Four
Matt touched the end of the match to the candle wick, and a soft glow welled and pooled across the top of the bar. Three seconds into burning, the candle began to give off the scent of vanilla. It was a tall, white pillar candle, stately in its makeshift candelabra of an overturned ash tray. They all stood around it, hands clasped, silent. A moment of respect and remembrance for Carly. Several of the girls were crying into tissues, cheeks streaked with mascara.
Holly’s eyes were dry, but she shivered on the inside, chilled down to her bones. She’d had relentless nightmares, dreaming of the ropes again, and she’d awakened with fear in her veins, a fear that refused to abate. She grieved for her friend, but the grief couldn’t quite touch her heart, because the fear was so great. She knew, knew, that this couldn’t have anything to do with her. Just a random act of violence. A stroke of evil against their bar; a chance killing, the life taken Carly’s, instead of hers, just because of timing.
She didn’t want to think that Carly had been killed because of her. That she’d finally been found, and that from behind, small and dark-haired Carly had been mistaken for her. That was too awful to contemplate. She wanted to believe Michael; wanted to feel sure that this wasn’t her fault. How could she live with herself if it was?
Vanessa broke the silence. Sniffling, she said, “Weren’t you supposed to close last night?” And lifted her tear-brightened eyes to Holly with an accusatory twist to her trembling mouth.
“I was,” Holly said. “I wasn’t feeling well and Carly offered to cover for me.”
Every pair of eyes came to her. Matt seemed sympathetic, but all the girls had something dark and angry lingering in their gazes. Holly was the newest waitress at Bell Bar, the one without local connections, without friends. She was the outsider anyway, and now she felt the chasm opening up between herself and the others. She could feel their blame, their anger and resentment.
“It could have happened to any of us,” Matt said, consolingly.
“But it happened to Carly,” Meg said.
Holly bowed her head, staring down at the toes of the little wedge-heeled sneakers she wore with her work uniform. “I wish I’d stayed,” she said. “I wish it had been me instead.”
There were no comments, but someone gasped softly, like she couldn’t believe Holly would say such a thing.
A hand landed on her shoulder and squeezed: Matt. “It was an awful thing that happened, but it was nobody’s fault. We’ll have to be more careful, from now on.”
Yes, they would.
“And you do this all the time?” Mercy asked, with a considerable amount of doubt, as he scanned the familiar environs of Bell Bar. The place was evening-dark, even in the middle of the day, and that made him feel fractionally better, but not a lot. “Just…in the bar like this?”
Ratchet gave him a blank look, like he didn’t see what the problem was. “Yeah.” He’d ordered a damn Jaeger bomb and took a sip of it like it wasn’t the nastiest shit anyone had ever tasted. “So?”
Mercy lowered his voice a fraction, reaching for his water. Water. Ugh. Ava was pestering him about drinking during the day. He was relenting…when she wasn’t around to see him. “So you meet drug dealers in public. In bars.”
Ratchet nodded.
Mercy shrugged. Whatever. This wasn’t his usual sort of gig. If Ratchet did this routinely, who was he to judge? He was just the muscle.
Their waitress today was Holly, the little brunette with the old Hollywood curves and the big green eyes. She breezed around their table and settled with a swishing of her silk uniform shorts – blue, today, with a white shirt – and whipped out her order pad with a certain uncharacteristic quickness. She wasn’t a flirt – unless you counted her talking at Michael as flirting – but she was usually more solicitous than this. Today, she’d been fast and distracted, her smiles slender and false.
Probably had something to do with one of her coworkers getting murdered last night. When he’d heard, he’d felt the blood drain out of his face. How many times had he and Ava met for dinner here? Granted, never at three-thirty in the morning, but still; they didn’t live far from this place. The idea of a killer running loose made him want to put knives in people.
Clearly, it made Holly the waitress twitchy.
“What can I get you?” she asked, voice a ghost of its usual chirp.
