Savage Things (Chaos & Ruin Book 2)

by Callie Hart

  “Don’t worry about my brother. Jameson’s like a goddamn cat with nine hundred lives. This time next week, he’ll be the golden boy at French’s again. And if not, the heavies who run the fights will all be dead and Jameson’ll be living in their houses, fucking their wives, and their kids will be calling him daddy. He always lands on his feet, you know? But your friend…”

  I nod, staring at my coffee. She’s right. Ben never lands on his feet. Ben has the worst luck in the whole fucking world.

  Chapter Fourteen

  SLOANE

  I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been afraid over the past year. I don’t seem to recall a week where I haven’t had reason to be afraid. Okay, since Charlie Holsan died and Zeth took over the gym, things have quietened down, but even that quiet has been punctuated with spells of panic. You ask yourself, how long can this possibly last? How much time will pass before something terrible happens? Before the grim reaper comes knocking on your door. I know better than that; the grim reaper doesn’t knock. He sneaks into your house, unbidden, without your knowledge or consent. He takes without asking, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. But still, it doesn’t stop you from trying to hold back disaster. You still end up with your back pressed up against the door, heels digging into the ground, trying to prevent the inevitable.

  I thought I’d reached the limit, maxed out the human capacity to experience fear, and yet as I stare down at the slender piece of plastic in my hands, eyes fixed on the brazen pink + sign filling the tiny display window, I know a pure and paralyzing fear the likes of which I’ve never encountered before.

  Pregnant?

  How the fuck can I be pregnant?

  I know the answer to that very obvious question: I was sick. I took antibiotics that screwed with my birth control, and then I had wild, animalistic sex with my boyfriend, and he came deep inside me. I remember the particular incident all too well. But that’s not what I’m asking. How could fate have permitted such a thing to happen? How could the universe have stood by and let life spark and form inside me, when I am who I am, a woman constantly balancing on the precipice of danger? A woman in love with a man who will probably end up shot and killed someday? I knew what I was getting myself into when I allowed myself to fall for Zeth. I was all too aware of the dangers and the risks, and I accepted them all because the reward of loving him was far greater than the fear of losing him. But this little baby inside me? This baby doesn’t have a fucking clue who its father is. It doesn’t know who its mother is, either. It didn’t get to choose us, the way I chose Zeth. It seems outrageous that such a tragic thing has been allowed to come to pass.

  My eyes have misted over. I don’t know how long I lean up against the wall of the bathroom, staring at the pregnancy test in my hands, but when I finally manage to pull myself together my shoulder is aching like a bitch and my eyes feel very dry, like I haven’t blinked in a really long time. I want to cry. I want to dash over to the hospital and grab another three tests so I can do them all again, praying as I wait for each result to develop that the first was wrong somehow. It would be a waste of time, though. I know the test isn’t wrong. The body doesn’t lie. As if to prove that point, my stomach heaves and roils as I hurry out of the bathroom and downstairs into the kitchen. The house is filled with an oppressive silence, as though the walls were inhaling and exhaling a little while ago but now they have stopped, now holding their breath, now waiting for what comes next.

  I have no fucking clue what comes next.

  Ernie raises his head as I enter the kitchen. The small nub of his docked tail slides back and forth on the tile like a windscreen wiper as he watches me pour myself a glass of water from the tap and down it in one go. He makes a comical yowling sound, little schnauzer eyebrows raised, head angled to one side, like he’s trying to ask me what’s wrong.

  “I’ll tell you what’s wrong, buddy. Everything is fucking wrong. The shit is about to hit the fucking fan, my little furry friend, and I have no idea what the fuck I’m going to fucking do about it.” Ernie doesn’t understand my need to swear in continued succession; he opens his mouth and begins to pant. It looks like he’s laughing. “This is not funny,” I tell him.

