He smothered her puny attempts to stave him off by tucking her into his chest, both arms tight around her, hand cupping the back of her head as the crying took hold of her and she started to shake.
“You didn’t know.” He rubbed her back, fingers delicate along her spine. “Hush, sweetheart, you had no idea.”
She couldn’t stand the sweetness, the acceptance. She hated herself too badly. With a firm shove, she managed to get loose of him, still crying, wiping at her messy face with inefficient swipes of her hands. “I should have,” she whispered fiercely. “Don’t give me an out.”
“Ava, baby.” He smoothed her hair back, tilting her head in the process. “Fillette. You need to calm down.”
“I was sleeping with Mason’s cousin!” she burst out, a sob tearing at her throat. “He killed my baby, and then he put his cousin in my bed. Oh, God. Oh, God, oh, God.”
“Ava, stop.”
But she couldn’t. Just like she couldn’t bear the anguish in his eyes when she was the one who’d done something so unforgivable. She rolled away along the wall, into the open room of his dorm, and rushed into the bathroom, locking the door before he could catch her.
Mercy waited, listening to her cry, until the shower taps cut on, then he made his way slowly back down the hall to the common room, where things had progressed to the point of Carter sitting at Ratchet’s laptop, clicking through Facebook pages and digging into Ronnie Archer as much as was possible, Ghost and the others peering over the kid’s shoulders at the screen.
Only Maggie was uninterested in all this, and she came to meet him, halfway across the floor, her pretty face drawn up with concern. She laid a hand on his forearm, a light, familiar touch, seeking reassurance. “Where is she?”
“In the shower.” He heard the unsteadiness in his voice, and realized the rage was in danger of spiraling inside him. “She…” He shook his head. “How did this happen, Mags?”
Maggie pulled her lip between her teeth and her eyes glittered with unshed tears. “She…” She blinked hard, staring into near space over his shoulder somewhere. “She didn’t seem to want anything to do with romance for the longest time.” She shrugged. “But I’d imagine, at Georgia, without anything to compare him to, Ronnie was charming. And most importantly” – her eyes snapped into focus, shimmering, hazel and furious as they locked onto his face – “he was nothing like the jerkoff who tore her to bits.”
The truth of her words fell like lead in his gut. It all came back to him, didn’t it? He broke Ava; he left her, and she’d sought comfort somewhere else, with someone else…who’d been nothing but a plant all along.
The self-loathing was too terrible to take, so he redirected his hate, sent it where it truly belonged: toward Ghost.
He glanced over at his president, and felt the tension begin to wind through him, curling around muscles, strumming bowstring tendons. “Is he happy?” he said quietly, through his teeth. “Does he like what his little girl brought home?”
Maggie’s hand tightening to a claw around his wrist was all that told him he’d taken a step forward. “No,” Maggie hissed, low so no one around the computer could hear. “Don’t let this one thing turn you against your president.” She’d pulled the tears back, composed herself when he glanced at her face. “That solves nothing.”
“Then tell me who I have to decapitate” – he gestured toward the dorm hall – “to make her stop crying.”
Maggie’s expression tweaked, a fast flash of sympathy. Then her mouth settled in a firm line. “She’s got to work through it. All you can do is be there, and sometimes, that’s the hardest part.” Her brows plucked, accusatory, hinting at a warning. Don’t hurt her again, she wanted him to know. Don’t break her this time.
When he didn’t move, she gave him a little shake and released him. “Don’t make things worse for yourself with Ghost,” she whispered. “He’s on your side this time around.”
He managed to nod. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been this furious and without an outlet for it. “I’ll keep her here with me tonight.”
“I think that’s a good idea.”
She scrubbed her skin with Irish Spring until it was pink, and the water began to sting. She stayed in the shower until it grew cold, and her teeth started to chatter. It didn’t even make sense – Mercy had been the last one to touch her. But she still felt so dirty. Soiled, deep in the most hidden parts of her heart, so betrayed and wounded and lost.
