Knife & Flesh (The Night Horde SoCal Book 4)

by Susan Fanetti

  “I know. We’re working every angle we can. He doesn’t have a record. We have some powerful friends. We’re doing what we can. First, we’ve got to find him.”

  “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” She set her mug down and put her face in her hands. “Oh, Trick, God.”

  They sat quietly together, while Juliana ignored Connor and processed the information she’d just gotten. DHS had had vast latitude since its inception after 9-11. There had been moves to curb its power over the years, but after a deadly attack on Disney World a few years earlier, on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the WTC, the Powers That Be had taken its leash off completely.

  She might never see Trick again. If they moved him out of the country, to a facility in a place with even looser human rights laws, he could be tortured for the rest of his life. Even if he stayed stateside, the conditions for terrorism suspects were grim.

  Terrorism. Trick? She didn’t understand. They had the wrong guy.

  “Juliana, we have to talk about some practical shit, too.”

  She dropped her hands and focused on Trick’s friend. “We do. I can’t stay here forever. I can’t sit at Riley and Bart’s pool while my life, and my daughter’s life, collapses around us.”

  “I know. If this goes on too long, then we’ll figure something out. But for now, we need you here and out of sight. I’m going to handle your ex today. The visitation thing won’t be a problem. Mel will see to it that you don’t lose your job. I’m sorry about school, but that’s out of the question.”

  “What do you mean, handle my ex?”

  His expression didn’t change. “I mean do what I need to do so that he doesn’t cause trouble. I hope I mean have a talk. But I will do what I need to do to keep him quiet.”

  The way these men talked about the option of killing someone—which was what Connor was saying without saying—disturbed her. Trick did it, too. What disturbed her more was how used to it she’d become already. “Lucie loves him.”

  “That’s great. Doesn’t matter, though. Your safety and hers. Trick. The club. That’s what matters. Period.”

  “Somebody would really hurt me, or Lucie, because Trick got arrested?”

  “Because Trick knows things, yes. The Feds will try to get him to flip on bigger players. He won’t, but some people we deal with could be badly hurt if he did, and they don’t have the trust in him that we do. They’d go for you first because you’re the most valuable target.”

  An exhaustion so pronounced it needed a new word to define it overtook Juliana. “This is not…this can’t be my life.”

  “It is. And don’t get any fancy ideas about leaving him and going back to what you had before. There’s no going back. This is your life now. You’re known as his. Leaving him doesn’t end the risk. The point of no return was the wedding, when everybody we know saw you together.” His serious expression deepened and went dark. He leaned forward again. “Plus, you hurt him while he’s going through this shit, and I will figure out a way to pay that back.”

  As much as Connor had been scaring her since last night, that threat was strangely reassuring. She was glad he was so protective of Trick. “I don’t want to leave him. I want him with us. But I’m scared.”

  “I know. We’re gonna fix this. Trust us.”

  “Everybody keeps saying that—trust us. But I don’t understand ninety percent of anything that’s going on. How am I supposed to trust anything?”

  “That’s what trust is, Juliana.”

  ~oOo~

  Six weeks. Almost seven. A lifetime.

  In that time, Juliana and Lucie never left Bart and Riley’s house. And in that time, nobody told her anything except that they were ‘working on it.’

  She’d had to withdraw from her classes. And she’d taken unpaid leave from work. Emily had been angry but had not denied her the leave or the ability to return. The Horde had handled that in some way, as Connor had promised. They’d been paying her bills, too.

  Connor had been right, as well, about handling Mark. She wasn’t sure how he’d managed it, what leverage they had on him that kept him so meek, but he came three separate times to the Elstads’ and spent the day with Lucie, and with Juliana, that way. On those days, the house was full of Horde. More than the two always present, different men at different times.

  The house and grounds were such a wonder that it took Lucie weeks to get bored. She’d started asking questions early, wanting to see Trick, wanting to go to school, wanting to go out and do things. But for the first month, Juliana had easily deflected all of them. They were staying with the Elstads while they waited for Trick, who was away for work.

  After a month or so, however, Lucie’s questions became more pointed and quarrelsome. She was beginning to feel as much a hostage as Juliana had felt from the very first day. But none of the Horde—not Connor, not Bart, not Hoosier—would entertain any discussion about how long it would last or how it would end.

  Juliana’s nights became full of dreams of running. When she slept at all. When she didn’t sleep, she worried about Trick.

  And then, without any kind of warning, Bart came home one afternoon and called her into the foyer. When she came to the front of the house, Trick was standing at the door, between Bart and Connor.