  I should eat something. I haven’t had anything in my stomach for hours and I’m feeling a little light headed, but I know as soon as I get something down it’ll be coming right back up again. I’ve seen so many pregnant women in my time at St. Peter’s. Most of them suffer from morning sickness, and there are a lucky few who don’t. The women who do suffer from the constant need to throw up seem to bear it with rueful pride. Look at me. I’m so pregnant, I just can’t seem to stop voiding the contents of my stomach everywhere. It doesn’t seem as though any of them have ever been this sick, though. I can’t get up out of a chair without wanting to run for the bathroom. And don’t get me started on bacon. The faintest whiff of greasy, salty, usually delicious bacon, and I can feel the bile rising like a tidal wave up my esophagus. It’s getting harder and harder to disguise the fact that I’m not sick with the flu, and that I am, in fact, very knocked up.

  Oh my god. What the hell am I going to tell my parents? I was supposed to be married and settled down with a nice neurosurgeon when I started a family. I wasn’t supposed to be living in sin with an ex-hit man. It doesn’t really matter what Mom and Dad think at this point, though. It only matters what one person thinks about it, and I’m almost one hundred percent sure I know how he’s going to react when he finds out.

  He’s going to lose his goddamn mind. I can’t imagine him as a father. I can’t picture it at all. I’ve tried not to picture how it’s going to go when I tell him, because I’m too damn scared to even think about it, but when the scenario has pushed its way into my head despite my best efforts to keep it at bay, things have not gone well. Furniture has been smashed. Angry words have been thrown. Tears have been shed. I’ve imagined him saying the very worst things to me, his anger spiked, his eyes filled with misery. I haven’t, on the other hand, been able to imagine what I’m doing while Zeth is losing his shit. Am I happy that he’s horrified by the idea of a child? Am I glad that he doesn’t want it? Am I relieved that I don’t need to go through with becoming a mother? Or…

  I’m too scared to consider the or.

  If I’m not happy or relieved, then it means that I’m heartbroken, and that possibility doesn’t even bear thinking about. I can’t have a baby. I can’t be pregnant and carry a child to term. I’m not ready. I’ve never even thought about a family with Zeth, not even in an abstract, whimsical way, because such a thing is an impossibility. This life that we live together, it’s not safe for us, let alone another vulnerable, innocent human being. It wouldn’t be fair. It would be cruel.

  And yet, a shade of doubt…

  A what if...

  Sloane Romera: Doctor.

  Sloane Romera: Accomplice.

  Sloane Romera: Lover.

  Sloane Romera: Mother?

  The idea sits heavy on my shoulders, either a weighty responsibility, or a weighty blessing. I just—I just don’t fucking know!

  “Stop looking at me like that, Ernie.” His eyes are shining bright, his face lit up with the simple joy of attention being paid to him, but to me it looks like he’s happy that these sneaky thoughts are infiltrating my brain. “You’re supposed to be on my side,” I tell him. He gets up and comes to me, raising his head so he can rest his chin against my kneecap, looking up at me with those deep, soulful brown eyes of his. Sometimes it seems as though he’s wiser than most people I meet in the street. He manages to communicate so much in that even, steady gaze of his.

  “I’m not telling him,” I say. “There’s no way I can tell him.”

  Ernie blinks.

  “I can’t. You don’t understand. How could you?”

  The tip of the dog’s tongue uncurls from his mouth, poking through his teeth, and then disappearing again. “It’s not that simple. Pregnancies fail sometimes, you know. It would be stup
id to say something this early. Who knows? It might not take, and then the arguing, the fighting, it will all have been for nothing.”

  Ernie makes a disapproving grumble at the back of his throat.

  “I’m waiting at least a month,” I say, imbuing my voice with a certainty that I’m definitely not feeling. “A month is fair. A month isn’t long.”

  Ernie’s eyebrows twitch again, his eyes locked onto me, his tail still madly flicking back and forth. He doesn’t have a clue what I’m talking about, but for some reason I get the feeling he disapproves. “Look, it’s not up to you, anyway. It’s up to me. I need time to process this, okay? And looking at me like that isn’t going to change anything.”