Ratchet ordered the grilled chicken sandwich, veggies instead of fries, because he was a health nut. Mercy thought about the sore places in his bad left leg, the one that had been trapped beneath the bike and been operated on twice, and thought about his weight loss, his need for protein. “Burger,” he told her, “and the soup.” That would give him two servings of beef, and he expected a comment, a laugh, even a twitch of eyebrows from Holly, but she didn’t react at all.
“Right up,” she told them, and whisked away as quickly as she’d come. She’d always been a frightened-seeming girl, Mercy reflected, and now it was amplified.
He didn’t get to dwell on it anymore. Ratchet said, “I think that’s them.”
Mercy glanced up to see two men entering the bar, their mouths set in firm lines, their eyes sweeping back and forth like they were searching for someone.
Had to be them.
Mercy leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. “Have at it,” he told Ratchet, and resolved to look terrifying.
Holly saw them as she was leaving the kitchen, Mercy and Ratchet’s food balanced on the tray perched on her shoulder. Her eyes went to the table where the two Dogs sat, searching for a clear path through the crowd to get to them, and she spotted the two men who’d joined them.
Her heart came to a full stop, slamming up against her ribs. Nerveless, her hand opened, and the tray began to tilt.
Abraham looked older than when last she’d seen him: more flecks of gray in his hair, deeper lines pressed into the sunburned skin around his eyes and mouth. He looked like a military man, the way he was built and the way he carried himself, but he wasn’t. He was just a man who put on airs, and who had one of those raging metabolisms, that kept all the alcohol from turning into a beer gut.
At his side, Dewey looked the same: his colorless hair clipped short in a crew cut, his Adam’s apple sticking too far out of his throat, like his neck was bent at a wrong angle. Too skinny and awkward in his own skin. The top button of his red plaid shirt buttoned tight at the throat. His mouth damp and pink enough to make it look like he wore lipstick.
Holly felt the tray tipping off her shoulder, but was powerless to catch it. It fell, crashing down onto the hardwood, the china breaking with an awful sound, soup bursting across the boards like spattering blood, hitting the baseboards, the walls, her sneakers and bare legs. She felt every eye in the place dart toward her, and the explosion of noise. She dropped to her knees with a gasp, ducking down low over the mess, where the bar would conceal her from the men at the table.
“Shit!” Vanessa said behind her.
“You okay?” Matt asked, hurrying from his place beside the taps to stand beside her.
“I’m fine. Sorry. I’m so sorry,” Holly said, but she was anything but fine. She was close to cardiac arrest.
She reached for the broken dishes with trembling hands, picked up a shard of the soup bowl, and was burned by the heat it retained. She fumbled it, and the sharp edge sliced across her palm, bright blood welling up in its path.
“Oh no,” Matt said, crouching down. “Here, did you cut yourself? Damn, it’s bleeding. Doesn’t look deep, though.”
On her knees, poised above the terrible mess she’d made, Holly stared transfixed at the blood. Her hand burned. Matt was right; the cut was deep. And all she could think about was the time she’d been threatened with a knife, the cool tip of it scratching lightly across her stomach, while the ropes cut into her wrists, and her ankles. That cut, if it had been made, would have been deeper than this one. It might have killed her, and then she wouldn’t have been here now, to spill food and make a big commotion that no one needed.
Some of the other girls were rushing from the kitchen, asking what the noise was about, already jumpy because of Carly and wondering if it had been a gunshot.
Matt was scooping up fragments of plate and handfuls of spilled lettuce, assuring them that everything was okay, as he glanced worriedly at Holly.
She hadn’t moved. She wasn’t sure she could, because when she stood, there would be people looking over this way, out of normal curiosity. And two of those people might be Abraham and Dewey, and then what would she do?
She would run. If they laid eyes on her, she would run as fast and as far as she could, and hope it was fast and far enough.
Mercy instantly disliked the look of these two. But then, when did he ever like drug dealers?
The older one had introduced himself as Abraham, a wide-shouldered, narrow-hipped, medium-sized man with a solid handshake. He wore a white t-shirt tucked into old Wranglers, no belt, a thick Carhartt jacket to fight off the winter chill, and boots that had seen better days. Typical working class guy, by all standards, but there was something in his face that set off the alarms in Mercy’s head. A strange, unnatural light in his colorless eyes, an insincerity to his smile.
