SIX

Mel

 

Misty rain falls across the light cast by the flood lamp over the yard as we pull into the Lincoln compound. The weather grew progressively worse as we rode, the clouds thickening until they became a dense blanket across what’s left of the early dawn light.

I shiver as Dog maneuvers the bike into the garage, my sweatshirt soggy and stuck to my body in places. I’d like to think he would have offered me a jacket, but given the fact his skin is covered in goose bumps, his dark T-shirt soaked, I’d say he didn’t even pack one.

Men.

He stops the bike in the wide aisle, allowing me space to get off before he backs it into the lineup. Dagne dismounts ahead of us, King offering her an arm to steady herself. I don’t even get that, just an indifferent stare as I try to slip across the wet seat, the damp flesh of my leg sticking to the surface.

“Thanks for the help,” I sass, promptly shedding the wet sweater.

I pull the fabric over my head and discover Dog clearly checking out my painfully erect nipples through the light tank I have on. Bunching the sweater in my hands over my chest, I scowl at him and head for the common room.

“What else did you think I’d do?” he calls after me.

I stop midstride and spin on my heel to face the fucker. “Show some goddamn respect.”

“I was, by showin’ how much I appreciated what you chose to share with me,” he quips.

Fuck him and his alluring smirk, the way his clearly defined lips pinch in at the corner, somehow drawing attention to his ridiculously sharp jawline.

Pretty boys are always the worst kind of torture—I know, I had Sawyer after all.

Not again. I’m not getting suckered into the challenge of humbling a jackass a second time.

He chuckles as he starts walking the bike backward, King now standing at my side as he frowns over at Dog.

“Ignore him. You know he’s harmless.”

“Still a pain in the ass, though.”

King nods, eyebrows raised. “Yeah. That he is.” He pats me on the arm. “Come on. Come inside and warm up. Sonya can probably find you some dry clothes.”

“Thanks, King.” He always was one of my favorites. Selfless and more concerned with everyone around him, than his own wellbeing. “I’ve missed you guys,” I admit as we cross through to the hub of the clubhouse.

He stalls, retracing his steps ahead of me to loop an arm around my shoulders and give me a quick hug. “We’ve missed you too.”

His lips press to my head in an adoring big brother type of way as Dog enters from the garage. I peer out from King’s embrace, intrigued by the anger in Dog’s stare as he walks by. He holds my gaze as I break from King’s embrace, twisting his head to keep eye contact until he physically can’t anymore.

“So.” I clap my hands together, rubbing the palms furiously. “When will my old man get here? Or do I have to wait until I’m back in Texas to see him?”

King sighs, his eyes sad as he looks me over. “I’ll get one of the prospects to find Sonya and arrange what you need.” He holds his hand out to the side, snapping his fingers. “I need a moment with you first in my office.”

Okay. The reasons he’d have to talk with me alone are few, but all I can do is assume it has something to do with Hooch’s current situation and the fact he just clean blew off my question about Daddy.

“What size are you, sweetheart?” King asks as a shaven-headed prospect appears at his side.

“Um, an eight I think.” I’ve lost weight considering I haven’t touched anything deep fried or overly sugary in so long.

King turns to the young blood, giving him instructions to search for Sonya and have clothes set out in the bathroom upstairs for me. The guy scampers, and King turns his attention back to me. I don’t like what I see.

“What’s going on, King?” I clasp my arms across my chest; the chill suddenly ten times more intense than it was a moment ago.

He beckons for me to follow and leads us into his office. I oblige—after all, I’m a guest in his house—and take a seat in front of his solid desk. A coat is draped over my shoulders, the fluffy lining warm and inviting.

“Thank you.”

King simply smiles briefly, rounding his desk to pull out a short bottle of whiskey and two stainless tumblers. My heart sinks as he pours the two drinks, his brow pinched as he concentrates on the task at hand.

He only drinks this way when he doesn’t like what he has to talk about. Why doesn’t he like it? What’s happened?

“Here.”

I accept the offered drop, holding it tight in my quivering fist. “Where’s Daddy?”

The realization strikes me like a red-hot hammer to the heart. Despite the differences between us in the last few years, my father loved us girls without compare. If he knew Hooch was going to collect me, he’d be there to see me home, welcome me back. He wouldn’t sit idle in Fort Worth and wait for me to come to him; he’d bring the party to me.

“King?”

