by April Lust
“Answer me,” she demanded anyway. Emma crossed her arms over her chest, but it did nothing to ease the angry and cold ache that had suddenly swelled up there. This couldn’t be her father. Emma’s father was as big as life and twice as strong. He wasn’t this old man. “What happened?”
“Cancer,” Kellan called from the far side of the room. He shoved a hand through his dark hair and shook his head as Rocco thumped through the room, stopping to sniff at everyone. “Lung cancer.”
“All those cigarettes finally did me in.” Mac Ketchum tried to laugh, but it ended in a sickly cough. The ache in her chest became a pain.
After a moment Kellan sauntered across the room like a big leather and denim cat, and plopped himself down into her father’s old leather Lay-Z-Boy. He lounged against the worn brown leather with the ease and comfort of someone who sat there a lot. Rocco jumped up after him, finding a way to lie across Kellan’ long body. Both of them settled their eyes on her.
That struck her as odd. Her father had always been particular about who sat in his chair. She heard the squeak of the wheelchair and thought maybe he had a new chair now. Emma felt sick to her stomach and her feelings took on a complicated edge. “How long have you known?” she demanded.
Her father didn’t quite meet her eyes. “A while.”
She didn’t want to ask the next question that came to mind. She wanted to be angry with him, to snap at him, to demand answers to all of the fear she’d been dealing with the past few hours, but her mouth betrayed her. “How…how long?”
He didn’t answer for a while. “Emma, I will answer all of that, but we have other things to discuss.”
She wanted to argue. She wanted to scream that there was nothing more important than knowing about his health, but she couldn’t quite bring the words to her lips. She sank onto the couch, taking the place Leon had sprung from. The worn fabric sagged beneath her. She looked around the all too familiar living room and felt more loss than she had ever known. She glanced at her father, sitting in a wheelchair, his audible breathing the loudest sound in the room.
“Emma-girl.” Uncle Leon’s voice was as gentle as she had ever heard it. “Why don’t you go ahead and tell us what happened.”
He tucked a cold can of soda into her hand. She didn’t drink it, but holding it helped. She told them everything she could remember. How she was on her way home from the vet clinic. From the run-in with Marco, to the attack, to stopping at a diner to call her father. Emma had assumed she would cry when she talked about it, or at least get a little loud. She didn’t. She spilled it all with the emotionless distance of a shock victim.
“So?” she demanded at the end of it. “What’s going on?”
“Most of it’s club business,” her father started.
Anger swelled up inside of her, burning away the cold and empty feeling. Her head was beginning to ache with all the different emotions experienced in such a short amount of time. “Are you kidding me?”
“Emma, don’t make this harder than it has to be. We gotta know.”
Emma wasn’t sure which of her father’s men spoke, she didn’t care. This entire day had been too much and she certainly wasn’t going to listen to some guy’s crap about how hard she was making things. “I didn’t make anything hard.” She got to her feet. Her hands became fists so tight that she felt the ends of her short nails bite into her own palms. “I was doing just fine, thank you very much. I was going to college, stressing out over classes and planning for my future. Normal stuff. I was just minding my own business and daydreaming about lasagna when someone attacked me!” She hated that her voice was growing shriller with every word that was coming out.
“Emma,” he father’s voice was as gentle as she had ever heard it, “I’m sorry.”
She was stunned into momentary silence. It was then that Emma knew something was very wrong. Mac Ketchum did not apologize, not to anyone or for anything. He was the leader of The Beasts and as such his word was law, or at least whatever passed for law in a motorcycle club. He hadn’t apologized when he missed her first science fair, or when their dog died, or even when her mother left. How bad had things gotten?
“What’s going on?”
“For your own safety, I can’t tell you everything.” Her father held up one hand when Emma opened her mouth to argue with him. The skin on his palm was so thin and sickly she could see his veins. “But I can tell you I never expected you to be hurt. If I had thought for one moment you would be, I would have called or something.”
“Or something?”
“Hell, Emma, I don’t know. You made it pretty clear when you left here that you didn’t wanna be a part of my life. I thought I was, you know, respecting that.”
It was true and everyone knew it. Emma had already been packed the day she graduated, boxes piled into her crappy four-door even as she pulled on her cap and gown. With her acceptance letter in one hand and what little money she had managed to scrounge together from part-time jobs in the other, she had driven off into the sunset while everyone else had been celebrating finishing high school.
“Fine,” she said. “All right, fine, but you should have told me when this happened. When you were…diagnosed.”
He laughed, but it was a humorless sound. “Yeah, sure, and what would you have done? Rushed home to help the dad who was never there for you? Dropped all your studies for the jerk who couldn’t be bothered to show up for you? Yeah, I don’t think so. You were staying away and making something of yourself. I sure as hell wasn’t going to interrupt.”
“That wasn’t your choice to make.”