The younger one, Abraham’s son-in-law Dewey, was just weird as hell. He’d shed his jacket and folded it carefully before laying it over the back of his chair. He was very thin, plaid shirt sinking into the concave cavity of his chest, his throat looking like a bent knee between his narrow shoulders and his awkward bobble head. His movements were slow and deliberate, like he was thinking hard about how to make each one of them just right.
Crazy redneck drug dealing hill people, both of them. They were in good company with the rest of their dealers.
Both had given Mercy measuring glances, their eyes getting big as they traveled up from the table to the top of his head. Mercy was glad he’d been there, for Ratchet’s sake. If the secretary was getting bad vibes off these two, he wasn’t showing it.
“We want to get outside our area,” Abraham said. “Where there’s more buyers.”
“And we heard we needed to ask you first,” Dewey said. He spoke slowly, carefully. Stupidly.
“That’s right,” Ratchet said. “The Dogs control the trade around Knoxville.” Not an ounce of threat or spin behind his words, just a friendly relaying of facts. “Where are you located now?”
“Pinewood.”
“Wow. Why’d you wanna come this far?”
“I heard good things. Thought it’d be nice to get outta the country for a little while.”
“You wouldn’t exactly be peddling shit downtown,” Mercy broke in, unable to keep quiet. He just didn’t like these guys. “You’d be outside the city.” He offered a wide, insincere grin. “Just saying. This ain’t exactly Vegas, boys. If you country mice are looking to hit the big time, Knoxville’s not the place to do it.”
Dewey made a face that was both confused and offended, brows plucking together over too-wide eyes.
Abraham snorted and said, “Trust us. Knoxville’s plenty big compared to where we come from. We ain’t tryin’ to get to the top of the ladder, just go up a rung or two.” His voice was friendly enough, but his gaze drilled into Mercy, an obvious challenge.
Cute, Mercy thought. Not impressed, asshole.
“I think Merc is just concerned is all,” Ratchet said in a soothing tone, proving that he had at least some sense of when things were going badly. “It’s in the best interest of our…er, associates if they know what they’re getting themselves into.”
Abraham gave a low laugh. “Hey, boys, I’ve got the product; just tell me what to do with it. S’all I’m saying.”
Dewey’s eyes followed the path of a waitress – the blonde, Vanessa – with rapt fascination. Poor shithead had probably never laid hands on a woman.
Abraham glanced between the two of them. “Are we gonna be able to make a deal, or what?”
Ratchet nodded. “Most like, yeah. My president will want to see your product personally, and test it.” Which was code for Ratchet would take some of it, and they’d all see if he keeled over dead. “And then he’ll want to meet you personally.”
“The boss man’s pretty particular,” Mercy chimed in again, with an unhelpful smile.
“Yeah?” Abraham lifted his brows. There was that strange glittering in his eyes again, that gave Mercy the impression that something was very wrong here. “Mine too.”
Holly’s left hand shook too violently to manage the roll of gauze tape that Steph had handed her with an aggravated huff before storming back out of the locker room. Holly stood with her injured hand held over the sink, the blood drip, drip, dripping down into the basin, a red splash for every thump of her pulse. In the mirror, her reflection stared back, white as a sheet, skin so clammy little baby fine hairs at her hairline were clinging to her forehead and temples. She looked like the proverbial girl who’d seen a ghost, because she had. The ghost of her childhood…and her ruined womanhood. She heard the breath whistling through her lips and felt the drain of blood from her face, like she might faint, but she couldn’t get the panic under control, not this time. In some way, breaking free had weakened her, because now she knew how frightened she always should have been.
She jerked when she heard the door swing open and footfalls started across the floor. It was only Matt, his reflection rearing up behind hers in the mirror.
“Hey, you okay?” he called, and then he drew close enough to see her hand. “Do you need help?.”
Holly dampened her lips and forced her throat to work. “I – I can’t manage the tape with one hand.” Not when she was shaking like this.