When she could stand it no longer, she shut off the taps and slicked her hair back off her face, wrung it out over her shoulder. Then it was just the drip-drip-drip of the leaky faucet and the cold humidity pressing all around her.
Mason’s cousin. She’d let Mason’s cousin inside her, literally and figuratively.
She toweled off and found one of Mercy’s t-shirts hanging off the counter. It swallowed her up, soft and warm, Mercy-scented, hanging almost to her knees, the short sleeves ending beneath her elbows.
He was waiting on the bed when she stepped out of the bathroom, a reverse of two nights before, him with his legs stretched out, her with the damp towel.
She tossed it over the desk chair and finger-combed her wet hair, studying him.
He’d hung his cut on the doorknob and was in his t-shirt, the ink on his left arm black and clear-edged against his golden skin in the lamplight. It was evening, and a blush glow came through the high window, but not enough to light the room. Amid the lamp-cast puddles, there were shadows, pockets of dark, like the dark under his eyes and in the taut clenched line of his jaw. He looked distant, removed from her, though only two feet separated them.
“What?” Ava asked, feeling a cold lump settle in her stomach. She was sick already; she couldn’t take his censure or rejection, not even if she felt she deserved it.
He braced his elbow on his thigh, brought his fist up and rested his chin on it. “It’s my fault,” he said, voice weary. “If I hadn’t left, you never would have…” He trailed off, gaze dark and sad as it lingered on her face.
It hit her like a fist, his self-recrimination, and it made her furious. “No.” She shook her head, hand clenched tight in her hair. “You don’t get to feel sorry for yourself about this. If it disgusts you, that I was ever with him, then you can get the hell out.”
“This is my room.”
“You don’t have a room!” she snapped. “Or a house, or an apartment, or anywhere, because you–”
“Left,” he snapped back. “Yeah, I left. We covered that already. You think I wouldn’t have done it different, if I could?” His scowl was thunderous; a small part of her knew that to anyone else it would have been terrifying. “You think I don’t want to go snap that little bastard’s neck?” He rose off the bed, his full height unfurling in one smooth, impressive flexing of bone and sinew. “Is that what you want?” He gestured to the door. “You want me to bring his head back to you in a shoebox?”
She let her head fall back, hands going limp to her sides. In this moment, she hated him, herself, Ronnie…the whole world. “Would you do it? If that’s what I wanted?”
He closed the gap between them, stepped in until her head had to press back farther in order to maintain contact with his black gaze. His eyes flashed, face tightening to fierce angles, razor-edged planes.
“With a red ribbon around it,” he said. “You know I would.”
The trembling started in her fingers, moved into her hands, migrated up her arms. She sucked in a huge breath and the tears came. “I can’t believe I was so stupid,” she whispered, shutting her eyes. “Mercy, I let him…”
He gathered her up in his arms like a little doll, lifted her off her feet. She tried to resist, pushing at his chest, but he would have none of it, sitting down on the bed, cradling her in his lap. He spoke to her softly in French, lips moving against her temple, and the tears overtook her. She needed to cry. She needed to press her face into his shirt and let it all out of her system. He stroked her hair and whatever he said sounded l
ike poetry, his Cajun butchering of the language of Paris.
She cried until her head ached, until she was breathless and dizzy. And then she blinked and willed her vision clear, drawing in deep, rattled breaths as she let the hard wall of his chest support her.
“You didn’t know, baby,” Mercy said. “You had no idea. Everyone knows that.”
“How could I not, though?” she whispered. “How could he have…touched me, and I didn’t…God, I’m so disgusting.”
“Hey.” He eased her back so he could look into her face. “You’re not the first person in the world to sleep with the wrong jerk. It’s not the end of the world.”
“He’s not just a jerk, Mercy. What Mason did to me…what if Ronnie had got me pregnant, huh? What then? What if I’d had a baby related to the man who murdered my first child?” She shuddered at the thought and tried to glance away from him.
