“I don't want her to undo everything we've done,” I say, and my voice comes out in a whisper. “Ty, I'm so scared. I don't want her to hurt you. You have enough scars already, more than your fair sure. We have a life now, and I'd rather put a knife through her chest than see her fuck you up with whatever bullshit baggage she brought into town.”
Ty stands up suddenly and drops his cigarette by our feet.
He takes my face in his hands and gazes down at me with no small amount of love. There's so much of it that I feel like I'm getting drunk on it. I sway a little on my feet.
He kisses either side of my face with warm lips and then hovers his mouth over mine.
“I don't want you to worry about me, Never. Not like that.” He pauses and his mouth twitches. “I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.”
“Lewis Carroll,” I whisper. “You're quoting me Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?”
“I know you don't like it when dudes quote shit, but it's kind of fitting, right?”
“I never did like guys quoting poetry. Until you. Ty, I love whatever you do.”
I pause and the soft winter silence settles over the two of us.
“If you feel like you need to talk to Hannah, if you … ” I feel like my throat is closing up, but I make myself say the words aloud. “If you want to call the police and tell them what you know about Marin Rice, then do it. I know you'll make the right choice. You always do.”
He wraps his arms around me then and pulls me close, rests his chin atop my head, and melds our souls into one.
24
I feel like I'm being stabbed with fire pokers, right in the stomach. The sensation freaks me out a little, but the doctor said there was nothing to worry about at my last appointment. I chalk up the sensation to stress. But – and this is fucking huge for me – I will call the stupid ob/gyn tomorrow and ask about it, okay?
“Mini McCabe Number Two doesn't want you to do this,” I say, leaning into Ty. This is the thing I like best about using India's truck – there are three seats in the front, so it's kind of ideal for snuggling while driving. Or giving hand jobs. Only Ty still won't let me touch him like that. With the surgery and all, he doesn't think I should be pleasuring him sexually, finds it too weird. I get it. But I wish he'd let me do it anyway.
“Mini McCabe Number Two is a smart little fetus then. I don't even want to do this shit. But I need to. I need this closure.” Ty glances over at me with his beautiful brown eyes, like the bark on a really old tree, full of stories and wisdoms and visions past. Brown eyes don't have to be boring eyes. Green leaves might top the trees, and a blue sky might frame them, but without the earth beneath, it would all mean nothing. “And I really, really want her out of my life forever. I don't want to see her again after today, and I'm gonna tell her that. Straight up.”
“I love your face,” I say and press my lips to his muscular shoulder, one last kiss before we pull into the slanted parking space. The bar brings back even more memories, of slow dancing with Ty, of him punching Luis for me. What a beautiful moment that was.
Ty parks the truck and takes off his seatbelt, glancing up in the rearview mirror for a moment and then pausing like he's been shot. His entire body goes rigid and he sucks in a massive breath.
“Fuck.”
I follow his gaze and see Hannah climbing out of her car, honeyed curls swaying in the breeze. She's wearing a baby doll dress in blue, a soft half-smile on her lips. She doesn't even seem to mind the cold, sashaying across the street in a pair of brown booties, a denim jacket slung over one arm. I guess when you have no heart, the cold burn of an icy winter must not be bothersome. Innocuous. Innocuous poison, that's what this woman is.
“I feel sick,” Ty groans, running his hands down his face. “When I see her, I get all … twisted up, and I feel like I'm trapped, like I'm never getting out of that hell I was in.”
“But you did,” I tell him, drawing his hands into my own and running my thumbs across his knuckles. “You did, and this time, you have me by your side.”
“You sure you want to go in there?” he asks, leaning close, putting our foreheads together. “You don't have to. You can wait here if you want, read about dirty bikers or rock stars or tattoo artists, whatever the fuck. I just want you and the baby to be safe and happy.”
I kiss Ty hard and fierce, hungry, roughly taking his mouth with mine.
It shocks him a little, just enough to snap to him out of the strange mood he's tumbling towards, one that's too empty and dark and lonely for me to bear.
