by Chloe Walsh
"Shouldn't have what, Noah?" Now I was the one to interrupt him. "Allowed yourself to care about people?" Now I was the furious one. "Allowed yourself to be happy? To love?" Furious to know that those scumbags had made Noah feel like this.
"I've put every single one of you in their direct line of fire," he shot back, clearly agitated. Clenching his eyes shut, he shook his head and groaned as if he was in physical pain. "Teagan, you are my life. If something had happened to you back there…"
"Noah," I interrupted, desperate to ease his pain. "I am right here with you." I tried to pull his body down to me, but he wouldn’t budge, so I settled for cupping his cheek instead. "This isn’t your fault."
"Not my fault," he laughed humorlessly. "You're in a goddamn hospital bed." Shaking his head, he released a heavy breath and added, "And T is on a slab in the morgue..."
A knock on the door, followed by someone clearing their throat filled my ears. The moment I laid eyes on the person standing in the doorway, the air vanished from my lungs. Immediately, Noah was coiled tight with tension.
"I've come to see my niece."
"About eight years too late," Noah growled under his breath, eyes locked menacingly on Max Jones.
"Noah," I hissed, wrapping my hand around his bulging bicep. "It's okay." Turning my attention to Uncle Max, I smiled brightly and nodded.
My uncle took an uncertain step into my hospital room, eyes flickering between my face and my husband's magnificent frame as he flanked my body, primed to defend me at a moment's notice.
In one hand, he carried a bunch of flowers, something Noah was sneering at in disgust. I knew he hated my uncle. He had good reason to. My uncle was the reason Noah had spent an extra eighteen months in prison. I knew all these things and still, I couldn’t hide the happiness his presence brought to life in me.
"Hey," I said nervously when Uncle Max had reached my bedside. Using my hands, I pulled myself up into a makeshift sitting position and smiled. "Thanks for coming."
"Teagan," he rasped, his voice unusually thick. I could see the turmoil as he stared down at me. Shame, guilt, pain, and love shone through his eyes. "Thank the lord." Placing the bunch of flowers on my hospital nightstand, Uncle Max claimed my hand with his. "When I got the call saying you were in an accident, I almost lost my mind."
"I'm okay," I assured him, reveling in the feel of my uncle's hand on mine. It had been a long time and I couldn’t hide the fact that I had missed him terribly.
I didn’t miss the sarcastic snort that came from Noah, or the way his body seemed to grow even more tense when my uncle took my hand.
"This is bullshit," Noah finally snapped. "He's been a complete fucking tool to you, Thorn," he added, clearly furious. "And what? Because he prances in here with flowers and a few kind words all is forgotten?"
"Noah," I muttered, mortified. "Not here, please…"
"I'm man enough to admit my mistakes," Uncle Max interrupted, surprising all of us. Both Noah and I turned and gaped at him.
"I could have handled things better," he added carefully. "I allowed my anxiety and pride to rule my heart, and for that I am sorry."
"It's okay," I assured my uncle, squeezing his hand tightly. "You're here now."
"You're here now?" Noah repeated in outrage. "What fucking hypocrisy." With that, Noah jerked to his feet and stormed out of the room without so much as a backwards glance.
"Should I leave?" Uncle Max asked.
I shook my head and sighed. "Noah doesn’t like change." He doesn’t trust it… "You showing up has thrown him." Understatement of the century. "He'll come around." I hoped…
"I'm not here to cause friction," Max added in an uneasy tone as he stared after my absent husband. "I don’t want trouble."
"So what do you want?" Embarrassed by my bluntness, I readjusted myself into a more comfortable position and sighed. God, I felt as weak as dishwater. "Are you here to build bridges?"
Max smiled. "That depends." Moving over to the armchair Noah had vacated earlier, he took a seat. Clasping his hands together, he looked up at me almost guiltily. "I shouldn’t have let it go on for so long."
"No," I agreed. Our feud had been going on for almost a decade and while I had tried on many occasion to heal the rift between us, my uncle's pride had also gotten in the way. "But you're here now."