  The sound of the front door opening nearly causes my heart to explode. I panic, hands patting myself down, searching for something…for the pregnancy test. Did I bring it down here with me? Is it still upstairs in the bathroom? What the fuck did I do with it? My hand finds the length of plastic in my jeans, barely managing to fit all the way into the pocket at my hip. I shove it down as hard as I can, pulling at my t-shirt then, hoping the material covers the pocket from view altogether, as if my boyfriend has laser eyesight and might be able to see through the denim of my jeans. Zeth appears, and all the oxygen leaves my lungs.

  He’s covered in blood.

  “What—what the hell happened?” I can’t seem to find my voice.

  He props himself up against the wall, looking down at himself. “Well. I was driving across town and I realized I was being followed. I thought it was Lowell, but turns out it was the Italians. Got a little ugly.”

  “The Italians? The guys from New York?” I remember them calling a couple of weeks ago. Seemed like they wouldn’t quit for a while there. It’s been quiet for long enough since then that I thought the bastards had given up harassing him and had decided to leave him the fuck alone. Really, how stupid is an assumption like that? What the hell is wrong with me? Being sick and dealing with this Mason crap has really blindsided me.

  “What happened exactly? What—what did you do with him?” I hate to ask questions like this, but I need to know.

  Zeth proceeds to describe in intricate detail how he restrained the guy after breaking his nose and drove him across town to the docklands, where he had some guy he knows seal the Italian’s car with him inside it into a shipping container back to New York. It’s going to take three days for the container to reach it’s destination, by which time the mafia guy inside the corrugated metal is going to have lost his fucking mind. I can’t see how this is going to end well. On top of everything else? Jesus, it’ll be a wonder if any of us make it through the next month.

  “I didn’t want to tell you.” Zee pushes away from the wall, yanking his blood stained t-shirt over his head in one rough, incredibly sexy move. “But…y’know. No secrets,” he says gruffly. I love that he wants me to know everything. Being kept in the dark so much back when we first met, along with more recently, when he was hiding Lowell’s arrival, was infuriating and also very dangerous, and so the fact that he wants me clued in these days is reassuring. But damn if the guy doesn’t know how to make a girl feel like utter crap.

  He says no secrets, and I have the biggest secret of my life nestled up, snug and warm in my uterus. Fuck. I should tell him. I should tell him right fucking now. I’m going to do it. I have to. I can’t not tell him. I—

  He cups my face in his hands, and his knuckles are covered in blood. I can smell it on him, thick, coppery, overpowering. My stomach heaves. “Okay, angry girl? You look…kinda pale,” he says. I love the look of concern he wears. Those deep brown eyes are brimming over with it as he rubs his thumbs over my cheeks. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work today?”

  I shake my head, touching my fingertips to his wrists. If he doesn’t remove them soon, the smell of the blood is going to make me vomit. “I was meant to. I still didn’t feel well, though.” Please, dear lord, don’t let him think it’s weird that I’m still sick. Please! “I have plenty of unused vacation time, so I figured why not take the rest of the week off. HR were threatening to make me take enforced leave, so this kinda works out for everybody.”

  Zeth studies me for a moment with sharp, intelligent eyes. Slowly, so painfully slowly, he leans down, his face getting closer and closer as the seconds pass. I imagine him calling me out on my half-truth. It feels so shitty not telling him what’s going on after I gave him hell for not telling me about Lowell only a few days ago. Is it obvious that I’m hiding something? Is my fear and panic sitting there on my face, out in the open for him to see, plain as day? It has to be; I don’t know how I could possibly hide it.

  Zeth’s lips part. He’s going to say something. He’s going to say something…

  He kisses me.

  I’m so surprised by the soft, gentle pressure of his lips grazing mine, barely making contact, that I feel all power draining from my arms and my legs. I melt into him, my chest meeting his, and he wraps his arms around me, crushing me against him. My breath leaves my lungs in a long sigh. I can feel Zeth’s lips form the shape of a smile as he grins savagely against me. The tip of his tongue flicks out between his teeth, tracing it gently over my lips, and then deeper, over my teeth. It’s ridiculous how quickly my body betrays me. My head swims as he envelops me, and the anxiety of the last few moments, hell, of the entire morning, is drifting away like so much smoke.

