Vince sat back, realization dawning. “Mason Junior?” he guessed.
Grey shook his head. “Close, though.” Then he turned the conversation around. “What about you? You got a set of eyes out there? That’s the only way you can get to these MC boys. Trust me: there’s no way in from the outside.”
There was a knock at the office door again.
“Well, you can talk to him yourself, see if he knows where your CI went.” To the door, he called, “Come in.”
The man who stepped into the office wore the usual blank, semi-panicked expression he always wore during these meetings, his bloodshot eyes widened by shock. He wasn’t wearing his cut, but a plain gray sweatshirt with the hood pulled up.
“Agent Grey,” Vince said, “meet Jace Bagwell.”
They didn’t get to Georgia, they didn’t even get outside of the city before Mercy was turning off, the bike grumbling to a halt.
“The courthouse,” Ava said, glancing up at the brick government building against the dawning pearl-blue sky.
Mercy took his helmet off and smoothed his hand along the loose tendrils of his hair. Then he reached into his cut pocket. “There’s something I think we ought to do before we leave town.” His hand came out of his pocket, and cradled in the big palm was a ring, a simple gold band, without adornment. “My grandmother’s,” he explained, half-twisting so he could see her face behind him. “Yours, if you’ll have it.”
She stopped breathing. “We…we don’t have a license.”
He smiled softly. “Ratchet’s got a friend inside who owes him a favor. There’s a license and a judge waiting on us. Leah, too, I called her while you were packing.”
She rested her chin on his shoulder to keep it from shaking, so her nose rested against his rough cheek, so her pounding heart pressed against his shoulder blade. “Mercy,” she said, because that’s all she could say, as the tears filled her eyes.
“Come marry me, baby,” he whispered. “Before one of us does something stupid again.”
She smiled and wiped at her eyes. “Okay.”
An hour later, she rode out of Knoxville on the back of a bike as Ava Lécuyer.
Thirty-Nine
Fourteen Years Ago
A man’s face. Peering at her through the screen of hollies that formed a rough fence between their yard and the neighbors’. A pale round moon of a face, as the gloom of evening settled over the neighborhood, and the streetlamps began to flicker on one at a time, and the clouds pressed at the horizon, squeezing out the first fat drops of rain.
“Ava Rose,” Mercy had said, his tall thin frame filling up the lighted doorway, and she’d forgotten all about the face. It was time for dinner, just her and Mom and Mercy at the table, Maggie testing some new recipe and Mercy entertaining them with stories of the swamp where he’d grown up hunting alligators with his father. Then it was a bath, and her pajamas, and then Maggie folding the covers up under her chin and kissing her forehead.
“Night, baby.”
“Night, Mama.”
As the light clicked out, she remembered the man’s face, the strange, plastic quality of his eyes as he’d stared at her. He’d put his finger up to his lips. Be quiet. Like he thought she might listen to him. The rain smattered against her window and the wind rushed along the eaves and she shivered. She should have told someone about the man. She was smarter than this; she should have reported it to her mom and Mercy right away.
Her bedroom door was open, and she rolled her head toward it. There was Mercy, stepping away, his big hand falling away from the doorframe.
Fear made her throat tight. “Mercy?”
He halted and came back, filled the threshold again. “Yeah?”
“I saw someone.”
“Where?” His voice changed, the velvet gentleness hardening and rising. He sounded aggressive and tightly-wound, as he came into her room, charging toward the window to gap the blinds and look through them, just a tall shadow in the glow from the streetlamps.
“In the bushes,” she said. “Before dinner. I saw him and I…” She took a deep breath. “I forgot to tell, but I should have.”
His head turned toward her. She couldn’t see his expression, but his voice softened again. He wasn’t angry with her, just worried. “That’s okay, fillette. Where exactly did you see him? Tell me everything you can remember.”
She recounted the moment, his moon-shaped face, the raised finger to his lips, the strange look in his eyes that she didn’t know how to describe properly.