“Let me see it,” Matt offered, and she put the gauze in his outstretched hand. “Hold this on it.” He secured the square sanitary pad over the slice. “You already washed it?”
“Yeah.”
With quick, sure movements, he began to wind the tape around and around; the pad soaked through with blood almost instantly, and he kept wrapping.
“I’ve never seen you drop a tray before,” he commented, his dark head bent over her upturned palm.
“I’ve never dropped one,” she said, realizing the words were true. Back home, the penalty for screwing anything up was so severe that she’d learned to never screw up. She didn’t drop things, didn’t trip, didn’t burn the bacon, didn’t even cough out of turn.
Matt’s eyes flicked up to her, sympathetic, worried, curious. “What happened out there?”
She shrugged. She couldn’t afford to tell him anything. “I thought I saw someone I knew and it startled me. Jeff can take the cost of the broken plates out of my paycheck.”
Matt snorted, breath rushing across her forearm. “Jeff doesn’t care about a couple of plates.”
She took a deep, shuddering breath and let it out slowly. “I’m sorry about Carly, too. If I’d stayed, she never would have–”
Matt cut her off with a firm headshake, securing the bandage and stepping back so he could meet her gaze. “That was just a freak thing. If it hadn’t been Carly, then it would have been you. The guy, whoever the sick freak is, he woulda killed whoever came out that door.”
“Maybe. But it would have been better for everyone if it had been me.”
“Holly.” He swallowed, and his brows tucked together, his frown troubled. “You don’t really think that, do you?”
That she was more deserving of death than some other innocent girl? Yes, she thought that.
“You don’t like them,” Ratchet observed as Abraham and Dewey were pushing out the front door of Bell Bar, bright winter sun streaming in around them and making them look grimy and countrified.
“No shit.” Mercy took a hard slug of his water – if anyone was capable of such a thing with water. “They set my creep meter to twitching.” He wagged his index finger back and forth through the air to demonstrate.
Ratchet gave him a polite frown. “I think that comes with the territory.”
“Well, they’re all no-good shitheads, I’ll give you that. But Fisher doesn’t make my skin crawl, not like these guys.”
Ratchet gave him a level, openly curious look. “There’s things that can make your skin crawl?”
“Fuck you,” Mercy said, good-naturedly, reaching for his water again. “And where’s our food?”
From the dark hallway, tucked into the alcove where the payphone was hung, Holly watched unseen as Abraham and Dewey left the bar. She let out a deep breath, the adrenaline washing out of her in a big rush that left her dizzy and faint. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to walk, and clutched at the pointed edge of the wall in her little hiding spot.
She had no idea what those two had wanted with Mercy and Ratchet, but she felt a desperate, clawing sort of dread. If Abraham and Dewey got on friendly terms with the club, then she had no hope of ever turning a member – one member in particular – to her cause. No way would some waitress merit more consideration than friends of the club. If she wanted Michael’s help, it would have to be soon. Tonight. She’d have to tell him tonight.
“No” wasn’t such a risk in the bitter cold light of today.
There’d been a time in his life when working late hadn’t been an imposition. When there’d been nothing but his books waiting on him at home. Not that he hadn’t loved reading by the lamplight, but these days, there was a lot more incentive to get his ass home when he punched out every day. And this day, Ghost hadn’t made him work OT, so at five, Mercy headed straight for the apartment, a bright warmth filling his chest that blotted out the lingering pain in his bad leg, and the sour remnants of that afternoon’s business meeting.
The light was fading as he made his way up the iron staircase to his door, and his knee grabbed and fussed at him for the strain of all those steps. He pushed the sensations down, drawing out his keys while he hummed to himself. Last week, he’d come home to cooking smells and cheery greetings and warm kisses, all before he could take his jacket off. Ava had been using this break before she started back to class in January to tackle cookbook after cookbook, succeeding more than she failed these days, even if the noodles were a little crunchy and the bread a little too brown on the bottom. That’s what it was supposed to be like with a new, young wife, wasn’t it? Slightly bad dinners and exuberant, newlywed conversation traded over them.
