by Megan Crane
“Rebecca was an experiment,” Annabeth was saying, fiddling with her plate of berries. “But I quickly learned I have no capacity for motherhood. Luckily, that’s what boarding schools are for. And I didn’t want her to come back, so I gave her access to her trust early.”
“There was no sign of a trust. We looked.”
Everly said we. She ordered herself not to look directly at Blue.
She just had to keep Rebecca’s mother talking a few more minutes.
“I cut her off two years ago when I learned she was going behind my back.” Annabeth popped a raspberry into her mouth. “Rebecca had maudlin fantasies about reuniting with her long-lost father. She was a regrettably emotional thing. I’m not entirely sure where that came from.”
“Didn’t her father want to know her?”
“If my friend wanted to know she existed, I would have used her as a bargaining chip a long time ago. He had less interest in her than I did.”
Poor Rebecca, Everly thought. Something like grief moved through her, but sharper, as if there was guilt mixed in.
Maybe Rebecca had needed a friend, not just a roommate. How had Everly failed to notice that during all those nights tucked up on the couch watching bad television?
She would never know the answer. And she would have to carry that.
You can live with anything, Blue had told her. That’s the price of surviving.
Everly hadn’t known then how much that price would hurt.
“She should have accepted the truth,” Annabeth was saying crossly. “Not everyone gets a family, and there’s no point crying over it almost thirty years on. But instead, Rebecca blackmailed him. And that was something I couldn’t allow.”
“Because you’d lose all this, wouldn’t you?” Everly asked quietly, meeting Annabeth’s frigid gaze. “You said it was yours, but it’s not, is it? Nothing here is yours. All of it can be taken away in a heartbeat, can’t it?”
The look on Annabeth’s face turned ugly, because there was no amount of smoothing that could change the fact that the woman had no soul. Or anything else in there.
“I told him I would handle it. I did.” Annabeth bared her teeth at Everly. “And I want you handled, too. You have no idea how much your stupidity has cost me.”
“My stupidity?”
“You should have stayed in that apartment and taken what was coming to you. This was a waste of everyone’s time,” Annabeth complained.
“I’d hate to waste your time,” Everly murmured.
Annabeth lifted her fingers, and beside her, her minion shifted position. He lifted his gun, seemingly unaware that there was a pissed-off ex–Navy SEAL only an inch or so behind him.
Blue’s dark eyes met Everly’s.
And when he surged forward and chopped the gun out of the thug’s hand with a blisteringly fast strike, Everly rolled up onto her feet, too.
Only to find herself face-to-face with a squawking Annabeth.
“I told you,” the older woman screamed at her, “I have Pilates!”
Then she tried to drive her sharp little cocktail fork into Everly’s left eye.
So Everly did exactly what she’d been taught.
And used her palm to strike Annabeth directly in the face, taking her down to the floor.
Twenty-one
“I thought you were dead.”
Everly’s voice was raw. It cracked on the last word and hit a nerve inside Blue.
He’d been sure she was dead. That he’d lost her to these people. That he would have to add her to that sharp-edged list of names he carried in his gut like a stone, forged from guilt and grief.
Blue had been sure that he’d have to find a way to survive her, too.
And he wasn’t sure he could.
On the floor at Everly’s feet, Rebecca’s psycho of a mother let out a loud keening noise. She writhed there on her side, her hands covering her bloody nose, the end table with her crazy tea and lunatic berry plate upended beside her.
Everly was standing over Annabeth, panting, her arm still locked out from the palm strike she’d landed. Expertly.
Blue was sure he’d never seen anything so beautiful. Everly was alive. She was flushed and alive and she’d knocked that cackling loon on her butt.
He was so proud of Everly it actually ached.
“I’m not dead,” he told her, his voice rough and low because he’d had no idea what he would find in here. He’d floated in that pool until his lungs ached and his head went spinny, thinking his only edge was taking himself out of the bull’s-eye without actually dying. Then the bigger goon had made the vast mistake of prodding him with one of the poolside cleaning implements.
When he’d finished teaching the moron the error of his ways, with prejudice, he’d gone to find Everly.
Aware with every agitated kick of his heart that he was probably too late.
He thought he would carry the sight of her in this room to his grave. He expected it to live in his nightmares. She’d been down on her knees but still defiant, staring up at Annabeth as if she could chat all day with a woman who wanted her dead and had already gone to some trouble to make that happen.
And when she’d seen him, everything had changed.
It wasn’t the world that had gone quiet; it was him.
Like a key into a lock, smooth and right. A recognition so profound and so simple that it had rocked him. Made him a different man than he’d been a breath before.
And that was before he saw that douchebag’s handprint on her face.
He stepped on said douchebag’s arm now, happy to share his feelings on that topic as the guy tried to breathe through the brutal takedown Blue had enacted.
With malice.
“I saw them shoot you, Blue. I saw you drown.”
Everly looked haunted. But Blue smiled, because she was alive and he couldn’t seem to help himself.
“I’m a SEAL, baby. SEALs don’t drown.”