He sucks in a deep breath, licking his lips before downing his tumbler in two hefty gulps. “I really don’t know how to break it to you, baby girl. But I get the feelin’ you already know what I’m going to say.”

My chin crumples and I choke on my next breath, pulling all manner of faces as I try to compose myself enough to keep my grip on the tumbler. Tears streak my cheeks as I toss the drink back, the burn nothing compared to what erupts inside of me.

“Another,” I demand as I hold the tumbler out to King.

He refills the cup, his brow firm.

“Was it him?” I ask with shaky tones. “Carlos? Did he do it?”

I knew when I left that Daddy intended on having a face-to-face sit down with the asshole drug lord. I begged him not to, but when the tyrant had placed a bounty on my head after kidnapping my baby sister, how could I have expected my father to sit idly by and not put up a fight?

King’s eyes close; his forefinger and thumb pinch the bridge of his nose. “Yeah, it was him.”

Fuck. Fucking fuck. That … asshole. That cold-blooded fucking monster. My heart stops, stutters, and restarts with painful determination.

“How?” I whisper before smashing the second drink.

“I won’t tell you that.” King regards me with nothing short of pity, and in that brief yet connected moment I know it was bad.

Really bad.

“It was after I left, wasn’t it? He went there to try and get Dana, didn’t he?” My voice quivers despite the fact I barely speak above a whisper in an effort to control it.

King nods.

All this time …

“Dana?” Another missing face from my impromptu welcome home. “He get her too?”

King swallows, his eyes pained as he holds my unwavering gaze.

I don’t want to believe it. My head literally can’t fathom the fact that while I was holed up like the precious treasure I’m not, both my father and sister were taken—no doubt brutally.

I haven’t heard anything about my family while I’ve been kept off the grid; the only contact I received was a box left at the end of the access road twice a week containing food and provisions. I lived in hope, in futile hope that somehow my father had outsmarted the asshole that placed the bounty on my head, and won.

That good prevailed over evil.

Yet it was never to be. We never stood a chance against a man who held no ounce of remorse for the things he did, the consequences he set into action. How could we? How could innocence and love ever withstand the relentless barrage of pain and suffering men like Carlos inflict in their deluded crusade to reach the top?

“Hey,” King croons as he sets his tumbler down on the desk. “Hey.”

I look into his eyes as he slides to his knees, shuffling until he’s before me, hands over mine. Only when his steady touch grounds me do I realize how badly I shake.

“Don’t hold it in.” He squeezes my hands, imploring me to understand. “Let go of it all: the hate, the anger, the pain. We’re here to catch you.”

I wish I could. I want to, so badly. I’d love nothing more than to fall apart and have the people I love cradle me until I felt strong enough to stand on my own again. And yet, I can’t. I’m afraid that if I do let all those things he mentioned flow in, that I might never find my way back out of the maze of grief they create.

I’m afraid of losing the last strands connecting me to who I was before all of this.

“Carlos …?” I crinkle my eyes at the corners, scrutinizing our northern president, searching for a clue.

Hooch said he’d been taken care of, but if he avoided the truth about our family, was he bending the facts on this also?

“He’s gone.”

I huff a sharp breath, knocking King’s hands away. I know it’s unfair, unjust that I’m offloading on him, but that last revelation has me angrier than the news Carlos took my baby sister and daddy from me.

Somebody else closed my door. I didn’t get to finalize that chapter of my life, get closure and deal with the hurt at my losses the best way I know how: by channeling the frustration and anger into retribution, penance against the person who stole from me.

I’ve been robbed of my revenge.

“Tell me what you need,” King demands, pushing to his feet.

I shake my head and stare at the photo that hangs behind his desk of the founding members. “I don’t know.”

What would help? What could honestly lessen this … this shock of hearing my worst nightmares confirmed? I sat out there, in the middle of nowhere, and played this scenario over in my mind. But hearing it brought to life, hearing the words given strength by someone I admire so much? Fuck, it hurts.

“Sawyer did it, right?” I ask, shifting my gaze to the corner of King’s desk.

He leans against the front of it, legs crossed at the ankles. “Yeah. Who it always should have been.”

Good. The pain Carlos caused that man was unimaginable. I can’t think of anyone else I’d relinquish the satisfaction of returning the favor to, either.

“Can I go now?” I avoid King’s pity by focusing on making a pattern with my fingers as I lace and unlace them.

“Sure.” It’s there, in the single word, his regret, his sadness at having to be the one who dumped this on me.

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

He stops midway around his desk.