“I'm safest with you, happiest with you, even happier if I get to punch Hannah in the face.”
Ty grins at me.
“I could live with that,” he says, reaching up to brush a thumb over my lips. “But wait till we get out of the bar before you do it, so nobody sees. You're too hot to go to jail.”
“No sane person would lock me up if they knew what Hannah did to you. Besides, I'm pregnant and that earns me a get out of jail free card.” I wink at Ty and open the door, smiling even though my words aren't entirely true. I'm sure I would get locked up for beating on this bitch. She looks so cute and innocent, like a spring fucking flower. And with the way my luck's been going, I'd better not take the chance. Still, if I do get a moment alone with her, I'm not saying it won't happen. “Let's get this over with, so we can go home and you can dress our son in that hideous monstrosity of an outfit you ordered.”
“Monstrosity? That's a flying purple people eater costume.”
I raise my brows at him before climbing out, glad that for a second here, we can infuse the air with laughter, with smiles. I know it won't last long once we get in there.
“Exactly. That's what I said: monstrosity.”
I glance around but don't see Hannah anywhere. Good. I take a moment to compose myself as Ty steps up beside me, perfectly beautiful in a pair of old jeans, a yellow SOG tee, and his customary pair of boots. I have his jacket wrapped around me, his baby inside of me, and a killer purple dress (also stolen from India). I had to look good for this, better than Hannah, but not for Ty – for myself.
“Last time,” Ty whispers, reaching down to take my hand. “Last time either of us will ever have to put up with her or her shit.” He steels himself, shoulders back, jaw locked tight, and then he moves us forward and into the doors of the Broken Glass, into a world of useless drunks, lonely souls, and wide-eyed drifters.
Hannah is at the bar, already surrounded by men. She has several drinks lined up in front of her and a smile on her face.
I wish a lighting bolt would shoot down from the sky, crack the roof, and turn her head into burnt pudding. If she died right now, I wouldn't feel a scrap of remorse or shed a single tear. If that makes me a bad person, then so be it. I have no sympathy for people like her.
“Tyson,” she says, but Ty doesn't cringe when she uses his name. In fact, he barely acknowledges her, finding us an empty table and pulling my chair out for me. After a quick look around, I'm relieved to see that tonight, Luis isn't at his usual watering hole. Thank God. I don't think I could deal with two demons all in one night.
Ty sits down beside me, close enough that our legs touch, and then crosses his arms over his chest to wait. Hannah's eyes alight on me as if she's just seeing me for the first time. When she makes her way over to the table, a drink in either hand, I can tell she's not happy to see me here. Too fucking bad for her.
“The bartender is skilled for a man who works in the middle of nowhere.”
Ty puts his hands flat on the table as Hannah sets a drink in front of him. When he looks at her, his expression is completely blank, as if she's not worthy of emotion. I like that. He really is cutting her off, snipping away the bad memories, letting them drown in a sea of darkness to be forgotten.
“We're not here to chat with you, Hannah,” Ty says, pushing the drink back towards her. “And my wife is pregnant, so neither of us will be drinking either.” I see the flash on Hannah'
s face when Ty says those key words. Wife. Pregnant. She's jealous of me, whether she wants to admit it or not.
“Then why did you come?” she asks, sitting down, tucking her skirt beneath her legs with a gracefulness that bothers the hell out of me. Like with my mother, I wish Hannah's outside would match her inside. If it did, she'd be a withered crone with melted lips and sightless eyes, pus swollen fingers, and an empty chest cavity where her heart should be. Too bad the world doesn't work like that.
“How did you get my number, Hannah? How the fuck did you find me?” Ty leans forward, his dark hair gleaming beneath the dull lights of the bar. It's beautiful, even in here. And he looks so badass with his silver piercings, his tattoos, the way his jaw tightens as he looks at her. Barely coiled violence curls under his skin, but that's okay. He's holding it back, and that's where his true strength lies.
