After some grumbling – “I’m an old man, Charlie, I can’t just be bashed about anymore, honestly” – the sniping conversation picked up again in the backseat, and that left Fox alone with Eden and his own thoughts.
Of the two, his mind was more disturbing.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Eden said. She sounded sincere.
The thing about it was: Fox was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a liar. Sure, he’d tell little lies here and there when he was running an op; that was just part of the game. But in his daily life, with his club brothers and his family, he was always honest. Blunt, yes, often unemotional, even disconnected – there were some wires crossed the wrong way in his brain, and he knew it. The way he didn’t always leap to the most obvious human emotion in a given situation.
He’d always thought Devin was like that too: honest and wrong. He wondered if the other twelve were like that too. If something had been – been done to them. To make them that way.
He wasn’t sure what he was going to say until he opened his mouth, only that it was a vulnerable kind of truth. He said, “I haven’t been to visit Abe in a long time.”
Her brows jumped in surprise. “Your old martial arts instructor?”
“Yeah, he’s that. But he was also in Project Emerald.”
“He…wait, what?”
“He was in Dad’s file. Number three. Dad was the one who introduced me to him,” he said, a frown tugging at his mouth.
Dimly, he was aware of her shock in the passenger seat, but he felt the memory rushing up on him, an unwelcome wave of something that was almost nostalgia – but not quite. Memory, in his mind, was never fond enough to be nostalgic.
~*~
He was seven the day Dad took him to meet Abraham.
A rare day. Charlie rolled out of his bed and landed in a crouch, reaching to gather the comics that had slipped off the top of his comforter in the middle of the night, all their glossy covers sliding water-like over one another. He heard Mum’s footfalls come down the hall, and cursed quietly under his breath, hurrying. But when she swept into the room, it wasn’t with the usual admonishments that he’d be late for school if he didn’t hurry, and why had he been buying comics with his lunch money again, and when was he going to clean up his pigsty room. No, she was smiling, breathless, high color in her cheeks.
“Charlie, get up, your father’s here. He’s come to take you on an outing.”
Charlie stood upright, comics falling from limp fingers. “He’s…Dad’s here? Right now?”
She bustled over to his tiny closet and began pulling out t-shirts by the handfuls, examining each one with a grimace and flinging them down on the bed. “Yes, isn’t that what I just said? Now, hurry, go brush your teeth.”
She always got a little…frantic, when Dad visited. And after he left, Charlie would listen to her sitting up in front of the TV long after he was supposed to be asleep; listened to the cabinet above the stovetop open and close several times as she pulled down the dusty bottle of whiskey he wasn’t supposed to know she kept. Her eyes always looked red the next morning, her face puffy.
Charlie didn’t understand why she cried over him; he never stayed, and he wasn’t very interesting anyway.
(Okay, that was a lie. But Charlie wouldn’t let himself find the man interesting.)
Once he was scrubbed, and combed, and dressed in his mother-deemed least offensive shirt and jeans, he was marched out to the lounge where Devin waited on the sofa, bored gaze fixed on the TV.
He glanced up when Charlie appeared, a smile splitting his face. He had a nice smile, Charlie could admit – the kind of smile that made you want to smile back; that made you feel welcome, in the presence of someone truly delighted to see you.
(As an adult, Fox would realize it was this exact on-demand smile that kept getting women into bed with the guy.)
“There’s the little fox. Ready to go?”
Devin had a motorbike these days, a Bonneville, beautiful and dark blue. He produced a spare helmet, too big, a Union Jack sticker plastered across the back of it. It kept sliding down over Charlie’s eyes, but he didn’t care, arms tight around Devin’s whipcord waist, wind in his face. Flying, flying – he wanted to leave this part of the city, their shit apartment, school and Mum’s secret whiskey…wanted to leave all of it behind for good.
Dad parked in front of a building that looked like one warehouse in a long line of others just like it. Bricks grungy from smog; bits of paper rubbish littering the curbs. The metal roll-top door in the front was half-open, just high enough for an adult to need to duck.