Mercy nodded as she finished, and stared out the window a long time. Then he came to the bed, and his hand found the top of her head in the dark, the gesture familiar, comforting, affectionate. “Don’t be scared. It was probably just some pervert.”
Ava smiled. How wrong that, at eight, she not only knew what a pervert was, but she knew that “some pervert” was much less frightening than the monsters from which Mercy had been charged with protecting her.
“Okay.”
“Okay,” he repeated, dropping a kiss on top of her head, his face pressed into her hair. “I’ll be right out here.” And in the half-lit hallway, he took up a posture sitting with his back to the wall, legs stretched out in front of him.
Ava rolled onto her side, so she faced him, hand tucked under her cheek, eyes fuzzy with fatigue and filled with the warm image of Mercy sitting in the puddled light from the open bathroom door. “You’ll stay there?” she asked, hopeful, not sure if it was wrong to want him there, but wanting it anyway.
“Yes, fillette, right here.”
Fillette, she thought as she closed her eyes. I wonder what that means.
**
Present Day
They stopped at the first Walmart they came to, and bought two prepaid cellphones, and then turned their own phones off, took the batteries and SIM cards out and stowed them in an interior, zippered pocket of Mercy’s cut. No chances: that was their motto. They had no idea who would be chasing them, but there was no doubt there’d be some major tech involved.
At a Shell station in Calhoun, Georgia, Ava sat in the shade of the gas pump canopy, sideways on the seat of the bike, and texted her mom from the new phone.
Stopped for gas. Everything fine.
She glanced down at the plain gold band on her left hand and her stomach leapt with a frenzied kind of excitement. She had champagne in her veins, and a head full of marshmallows. She was breathless, giddy. Almost four hours on the road, and she was too ecstatic to be sore or wind-beaten.
Yeah, everything was fine. Everything was spectacular.
Great! Love you both. Be safe. Text me later, came Maggie’s immediate answer. Ava knew her mother would then delete their text exchanges.
As Ava stowed the phone in her pocket and zipped it shut, she heard boots behind her on the concrete, and then a massive arm wrapped around her, across the fronts of her shoulders, tops of her breasts. Mercy’s face in her hair, like always, since the beginning, one of those gestures he’d kept, would always keep, no matter how old she was. He kissed her head. “Sitting out here smiling to yourself like a crazy person,” he scolded with a low laugh.
“I’m pretty sure you can’t call your wife crazy.”
He laughed. “That’s one of the perks of being married, sweetheart.”
Married. The word zinged through her, sang in her bloodstream. He was her man – he’d always been – and he was her husband, too, and she didn’t know if she wanted to cry or laugh, or maybe both, because she was so purely happy.
She tipped her head back, as his face lifted, so she could look up at him with a wry smile. His face was upside down to her, and the sun struck his high cheekbones, tanning them a rich gold. “Any other perks?”
He kissed her, his chin against her nose, the stubble tickling her skin. His tongue played between her lips and she brought her hands up to frame his jaw, holding him down against her as she opened her mouth.
The guy gassing up his truck at the next pump over cleared
his throat loudly and Mercy lifted his head, shooting him a glare.
Ava bit back a laugh. “We are obnoxious,” she said. “We’re like those handsy people waiting in line at the ferris wheel.”
“Which ferris wheel?” he asked, distracted as he murder-stared the truck owner back around to the other side of his pickup.
“Every ferris wheel in the entire history of state fairs.” She tugged at the front of his sweatshirt. “Don’t scare the man.”
He made a snorting sound, but backed off, stepping to the pump and pulling the nozzle off the rack so he could fill the bike. “Did you talk to your mom?”
“Yep.” She swung her legs around so she faced him.
“Did you…?” His brows went up and she understood.
“No, I didn’t tell her.” Her eyes went to the ring. The fingers of her right hand went to the ring too, the tips running across the smooth gold circle. “I just…” She shrugged. “Want to enjoy it first for a little while, I guess.”