“The hell it wasn’t,” Kellan put in. He swung his legs down, disrupting the dog in his lap. “We all made that choice. You were gone and you were doing the best thing you could do.”
Emma shook her head again, but she chose not to say anything. What was there to say to that? They were right. She had left. She had severed ties with them, this whole town and all of the people in it. At the time it had seemed like the best idea. What had been here for her? Nothing, that’s what. Maybe she had been wrong.
“Yeah,” she said slowly, “I guess so. I just…I don’t like that I didn’t know anything. I mean, I still don’t know much. What’s going on? Why me?”
Kellan and Mac exchanged a look. A long conversation was held in that single exchange and Emma felt like an intruder. She had always felt like an outsider where the two of them were concerned. Then again, how could she compete with the son her dad had always wanted?
“Emma, how much do you know about the club?” Mac asked.
Emma blew out a breath. It was an odd question, but she felt a need to answer it. “Not much…too much. I don’t know. I mean, I know other parents were terrified of letting any of my friends come over. Boys who wouldn’t date me because of my ‘badass’ dad.” She rolled her eyes.
Kellan chuckled. “You dated pussies.”
“At least they weren’t criminals,” she shot back.
He leveled a smile at her. “Maybe you needed a little more criminal in your life.”
She rolled her eyes, wondering how she could have ever thought he was going to kiss her. Had that really only been twenty minutes ago? “I had quite enough of that in my life, thank you very much.”
Mac broke in. “Yeah, I know it wasn’t easy for you. I didn’t mean to make life hard, you know.”
“I know, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard.” She tugged her legs to her chest and sighed.
“I wish I could say that it was gonna get easier.” Her father hung his head in an act of shame that she had never seen him display.
How bad was this going to be? Apologies? Shame? Understanding? These were traits she had never known her father to display. What had happened in the past few years to make him so unlike the gruff and distant man she remembered? She glanced at the chair and the tubes of oxygen going to his nose.
“What’s happened?” she finally asked.
Leon cleared his throat and sat
forward, speaking for the first time since she started her story. “We are pretty sure the guy who attacked you was one of Gabriel’s men.”
“Gabriel?” she asked. She searched her memories for the mention of the name, she couldn’t recall it. “Who is Gabriel?”
“Drug cartel sicario with dreams of being a lieutenant,” Kellan offered. “Second generation Cuban American, claims he’s got family up in the big leagues. Was well on his way to being taken seriously before—”
“Shut your mouth,” Mac snapped. “She doesn’t need to know everything.”
A sicario was a lieutenant in the cartel’s chain of command. Emma racked her brain to remember what little she knew about loosely organized crime. Sicarios usually lorded over a particular area, and had some men beneath them to carry out orders and get their hands dirty. It was like a chapter president, making him toe-to-toe with her dad.
Emma flopped against the back of the couch hard enough to make it shudder. It was a petulant move, and she knew it. But it was two in the morning and her world was upside down, she had earned the right to a little petulance. “Yeah, because keeping me in the dark helped a lot.”
“Girl’s got a point,” another of the group responded. She didn’t look up, but she was pretty sure it was big grumpy Vinny.
There was a silent council meeting to which Emma was excluded. She let them have it. It gave her enough time to pull her brain back together. A glance at her cell phone told her she had no calls and it was a little after three. While she’d spent plenty of nights seeing the sun come up during finals, she was beginning to sag.
“Emma?” Uncle Leon’s voice called her back. “You need to go lie down, sweetie?”
“No,” she said, “not yet. Not until everything is said and done.”
“Vinny over here was asking you if you could describe your attacker.” Kellan prompted. He was watching her closely, with a small amount of concern.
For a moment she was a teenage girl again and her belly was doing flip-flops. She shook it off. She needed sleep. Her brain wouldn’t be feeding her all these alternating feelings if she got a good eight hours of sleep. “I dunno. I guess.” She sat up in her seat. She must have dozed off since everyone had moved around. “I really don’t know. I remember he was tall, he smelled like cheap liquor and cheaper cigarettes. Wait…he had tattoos.”
She could almost feel the attention sharpen. It was like being caught in a spotlight. Eyes in every available hue turned in her direction and focused. She squirmed. Right now she did not want that attention.
“Better than fingerprints,” Kellan snorted. “What of?”
“Catholic symbolism stuff. Angels and the Virgin Mary.” She shrugged. Her ponytail suddenly felt too tight. With a careless gesture she tugged it free and let her hair tumble down. Her nails scratched listlessly over her scalp. The ache in her head was slowly turning into a migraine. She was so tired. “Pretty similar to what a lot of pious gangsters have.”
“The Virgin, was she done in black and white, or colors?” Mac asked. He navigated his chair forward, stopping right in front of her.
“Black and white,” she explained. Her hand swept over her drooping eyes. “All his tattoos were grayscale.”
“Michael,” the men chorused.