He wanted to go to her. He wanted his hands on her. He wanted things he could hardly articulate, even in his own head.
But it didn’t matter what he wanted.
Because that was when the cavalry arrived.
Alaska Force came in like the well-oiled machine they were. Isaac and Jonas entered the room low and hot, weapons at the ready. Blue knew that meant Griffin was on point and Templeton was walking the perimeter.
To say nothing of the guys out in the truck.
“You missed the party,” Blue told them, still smiling. “Typical.”
“Looks like you had a nice swim,” Jonas retorted. “Was it a pool party?”
“We always miss the good stuff,” Isaac said, though his gaze never left the woman writhing on the floor.
And that was it, Blue thought, stepping back so Jonas could zip-tie the goon’s hands behind his back. He rubbed his hands over his face, and when he dropped them, Everly had moved. She was shakily lowering herself onto the couch behind her, but her gaze was fixed on him while she did it.
Broadcasting things he didn’t want to see and certainly didn’t want to feel.
“Cheer up, Everly,” he said, still smiling like he was having fun.
He ignored the clamoring thing inside him that told him truths he didn’t want to know and refused to articulate, even to himself.
He’d had a job. He’d done it. The end. “It’s over.”
* * *
• • •
Much, much later, Blue pulled his SUV back around behind his mother’s house. There was no need to hide it anymore, but old habits died hard.
Or you still don’t want anyone to see you, a voice inside piped up. Coward.
Blue wasn’t a fan of that word. But he also didn’t park out on the street, where the fact that he was here could be noted by, say, someone in a house across the way.
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Alaska Force had descended on the house in Winnetka with their usual devastating might. The local police had come next. It had been hours and hours of giving reports. Clearing up details.
Blue appreciated Isaac’s abilities in times like these. The man had contacts and friends everywhere. What might have taken days in other circumstances, thanks to the usual bureaucratic nonsense, Isaac managed to get done in a few intense hours.
Now there was nothing for Blue to do but grab his bag and head back to Alaska, where he belonged.
Blue let himself in his mother’s back door, then paused as the screen slapped shut behind him. That same sense of déjà vu that had messed with him last night walloped him again, hard. There were still too many ghosts. It made his mother’s kitchen feel crowded, even when there was nobody there but him.
Maybe it was just him. Maybe he was the one who was haunted.
He started across the kitchen floor for the stairs, but then sensed more than saw a figure appear in the entrance to the living room. His mother.
“I’m going to grab a shower,” he said. “Then I’ll get out of your hair.”
“Did . . . whatever you were doing work out?” his mother asked. “Is Everly all right?”
Blue didn’t know what to tell her. He hadn’t told her why they were here in the first place, so he didn’t see the point of laying it all out for her now. What would he say? Everly had been cleared of everything, at last. Annabeth Lambert and her surviving muscle had been rounded up and taken into custody. It was all over.
He couldn’t even tell her that the last two weeks had transformed him into a different man, whether he liked it or not—and he didn’t like it at all—because he’d made certain his mother didn’t know what kind of man he was in the first place.
It was better to say nothing.
Just like it was better to avoid all these entanglements in the first place, Blue thought darkly, because he’d rather get shot than navigate all these . . . feelings.
“Everything’s fine,” he said, and tried to sound slightly more friendly than a drill sergeant. “Everly’s fine, too. Like I said, I won’t be long. Just a quick shower, then I’m out.”
He expected the long sigh his mother let out then. Or he wasn’t surprised by it, anyway. But he didn’t expect her to stay where she was, hovering there in his peripheral vision like one of those ghosts he wanted to avoid.
“I can’t pretend to understand all the hate you carry around in your heart,” she said quietly, and he wanted, desperately, for that to make him angry. But it didn’t. Because his mother didn’t sound as if she was trying to score points—she just sounded sad. And what defense could he have against making his mother sad? “But you’ve always been too stubborn for your own good. What I’m going to hold on to is the fact that when you needed somewhere to go, you came here. I’ll tell myself that means that your heart knows the truth, even if you don’t want to.”
It was like there was an earthquake inside him, no matter how he tried to hold himself together. No matter how Blue tried to forbid himself to shake, everything crumbled anyway.
He stood there and fought it for longer than he should have, and he still didn’t feel solid.
“Mom, I don’t—”
But it was too late. When he looked over, his mother was gone.
Blue told himself it was for the best.
He jogged upstairs, threw his bag together, and took that shower. Alaska Force was rolling out tonight. He intended to wake up in his own bed the following morning, so he could get started on forgetting everything that had happened.
Everly was safe now. That was what mattered. He’d done his job.
He got out of the shower, toweled himself off, and finally put on some clean clothes. There was nothing like a fresh T-shirt, a new bandage on his nicked arm, and a nicely battered pair of jeans after a long, drawn-out situation to make a man feel brand-new and something close enough to content. He walked back out into the sitting room, finally feeling like himself again after too many earthquakes to count, to find his stepfather there in the armchair. Waiting for him.