Charlie paused, helmet held in his hands, the breeze cool on his sweat-matted hair. “Um.” He wasn’t afraid. Afraid was for babies. But this didn’t look like the sort of place he wanted to be.
Devin had already stepped up on the curb, and looked back now. “Coming?”
“I – where are we?”
“Someplace you’ll like,” he said, cryptically, and winked. “Let’s go.”
Charlie, with nothing else to do, hooked the helmet over the handlebars and followed his father into the dodgy warehouse.
Inside, it was dim and cool, and smelled faintly of sawdust.
“Halloo,” Devin called, voice echoing off the wide space and the brick walls. “You in here, you little bastard?”
Someone was.
The inside of the warehouse was set up like a gym: mats, heavy hanging punching bags, racks of free weights, mirrors, and even a boxing ring. A man stood in the center of one of the mats, in a blue shirt with the sleeves cut out of it, and loose gray sweats that cuffed at the ankles. Barefoot.
He stood in an unfamiliar pose, feet braced apart on the mat, one arm held forward, fingers curled into a flat palm, his other arm held back for balance. He looked caught frozen in a moment of intense movement: a snapshot.
A small man, by some standards. But arms carved with lean, stark muscle. A hard expression – no expression. His head turned toward them, and then his pose relaxed. He stood upright, arms folded across his chest, head tilting to a disapproving angle.
Devin’s hand landed on Charlie’s shoulder. “Charlie, this is my old friend, Abe. Abe, this is the one I told you about.”
Monotone, Abe said, “You have a lot of kids, Dev. Remind me which one this is.”
Charlie heard a smile in his father’s voice: “The one who’s like me.”
~*~
“…Charlie?”
He’d zoned out.
And they’d arrived.
Shit, he’d been driving on autopilot.
The van was parked at the curb in front of a warehouse that looked just like he remembered. Still soot-stained, its curb still littered with rubbish.
Fox killed the engine and took a moment, pulling in a few discreet deep breaths through his mouth, studying the scuffed-up garage door in the front of the building, same as ever.
“Uh, nice place,” Evan offered from the backseat.
Fox was aware of Eden shooting him a disapproving look.
Devin said, “I can’t believe he’s still here.”
“Yeah, well.” Fox finally started moving, popping his door open. “We can’t all be as transient as you, Dad.”
He led their small band up to the roll-top door and knocked on it. It rattled in its tracks. “Abe!” he called through it. “Abe, it’s Charlie.”
No response.
“Did you call ahead?” Eden asked. She didn’t fidget, exactly, but her shoulders shifted minutely; he imagined her hands tightening into fists in her jacket pockets.
“He didn’t answer.” Worry settled low in his gut, dark and churning like too much coffee. He shifted around her to check the pedestrian door. It was locked, too. A quick peek through its chicken-wire-laced window proved that the inside of the warehouse was pitch black save the thin bar of light currently being obscured by Fox’s face.
He waited, straining to listen over the faint hiss of traffic on the next street, not sure what he wa
s hoping to hear. A footstep. A cough. Any sign of life. He wasn’t sure which was more ominous when it came to Abe: silence or sound.
He reached into his pocket for his lockpicking kit.
“Oh, relax,” Devin said. “Of all the losers on our list, Abe is the least likely to have been picked up.”
True, but that didn’t make him feel any better.
“Charlie,” Eden said, quietly, when the lock gave and he pushed the door inward with a press of his fingertips. When he didn’t answer, and instead stood and took a step across the threshold: “Charlie, I don’t like this.” He heard her jacket rustle, and knew she’d drawn her gun.
“It’s fine,” he said, and took another step–
And a hand closed on his wrist. Small, wiry, strong, it yanked hard, in just the right way, and he came off his feet. He stumbled forward, and a shoulder landed hard in his gut, and he went sailing.
He seemed to fall for a long time, the dark disorienting. And when he landed, the hard concrete floor forced all the air from his lungs.
“Hey!” he heard Eden shout, and a flashlight beam bounced across the floor.
