She needed to see that for herself, too. She needed to see that she had more in her than Victor. She needed to be the kind of woman who deserved a kid like Benny.
Chapter Fifteen
Thorne kicked off the bedsheets, unable to sleep. She’d put him in the room at the end of the hall, farthest from her. Yeah, he got the message.
Past midnight now.
He turned over, thinking about Richard.
He’d realized that night that Richard really was living there—he had his own bedroom. He didn’t seem to be a bodyguard and he wasn’t a boyfriend, so what was he doing there?
They’d dined out on the porch again. Nadia had brought in a massive dinner for the guys—turkey, of all things. Some of the guys were too hopped up on coke to eat, but not all of them. Thorne had eaten enough for three.
They’d gone back to the search after that, and by the time it was over they’d buzzed through 75 percent of the mansion. Nadia seemed to think it was in the attic. They would check there tomorrow.
Activity in the house. Somebody in the kitchen.
Thorne got up and snuck down, quiet as a ghost, just to make sure it was somebody who was supposed to be there. He hadn’t liked how Jerrod looked at Nadia. Miguel had made the play, but it was Jerrod he worried about.
He reached the bottom of the stairs and relaxed as he caught sight of Nadia standing in front of the island spreading mustard onto bread. Making a turkey sandwich.
“Couldn’t get enough, huh?”
She looked up, like she’d been caught doing something. God, just the feeling of her eyes on him was a shot into his core. You’d think he would’ve gotten his fill of her today.
He yanked open the refrigerator and pulled out a jar of sweet-hot pickle medallions. His favorite.
“Well, those are gone,” she said.
“You mind?”
“Nah.” She looked at the clock.
“You’re up late.” He started biting the skin off of a pickle, making tiny bites all the way around.
“I got a kid now. Nothing’s late,” she said. “You still eat pickles like that. Gnawing the edges.”
“Yep.” He couldn’t believe that she remembered. “How’s the arm?”
“It’s fine. It’s totally nothing,” she said.
“You never told me what happened.”
“Not paying enough attention,” she said.
Was she hiding something? Or did she just want to keep him away? He popped a bared pickle center into his mouth. Like a bright slap, those sweet-hots.
“So, things better with your guys? Now that they know it’s not you?” she asked.
“Yep.”
“And this is just where you want to be. A guy in Hangman.”
“It’s where I want to be.” So that he could kill Jerrod. After he helped Dax get what he needed to finally destroy the gangs and those who protected them.
“You never want to live a regular life?” she asked.
He frowned, unsure what to do with a question like that; it was like asking a starfish if it wants to lead the life of a horse.
“What?”
“I’m thinking about the question.”
She snorted. “I guess that’s my answer.”
He started on another pickle. He always could read her—sexually and otherwise. Something was on her mind. Something specific. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know, maybe because you’re in the most dangerous line of work possible, working alongside the most fucked-up group of people ever?”
“It’s what I do.”
“Just the stress alone. Always under fire.”
He shrugged.
A pause. Then, “How do you not freeze? Or, you know, fuck up?”
He narrowed his eyes. You didn’t ask that question for nothing.
“What?”
“Are you worried about something?” he asked.
“Excuse me,” she said. “A woman does a lot of new things when she has a little kid, okay? Every day I do things that scare me.”
Was that it? But then again, how the fuck would he know? He started on another pickle, hating his ignorance about families.
“This is going to sound stupid,” she said, “but sometimes I think of you. The way you fight. Because you got rid of your fear,” she added. “You know. On the night of the scorpions.”
He’d always regretted telling her about that. Especially after he heard her try to pass him off to Kara. Or maybe it was the whole warped saga of his that made her think of him as less than human. He wouldn’t blame her.
“It’s how you got your hand out. By losing your fear.”
“I didn’t lose it. I’m always scared. I just stopped avoiding feeling it. There’s a difference.” They both looked down at his hand, wrapped around the pickle jar. He forced himself to leave it on display for her, his nearly useless thumb, his scarred, twisted fingers that would never line up straight. He’d had to break his hand in seventeen places to get it out of the cuff—that’s what some doctor had later told him, but the alternative had been to die out there. He had died in a lot of ways out there.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bring it up.”
“No, it’s good for me to think about it,” he said. “It’s important for me to always remember.”
The warmth in her deep brown eyes was too much, and he had to look back down at the jar. She was building her own family. It was good she’d brought Richard into it. Thorne didn’t have to understand how Richard fit in; Richard was a good man. That should be enough.
“If you stop avoiding fear, how does it not…win out?” she asked.
He bit an edge off the piquant pickle round, thinking about the day the Slaters had brought him deep into the desert to die. They’d hauled him out in a wagon attached to the back of an ATV, beaten up and half conscious, bumping like crazy in the unrelenting sun. Not that he felt anything. Sandi had just been murdered before his eyes.
They drove forever over rough terrain, maybe a hundred miles away from civilization. Eventually, they reached an area that was protected from view by a rocky outcrop; they pulled him from the wagon and dragged him to a concrete slab on the desert floor that had a chain sunk right into it, and that’s what they handcuffed him to—so tightly that it nearly cut off his circulation. As he lay at their feet, one of the brothers informed him that he’d either die of dehydration or of vermin picking him apart. It would be a kind of race. The Slaters laughed about that. And then they left.