"When Kyle called me," Max began to say. "And told me what had happened, everything that had happened between us just seemed so…petty." Shaking his head, Max ran a hand through his reddish-grey hair and sighed. "All I could think was, if she dies, I won't get a chance to fix things."
"Uncle Max…"
"Life always seems so permanent," he continued to say. "Until you realize that it's not… Until you wake up one morning and realize that it's very much temporary."
"Nothing has changed," I was quick to point out.
Max frowned in confusion. "What do you mean?"
Raising my left hand, I held it in front of me, letting my uncle see the permanent black band encircling my ring finger. "Noah is my husband." I dropped my hand to my stomach. "And this is his child." Swallowing deeply, I forced myself to say, "I love you, Uncle Max – I always have – but if you ever try to make me choose again, you should know that I will choose him. Every single time."
****
Noah
She wanted him there.
Disbelief had clouded my vision as I watched the good doctor walk into Teagan's hospital room with a bunch of flowers hanging from his hand. The look in her eyes as she watched her uncle approach made me feel sick with jealousy.
And why the hell hadn't I thought of bringing her flowers?
Thoroughly disgusted, I had watched on in semi-horror as Max claimed the space between him and my wife. That prick had treated her like a goddamn pariah for almost a decade and the minute he shows her an ounce of attention, she welcomes him back with open arms? Maybe it was because of the way I'd been raised, but I honest to god didn’t get it.
I'd gotten the hell out of there before I lost my temper and bust open my stiches cutting him a new asshole.
I'd had to.
I couldn’t be in there, watching that farce unfold, knowing that Tommy's body was filed away in a freeze box in the very basement of this hospital.
Even now, as I paced the corridors of St. Luke's Hospital in Boulder, my rage was threatening to overtake me.
My best friend died because of me…
Because I loved my wife too much...
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that Max wasn’t the person I was truly angry with, but he was here, he was a dick, and he would do just fine.
"…Mr. Messina, it is very likely you will never regain full mobility in your right arm…"
The pain searing through my shoulder only fueled the fire inside of me, making my thirst for revenge all the more pungent.
I was going to kill JD Dennis.
If it was the last thing on this earth, I was going to take that rat bastard's life away from him, the way his puppet had taken Tommy's.
Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Lucky leaning against a soda machine at the end of the corridor.
Had he been here since the shooting?
Goddamn.
Moving towards my friend, I didn’t stop until I'd caught his eye, and even then I kept going until we were both holed up in an elevator, moving down to the ground floor.
Lucky didn’t say a word, not even when the elevator pinged and the doors opened. He followed after me silently, never questioning me, never asking where we were going.
When we reached the parking lot, I made a beeline for my Lexus, unlocking it with the key fob before quickly climbing inside. Wordlessly, Lucky opened the passenger side door and climbed inside.
I wasn’t the type of man who took threats easily. I certainly wasn’t the kind of guy who took a direct hit on his family lying down.
No fucking way.
My reasoning made perfect sense and with every mile the car ate
up, my clarity grew.
I was done running.
I was done being the Dennis family's bitch.
This prick couldn’t pull my strings anymore and it was high time he learned about it.
I found myself navigating the winding mountain roads easily. Roads that even after all these years of being away from The Hill, I knew by heart.
"Dude," Lucky finally said, breaking the silence between us, as we traveled through the darkness. "Not trying to tell you your business or anything, but you've just been shot." Sighing, he added, "Don’t you think you should be, I don’t know, taking it easy for a while?"
"I'll take it easy when that prick is six foot under." Clenching my jaw, I twisted my head from side to side. "Rat bastard has it coming. A life for a life."
"Ah," Lucky said, finally catching on. "So, we're going to kill JD?" The airy way he said it grated on my nerves. "Well, this is an interesting end to a fucked up weekend."
"What?" I demanded. "You don’t think I can do it?"
"No," Lucky replied calmly. "I know you'll do it. I'm just surprised, that's all."