Tonight, though, there was no smell save the soft floral notes of their laundry detergent. The living room, when he stepped in, was soft with lamplight, and warm as a hearth fire, the TV mumbling at a low volume. He smiled when he saw Ava – curled up in a corner of the sofa, head propped on its arm, asleep with a pair of socks in her lap and the laundry basket at her feet – and closed and latched the door without making a sound.
He stepped out of his boots and went to her quietly, crouched down in front of her and smoothed her hair back off her face. His knee pained him; he ignored it. She looked very young and very sweet, her face soft in sleep.
At his touch, her eyes fluttered open and she snatched in a fast breath. “What?” The momentary tension left her when she spotted him. “Hi.”
“Hi.” He smoothed his thumb down the silken skin of her cheek because he liked the feel of it. “Did you get sleepy?”
“Mm.” She pressed a hand to her belly. “It’s the baby. I just can’t fight the naps.”
He laughed, because he couldn’t help it. He loved when she talked about the baby. He loved the idea of some secret communication between mother and child as it grew inside her. His own mother had hated him from conception. To see Ava loving and wanting the baby he’d given her, already, when it was so tiny, restored some of his lost faith in humanity. He had faith in her, anyway, in her ability to be the kind of mother he’d never had.
“You want me to make dinner?” he offered, still touching her face, because they were married now, and he could do that.
She sat up straighter, looking startled. “Dinner, shit. What times is it? I was going to have it ready when you got home.” She tossed the socks into the laundry basket and tried to get to her feet.
Mercy stayed in the way, not letting her up, smiling as his hand fell to her knee. “Relax. I didn’t have to stay late. It’s only five-fifteen.”
She slumped again, eyelids heavy, clearly exhausted. “Oh.” Then she rallied. “I’m gonna cook, though. I have stuff to make chicken parm.”
His stomach growled at the idea. “Yeah?”
She nodded and made a little shooing gesture. “Yeah. Pasta actually sounds good to me right now. Let me up, and I can go make it.”
“Okay.” But he didn’t move right away, thumb brushing over the inside seam of her leggings where they covered her knee.
Ava propped her elbows on her thighs and leaned forward, so her face was right in his face, her smile sleepy, and stirring things in him, the way her hair was all a mess. “What are you doing?” she asked, smile widening, little flash of white teeth showing.
“Looking at you.”
“Uh-huh. Why?”
“A girl got killed at Bell Bar last night after we left. One of the waitresses.”
Her smile faded. “Yeah.” Her voice was soft. “I heard it on the news. And then Mom called to tell me about it.”
“That was right down the street from us,” Mercy said, a trace of panic tickling at his gut. “And you’re here all day by yourself. And there’s a murderer out there somewhere…”
She reached out and stroked a fingertip down the length of his nose. “And I have lots of locks on the door and guns in the closet. And I know how to use them,” she added, brows lifting.
“I know you do,” he consented. “Doesn’t much help with the worry, though.”
She smiled again, heaving a little sigh that was cute and sweet. “Alright.” She kissed his forehead. “Let me up so I can cook.”
He stood, finally, reaching down a hand for her. “I’ll help you.”
Together they went into the fifties-era kitchen, clean and white, as he’d left it just over five years ago. Mercy pulled the heavy cast iron skillet and the large pasta pot from the overhead rack, while Ava cracked eggs into an empty casserole dish to use for the egg wash. When his phone rang, he braced a hip against the counter and answered it, watching – pleased, delighted, a touch surprised – as Ava carried on without him, filling another casserole with seasoned flour and crumbled parmesan cheese, defrosting the chicken breasts.
“ ‘Lo?” he said, without checking the screen first.
It was Ghost, his brusque voice unmistakable, even over the phone like this. “You got home alright?” he asked without preamble.
“Making dinner right now,” Mercy assured. When Ava cast him a quick glance over her shoulder, he said, “Helping make dinner, actually. Chef Little Missus wants me to be clear about that.”
Ava smiled and turned back to her work, slicing into the chicken package with a knife.
“Everything was in order?” Ghost said, not amused by the joke.
“It was fine.”
