He worked her bra down, and then her breast was bare beneath the clinging shirt, its shape, and its dark coral center clearly visible. Her nipple was a hard button, tenting the fabric. When he took her in his hand, her nipple thrusting into his hot palm, she closed her eyes and made a disgraceful sound in the back of her throat.
She felt his breath feather across her lips the moment before he kissed her, and she opened her mouth to receive him.
There was no hesitancy, no uncertainty. In the five years since he’d last touched her, she’d relived every kiss they’d ever shared in her dreams, and their mouths came together with the heat and fervor she remembered. His lips pressed hers for entry; his tongue invaded her. He tasted like beer.
Ava was pliant as a doll when his hand left her breast and he picked her up around the waist, lifting her onto the bed, into his lap. Mercy ravaged her mouth and his hands were so blessedly warm against her cold skin. She twined her arms around his neck, wanting only to melt against him, to pretend that her heart had never been broken and that they hadn’t lost any time.
She was dimly aware of her shirt lifting, of the separation of their lips as it whisked over her head, the fast glimpse of his heavy-lidded eyes, his damp mouth, before his kisses were robbing her of oxygen again. Vaguely cognizant of her bra straps going down her arms. Then his rough, hot palms were on her naked breasts and she was lifting and grinding, undulating at the touch.
Against her lips, he whispered, “Do you get like this for him? Does your rich boyfriend make you this excited?”
A bucket of ice water couldn’t have brought her back to her senses faster.
Ava put her hands on his chest and shoved back, breaking the kiss with violence. Oh, God, what was she doing?
She was on her knees, straddling his lap, her yellow skirt a sunny puddle across his and her thighs. She was topless. His large hands clutched her breasts. And she had been grinding against the telltale bulge behind the fly of his jeans.
“Oh, Jesus!” She leapt away from him, jumping to her feet, covering herself with her arms.
Panic gripped her. Her skin was electrified; the tender place between her thighs throbbed. In a wild craze, her eyes darted, searching for her shirt, her bra.
Oh, how could she have let this happen? How could she not be alone with the man for five minutes without taking off her clothes?
“Here.” Mercy held up her bra by its strap with one finger. The damp shirt was at his feet. He wasn’t smiling; his face was harsh with an emotion she recognized on him: want. Blind physical need transformed his often-jovial face into a mask of anger and aggression.
There’d been a time when she would have allowed herself to regret putting those lines around his eyes and mouth, between his brows. There’d been a time when she was a stupid kid so smitten with him she couldn’t see any of the flashing hazard signals, the red lettering that marked their wrongness together.
But now, she snatched up bra and shirt and put her back to him, struggling back into her clothes with fast, jerky movements.
“You can’t tell anyone about this,” she said through chattering teeth as she tugged her shirt over her head and the wet fabric hit her heated skin with a shock. “Dad and Aidan would flip their shit.”
She spun to face him, searching for an argument, and realized he hadn’t heard anything she’d just said. His eyes burned her, the way they were fixed to every part of her at once.
He swallowed, his throat working. “You look good, Ava. Really good.” Like he hadn’t just had his hands on her; like he hadn’t meant to roll her onto this beat-up mattress and take her right there without even a proper hello. He said it like he’d missed her, like a broken boy standing on the other side of a chasm, longing for what they both knew could never happen again.
“I have a boyfriend,” she said, like an idiot.
“I know.” His smile was slow and wry. “I guess you love him, huh?”
Ava bit the tip of her tongue until she tasted blood. “Don’t tell anyone,” she repeated. “You can’t.”
“I won’t.” His eyes were the color of smoke, of water at night. The way they stroked her was more intimate than his hands or mouth had been. “I never did.”
She left him sitting there, on the edge of the bed, her self-control trailing behind her in tatters.