Blue hadn’t seen him since last night, when he’d been nothing but a pale face through the screen door.
In his memory, Ron Margate was big. Brawny and mean, red-faced like a bulldog. But the man sitting before him didn’t look like a monster. He just looked like an old guy. He was a lot smaller than Blue remembered, for one thing, and whether that was age creeping up on Ron or the unreliable memories of a scrawny seventeen-year-old kid, Blue couldn’t tell.
Ron had lost most of his hair. He was wearing glasses, a polo shirt, and khakis—not exactly clothes to inspire fear. And he didn’t light into Blue the minute Blue stepped into the room. Instead, he just looked at his stepson.
As if they were both noting all the changes between them. The last time they’d been in this house together, Ron had been bigger. Now Blue could snap the older man like a twig.
The trouble with that was, he knew exactly what he was capable of. And he wasn’t about to attack an unarmed man.
“I’m not really in the mood to do this tonight,” Blue said shortly. “I have a plane to catch.”
Ron didn’t snap at Blue to mind his tone. He didn’t demand respect. He didn’t shout something about his house, his rules and then shove Blue as punctuation, the way he might have years ago.
“Here’s the thing, Blue,” Ron said instead, squaring his shoulders as he spoke. “I’ve had a long time to think about how things went down after I married your mother. Twenty years and then some.”
“This will be a short conversation, then. Things were crappy.”
The Ron that Blue remembered would have blown up at that. But this Ron only let out a quiet sound, like a sigh. “I don’t blame you. You were a little kid, messed up with grief. I was the adult, and I take full responsibility.”
That . . . wasn’t what Blue had been expecting.
To put it mildly.
Another aftershock slammed through him, and he found himself shifting from one foot to the other. He locked that down, hard. His long-hated stepfather might have just blown his mind, but he didn’t need to show Ron that.
“I lost my father,” he managed to bite out. “I didn’t need another one.”
“But you see, I wanted a son.”
When Blue could do nothing but stare at him, completely unable to make that statement fit with all his memories, it was Ron’s turn to shift in his chair. He looked down at his hands, then up at Blue again, as if he were forcing himself to man up. To look Blue straight in the eye.
“I love my daughters. But I wanted a son and was thrilled that Regina came with you in a single package. And I couldn’t understand why everything I did to make you that son backfired. Spectacularly.”
Blue felt as if something were choking him. He would’ve preferred it if something really were, because then he could have fought it. As it was, the sensation was almost too much to bear. It pressed down on his throat. It made it hard for him to breathe.
He’d never wanted this man before him to be anything but the villain he’d always been in Blue’s head.
He’d never wanted Ron to be complicated. Or conflicted.
Ron was evil. Ron was supposed to be evil, pure and simple.
“I thought I could repair it, in time. But you never came back.” Blue was rocked again by how steady the other man’s gaze was. “I don’t suppose there’s an apology I could make to you that would take away how out of hand I let things get between us back when you lived here. I allowed a confused teenager to provoke me, and I’m not proud of it. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
Blue thought his jaw might shatter—it was clenched so tight.
He still felt like he was being choked. Now there was that tight band of steel around his chest, too, pulling so hard and fierce he thought it
might cut him in half.
He didn’t understand what the hell was happening.
And Ron wasn’t finished. He stood up, letting his hands dangle at his sides, and if anything, his gaze got more direct.
“You’re older now than I was when I married your mom,” Ron said. It was another unpleasant reality check that Blue didn’t know what to do with. “I’d like to think you’re not the same grief-stricken kid you were then.”
“I’m not.”
Ron nodded. “I accept what I did and the fact I could have—should have—handled things better.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.” He sounded stiff. Formal.
“You don’t have to say anything,” Ron replied. “I’d like your forgiveness, but that’s your choice, not mine. I understand why you left here and didn’t want to come back. But it’s not me you hurt. It’s your mother.”
Blue didn’t know, as he absorbed that blow, why he hadn’t seen this coming. It was like he’d set foot in Illinois and had lost his crap on every level. No control and no clue where the hell he’d lost it. No idea what was coming and no ability to counter it or, better yet, prevent it.
It was like he was seventeen all over again. He snuck a look at his own arm to make sure it hadn’t shriveled away into scrawniness while he hadn’t been paying attention.
“Day after day, year after year, you made your mother pay, when the person you were mad at was me,” Ron said quietly. It would have been better if he’d yelled the way he used to. It would have been better if he’d lost his temper, thrown things. Made this familiar. Because then Blue could dismiss him. This was like torture. “It’s forgivable in a boy. Expected, even. But you’re not a little boy any longer, are you?”
“I don’t think I need you to tell me how to be a man,” Blue managed to say.
He felt as if he and Ron had finally gotten in that fight he’d dreamed of when he was younger, only it was clear that Ron was winning. Because he was still standing tall, while Blue felt battered. Bruised all over.
“If you want to hate me for the rest of your life, go ahead,” Ron said in the same quiet way that Blue hated—hated—he could feel resonating inside him. “Your father—”