“I have my ways,” she says, unfolding and refolding the red paper napkin under her drink. When she looks up, her eyes flicker between blue and green, like the ocean on a hot summer day. They shouldn't look like that, the eyes of a predator. They should be yellow and slitted with two sets of eyelids instead of long curling lashes. “I told you before, Tyson, that all kinds of information gets passed around in my circle. When the cops came looking for information about Marin, after her family put up the reward money, your name started being tossed around. I'm not the only one that knows where you live.”
Hannah picks up her drink and sips it from the tiny red straw, all dainty and shit. It takes everything I have inside of me to sit still.
“Is that a threat?” I growl, but Hannah refuses to acknowledge my presence, still staring at my husband as if she could get him to crack. He won't. Nothing she says tonight will matter to him.
“Answer my wife's question,” he says, and I notice her fingers tighten almost imperceptibly around the dew covered glass in her hand. Ty sits back and crosses his arms over his chest again.
“I'm not threatening you, Tyson. All I'm doing is telling you the truth. I came here to ask you to let bygones be bygones. What happened to Marin was terrible, but it wasn't your fault.” Hannah leans over and tries to touch Ty's arm, but he pulls away. “It wasn't my fault either. You do know that, right?” Ty continues to say nothing, and I watch as Hannah struggles to come up with a convincing argument. “You can tell them about Marin, but you're only implicating yourself.”
“Maybe the truth deserves to be out there, don't you think?” he asks, voice quietly menacing, as if the word truth is a sword that he could stab right through Hannah's throat. “Marin deserves justice, doesn't she?”
“Justice,” Hannah says as she sets her drink down on the table and rises to her feet. “Means all kinds of different things to different people.” She pauses and looks between Ty and me for a moment before picking up her jacket. “I wish you good luck with yours.”
25
As soon as Hannah exits the bar, Ty is grabbing my hand and pulling me up.
“What are you doing?” I ask as he tugs me towards the door. The look on his face when he glances back at me is terrifying.
“Something's up with her. Remember my fucktard-dar? It's going off like fucking crazy right now. Come on.” Ty takes me outside and opens the passenger side door of the truck, glancing surreptitiously over his shoulder at Hannah. In the rearview mirror I watch her, too, watch her smoking a cigarette, pulling out her cell for a quick text. Whatever clue she gave Ty that she was up to something, I'm not seeing, but I trust him anyway. If Ty says the bitch is full of shit, then I believe it as surely as if I saw her do something with my own eyes.
Ty closes my door and moves over to the driver's side, climbing in and starting the engine. He even pulls out of the space and drives around the block, turning us down a side street and parking in the shadows beneath the old bank building.
Hannah is still standing by her car, talking on her cell phone, but after a few moments, she gets in and takes off, too.
“You're not seriously going to try and follow her?” I ask, but Ty just smiles tightly and puts his foot on the gas, turning the corner and following a discreet distance behind Hannah's black sedan. Fancy, expensive. It's nice, too nice for someone like her, nicer even than the red one she showed up in at our house in New York. I wonder how she makes her money, if she gets it all from sex trafficking, selling off boys like Ty to men without souls.
“We're like spies or some shit,” McCabe says, trying his best to lighten the mood. It works, at least a little anyway. “First we tracked Luis, now this? Pretty cool, right? Maybe I could get a job as a professional sleuth or something?”
“Because you're so inconspicuous?” I ask, reaching over and poking Ty right in a purple butterfly tattoo. He smiles, but his dimples have definitely left the building. He's trying to joke, trying to be strong, but I know even a brief encounter with a demon can set someone back. I squeeze his bicep and press our bodies together, loving the way his right hand immediately drops off the wheel and curls around my knee. We were made to be mates, Ty and me. We work best as a unit.
“Thanks for coming with me. I know it can't have been easy for you either.”
“However hard it was for me, it was ten times that for you. At least it was over before it really started.” I pause and glance up into his face. “Are you feeling okay?” Ty nods, and even though I know I wouldn't be alright after a tense encounter with my rapist, I believe him. He's strong in so many ways, too many to count. After all, strength in the face of luxury and ease isn't truly strength at all; strength against all the odds, against pain and heartache and poverty and loss, that's the good stuff right there.