"Surprised?" Now I was shouting. I couldn't fucking help it. "He killed Tommy, man. He took his life away."
Growling, I added, "You should get out of the car."
"And leave you to go on your own?" Lucky gaped. "You must be fucking kidding me."
"You know where I'm going." I'd explained the quarry to Lucky in detail every night for half a decade. The guy probably knew the place as well as I did. "You know what I'm going to do," I added, clenching my fist around the cool, hard leather of the steering wheel. "I can drop you off and you can go back to the house and pretend nothing's wrong."
"You're not doing this on your own," Lucky replied calmly, seemingly not one bit ruffled at the prospect of what I had planned for tonight. "I've got your back, man." Exhaling a cloud of smoke, Lucky's lip tipped upwards as he flicked his cigarette ash out of the open passenger side window.
His long blonde hair was pulled back in a makeshift ponytail, making him look less dangerous than I knew to be true. You didn’t serve eleven years in the state penitentiary for being a fucking pussycat.
No, those hands had snuffed the life out of another human.
"If we're caught, we're going back inside," I warned him. "And you're still on parole." Turning my head sideways, I glanced at his face. "Getting involved in my mess is the last thing you should be doing, man."
"You say it like I have a choice," he replied airily. "Noah, I have nothing to lose, man. You don’t get it, thank god, and I hope to god you never will, but trust me when I tell you, I've got this."
He was talking about Haley.
Everything Lucky ever did always came back to his murdered girlfriend.
But throwing his life away for me wasn’t something I was comfortable letting him do.
"It's not just for you," he added, reading my thoughts. "There's a girl back in the hospital that I happen to be crazy about. And said girl has a kid in her belly. I want to keep her safe, too, Noah. I won't sit back and watch another girl die."
"Fair enough." There was nothing left to say. He had made his mind up and I wasn’t going to be able to sway him in any shape or form. And if I was being honest, I was kind of glad he was here with me. He was cool and calm and everything I wasn’t. We made a pretty good fucking team and had racked up a little under seventeen years' worth of imprisonment between us.
The moment we drove into the quarry, memories tried to bombard me and I forced them down, burying them somewhere deep down inside.
Somewhere I'd never have to work through them again.
Being back here, after all those years, felt bittersweet. I used to hate this place. I blamed it for everything.
Looking around now, I realized it was just a desolated quarry. It wasn’t the place that had brought so much hatred out in me.
It was the people.
Killing the engine, I jacked the handbrake and climbed out of my car, leaving the headlights on.
If I had been expecting to get redemption for Tommy's murder by coming back here, then I was going to be disappointed.
The place was dead.
Not a soul in sight.
Disappointment flared inside of me.
"So this is it," Lucky, who had moved to stand beside me, said. Looking around at the desolate warehouses and burnt out cars, he cocked a brow. "You described it down to a tee, man."
I watched as he took a few steps ahead of me. "The smell of death," he called out. "It's fucking stifling."
"I know." To a person who'd never been sucked into the world I'd grown up in, talking about the smell of death would sound fucking crazy. But for me, it was all too real. I had lost count of the number of bodies I'd witnessed being taken away from this place on the bed of a truck. Their resting place in the mountains, miles above us. Shallow graves sprinkled this earth and every fucking ghost of the dead seemed to swarm this place.
"It's almost malevolent," Lucky added, putting into words exactly what I'd been thinking.
I cast my gaze downwards and immediately honed in on the blood stained gravel.
Someone had been stuck like a pig in this place and not too long ago by the look of the blood stains.
Even though I was standing next to where someone had taken their last breath not too long ago, nothing moved inside of me. Not an ounce of pain, or fear, or sadness. The only emotion I seemed capable of feeling these days was anger.
Yeah, I was full of fucking anger.
I'd expected to see JD or one of his pricks so I could get this over with. I was done with running and watching my back. I couldn’t do it anymore. Not when the people I loved were paying the consequences with their lives.