When he could draw a breath, Fox wheezed a laugh. “Hi, Abe,” he said to the air above him.
A moment later, the light found his face, gone craggy and tired with age. The eyes were the same, though, dark and serious.
“What are you doing, you little shit?” he asked, voice gruff as ever.
“Coming to save your ass,” Devin called. “You’re welcome.”
Fifteen
Whiskey was a bad idea. She was full of those lately. I won’t make your mistakes, she’d thought at her father’s graveside, in her itchy, cheap black dress, looking at the casket she’d sold her car to buy. Penniless, optionless, she’d vowed she would never be in that position again. Mom was gone, Dad was dead, and she was grown. No one could control her life anymore.
And yet, here she sat in London, homeless, hopeless, bossless, caught up in someone else’s crazy personal war. Surrounded by the very assholes who’d put her father in the ground.
(Deep down, she knew that wasn’t true. Dad’s addiction was no one’s fault but his own. But.)
She was trying to be a decent person, though. Or so she told herself. When Raven finally left the clubhouse, security detail in tow, and she again found herself aimlessly stuck at Baskerville, she did her assistant/driver duty of going to see if Eden’s mother needed anything.
Vivian was…horrible. And horrifying. And just…awful.
“Oh no, dear,” she said, staring frostily into the fire someone – definitely not her – had lit in the grate, cut crystal glass of Scotch held delicately in one hand. “What could I possibly need?”
In every movie about the South, girls’ mothers possessed a glacial kind of calm. Unfailingly polite, but utterly cold; they could cut you down through guilt and glances, and never have to resort to a single vulgarity. Vivian was like that; Axelle had learned that Old South manners and charm had been imported from England.
She didn’t care for it, but she respected it. Feared it, even. She beat a hasty retreat to the bar – the woman wasn’t her mother, after all – and now she was staring down into a glass of whiskey on the rocks, suspicious it might be just the first of several mistakes tonight.
(She would be proven correct.)
“Normally,” a voice said beside her as someone climbed onto the next stool, “I would offer to buy you a drink and hit you with one of my best lines. But. You already have a drink. And I get the feeling my line would just result in you throwing that drink in my face. That’s the impression you’re giving right now, anyway.”
She turned her head just far enough to give Tommy her best side-eye. “There are lots of women in here.” And there were; it was the dinnertime crush and the pub was packed with regular customers and Dogs, and plenty of women looking to catch a Dog’s attention. “Did they all already turn you down?” she asked sweetly.
“Ouch. Alright, yeah, I deserve it.” He leaned in closer and dropped his voice. Up close, in the dazzling spray of fairy lights, he went from being hot to being almost beautiful. They had good cheekbones, these half-brothers. And eyes. And their smiles were more like smirks, and…she needed to stop that line of thought. “The thing is,” Tommy said, “I’m not smart, yeah? But I’m not so stupid that I’d actually do you like that.”
“What?”
“I’m not hitting on you.” He winked.
“Then what the hell are you doing?”
“Giving the person who wants to hit on you a little incentive.”
“What?” she asked again, and a hand appeared between her face and Tommy’s. Callused, the nails bitten down. A ring on the middle finger, heavy, masculine silver, some design she couldn’t parse out in the low light.
She knew who the hand belonged to, but she turned her head anyway, and was rewarded by an image of Albie glaring at his brother. It was the most pointed expression she’d seen from him so far, and she had to bite her lip to keep from laughing.
“What are you doing?” Albie asked, deadpan.
Tommy slumped over with one elbow braced on the bar, chin cupped in his hand, pleased with himself. “Offering to buy the lady a drink.”
“She has a drink.”
“A fact she’s already pointed out to me.”
“Then you should leave her alone.”
A smile tugged at Tommy’s mouth, and he managed to bite it back into something sly and manageable. “Do you want me to leave her alone?”
A stare-down ensued.
Albie said, “Tommy.”
His younger brother chuckled and slid off the stool. “All yours, bro.” He tossed Axelle another covert wink and slipped off into the crowd.