“Enjoy it while it lasts, you mean?” There was a bitter twist to his smile.
“No.” She was firm. “I mean, if this is our honeymoon” – she gestured to the gas station, the customers filling their cars, the two kids screaming over dropped ice cream sandwiches at the sidewalk – “then I don’t want to hear my dad bitching us out over the phone for half of it.” She gave him a wide, bright smile, too full of exuberance to let his doubt about her sincerity slow her down.
He studied her as the pump ticked, ticked, ticked.
“Don’t look at me like you’re waiting for me to regret it,” she said. “Because that’s not going to happen.”
His smile was small, but more true this time. “I know.”
Ava didn’t want him going down this rabbit hole any further than he’d already gone. “So where are we going from here?”
“Cartersville,” he said. “We’ll get something to eat, catch a few hours of sleep, and head out while it’s dark.”
She nodded. “The people we’re staying with – they’re club-friendly?”
He nodded. “Guy went to London with us. I trust him.”
And he didn’t trust easy. His word was more than good enough for her.
Ava got to her feet and put her back to the gas pump, so she stood alongside him.
He watched her. “What?”
She slid her arm around his waist, inside his jacket, leaning into his side, breathing the smell of road and wind off of his clothes. “I needed to do this,” she said, smiling against his flannel-covered chest.
His free hand came up, settling against the back of her head. There would always be something reverent and paternal about the way he touched her, her little girl self always in his conscience. His voice dropped to the barest whisper. “Do you wish–”
“No. Hush,” she admonished, the way he always did with her. “I don’t wish anything but this.”
“No. I don’t believe that.”
In the mid-afternoon, with the blinds shut, the chapel gave the dark, deep impression of an English study, a shuttered library, the smell of wood polish thick as smoke. It was the first chance Aidan had had to be alone with his father, and they’d needed to be alone, because what Greg had shared that morning didn’t belong out in the open air.
Aidan took a hard drag on his smoke – how many cigs was this for the day so far? – and said, “That’s just what he told me,” on the exhale.
Ghost sat leaning against the back of his chair, one elbow bent as he gripped the velvet-tufted arm, the other hand raised, knuckles pressed to his lips as he studied the toes of his boots with a deeply disturbed frown. He shook his head. “Collier? Collier. He’s torn to bits about losing Andre.”
“Yeah, but is it grief? Or guilt?”
“Jesus Christ,” Ghost muttered. His eyes came up; they looked black in the gloom. “Where’s Greg?”
“Tango’s keeping an eye on him.”
“Bring him in here.”
Aidan nodded and pushed to his feet, grinding his smoke out in the nearest ashtray.
It felt like a long walk back to the common room, his shoulders roped with dread. “Your VP,” Greg had said before, by the practice fields. “I saw him, plain as day, stab your guy Andre.”
“And the girl he was with, she didn’t see it?”
“The VP was in a hood,” Greg had said. “He came out of the shadows, like, out of nowhere. But he turned to me at the last second, after, and I had a flashlight. I saw his face. The girl never got a good look at him, I’m sure.”
Aidan had wanted to puke his doughnuts up on the grass right there. Instead, he’d invited Greg back to the clubhouse, friendly and not at all suspect. Tango had a way of putting everyone he was around at ease, so Greg doubtless had felt like a guest all this time, and not a captive.
Aidan found them in front of the TV, Tango offering commentary on the episode of Seinfeld they were watching, making slow, easy gestures with his hands to accentuate his point. Greg was smiling, but when he glanced at Aidan, the nerves were shining in his eyes.
“Come back here,” Aidan said, nodding toward the chapel. “Dad wants to talk to you.”
“Okay.” Greg looked afraid, but he got to his feet.
Where the Carpathian couldn’t see, Tango asked a silent question, brows raised.
Aidan sighed and gave a fractional headshake in response.
“Just tell him what you told me,” Aidan told Greg as they moved down the hall. “And no fucking around, okay?”
“No, none.”