“For burdening you with this.” It should have been Hooch. My brother, my last remaining family member, should have been the one to sit me down with the news.

“Go get some rest, Mel,” he says quietly. “Make me a list of what you need, and I’ll get one of the girls to go out and pick it up for you.” He runs his finger across the timber top as he speaks. “I’m takin’ you didn’t have anything with you?”

Glimpses of the man jolt through my mind, the shock that registered on the agent’s face as he realized I’d delivered a fatal shot. “Nope. Didn’t really get time to think much about what to pack.”

“It gets better,” he offers futilely.

Yet, that’s not what I want to hear. I don’t want somebody to tell me how they moved past their own grief once, how the days will get brighter as time goes by.

I want somebody to justify my anger, the deep resentment that grows like a vine around my heart. I want somebody to be mad with me, to throw a fist to the wall and curse out every fucking deity there is who did nothing to help my family when they needed protection most.

King says nothing further when I drop the jacket and rise from the seat, leaving his office with more composure than I thought possible. People pass by me in a blur as I head for the stairs that lead up to the living quarters. Life echoes on repeat in my mind, the tense moments before I rode away to my seclusion.

A princess locked in her tower.

The final words I spoke to my father weren’t kind, the last thing I said to my sister pointless. What would I have said if I had known? I left in a hurry with the naïve assumption that Dana would be okay if I went. In my mind, I was the martyr; leaving everything I loved behind in order to free my family from some fucked up dispute with a man who never cared how it ended, as long as he won.

My foot falters as I crest the top step onto the landing; my toe catches the final riser making me stumble. A sob hiccups from my chest at the pathetic failure. So I tripped? It shouldn’t matter. I recovered. I stood strong and made it to the second floor. And yet, it irks me on a deeper level. I screwed up. I made a simple mistake that had the chance at turning a hell of a lot worse. What if I’d fallen down the stairs? What if I’d twisted my ankle trying to recover?

What if I’d never left? Beaten off the nomad sent to take me away from my family and refused to go?

What if?

What if?

My knees give way and I crumple to the floor, right there in the hall, not giving a fuck who sees me in this moment. My chest aches, the pain as my heart shatters so real. I always thought it poetic how people say others can die of a broken heart, and yet, as I clutch at my stomach, groaning as the pain radiates through my core, I believe it: I feel it.

Loss carries an agony like no other.

A million realizations fleet through my mind; the endless list of things I won’t have anymore, I won’t get to experience.

My daddy’ll never walk me down the aisle. And I’ll never see him do the same for my baby sister.

I’ll never share another full table at Thanksgiving.

Never celebrate another Christmas, laughing as Daddy plays the same clichéd carols and lip-synchs into the top of his beer bottle.

Stupid things like the way he’d wave his arm about when he coughed, or how I would forever be tucking the tag in on Dana’s shirts.

“Jesus, girl.”

I stick my arm out to fend off his approach, determined even in my most desolate hour that I don’t need anyone to save me.

And yet, he forces it away and pulls me to my feet all the same.

“Hey, talk to me.” Dog jams his arms beneath my own, stopping me from falling to the floor again.

I stare through blurry eyes at his clear concern and laugh before dissolving into tears once more.

Talk to him. I wish I could. Yet when I urge the words to form, the sentence to construct in my mind, it melts into a black pool of nothing.

They’re gone. And what hurts the most is the way in which my loved ones went: painful and terrifying.

I don’t need to know the specifics to know that Carlos wouldn’t have spared them in the slightest.

“You heard, huh?” He jostles me in his hold, slinging me closer to his broad frame.

I wrap my arms around his shoulders, not so much out of a need for him, rather out of a need for comfort in whatever form it comes.

I need to feel that compassion, that love, to know I’m still alive too. That in my grief I haven’t slipped away as well.

“Let’s get you somewhere better than the hall, huh?” he half chuckles.

I smile, despite the clear sobs still falling from my lips.

Dog hoists me easily into his arms and carries me two doors down to his room. I run my eye over his walls as he sets me down on the end of the bed and then promptly straightens the covers.

I expected the same old titty girls, skanks draped over bikes, and women with dead eyes staring back at me from overly sexualized poses that most guys his age have. And yet I get at most two of those. He’s stripped back the skin, and what adorns his walls instead are breathtaking nature shots: forests, lakes, and vast plains accentuated by distant mountain ranges.

He traces my line of sight, eyeing them all as well as though seeing them for the first time. “Dreams,” he explains simply. “I want to have a place like that one day; to wake up to that view every morning.”