Mercy caught her chin in his hand, held her fast and forced her to hold his gaze. “That didn’t happen, though. It didn’t happen, Ava.”
“But it could have. I can’t forgive myself for being that stupid and weak.”
He leaned in and kissed her, but she wouldn’t respond, her lips closed against his, the awful grief building inside her again. That’s what it was: grief. The loss of a part of herself she’d thought untouchable: her loyalty to her family.
“Fillette,” he breathed against her lips as he pulled back a fraction. “You think I don’t want you now?”
She sniffed. “How could you?”
“Because you’re my girl, and I’ve wanted you since it wasn’t legal. And I won’t lose you over the ghost of some motherfucker I’m going to kill anyway.”
She smiled, despite the awful lump in her stomach, smiling against the threat of more tears. “Because you love me.”
“Je t'aime, Ava Rose.”
His hand left her chin, stroking slowly down her throat, fingers massaging the back of her neck. “Don’t worry about him anymore, okay? You let me worry. This is my problem now.”
She sighed, and pressed her forehead against his jaw, trying to absorb the feel and smell and immeasurable comfort of him.
My man, she thought. Hers, since she was eight, always hers. And those five years, just a nightmare, one that was haunting her now.
She woke in the black dark, as the sheets rustled and his warmth drew away from her. “Merc…”
He kissed her forehead. “Go back to sleep. I’ll be back later.”
She let her head fall back against the pillow and gathered the blanket up under her chin, cold without him pressed against her. Fear stole over her, directionless and fuzzy with exhaustion. She wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep, she thought, as she listened to his bare feet go across the carpet.
But she must have drifted off, because she tumbled into a nightmare. The old dusty boards of Hamilton House, smell of damp and blood filling her nose. Ronnie and Mason, standing over her, their voices faraway and brimming with laughter. Pain, shooting through her, stabbing deep into her stomach. The blood between her legs. Ronnie’s face dropping down close over hers. “You didn’t even know,” he laughed. “Stupid bitch, you had no idea…”
“Ava.” Mercy’s voice tore her from the awful dream, slammed her back into the bed in the dark dorm room.
She gasped, shoving up on her elbow, willing the phantom pain, the images away.
“Hey.” His hand was on her hip, rubbing slow circles through the blankets. “You alright?”
She sat up, wiping at her eyes. They were sore, her whole face puffy and swollen from crying earlier; she felt her pulse throbbing in her cheeks and temples and eyelids. “I…what’s going on?”
She blinked and saw the faint panel of light coming in through the open door from the hall. Someone stood framed in silhouette in the threshold. Mercy sat on the side of the bed, hand still on her hip, just a hulking shape in the dark.
He reached up and pushed her hair back off her face, swept her cheek with his thumb. “It’s three in the morning,” he said, voice as gentle as his touch. “I’ve been out hunting with Hound and Rottie.”
She drew in a deep breath.
“We thought you might want to see them, before…” He didn’t have to say the rest. Before he went to work on them.
It was her father in the doorway, his voice floating toward them. “Just if you want to, Ava. You don’t have to.”
Adrenaline flooded through her veins and she was wide awake in an instant. “I want to,” she said, squaring up her shoulders. It felt like someone else possessed her body, someone certain and ferocious. “Let me get dressed.”
“Right,” Ghost said, and stepped back.
Mercy patted her leg and then went to join him, flipping on the lights and closing the door on his way out.
She tossed back the covers and was amazed how clear-headed and sure-footed she was. Her breathing was regular, her pulse slow.
She pulled on her socks, jeans and boots, pulled her jacket on over Mercy’s t-shirt and zipped it closed over top of the running black dog silkscreened on the front.
Ghost and Mercy were holding up opposite sides of the hall when she stepped out, hands in their pockets, both drawn and visibly tired, both electrified from the inside out by the promise of justice. Whatever animosity still lingered between them about her, it had been shelved indefinitely; they were galvanized and brought together by this singular purpose.