“At this point, I'm just hoping my hunch is all for nothing, that I'm imagining shit, you know?”
“And what kind of hunch do you have exactly?”
Ty plays with his lip ring for a moment before answering.
“She came all the way down here for a five second conversation? I'm just not buying it.”
“Maybe I scared her off?” I joke, but Ty's tight smile says he's still worried. Then again, maybe he's right to worry? She did stalk him like a crazy person, toss out a veiled threat, and then leave without hardly saying anything at all.
I sit back and try to calm the sudden queasiness in my belly. Maybe Mini McCabe has a hunch, too? Please let this all turn out okay. I don't think I can handle anymore tragic situations or broken hearts, loss or that devastating sense of what-if. Fuck.
At least I don't have to sit with my anxiety for long; it takes just a few minutes of driving in the dark, straight out of town and towards the lake I went to that first night with Noah. Ty goes right past the exit at first, letting Hannah turn onto the quiet road leading towards the campground area. As cold as it is right now, and with the freak little flurries of snow we've been getting, I doubt there's anyone else there.
I start to get nervous.
Unused campgrounds, middle of the night, middle of nowhere, that's where bad shit happens. I know. I've been around plenty of it. Ty, too.
“Why'd you drive past?” I ask him, but he's already flipping a bitch and heading back in the other direction. I watch him play with his lip ring again, left hand tightening on the steering wheel.
“I didn't want to spook her,” is all he says before he shuts off the headlights and turns down the campground road, past a few lonely RVs, and straight to the mostly empty campsites.
There's only one that has a car parked in it, and that's where Ty stops, blocking Hannah in with the truck. Before I can even ask if there's a plan, he's climbing out and taking off after her.
I stumble after him, hitting the dirt road with a sudden burst of dizziness. Fuck. I hate being pregnant. Why can't I be a glowing maternity ad with shining hair and a beatific smile? Shit.
I look across the campsite and see Ty standing beneath the swags of old fashioned Edison bulbs, draped between the trees, like our little homestead is the epitome of Old Town Midwest America. Even in the off-season, it looks pictu
re perfect.
Ty is panting, chest heaving with big breaths, and his hands are curled into fists by his sides. It takes me another minute or two to spot Hannah, halfway out of the fancy black foreign whatever-the-fuck-it-is car.
“Tyson,” she says, and I can see the way Ty's body reacts to her, like he's been poisoned and simultaneously slapped in the face, kicked in the nuts, and run over by a car. He shudders and goose bumps crawl all over his skin. “What are you doing here?”
“The fuck is this?” he asks, and his voice is barely coherent, half anger and all pain. “What is this, Hannah?” His tone is rising sharply, careening into the realm of panic. I look both ways before climbing out of the pickup – these country fucks drive crazy and I refuse to lose another baby because I'm not paying attention.
When it's clear, I jog over to stand next to Ty.
Hannah is not happy to see me, tucking some of her honeyed curls behind an ear as she climbs out, booted heels loud on the hard packed earth beneath our feet.
“Now let me explain,” she begins, but Ty is beyond listening to her. He storms forward like a thunder cloud, rolling in dark and deadly. His combat boots get up and personal with Hannah's shoes and his eyes flash with a thousand shades of darkness that my soul recognizes all too well.
“Open the fucking door,” he says softly. His voice is scary now, different than I've ever heard before. I can't stop staring at him, can't quite figure out what's going on.
And then I hear a familiar voice from the backseat.
“Can we roast marshmallows now?”
Darla.
This bitch has Darla.
I lunge forward and grab the handle, but it's locked. I yank and pull anyway, kick the side of the sleek black piece of shit before spinning to face her. If I was mad before, I'm not even really sure what I am now.
“Open the fucking door!” I scream, and I don't care that my voice is echoing around the campground – hell, maybe the ranger will show up to see what this scuffle is all about. “NOW.” It's not a suggestion.
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