Five
Fourteen Years Ago
Mercy was twenty-one. He couldn’t get the stink of the bayou out of his clothes, and his hair needed cutting, badly. He wasn’t sure he’d fully come to grips with what had happened only weeks before in the swamps just outside of New Orleans, in the tar paper shack where he’d been raised, but here he was in this Tennessee college city, full of bookstores and soft, friendly Tennessee people. This wasn’t the Deep South, but a more northern, more temperate, more welcoming South. He appreciated, in a gross display of homesickness, the smell of the water. Only here, it was the algae tang of river, and back home, it had been the fetid musk of swamp.
He loved how busy it was at night, all the lights, the cars crawling along on the interstate. New Orleans had been busy too, but in a parti-colored, witch’s brew kind of way. New Orleans was a haunted, spirited city. This was just…just pleasant. Just a nice place to live. The food lacked the inspiration and flavor of home, but there were decent restaurants and bars. It was all so vague and shapeless, so ruled by the color orange. He was glad for the change. Glad enough he thought he could break into tears.
Glad enough to obey blindly when his new president and vice president set tonight’s task before him.
“You made yourself an overnight reputation back home,” Ghost said at church. Ghost, of the shrewd eyes and the complicated blankness of face. “That’s what I want around here: someone with a reputation. Someone to put the fear of God in these bastards who think they can pick us off one by one.”
It didn’t matter that he was only twenty-one, Mercy was six-five, and built in a way that let the world know he’d fill out soon. When he did, look the hell out. It was not his loyalty the Knoxville brothers had been after, not his dedication, commitment to the club. It was his ruthless reputation that made him special in their eyes. The things that he’d done, rather than who he was. None of his Louisiana brothers knew about early mornings on the swamp checking the baits with Daddy. They didn’t know about the Ruger 10/22 or the hissing, moaning gators they’d pulled up into the boat. They hadn’t asked about his Cherokee grandmother, her knitting, her swamp wisdom. Most of them knew about Mama, because that was unavoidable. The story of Mama was a part of the story of his reputation.
No one cared that he was Felix. Or that he could slide a whole chicken carcass onto a shark hook with deft hands, not so much as a spot of grease on his clothes. Or that he liked to read poetry, because his grandmother had recited Longfellow and Wordsworth to him from memory, repeating what had been recited to her, because she’d never learned to read.
He was Mercy now. “Merci beaucoup,” Oliver Landau had whispered before the last of his blood left him. Thank you. Thank you for giving me death, finally.
“Keep up, kid,” Hound said. “I know you can with those legs of yours.”
Tonight, he worked alongside the Knoxville chapter’s tracker, a whipcord thin man named Hound; he could have found a needle in a stack of needles, James had said laughingly. Hound’s apprentice, a nineteen-year-old kid, had been dubbed Rottie, as a sort of kindred naming, and it was with these two, and Dublin, that Mercy worked.
“Coming.” Mercy loped after the others, his new brothers, as they rounded a corrugated steel warehouse and slipped between two industrial brick buildings. Via a trail of evidence Mercy wasn’t sure existed, Hound had led them fifty miles south of Knoxville, to the TVA nuclear power plant in Spring City. A homeless woman, a boisterous, tambourine-tapping, shopping cart-pushing black lady who liked to rail at passing cars about Jesus, had been under the bridge the night Laverne had disappeared. Before the woman’s son had been called, and he’d carted her hom
e for a shower and a hot meal before she abandoned him once again for the streets, Hound had managed to wring a story from her in exchange for a Coke and some peanut M&Ms. She’d seen a man dump the body in the car and run off like, “a scalded cat.” He was, in her words, “a bad-looking man. He needed the lord in a bad way, that one.” His shirt had been an industrial smock; he’d worked, according to her keen eyesight (all that was keen about her these days) at the power plant. She’d seen TVA on his breast pocket.
Four Carpathians worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority. One was working tonight. It was him they hunted. From him, Mercy would wring the intel the Dogs wanted, not just an admission to Laverne’s murder, but to all of the recent infractions committed by the expanding street gang.
They reached the edge of the building and halted behind Hound. Having snuck on the property, climbing the fence, they’d crept up from the river and approached the parking lot from the plant-side, rather than the street-side. Their target, Hound reasoned, would never expect a threat while on the TVA property. He would be at his most vulnerable, his most tired, and unarmed. He’d put a lot of thought into this entire situation.