“How’d you find them so fast?” she asked as they shoved away from the walls.
Ghost led the way; Mercy fell into step beside her.
“Hound and Rottie can find anyone. They were together, freaking out because you had the phone,” Ghost said.
In the common room, Carter lay asleep on one of the sofas. Someone, most likely Maggie, had thrown a blanket over him. Maggie, still dressed, sat at the bar with a tumbler of whiskey, legs crossed, beautiful even while exhausted.
Ava shared a look with her mother as she passed through the room, a silent give and take of support for one another. Then she was following Dad out into the utter blackness of predawn.
The air was cool and clean-smelling, the usual taint of river pushed down by the sharp cut of clouds and sky and slumbering autumn grass. It was too dark and too early for the fog to have set in, the usual rolling-in of thick low banks of it off the water. The stars had all winked out. Only the security lamps on the Dartmoor lot evidenced life.
Ghost led them into the dark office of the bike shop, pausing at the door that connected to the garage bays, turning to give her a measuring look through the gloom. Faint light filtered through the front windows, making him look sharp and ageless.
“Ready?”
She understood the things he didn’t say: that he shouldn’t be doing this; that this was club business now, and she had no right to it; that he felt like a shitty father for inviting her to step into more pain; but that this was a way he was trying to make up for all those other shitty-father things he’d done. He was giving her a chance to gain some closure, because that was the only way he knew how to love her.
Mercy’s hand landed at the small of her back, supportive and reassuring.
“Yes,” she said, voice steady. “I’m ready.”
Inside the working area of the garage, all customer bikes had been removed, each half-finished project shoved to the side and draped with oil cloth. The benches and tool chests had been lined up along the back wall. The roll-top doors were cinched tight, their narrow, rectangular windows covered with garbage bags and duct tape. In the middle of the cleared center bay, two plastic lawn chairs had been set up, side-by-side, right over the drain in the concrete floor. And there were Ronnie and Mason, in rumpled clothes, duct-taped hand and foot to the chairs, strips of the silver tape over their mouths. Ronnie had a very obviously broken nose, its shape distorted, the skin purple and broken, nostrils crusted with blood.
Walsh stood with one foot braced against the wall, a yellow legal pad in one hand, pen lodged behind his ear.
He’d be taking notes for Mercy, a record of everything the cousins had to reveal to them.
Walsh gave her a small nod of greeting as she stepped into the bay.
Ghost moved to stand against the closed doors.
Ava stopped three feet back from the two captives, folding her arms, not wanting to be close enough for them to even breathe on her.
And Mercy…Mercy transformed into the talkative, delighted caged tiger playing with his prey.
“Did you boys behave yourselves while I was gone?” he asked, cheerfully. He paced in front of her, and ripped the duct tape from both their mouths to the sounds of muffled yelps. He wadded the tape and chucked it into the trash can off to the side. He was all loose-limbed and juiced-up, a manic blend of tightly wound and completely at ease. This was his wheelhouse, his talent, his contribution to the club.
He came to stand behind her, both hands settling on her shoulders. “I told the lady here that you’d be happy to answer any questions she has. Don’t disappoint me.”
Ronnie looked petrified. Ava tried to dredge up some sympathy for him, but there was none.
Mason, idiot that he’d always been, had a scrap of resistance in him. He glared at her with undisguised hatred, a sneer tugging at his split lower lip. “How’d you stand it, Ron? How was anything worth having to put up with this bitch every day?”
Mercy’s hands left her. She heard him step back, boots scuffing against the concrete. Then he moved into sight, moving around her toward Mason with a pipe wrench in one large hand.
Ava didn’t glance away. She didn’t even blink when Mercy’s arm swung back in a great arc and the wrench crashed into Mason’s knee.
His scream was terrible, echoing in the high, steel corners of the garage.
As it died away to noisy gulps and hiccups, Ava looked at Ronnie. He was pale, face slicked with nervous sweat. He wet his lips and swallowed like he might be sick.
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