The area around him was strewn with rocks and scrub, and most notably, bones and a skull, and when he really focused, he could see scorpions hiding in the skull. He’d always been terrified of scorpions.
He found that whenever he lay still for any length of time, one or two scorpions would approach, and he would have to scare them off. It wasn’t hard, because the scorpions were frightened of movement. But at one point, he must have passed out, because he woke up with a scorpion stinging his cuffed hand. He jerked the thing off, scared to death, heart pounding.
The sting felt funny. Numb. But he didn’t die.
He wondered if they could kill him, and little by little he began to wonder if it might not be best if they did. If they stung the shit out of him, maybe he’d die quickly. The vultures were already circling. The coyotes would come out soon enough. The more he thought about his sister, the more he wanted to die anyway, because really, it was his fault that his sister was dead, the way he’d blundered in to save her.
He grabbed a sun-bleached bone and nudged the skull full of scorpions nearer to him, right to his handcuffed hand. Thrusting his hand in there had been the scariest thing he’d ever done, but he was dead already, and that knowledge gave him a strange kind of bravery.
The pain was intense, but he held still and let them sting and sting.
Eventually they stopped stinging—or maybe he stopped feeling it. He remembered pulling it out and just staring at it, his numb nothing of a hand attached to a rock by a chain. He
stared at it, feeling as if he was on the other side of something. But then he realized that it was a gift, this numbness, because he could bite it and rip at it with his teeth and not feel a thing.
It amazed him that when he plunged into fear and death, he received the tools for staying alive. He began to smash his hand with a rock, destroying it in earnest, something he’d contemplated earlier but couldn’t bring himself to do. He ripped at it and crushed it, reducing it to skin, tendons, and broken bones.
And then he pulled it from the cuff.
He looked up at Nadia, wanting to give her something true, something she could use. “Fear only wins when you resist it, when you fight it. That’s the only thing that can make it seem huge.”
“But how? On the night of the scorpions, you kind of didn’t have anything left. And then...” She nodded at the mangled hand. “How do you do it in a normal fight?”
“You can’t know ahead of time what gift fear will give you,” he said. “Or what gift hate will give you, or any emotion. You have to permit everything, even death. Especially death.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I could do it for myself, but I couldn’t ever accept something horrible happening to Benny. I couldn’t permit that.”
He didn’t have an answer for that. It was hard enough being very attached to Nadia, worrying about what might happen to her. What would it be like to have a kid? Somebody who needed you, and who you loved beyond anything?
His relationship with his sister Sandi had come close. She’d needed him. He’d loved her more than anybody in the world. And she’d died because he’d been too focused on saving her, too uptight, too scared. He’d made so many mistakes, wasted so much time—starting with believing their dad when he’d said Sandi had run away, because how did a man sell his own daughter?
It had only been later that awful night when he’d seen his dad doing drugs in the kitchen, and noticed the huge stash in the Tupperware, that he’d realized the truth. His dad had threatened to sell Sandi off in the past, as though he was joking, but there had always been a certain edge there.
In just ten minutes, Thorne beat the name of the buyer out of his dad. Thorne was just seventeen at the time, but he was a hell of a fighter already. Growing up off the radar and being dragged around by a trust fund dad was dangerous for a kid—you could land anywhere, and it was almost always hostile territory, full of adult predators and hostile kids, too. Street kids wanted to kill him for being rich, rich kids wanted to kill him for being street, and there were even times his dad went for him. And more than that, there was his sister to protect.
When Thorne figured out what his dad did, he’d gone straight to the cops to give them the name of the buyer, but the cops hadn’t been inclined to believe a teenaged punk with dyed-orange hair and rings in his eyebrows over a man in a polo shirt who’d obviously been fighting with his son.
So Thorne tracked down the guy himself. It turned out that the first buyer was just a middleman—he’d sold Sandi to somebody else, who had sold her to the Slaters.
When he’d finally gotten to the Slaters, he’d enraged them by bounding into the back room of their strip club and going at guys with a baseball bat, trying to beat Sandi’s whereabouts out of them the way he’d done with the other buyers.
It wasn’t so effective with the Slaters.
The sickening crack of his bat connecting with Carl Slater’s kneecap had been him signing his sister’s death warrant, or so they told him after they subdued him. They brought Sandi out and slit her throat in front of him. And then they left him in the desert to die, chained to a concrete slab made for that purpose.
Pain, death—he’d let it all into his heart that night. Not caring about death had become his power, and the scorpions made him what he was.
He’d returned to the Slaters’ club months later, mostly healed and fully in disguise, which meant he’d grown out his hair and removed his facial jewelry, and he killed four of the men responsible for Sandi’s death. Everything was new, then, and he was unstoppable because he didn’t care if he died, and he was attached to nobody. Over the weeks that followed, he hunted down and killed more of the men who had been in the room when Sandi was murdered. He’d killed the ones who’d held him, he’d killed the ones who’d held her, and he’d killed the one who’d wielded the knife. Eventually he got everybody except the one who’d laughed: Jerry, Carl Slater’s eighteen-year-old son.