Albie stood and stared at the vacated stool a long moment.
“It probably won’t bite you,” Axelle offered. She might, but she figured he already knew that.
He sent her a raised-brow look that said as much, and then sat down. The bartending prospect walked past and a glass of whiskey appeared before Albie unasked-for. Lucky.
“No beer tonight?” he asked. His tone was just this side of bored. It was light, like he didn’t care what her answer was either way, was just trying to make conversation.
She didn’t want it to have an effect on her, but she found it did. Flirtation had never been her weakness; no, she had a competency kink.
“Beer only gets you so far,” she lamented.
He slid his glass over and clinked it against hers. “I’ll drink to that.”
~*~
Fox had joked on more than one occasion that Albie was a monk. He guessed it looked like that from the outside; he didn’t spend time with any of the club groupies; never pulled one of them down into his lap, willing and warm, in the midst of a poker game – partly because he didn’t participate in the poker games. But also because that didn’t interest him – the act of taking what was offered simply because it was there.
He wasn’t a monk, but sex just for the sake of it had never interested him much. The hollow endorphin drop after a casual fling had always outweighed whatever fleeting satisfaction it brought.
He got lonely sometimes, though. He and Walsh had that in common. He’d never been to visit with King in America, but once, after he’d married his Emmie, Walsh had admitted that he hadn’t known he was lonely, during those nights that he stared at the ceiling of his little shack, wondering about the restless nostalgia under his skin.
“I wasn’t gonna get married just to have an old lady,” he’d said. “It had to be right.”
“I thought you married her for legal reasons.”
“Yeah, but I already knew. She was it.”
Albie was wired that way, he thought. Sex could be had anywhere; his fantasies, in the vulnerable moments between sleeping and waking, were of a gentle hand on the back of his neck when he sat at his drafting table; of waking up with long hair in his mouth; of companionable silences and steady reliability. Phil
lip was that way too, he knew. Tommy and Miles were young. And he wouldn’t dare hazard a guess as to the girls – didn’t want to think about Cassandra and boys in any capacity. He thought Fox was the same, but that he’d tried to be different.
A psychiatrist could have explained it to him. All Albie knew for certain was that he didn’t like games, but he did, for reasons as of yet unknown, like the soft smirk lifting the corner of Axelle Thomas’s mouth.
“Why furniture?” she asked. Two whiskeys had eased the tension from her shoulders and softened her face – a face that was, he could see in the low light, naturally soft and feminine, made harsh by the set of her jaw and the quirk of her eyebrows most of the time. “I mean, you’re this outlaw biker guy,” she said, tone kindly mocking, “and you’re making, like, chairs for little old ladies to sit in.”
He chuckled, surprised by the lightness in his chest. “What’s wrong with chairs?”
“Just not what I was expecting. I thought maybe, I dunno, custom knives. Or baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire. Wallet chains.”
He actually snorted. “Wallet chains?”
“It’s part of the Biker Outfit, right? Rule One: must have douchey wallet chain.”
“Wow,” he deadpanned. “You sure do like the biker look.”
She rolled her eyes and took another sip of her drink. And her expression softened another fraction, something almost vulnerable in her eyes as she glanced away from him. “You just – well, you all go for a certain look. And it’s ironic, you know? ‘We’re outlaws, we don’t play by the rules.’ And they you all ride the same bikes, and you wear the same kind of clothes, and you act the same way, and drink all the same drinks, and–” Her voice caught, and she looked down into her glass. “You all do bad things,” she said, quietly, and he thought she was more honest than she’d intended. “You’re not different. You’re not some kinda brave rebels. You’re just…”
He wasn’t one to suffer insults lying down. But she wasn’t trying to do that; her throat bobbed as she swallowed, and he knew she was trying to wrap her brain around it. Her father had died, and she wanted to blame someone, and she wanted to understand why the Dogs were – in her mind – the dark, hedonistic entity that they were.
Prodigal Son (Lean Dogs Legacy Book 3) Page 12