Emotionlessly, Lucky and I walked around the burnt out quarry and over to an area where a huge ring was burnt out and blackened into the ground.
Standing at the edge of the ring, I looked down and frowned.
How many men had I fought in that ring?
How many close encounters with death had I had in that circle of hell?
Too many to count...
"Messina," a voice came from behind me, distracting me from my thoughts.
I didn’t have to turn around to put a face to the voice.
It was one that was imprinted in my memories.
"Gonzalez," I acknowledged, not taking my eyes off the ground, as I heard him approach.
I might have known the owner of the voice, but Lucky didn’t.
In the blink of an eye, my former cellmate was on guard. Pulling a knife I hadn't realized he was carrying out of his pocket, he turned and glared at my old boss. "One more step, old man," he said in a deathly calm tone of voice. "And I'll rearrange your intestines."
"Lucky," I warned, shaking my head slowly. "Don’t."
Gonzalez threw his head back and laughed. "Your friend has some big cojones, Messina."
"Come on," Lucky shot back, not taking his eyes off of Gonzalez. "I could do with the practice." Smiling darkly, he added, "It's been a while."
"Put your knife away, boy," Gonzalez drawled in a thick Spanish accent.
"Do it," I piped up, not taking my eyes off the shiny steel blade in my friend's hand. Later on, we were going to talk about the fact that he was walking around with a weapon in his back pocket, but for now I had to focus on Gonzalez, and the fact that he'd known I was going to come here. "You got eyes on me, G?" I asked calmly when Lucky withdrew his knife.
"You know me, kid. Nothing goes unnoticed around here," he shot back knowingly. He looked me up and down with his beady brown eyes and let out a tuft. "You look like shit," he informed me. Wiping his beard with one of his gold ring clad hands, Gonzalez shook his head and sighed heavily. "Such a waste."
His words hit me hard, but I was brought up masking my emotions, which was exactly what I did in that moment. I motioned to where the sling hung on my right shoulder, encasing my arm in white bandages. "Flesh wound." I probably should have gone somewhere
and changed since the shooting, but the thought of leaving Thorn's side had been too fucking much for me to bear, so I'd slept in my blood soaked shirt last night. I didn’t give two fucks about my appearance but standing in front of a man like this made me feel vulnerable.
Weak.
I loathed weakness.
"You wanna take a walk with me, kid?" Gonzalez asked, tone suddenly void of all humor. "For old time's sake."
Nodding in understanding, I cast a glance at Lucky and told him with my eyes to simmer the fuck down. Getting riled up with Mortico Gonzalez was a bad fucking idea.
I could feel the tension emanating from Lucky. He wasn’t happy about this. But I also knew that wherever Gonzalez was, at least another dozen of his men were nearby. Picking a fight with this man meant certain death. And besides, he wasn’t my enemy.
Not tonight at least.
Mortico Gonzalez had been the lesser of two evil growing up under George's roof. He was a bloodthirsty drug-lord, and twice as meticulously calculated as my former stepfather. But Gonzalez had been somewhat good to me in my younger days.
Fair.
In the underworld, that made a man's loyalty shake.
He was also one of the few gang leaders who was actually true to his word.
Not that I gave a shit about anyone's word.
The only word a man could depend on was a threat.
Threats were intended.
Threats were promises.
I'd had plenty of them over the years and had quickly learned that they all rang true.
Thankfully, when I walked after Gonzalez, Lucky had the good sense not to follow us.
"I had a feeling I would see you again, Messina," he announced when we were out of earshot and out of sight.
"That wouldn’t be hard." I shrugged and stuffed my good hand into my suit pants pocket. "I'm on TV every Friday night."
"You never lost your steel, Messina." Gonzalez barked out a laugh. "But no, I aint talking about seeing you on the television – although your fights have made me a lot of money. I meant I knew you would come back here someday."
Now I turned and looked at him.
"And how did you know that?" I asked coolly as I studied his ageing face. The long, black, greased up ponytail he had always sported was now a silvery grey.