“There.” Hound pointed across the shadowed lot and its dark cones of streetlamp light, toward a man walking to a rusted-out Ford pickup.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but how do you know that’s him?” Mercy asked.
“That’s his truck. This is the time he always gets off. And he walks like a jackass, that’s how.” Matter-of-fact. No room for doubt.
Mercy didn’t want to do what the club was asking him to do if this wasn’t their man. Then again, if the club wasn’t worried about any moral ramifications, maybe he shouldn’t be either.
With a series of hand gestures, Hound sent Mercy right, Dublin and Rottie left, and began to stalk straight toward their prey himself.
Mercy let his legs eat up the distance, unfurling across the pavement in ground-covering strides that stirred the stagnant river air against his face, carried him between the cars until he got close enough to their mark to smell the tobacco stink on him.
This man, Mercy reminded himself, had killed a member’s old lady. If not himself, then by proxy thanks to shitty friendship decisions. This man was of Oliver Landau’s ilk. He brought a mental image of that killer’s face to the forefront of his mind – Landau’s split and bloody lips, swollen eyes – the better to engage his aggression. To tap into that part of himself that stayed dormant like a gator sleeping in the rushes, and came leaping and snapping to the surface when someone spilled blood in the water.
Blood…so much blood on the floor of the tar paper shack. Boot prints in the blood. Grandma limp as a dish rag out at the water’s edge…
No. Those memories would not serve him here. Only the fury. That metallic, constant anger that knew neither emotion nor restraint. Emotionless, like the gators he’d grown up hunting, the black tide inside himself would rise to the occasion and like a puppeteer, he would take total control of the wicked things his hands would do.
“He’s gone crazy!” one of Landau’s friends had shouted that day in the swamp.
But crazy was the farthest thing from the truth. That was the scary part: he wasn’t a bit crazy.
Behind the mark, Hound broke into a jog and called, “Hey, man, hold up a sec!”
The man turned; the streetlamp caught the field of stubble across his cheek, the sharp hook of his nose, the glassy sheen of his eye. “What?”
“I wanted to ask you something,” Hound said, approaching him.
This would be Mercy’s best shot. From the shadows, he closed in with a panther’s grace, reached for the back of the man’s neck with one too-large hand, pinched, and covered his mouth and nose with the other. The man struggled, bowing up like a toddler resisting his mother’s embrace. But Mercy put him in an expert sleeper hold and his gator-wrestling arms accepted the man’s weight as he lost consciousness.
Hound pulled duct tape from his cut pocket and bound the man’s hands and gagged his mouth with a bright silver strip that flashed in the streetlamp. “Let’s move.”
And they did.
**
Present Day
During his first-ever club sponsored interrogation, Mercy had felt a low beat of disappointment, somewhere in the blackest depths of his soul, when the Carpathian who worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority spilled his guts too soon, unable to withstand the questioning. That night, Mercy had gotten spectacularly drunk, puked in Ghost and Maggie Teague’s bushes, and then knocked on their front door, using the brass knocker that was circled by a wreath of autumn leaves and tied off with a festive brown and gold ribbon. Ghost had given him a flat, impossible to read look and let him sleep on the sofa. The next morning – afternoon, whenever – he’d opened his eyes and found a pair staring back at him. Bright, brown eyes, full of questions and mischief. Ghost’s eight-year-old daughter, Ava.
It had been Walsh – quiet, disinterested, brooding Walsh – who had finally put the question to Mercy. How could he have known Ava at age eight, and want to know her at age seventeen? There wasn’t a simple answer. He’d always loved her; at some point, that love had taken a dangerous turn, right around the time her curves had bloomed and her adoration for him climbed to new heights, fevered with the danger of that time period, the way they’d been thrust together.