  If not for the ink on his arms, she might not have recognized him. His hair and beard were matted. He’d lost at least twenty pounds from his already lean frame. Maybe more. His face was mottled with old and new bruises. He smiled when he saw her, and she saw that he was missing two teeth from the left side of his mouth.

  For the weeks they’d been trapped in this house, the weeks since he’d been arrested as a terrorist, Juliana had been at war with doubt. Since she’d fallen in love, she had accepted a lot about Trick’s life, past and present. She had accepted the things he’d done, what she knew about and what she imagined, as either involuntary or necessary. She had come to know him as a moral man, a good man, and so the things he’d done had become irrelevant to the man she’d started making a life with.

  But the idea that he’d done something—she still had no idea what—that could be classified as terrorism, that she’d struggled to comprehend or accept. One thought kept her calm enough to do what she was told: the truth that the government could and did warp its laws to serve its own ends. Especially DHS. If they could construe an act as terrorism, that gave them nearly limitless power to behave as they wished. Because they were accountable, then, to no one.

  She didn’t believe he had done nothing, that they had the ‘wrong man,’ anymore. The behavior of the Horde had quickly convinced her that Trick had done something that served as real grounds for his arrest. So instead she clung to the same thread she’d used to weave her acceptance of his life: whatever he’d done, he’d had no choice. And the government was now using him to suit its whim, as it had done before.

  She believed it. But it was frail armor against the onslaught of worry about what she had done to Lucie’s life, and her own, by bringing Trick into it. Despite her love for him, and her overwhelming worry for what he was going through, even as she grew to know all the Horde family much better, to like them all and to love a few, the fear and doubt wanted to wipe all that away.

  Then she saw his beaten, emaciated body, and his sad, wary eyes, and her doubt and fear broke apart and burst away. What filled her instead was a righteous anger she hadn’t felt since her parents had been put on a plane and carried away from her forever.

  And relief. So much relief and joy.

  “Hey, Jules.” His voice was rough and weak.

  “God, Trick! Oh, thank God!” She ran to him.

  When she reached him and threw her arms around him, he flinched hard, and at first his body was stiff against hers. Then he all but collapsed on her. His arms went around her and held on, and he tucked his face against her neck.

  “I love you so much,” she whispered. “So much.”

  He didn’t answer, but his shoulders began to shake, and she held h
im more tightly while he cried.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  His face pressed hard against Juliana’s soft neck, Trick flinched when Connor’s hand landed on his shoulder. His friend lifted it right back up.

  “Everybody’s on their way here, brother. But take some time with your lady. Decompress.”

  He didn’t move until he could sense that Connor and Bart had left the front hall. Juliana let him hold her, and she held him, remaining as still as he needed her to be. They stayed like that, and he breathed her scent in, replacing the stench of where he’d been with that sweet pleasure.

  When he had again forced calm over the chaos inside him, Juliana sensed it. She kissed his cheek, lingering at the touch, and then leaned back. “Lucie will be so happy to see you. They kids are out back, playing house.”

  “No.” It felt strange to be talking to normal people. He couldn’t let Lucie see him, not now, like this. “I need…uh…I need…”

  Her fingers brushed over one of his fresher bruises, and he closed his eyes. “You need a shower. I know. Come upstairs. I have some of your clothes up there, too.”

  Yes. A shower. It gave him comfort to remember that she knew him well enough to know what he needed. God, he needed a shower. He needed to boil his skin. He nodded, and she took his hand and led him upstairs.

  She led him into one of the guest bedrooms. Trick had never been in any of these rooms. They’d locked down a couple of times here, but he’d always preferred to find a sofa downstairs and crash there. The Elstads’ money unsettled him. So much comfort made him uncomfortable.

  Especially now. Now the comfort in this room caused him actual pain, and he closed his eyes. Juliana closed the door and came to him, but when she touched him, tried to hold him again, he felt her touch as more pain than comfort, and he pushed her away.

  “Trick?”

  “I’m sorry. I just…I…I can’t.”

  “Okay. The bathroom’s just there.” She pointed to a door in the far corner of the room. “Everything you need’s in there. I’ll get some clothes out for you, okay?”

  He nodded and crossed the room.

  Closing himself into the bathroom, he locked the door. Then he turned around.

  The room was big, with a fancy bowl for a sink, a deep tub, and a huge shower. There was even a bidet next to the toilet. Everything was tiled in oblong white tiles except for a four-inch swath of dark blue glass tiles. Fluffy while towels hung on thick rods. There were wrapped soaps in green glass dishes, and a tray full of shampoos, conditioners, lotions, and powders.