“How’s Ava?”
Mercy rolled his eyes. The show of concern was nice, but he knew what this was really about for Ghost. He’d had the same thought Mercy had: Ava alone in the rented room above the bakery, no one to cry out to for help if the waitress-murderer showed up at the door. “She’s a little tired,” Mercy said, “but yeah, she’s fine.” Then, to ease the man further, he added: “I leave an arsenal with her every day, and she’s a smart girl. She’s not gonna go opening doors and letting people in.”
Ghost made a muffled sound. “Yeah, well, you make sure she knows to be careful. Scare her real good, if you have to, so she’s more alert.”
Mercy grinned. “There’s the sweet dad coming through. How do you manage all that sugar you dole out, Papa T?”
Ghost said, “Shithead,” and hung up, knowing full well, on his end, that he didn’t need to worry about Ava while she was in Mercy’s care, but unable, except on rare occasions, to ever say anything that came close to a compliment.
“Papa T?” Ava asked, as she poured oil into the skillet.
Mercy stepped up alongside her at the counter, and picked up the first chicken breast, dredging it in flour, then egg wash, then the crumbled parm. “I’ve been testing out grandpa names for him. Whatdya think?”
She made a considering face. “I like the Papa part. Not sure about the T.”
He shrugged. “Not like the kid’ll have two sets of grandparents to distinguish from, so it won’t matter.”
Ava gave him a sideways look, part-reprimand, part-anguish on his behalf. “We’ll tell him about Remy, though, sweetheart. He’ll know he has two grandfathers.”
“He?”
“I’m just guessing. I don’t like saying ‘it’ if I don’t have to.”
“Hmm.”
The oil had to be warm, so he passed over the chicken and she laid it in the skillet. Then he washed his hands, moved around her to dump the pasta in.
“Dad let you go from the shop on time today because of the girl who got murdered,” Ava said, not a question.
“He might have.”
“You guys were that worried?”
He gave her an oh, honey, please look. “Girl gets murdered a hundred feet from our door, and I’m not supposed to come home a little early?”
“I didn’t say that. I’m glad you did.” She bumped his thigh with her hip as they stood together at the stove. “It’s just…” Her brows plucked together. “It hasn’t frightened me, not the way it has you two. I think because we’ve lived through so many threats that were directed toward us, this random one can’t get under my skin. I have to draw the line on the worrying at some point, or I’ll go nuts.” She turned a suddenly serious, appealing look up to him.
Mercy picked up on all the little unspoken cues, and felt his stomach clench. “What else are you worried about?”
Her hand, coated with flour, fluttered toward her stomach. “The doctor says everything’s fine–”
“Do you feel alright? Does something seem off?” His hands lifted and he was prepared to scoop her up, carry her straight to the hospital.
But she shook her head. “I feel fine. Normal for a pregnant woman, anyway. It’s just…after what happened last time. I’m afraid to make too many plans, you know?” Her eyes grew shiny, bright under the overhead light. “I get scared when we talk about what we’ll do after he’s born. Because what if…” She didn’t finish, and he was glad for it.
Mercy glanced at the stove; the food could sit for a moment. Then he gathered his wife into his arms, hugged her close, tucked her head into his chest. “It’s going to be fine,” he said, stroking a hand down the slender ridge of her backbone, though inside, he felt the tiny tremors of anxiety. “It’s different this time.”
Her flour-dusted hands latched onto his shirt. “It is, isn’t it?”
“Yes, fillette.” Because this time, he knew about the tiny life, and he loved it fiercely already, and he’d lop the head off any son of a bitch who dared to threaten the things that were his.
Holly felt the biggest surge of relief when she saw Michael come in. All day, she’d felt like a tightly stretched rubber band, plucked hard by every little sound and shift of the light across the floorboards. Laying eyes on his familiar, impassable face released some of the tension inside her, eased her breathing. There was no question in her now: she would make her offer again, and she’d convince him to accept, no matter how cold he was. After all, he’d come by her place last night. That didn’t constitute indifference on his part.