  Worlds are miraculously created and come to catastrophic ends in the brief minute where Zeth Mayfair holds me in his arms. The universe sighs at the beauty of it all. When he pulls back, Zeth’s irises are flashing, filled with steel. “You have nothing to worry about, angry girl. You know that, don’t you? The Italians are just stretching their legs, pushing to see how hard I push back. If they want Seattle, they can come and take it. They’re not going to get any trouble from me. I told them I’m done. I won’t ever be someone else’s whipping boy again. And I won’t involve myself in shit that might ever take me away from you. Nothing in the world is worth that.”

  So he has seen my panic. He’s mistaken it for something else, though. Makes sense that I’d be upset about how his day has panned out so far; I don’t correct him. I smile weakly, feeling like I’m betraying him as I turn away, reaching under the sink for the small first aid kit I keep there.

  I unzip the small red bag and reach for the alcohol wipes inside. “I know. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be worried. I know everything’s going to be okay. I guess—I guess I’m just being stupid. Here, let me clean those hands up.”

  Zeth grunts as I apply the alcohol wipes to his split knuckles. This part of our day is practically routine now, given how often he messes up his hands at the gym. It doesn’t escape me that somewhere leaving Seattle, a shipping container is headed for New York with an irate Italian trapped inside, though. That part of our day is definitely different.

  Zeth is quiet, watching me with a quiet, all too familiar intensity as I go about my task. I may have told him a moment ago that I know everything is going to be okay, but from my shaky delivery down to the tremble in my hands, I know I didn’t do a very good job convincing him that I’m okay. His body takes on that strange, intimidating stillness that always arrives when he’s thinking too hard. I look up at him, smiling, trying to ease the tension around my eyes some, but I know it’s too late for that now. He folds his arms around me, drawing me into a long hug. Trying to hide this thing is going to be difficult, and it’s only going get harder.

  He knows something is up.

  Chapter Fifteen

  MASON

  Lack of sleep really fucks up my schedule. I spent all night trying to locate Ben, calling around everyone I could think of, trying to track him down, but the bastard’s disappeared from the face of the earth and no one seems to know where the hell he is. If they do, they’re not telling, anyway. Millie had a coughing fit in the night which scared me half to death, so I spent the remainder of the dark hours sitting in a chair beside her bed, watching her sleep, watch
ing her little chest rise and fall, the soft sounds of her breathing filling the room, which explains why I feel like a goddamn zombie as I pull up outside work in the morning. I’m on time—a minor miracle in itself—but I can tell Mac’s still pissed at me when I climb out of the truck.

  “What’s up, Mac?” I slam the car door, bracing for the stream of abuse he’s obviously about to hurl at me. I know things are serious when Dave appears from out back and plants himself against a workbench, arms folded across his chest, jaw locked, with a severe look on his face. Dave used to work on engines like me, but recently he’s spent less and less time turning up for morning shifts, instead appearing as the sun is going down, picking up tools when I’m putting them down. I have no idea what Mac has him doing, but it’s not legal and it’s bound to get him into serious shit some point soon.

  When he reaches me, Mac slaps his palms against my chest, grabbing hold of my t-shirt. “Get your ass out back, you little punk. You an’ me are gonna have a little chat.”

  Fuck. What the hell is this about? Any number of scenarios flash through my mind. Maybe he did see Kaya show up yesterday. Maybe he’s heard about me training over with Zeth. I quickly discover it’s neither of those things, though. It’s way, way worse. Mac corrals me through the narrow doorway and out into the yard behind the shop. The ground is littered with spent cigarette butts and shattered pieces of brick. Mac picks up one of the larger pieces of brick at his feet and tosses it up in the air, catching it in the flat of his palm. “You had an early morning visitor today, Mason. Someone who seemed very interested in catching you before you started work.”

  “Oh?” I try not to eyeball the brick. I get the feeling I’ll be getting a very close look at it soon enough.

  “Yeah. Oh. This early morning caller said she was a friend of yours. I saw you talking to her a couple of weeks back, talking to her outside the shop, and you told me she was just asking for directions. Remember?”