  And this was one of their guest bathrooms. The jarring disparity between where he was and where he’d come from struck him as perversely hilarious. He slid down the door until he had landed on the gleaming floor, and he laughed.

  That laughter was no medicine, however. It was harsh and hollow, and it dried quickly up, leaving the same crushing weariness that had been his safest mental state for an eternity.

  Connor had told him how long he’d been gone, but he didn’t remember what he’d said. Weeks, he thought. It had seemed longer. It had been timeless.

  He got to his feet and stripped out of the black coverall and t-shirt he’d been wearing when his previous life had ended. Once naked, he turned the shower on, using only the hot tap. The Elstads’ water heater pumped out some real temperature, and the water was soon hotter than he could stand.

  He stepped in and closed the door.

  Focusing on the scalding water on his body, he kept his mind quiet. He wasn’t ready to let anything inside it loose out here in this world.

  There was a loofah on a shelf inside the shower, along with more soaps and shampoos. Trick washed and scrubbed until his hands ached, and then he let the loofah fall to the floor and simply stood under the stream until the water turned cool and gave him a chill.

  He got out and reached for one of the fluffy white towels. Warmth covered his hand and arm—the rod was heated. Another choked chuckle ripped from his throat. He dried off and wrapped the towel around his waist.

  Juliana sat on the bed. He stopped in the doorway, surprised; he’d thought—he’d hoped—she would have left him alone. “Ju—”

  Her reaction to seeing him cut her name off his tongue. She rose to her feet, her mouth open. “Trick. My God. Oh God.”

  She crossed the room to him. He wanted to get away from her gaze and her touch, but he couldn’t make his feet move, and she reached him and put her hands on him.

  He writhed as if her touch hurt him—because it did. There was no sense in that, she wasn’t poking at any of his bruises or wounds, but it was true anyway. “M’okay.”

  Undeterred by his discomfort, she continued to study him with her hands and eyes. “No, you are not. Oh God, what did they do?”

  “What it looks like they did.” He wasn’t ready for those thoughts. If he took his shoulder off that door in his mind, he’d go crazy and stay there.

  Her hands smoothed over his shoulders and down his chest. He wanted the touch to feel good, to soothe him as it had in his previous life. But her hands were made of glass shards, and it was all he could do not to knock her away.

  Then her exploration arrived at his nipples, and he grabbed her wrists and broke her touch from his skin.

  “God. What happened?”

  “Couldn’t keep my metal in. They, uh, helped me with that one.” He tried to laugh, make it a joke, but he couldn’t. They’d ripped it off his chest. The memory of that pain had seared into his body. His skin had stretched shockingly far before it had finally given, and the agony had been red fire.

  “It’s infected.” She lightly palpated the hot, swollen wound, and he winced. It was an early wound but had never healed.

  “I guess.” He knew. He didn’t especially care, not just then.

  Then her eyes went wide and dropped below his waist. She shook her arms from his grip and went for the towel, but he grabbed her again. “No. They let me take that one out.”

  When her eyes came back up to his, they swam with unshed tears. “What did they do?”

  Her tears would break him. “Don’t, Juliana.” He pushed her away. “I need…I need…some time. Alone.”

  “No, you don’t. You need to feel love. You need to talk about what happened. Don’t let it poison you the way the war did. Talk to me. Please talk to me. Get it out.”

  There was a stack of clothes on the bed. Assuming they were his, he walked around her and crossed the room, his bruised feet pillowed on thick, plush carpet. He dropped the towel and stepped into a pair of boxer briefs and then his jeans. When he buttoned the fly, they slid down to his thighs and only stopped there because his legs were spread enough to hold them. Anger grew in his belly like a stoked fire. He swiped up his wide, black leather belt and fed it through the loops, closing it on the tightest hole, three in from the one that had worn from daily use. The jeans hung precariously on his hips, bunched around the belt.

  “My God, Trick.”

  “Stop saying that.” He yanked a white t-shirt over his still-wet head. “God has left the building.”

  He felt her hands on his back, and he flinched away and turned to face her. With his hands on her shoulders, he held her off. “What do you want, Jules? You want me to talk? And say what? You want to know about the maggots in the food? The way it was a grey slab of leavings and old meat and made me so sick I shat myself, but I ate it anyway because I was so fucking hungry? You want to know what they did when I did refuse to eat?”

  She looked stricken. He was hurting her, he knew it, but he couldn’t stop.