She was the reason he’d left Knoxville, and the reason he almost hadn’t come back. As he braced his elbows on his knees and concentrated on regulating his breathing, getting his arousal under control, he realized how smart he’d been in keeping away. They couldn’t be in the same room together. Not when he could so well remember the gentle heat of her body, its shape pressed against him, the dewy lush curve of her bottom lip between his teeth. Not when he still had dreams about her breath against his throat and her fingers twined in the front of his shirt. He didn’t know how to be her friend or acquaintance. He was incapable of indifference. And tonight, seeing her little douchebag boyfriend with his shiny hair and shinier shoes – he’d had to prove, to the both of them, that she would still come alive at his touch, that it was him she loved, no matter who she allowed to pray at her altar.
What had just happened could never happen again. He was back in Knoxville; he was needed at this chapter. Never again could he allow Ava Teague to jeopardize his place in this club.
It was the club, after all, that had saved his life.
There was a fast knock at the door and then it opened, the din of the party tumbling in and striking him hard in the chest. The bass thump of the music reverberated up through the soles of his boots. It was Walsh who stood framed in the threshold, a bottle of Newcastle in one hand, his eyes narrow, blue, and shrewd.
“You back here with a girl?” Walsh’s gaze asked the real question: You back here with Ava? There was both pity and accusation writ in the shallow lines of his face. He would, Mercy had always thought, be handsome, if he had an ounce of personality.
“Nah.” Mercy stood, and Walsh’s glance lifted and kept pace with his own. “Just beat from the ride up is all.”
Unconvinced, Walsh said, “You can nap later. Ghost wants to do the thing.”
“Coming.”
He stowed Ava where she belonged, in the farthest back corner of his mind.
In New Orleans, the chapel was the heart of the clubhouse, a centerpiece from which all other rooms branched. In Knoxville, it was secreted away down a hard-to-notice hall, kept separate from the revelry, a serious room for serious meetings. The Knoxville chapel, with its heavy, ornate table and balancing furniture, its velvet-cushioned chairs, was where he’d first met Ava, back when she was only eight and only a sweet kid who’d wowed him with her realism.
Brothers were filing in, their steps slow with drink, their conversations snatches of what they’d brought from the common room.
Ares the German Shepherd was curled on his bed; his head lifted as he watched them enter the sacred room. Mercy never stopped loving the idea of a d
og guarding the Dogs’ most holy of chambers. He paused to scratch the animal behind his ears on his way to one of the visitor chairs at the end.
“Good boy.”
Ares panted against his wrist, his fluffy tail thumping the floorboards.
“Mercy!” someone bellowed, and Mercy glanced up with a grin for Troy.
The crusty old biker had already settled into his favorite chair halfway down the far side of the long dining table. That way, he could hear what was said at both ends.
A curmudgeon in the truest sense of the word, Troy Timmons lived in the basement suite of his daughter’s sprawling Alcoa home, addicted to the Camels that had ravaged his voice and the Jim Beam that had ruined his marriage decades before. Gnarled with arthritis, at least two inches shorter than he’d been fourteen years ago when Mercy had joined the Knoxville chapter, the old man still rode like a bro, a bandana covering his bald head, his leathery arms and their now-misshapen tattoos displayed with pride beneath a Lean Dogs t-shirt and his weathered cut. He spent little to no time with the boys anymore, only coming in for official votes, making a run now and then when he felt like it. Everything pissed him off; his favorite topic of conversation was the war wound that pained him each time it rained, and if everyone was honest, nobody missed him much when he wasn’t around.
But tonight, they were voting in a new president – and a new member – and he’d come, duty-bound, if not happy about it. “Where the hell you been, boy?” he asked, scowling, as Mercy took his crooked hand gingerly in his own and shook it. “You can’t even see fit to visit?”
“They’ve been keepin’ me busy,” Mercy answered, smiling. “Didn’t you hear? I went to London.”
“London?” Troy’s face puckered. “Why the hell you’d do that for?”
Mercy laughed. “You don’t sit at table much anymore, do ya?”
“Hell no! I ain’t got time to be wasting listening to these kids talk politics.” He gestured to the filling room.
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