By the time Thorne had returned from his near-death in the desert, Jerry had disappeared into thin air. Thorne hadn’t known at the time that Jerry was about to be indicted for an unrelated murder, or that the Slaters had bundled him off to Buenos Aires for plastic surgery that month. Thorne hadn’t known that Jerry came back a year later with a new identity.
Jerrod Westphal.
Nadia watched him with a faraway look. He didn’t know how to help her. She had so much to lose.
“I guess my power is in being alone. Unattached. I’m free to win because I’m free to die.” It was the most truth he could give her.
She watched him, transfixed, and slightly disappointed. “Right.” It wasn’t the answer she sought, but she still watched him, and he still loved her eyes on him. He was nothing but an interchangeable cock to her, somebody who satisfied her specific desires, but he couldn’t stop how her look operated inside his heart, like a gulp of pure water to a man dying of thirst.
He watched himself go to her. He hooked a finger over the collar of her T-shirt, pulling her to him. “If you’re scared,” he whispered, “If you need something—anything—you ask me.”
“Thorne—if I could, I would.”
“You just ask me, okay?” He didn’t have much to give her, except for the fact that he had nothing to lose. Good for fighting and fucking.
Footsteps. Richard’s footsteps.
Thorne straightened his finger and her T-shirt popped back into place, but he stayed close. Let Richard see them close like this.
“What’s up?” Richard asked as he strolled in. Richard the Barbarian. Always the poker face. Richard went to the refrigerator and pulled out the milk, and then he took down the Nutella. “Who wants hot chocolate?”
“Hot chocolate?” Nadia’s voice sounded strange.
Richard took down a pan. “Want some?”
Something was up. “Sure,” Nadia said.
“Thorne?”
“Sure,” he said.
Richard heated the milk in a small pot, stirring gently with a wooden spoon. Something was up between them. A suspicious prickliness.
“So what have you been up to, Richard?” Thorne asked.
Richard turned. “Helping Nadia pull things together.”
“What does that mean?”
“I thought Hangman was supposed to be so fucking research savvy,” Richard said. “Don’t you guys have computer whizzes who know everything about everybody?”
“We don’t know about you.”
Richard smiled and turned back to the pot.
A lot of women wanted a man in their kid’s life. Somebody to give them a male role model. Maybe that’s what was going on. A free room for being the male.
“So, when does the kid start talking?” he asked.
“He’s saying words now,” Nadia answered, pulling down three mugs. “They talk at different times. There’s no right time.”
“He loves cars,” Richard said. “Car was one of his first words.”
“Any big machine,” she said. “We take him to construction sites.”
We. It twisted in his belly.
“Yeah, a yellow backhoe?” Richard said. “Forget about your plans if you see a yellow backhoe.”
Nadia smiled. “Or one of those hydraulic cranes.”
Thorne took a seat. He’d gone so long thinking he’d be happy if only he could kill Jerrod and take over Hangman that he’d forgotten other kinds of happiness existed. Like this cozy sort where you didn’t have to do or be anything because you just belonged.
Richard poured out
three mugs of hot chocolate. Nadia watched him carefully, and Richard watched her watch him.
Richard slid a mug to Thorne.
Nadia grabbed Thorne’s mug. “I want the Christmas bear mug,” she eyed Richard. “That’s my mug.”
“Fine.” Richard slid two mugs to the center of the island. “Thorne, you want Hawaii or the Tampa String Quartet?”
Thorne took Hawaii and grabbed a bag of tiny marshmallows from the cupboard. He tossed a few into his hot chocolate and offered the bag to Nadia.
“Yuck,” she said.
“Come on.” Richard led them to the kitchen alcove with its array of easy chairs that looked out over the back.
Richard settled into the loveseat and Nadia curled up beside him, hands around her mug. Thorne took the easy chair and looked out at the stars as Richard launched into a monologue about a soccer game he’d watched. It was incredibly boring. Thorne stirred his drink, eating the marshmallows. He was feeling so sleepy.
What was it, just one in the morning? But then, he hadn’t slept the entire night before. And fighting expelled a shitload of energy.
As did fucking.
Still. He needed to stay awake to protect Nadia from Jerrod. She’d gotten onto Jerrod’s radar, and Thorne didn’t like it.
He rested his eyes just for a second as Richard droned on. He needed to set his mug on the table, but he was so sleepy.
Chapter Sixteen
Jerrod paused the movie when his phone rang.
Andrea glared at him. “It’s two in the morning,” she said.
“Yes, it is,” he said coolly.
She mumbled something about business hours. He didn’t much like that attitude.
It was Miguel on the line; he and Skooge were on the road following Victor’s girl, Nadia.
“She’s with Barbarian,” Miguel added.
“No shit. Where?”
“Heading northeast on Four.”
“With Barbarian,” Jerrod said. Richard Barbero, Victor’s Vegas muscle. What the hell? “Do you get the feeling they’re in a hurry?”
Into the Shadows Page 18