it could belong to only one cop, well before he saw Sergeant Vince Fielding unfold himself from a picnic table beneath the pavilion and walk forward to greet him.
“Meet you inside,” Ghost told Walsh, and the VP nodded, heading into the clubhouse, leaving his boss at the mercy of the uptight cop out in the open air of the parking lot.
“Vinnie,” Ghost greeted with a smirk, “seeing you was not on my to-do list today.”
The sergeant, about as good-humored as a nun at a boys’ school, stood with hands braced awkwardly on his hips, as always not sure what to do about the gun belt in the way. He gave Ghost the old wrinkled-brow, sharply disapproving frown they’d all grown so accustomed to over the years. Vince Fielding had started hating Ghost the moment Maggie took a shine to him, and he’d maintained a stiff, formal dislike ever since.
“I wanted to talk to you,” Fielding said.
“That’s generally what people do when they’re standing together like this.”
“Off the record.”
“Sarge, nothing you and I ever say to each other is on any kind of record.” Ghost shot him a dark grin. He had to give the sergeant credit; the man had a way of making him twenty-seven and invincible again.
Fielding sighed, and braced a shoulder against one of the steel poles that held up the pavilion. “That girl,” he said, pressing on with business, ignoring the smile, “who got killed outside of Bell Bar back before Christmas.”
“I know the one.”
“I’ve got nothing,” Fielding said with a defeated exhale. “It’s a murder, so it’ll stay open indefinitely, and it’s too fresh to get kicked into cold cases yet – but I’m about ready to pull the man power back. We’ve turned up nothing but dead ends, and it’s taking up my peoples’ time.” He made a regretful face. “The poor thing’s family’s a mess. I hate it, but…”
“If you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing,” Ghost finished, feeling cheeky in his bright, helpful tone. It felt good, being the one giving the other guy hell, after having been on the receiving end with Shaman. He amended his earlier sentiment: he was glad for this talk…so long as it didn’t lead anywhere.
Fielding nodded, and his eyes flipped up, dark and tortured, his mouth twisted at a wry angle. “I wanted to see, before I pulled my uniforms off, if you knew anything I ought to know. If you’d heard anything, in the underground grapevine.”
“You’re not saying we killed her.”
“No,” Fielding said immediately. “No, not that.” Nice to know they weren’t completely vilified. Fielding’s gaze sharpened. “Just if you knew who did.”
Ghost considered. Michael had told him it had been one of Holly’s three tormentors. The husband, he’d said. The one with the big ears, mistaking the other waitress for Holly, strangling her to death when he realized his mistake and panicked, thinking she’d report him to the police. “Well,” Ghost said slowly. “If I did know anything, I’d say it’d be safe to assume that your killer isn’t gonna be bothering any more waitresses.”
Fielding stiffened. “You know him, then.”
“Can’t say that I do.” Ghost walked away from him, ambling toward the clubhouse.
“Ghost,” Fielding said behind him. “Ken!”
He threw a wave over his shoulder. “Afternoon, sergeant. I think you know the way out.”