“You’ll do it.” I shift my gaze to his handsome profile as he gazes dreamily at the images still.

He’s exposed this sliver of himself with me so freely, and what’s strangest is it’s such a contrast from the man I’ve known in the past.

Dog got his name from his propensity to try and hump anything that moves, his playboy antics and the ever-revolving bevvy of women that were seen creeping from his room early in the morning.

He’s a man-whore. One who never seems to care what others think of him, or how his behavior impacts people’s opinion of him.

And yet, all he wants is a slice of solitary paradise in the wilderness.

“Why?” I ask. “What is it about living miles from anything that you like?”

He drops to the bed beside me and stares down at his hands as he fidgets between his knees. “There’s no bullshit, you know? Like, it’s just you and nature around you. You, pitted against your desire to survive.”

“You hunt?”

He nods, turning his head to catch my eye. “Yeah. A bit.”

“Why have you never told me this before?” It dawns on me that I haven’t thought about the crippling grief that had me doubled over in the hall since we walked in here.

He’s distracting me by being so open, and I think he knows it.

“You never asked,” he explains. “And not in a bad way. You never pushed me to say anythin’ I didn’t want to, and I appreciated that.”

“I’ll take it as a compliment.”

He nudges my shoulder with his. “Got you thinkin’ about something else though, didn’t it?”

“Yeah.” For a while at least.

I drop a heavy breath and will myself to save it all for later, but reactions to things that cut this deep never wait. You can’t set a locomotive in action and expect to stop it with a few encouraging words.

“I’m sorry,” I manage to blurt before my ability to speak turns to shit again.

He sets a hand on my knee, and I lose it—completely fucking lose it. I can’t even breathe, let alone speak to say how ridiculous I feel being so out of control of my own body.

Time passes, and as it does, he gently coaxes me closer until I end up tucked against him, my arms threaded around his waist as he strokes my hair with one hand, the other bunched in the back of my still-damp tank as he keeps me close. I leave a wet patch on his cut, the leather refusing to soak up my tears.

My lungs fill easier, the time between each hiccup of my diaphragm longer. My chest rises, slow and measured. The familiarity of what I cry about so … unexpected.

The more I think about it, the more normal it seems. The easier it is to process and dissect, to ponder on without letting my emotions take over.

“I wonder where they’re buried,” I whisper into Dog’s shoulder, my hands refusing to uncurl from the back of his cut even though in my mind I know it’s time.

He stiffens beneath my touch, easing me back gently so he can look me square in the eye. “They have grave markers, but that’s all.”

My breathing picks up pace once more, the restriction in my chest a trespasser as I remind myself I’ve worked through this already; there’s no need to repeat the last however long—ten, fifteen minutes? Hour?

“I bet you wish you were still in the woods, now, huh?” He graces me with a lopsided smirk.

I smile, grateful for once for his blatant honesty. “A little, yeah.”

“Had to face this one day or another, though.”

“I guess.”

“And it’s better dealt with here, with others, than out there on your own, right?”

I don’t even answer him; just stare into his eyes as he smiles encouragingly. “You better be careful, Dog,” I warn. “Otherwise I’ll have to tell everyone what a big softie you are.”

He chuckles, patting me on the knee before he stands and crosses to his bureau. “You tell ’em what you want, sweetheart. I’ll prove it wrong one noisy, heartless fuck at a time.”

And there he is; the Dog everyone knows and loves in a contractual kind of way.

“Thanks for this.” I gesture around his room. “It’s appreciated.”

He smirks, choosing to stare at the top of his furniture as he shoves a few coins around with his fingertip. “Pays not to judge a book by its cover, Mel.”

“I know that.” After all, the Dog I remember is exactly this: kind, thoughtful, and a shoulder to lean on.

He steps back abruptly, patting himself down as though checking for something. “Anyway. If you’d like a few more moments alone, feel free to make yourself at home.” He wiggles a finger at the bed. “I gotta shoot out, so the room’s yours.”

“Thank you.” It doesn’t feel right; we haven’t seen each other in so long and the time and distance only served to prove with greater clarity how different we always were. But I’ll take it if only to give my puffy eyes time to shake the redness before I show my face downstairs.

He drops his jaw as though to speak, and then shakes his head. “Never mind.”

I sit on the edge of his bed and watch him go, wondering how in the hell my life got so turned upside down in the span of a day.

Where are you, Hooch?