She went to the bar first, as Michael settled into his favorite booth. Matt poured the double Jack neat while she waited. He was looking at her like he was afraid she’d fall apart, but she was better now. Michael just being in the bar boosted her spirits tenfold.
Drink in hand, she leaned into the kitchen, to tell Hollis-the-three-hundred-pound-cook to fix up a plate of fried chicken tenders and mashed potatoes with brown gravy.
Then she went to Michael.
Holly almost dropped the whiskey when she saw that he hadn’t brought a book tonight. In her memory, he’d never sat down to dinner without some sort of reading material.
His eyes came straight up to her face as she slid into the booth and set his drink before him. Amber, deep, impossible to read, but intense. Fixed to her like there was nothing else in the world to look at. Like she was the most interesting thing he’d ever seen.
“I put your dinner order in,” she said, voice a little breathless. “Fried chicken and potatoes okay? It’s the special.”
He nodded. “It’s fine.”
Holly inhaled deeply, and exhaled in a fluttering rush.
Michael wrapped a hand around his drink, but didn’t lift it. “You changed your mind,” he said, levelly. “About telling me.”
She nodded. “They were in here today.”
A shift in his face, a faint strike of surprise in one eyebrow.
“And I don’t know what else to do,” she went on, “except tell you.”
“Okay.” He sipped his Jack.
She sighed, feeling small and caved-in, desperate and afraid. Less afraid, with him, but still in fear of rejection. “I’ll get your food, and then I’ll start.”
“You’re the sergeant at arms. It says so on your vest thing.” She gestured to the patch affixed to his chest.
“Yeah.” He stirred the gravy into his potatoes and looked at her expectantly, waiting for her to get to the point. He’d never looked at her so much before, making eye contact for long, lingering moments.
“Well.” She kept taking deep breaths, fighting off her nerves. She leaned low against the table, not suggestively, just keeping low and quiet, so as not to draw attention to them. “I don’t know that much about biker…”
“Clubs,” he supplied.
“Right. Clubs. But from what I do know, there’s guys in the club, like the sergeant at arms, who do…some bad things. For the club.”
She winced and he didn’t twitch as he cut into the chicken tenderloins.
“Guys who…” Her voice was just a breath. “Kill people.”
Michael chewed his bite of food without expression, swallowed, sipped his drink, and then spoke. “The sergeant at arms of an MC is a member who maintains order among his brothers at meetings; he keeps the peace within the club; he protects his president and does what’s asked of him,” he said, as if he were reading a definition from a book.
Holly felt desperation working in her blood, but forced it down, telling herself to be patient. “That sounds like a big responsibility.”
He nodded, one sharp motion of his head.
“Is the sergeant at arms always on the clock?” she asked. “Or does he get time to himself?”
“Think of it like being on call,” Michael said. “Like a doctor who gets paged off-duty.”
In the past four months, she’d watched enough daytime TV to be able to understand that reference. She nodded.
“Holly.” An electric current moved through her at the sound of her name on his lips again. The rigid set of his jaw reflected an obvious aggravation, in this moment, and she was proud of herself for seeing the traces of emotion in him. “I thought we were going to talk about you.”
She took a deep breath. “We are.”
“You gonna finally explain why you’ve been sitting in that spot” – indication of her place on the booth with his fork – “trying to talk to me for four months?”
His words stung. What man would question female attention like she’d been giving him? Only the coldest, most untouchable of creatures would have thought she was weird, rather than take advantage.
And in a strange way, his attitude gave her hope. A hope that, once their transaction was completed, he wouldn’t haunt her. He wouldn’t ask for anything else from her, content to go separate ways without a backward glance.
Leaning even closer to him, her hair swinging forward and brushing at the edge of his plate, she dropped her voice to the tiniest whisper. “You’re right,” she said, the words the barest hiss of sound, “I’m running, and probably someone’s hunting me, too. That’s why I’ve been trying to make friends with you.”
He lowered his voice, not a whisper, but a flat, soft sound that wouldn’t carry. “You’re hoping I’ll protect you.”
“No. I want to hire you. There’s three men after me. I want you to kill them.”