To a son with no claim to any sort of authority, Ghost possessed an enviable gravitas, a presence larger than his frame, in Aidan’s eyes. When they entered the chapel, Ghost was on his feet, his back to them, peering through the blinds he’d gapped with his fingers, smoke curling from the end of a freshly lit cigarette. He turned at the sound of their footfalls, one of those slow, mob boss turns Aidan didn’t know how to pull off yet.
“It’s Greg, right?”
Greg bobbed his head; his swallow was audible. “Yes, sir.”
“Have a seat.”
Greg fumbled into the nearest chair, clumsy with nerves, and Aidan sat down beside him with more grace.
Ghost took his time coming to his seat, his movements deliberate and unhurried. He turned the velvet-covered dining room chair into a throne, the way he occupied it. “Time,” Maggie had told Aidan. “It takes time to become a true king, baby.”
“Aidan tells me,” Ghost said, his eyes laser-focusing on Greg, “that you saw Andre’s murder.”
“Yes, sir,” Greg said, stuttering a little.
“Walk me through it.”
Greg took a deep breath. According to him, he’d been able to see the party lights from the water. He’d cut the boat’s engine and floated in to shore, letting the current and the aid of a canoe paddle get him to ground. He’d known where the gate was, and that was where he’d headed, slinking along, small and silent, through the cloaking dark that hugged the river. He’d seen Andre and the blonde groupie groping at one another, stumbling, laughing, both clearly drunk. Their voices had been too loud, carrying across the distance. The girl wanted to go down to the water, “walk on the beach” as she put it. Andre told her she was a dumbass for thinking the bank of the Tennessee River was a beach. They’d argued. Greg had crouched along shore, not sure what to do with this unexpected hiccup in his plans.
Finally, Andre had opened the gate; he’d had the key in his pocket and had unlatched the heavy Master lock. Before the couple could get down to the water, a man in a hood had appeared. He’d caught Andre by the shoulder, spun him, stabbed him. Greg remembered the sound of the knife going into him. There’d been a bit of struggle, and the girl had screamed. The assailant had fled, then, as the girl shrieked at him. He’d turned, and Greg had seen his face: Collier.
“So you expect me to believe,” Ghost said, when the tale was finished, “that Collier Hershel murdered his own prospect?”
Greg lifted his c
hin up out of the collar of his sweatshirt, not defiant, but deciding to be brave. Aidan felt sorry for him, a big squeeze of real sympathy. “It’s what I saw, sir.”
Ghost closed his hand into a fist and brought it up under his chin, pensive and intimidating without thought. “What were you doing?”
“I’m sorry?”
“What were you doing here that night?” Ghost’s brows went up a fraction.
“I…” Greg dampened his lips and glanced away. His pulse trembled in the side of his throat.
“What,” Ghost repeated, slowly, “were you doing?”
“I’d…I’d rather not say.”
“Yeah, that’s not an option.”
“We know you’re a Carpathian,” Aidan said, in an effort to smooth things over. “We know that whatever you were doing, it’s gonna piss us off. Just tell us. You gotta be honest if you expect us to trust you.”
Ghost made a gesture with his free hand that said go ahead. “Nothing we haven’t heard before.”
Greg took a breath. “Jasper said…well, he thought…if we could get hold of one of…the women…” He shrank down into his shirt, red-faced and miserable.
Ghost’s smile was thin and grim. “Like father like son. Those boys have a real thing for going after women and children, don’t they?”
“We had surveillance photos,” Greg said to the tabletop. “Of the wives. And your daughter.” His eyes cut to Ghost, though his head stayed down.
Ghost sighed. “God, I wish she’d been born a boy.”
“I didn’t want to do it,” Greg whispered. “Honest, I didn’t. But Jasper–”
“Was your president,” Ghost finished.
“And you were doing what you were told,” Aidan said. He clapped a hand on the guy’s shoulder. “Chill. We know it was Larsen, and not you.”
Greg nodded. His eyes had a suspicious sheen to them.
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