“Michael? Like Gabriel and Michael? Biblical? Really?” Emma rolled her eyes, feeling a fresh wave of weary frustration. “That’s…wow. That’s so not awesome.”
“Pretty sure some of his men have tattoos, but I don’t think he’d trust this kind of attack to one of his lesser guys. It was personal.” Leon offered.
“No shit,” Mac snorted. “He went after my fucking daughter. It’s personal. It’s—” His words were swallowed up in a coughing fit. It wasn’t the dry cough of someone who was getting over an illness, but the wet, hacking of a body trying to rid itself of something horrible. His shoulders shook, and the chair squeaked with every jerk of his body. “Gentlemen,” he croaked out, “I appreciate you coming over, but I’d like to speak with my daughter now.”
It was an order, no matter how weakly stated, and everyone knew it. As a unit they got up and tossed their beers into the recycling bin. The clatter of glass on plastic echoed hollowly.
One by one her father’s friends said their goodbyes. There were hugs, and kisses, and promises to keep her safe. She responded, but she didn’t really hear them. The effort to get through the evening had sunk well into her bones and taken away what little energy she had left.
“You take extra good care of yourself, Emma-girl.”
“I’ll try, Uncle Leon.”
“Kellan,” Mac said, “I’d like you to stick around.”
Kellan, who, like a good solider, was following all the others out the garage door, stopped in his tracks. He glanced over his shoulder, looking concerned. Suddenly she saw that the patch on his vest read Vice President. She frowned. That was what Leon’s used to say. When had that switch happened? What had she missed?
“Rocco and I could crash at Leon’s, no big,” Kellan offered. “Or even go back to our own place; it’s been a while since I actually slept in my own bed.”
“This is your home, at least for now,” Mac said, shaking his bald head. “And I gotta lot to say, some of it concerns you.”
“I didn’t move back in permanently, Mac. Just helping out.” Kellan hesitated by the door to the garage. The light from outside cased a long shadow across the floor.
It should have been a surprise that he was living here, but it wasn’t. Her father hadn’t called her when he got sick; he had turned to Kellan. Why wouldn’t he? Kellan was the son Mac Ketchum had always wanted. A dutiful son to follow in his boot steps. She had never been willing to be the kind of daughter he wanted. They were both stubborn.
“You have been here two years, I don’t care if you are still paying mortgage at your other place. I’m not kicking you out tonight. So sit down, shut up.”
“If you’re sure.” Kellan dragged a hand down his face, clearly not wanting to argue. Emma couldn’t blame him.
She wasn’t sure she was okay with it, but no one bothered to ask her. No one ever did.
Chapter 3
A minute later she heard the roar of five bikes come to life and haul off down the road. She wondered how many people it woke up, and who might call the police for the disturbance. She watched them from the window, driving off like modern day knights. Not the good ones you saw in movies, who rescued maidens and slayed dragons, but the historic enforcers to some little king’s law. She decided no one was going to call the cops.
The moment they were gone, reality crashed down on her. Her neck hurt, and she was fairly sure she’d wrenched her shoulder flipping a very large man over it. She had snapped at her teen crush. Her father had cancer, lung cancer, and no one had told her. All of her things were in her apartment. And she still had no idea how she was going to pay for next semester.
It was just too much to handle.
Emma felt Kellan’s eyes on her but she didn’t bother looking. Him staying or going wasn’t going to change anything at all. She kept her eyes firmly on the cluttered living room table and wondered what was going to happen.
“Dad…can I get you anything?” Emma turned away from the window.
It was Kellan who answered. “Water. I got a bunch of bottles of it sitting out on the counter. He doesn’t like it cold anymore.”
Emma moved to the kitchen, thankful to have something for her hands to do. She popped open a bottle and brought it back to her father. He wheezed out a thanks before taking a long swig of it.
“Mac, it’s late, or early, depending on how you want to figure it.” Kellan stood up. A nearly asleep Rocco rolled down his legs and flopped to the floor, happy to stretch out over his favorite human’s feet.
“You trying to send me to bed, boy?” Mac asked without any real malice.
Kellan’s lip quirked up into a grin. “Nope. Just pointing out the truth, old man.”
Emma took a deep bre
ath and blew it out slowly. Apparently it wasn’t just Emma who was tired and frustrated. Kellan dislodged his feet and took a few steps around the living room, gathering up some of the garbage and depositing it in a trashcan.
In the more discerning light of the indoors, Emma realized that while Kellan had filled out, he had also lost weight. There was a gaunt line to his cheeks and dark circles beneath his eyes. She had taken care of animals who were in hospice care, and that was hard. She could only imagine that the twenty-four-hour job of taking care of her stubborn father wasn’t easy.
“I know it’s late, and that I have no right to ask anything of you, but what are we going to do?” Emma asked as she tore her eyes away from Kellan.
