“How’s Andre?” Ava asked.
Maggie shook her head. “He died on the way to the hospital. Jackie just called. Collier’s upset, because he was his sponsor back when Andre prospected.” The breath left her in a slow rush “This is going to be bad,” she mused.
“I picked a bad time to come home, huh?”
“No.” Maggie twitched a smile and reached over to pat the soft underside of Ava’s wrist. “It’s never a bad time for you to come home.”
Across the hall, the bathroom door opened, releasing a cloud of steam, and a wet-haired Ronnie, his t-shirt sticking to his damp chest. Ava watched the way the cotton outlined his tennis player’s physique, waited for the butterflies to stir in her stomach, and felt less than disappointed when they didn’t.
“Did the water stay hot?” Maggie asked him with layered-on cheer. “I keep telling Ghost the water heater’s fine, but he won’t stop talking about getting a new one.”
Ronnie paused in the act of toweling his hair, frozen in the hallway, his gaze swapping between the two of them on the bed. Ava felt the reservation in him, that sudden caution. The world had been showing her that caution since she was a toddler, whenever anyone found out where she came from, and who her people were.
It was the first time Ronnie had shown her The Fear. “It…stayed hot,” he said, his expression slack.
Maggie stood, cheery and pretending she didn’t notice. “Great. I’ve got you a bed on the couch all fixed. Come take a look.”
“Um…okay.” He looked at Ava, The Fear intensifying.
“Not in my dad’s house,” she said with a sigh. “Sorry.”
When he trudged away, she stared at the ceiling, her mind spinning away from him, toward Andre, what had happened to the club that night because of it. Someone had murdered a member. That wouldn’t be taken lightly. There would be retribution. There could even be war.
She closed her eyes and remembered Mercy’s warm hands on her skin. Her pulse leapt at the memory of his tongue in her mouth.
“Welcome home, Ava,” she whispered.
“You all set? You need anything else?” Maggie asked on her way through the living room.
Ronnie was sitting on his makeshift bed, holding his cell phone which he’d just plugged into a wall outlet to charge. He looked skittish as a colt, eyes too open and mouth too small. “Maybe just a glass of water.”
“Okay.” She proceeded on into the kitchen, where she got down two short glasses. One she filled with water at the tap. The other with two good splashes of the Jack Daniels she pulled down from on top of the fridge.
When she returned, Ronnie stood up and accepted his water. “Thanks.” As he sat again, his eyes came to the whiskey, its lush amber color, as she raised the glass to her lips and took a sip.
“Sorry.” She twitched a smile as she stepped backward and lowered herself into the little slipper chair where she liked to have her six a.m. coffee. “Been a long day. I’d offer you some, but you don’t look like a whiskey man.”
He blinked, some of that trepidation replaced with the gentle coloring of rich-boy indignation. He might have come from a completely different side of the tracks from the men in Maggie’s life, but there was one thing she’d found to be true of all men: they didn’t like to have their masculinity questioned.
“So, Ronnie.” Maggie hooked her legs over the arm of the chair and got comfy, glass held against her chest. “You’re going to grad school at UT too?”
“It’s one of my top choices.”
“What’s your area of study?”
“Business. Marketing, specifically.”
“A salesman.” She sipped her Jack and kept her face neutral. She let her eyes take in the little details of him, plucking at areas she hadn’t had the chance to see earlier: the aristocratic shape to his lips, the feathering at his hairline, the flat, glassy color of his eyes. She saw his pulse in a tiny vein along his throat, saw that it was elevated. Saw the sheen of perspiration at his temples. He was a fit, handsome boy, all-American, clean-cut, and made for meeting girls’ parents. “There’s lots of money to be made in that,” she said. “I had a cousin who sold office equipment and ended up a millionaire.”
His brows twitched, his expression asking the obvious: So why’d you end up a biker wife?
Maggie quirked a grin. “We all have our choices to make. College wasn’t for me. But my girl – Ava loves learning. She’s wanted to write books since she was in diapers.”
“She’s a smart girl.”
“Yes she is.” She felt her smile stretch and let it go, allowing it to spread at will. “She was raised by a smart girl.”
“Oh.” Ronnie’s expression tightened with panic. The pulse in his throat looked ready to punch through the skin. “I didn’t mean–”
“I know what you mean.” She waved for him to calm down. “She and I aren’t the same kind of smart. I get that. She’s my little book-smart brainchild.” Maggie had been drinking Jack Daniels since she was sixteen, and she’d developed a taste for its subtle, sweeter undertones. It was almost like honey down her throat as she took another swallow and twisted her smile to something sinister. “Now let me tell you what I mean. When I said you were a salesman, that wasn’t a compliment, sweetie.”
He paled under his golden tan.
“I know your kind. Boys with good backgrounds, boys with money – you see something you want, and you take it for yourself. You saw my daughter, and maybe I should give you some credit. Maybe you saw that she was beautiful, and brilliant, and talented, and quirky in a cute sort of way. Maybe you adore her for that. Or maybe you saw a hot piece of ass and figured, what the hell, she’s from a biker family, she must be easy to nail.”
“Mrs. Teague, I swear–”
“But let me make something perfectly clear to you, Ronald.” She heard the knife-edge in her voice, the one that made Ghost say, “That’s my girl,” and sent prospects and hangarounds running for cover. “If you’re just out for a lay, if you don’t adore my daughter, then you made a big mistake crossing my threshold.”
He was struck mute, staring at her in unblinking disbelief. Maybe terror.
“Understand?”
He nodded.
“Good.” Maggie drained the rest of her drink and stood. “Sleep tight. My husband will be in sometime later. If you hear someone stumbling through the dark, it’ll be him. Try not to make any sudden movements or weird noises. He only shoots when provoked.”
When she put her glass in the dishwasher, she smiled to herself a moment. Then it faded. She hadn’t been bluffing with him. Felix Lécuyer had broken Ava to bits. She’d be damned if she watched some pretty asshole put pressure along those fault lines.
The sound of the bedroom door easing open woke Maggie sometime in the darkest middle of the wee hours. She blinked against the black veil of sleep and inhaled deep the familiar smells of leather and cologne. It was Ghost. Her waking panic dissolved, and she let herself come slowly to the surface, rolling onto her side to meet him when he climbed into bed in his boxers.
“What time is it?”
“Four-thirty.”
Maggie reached through the sheets and found her husband’s chest, the wall of dense muscle, the wiry hair that she laced her fingers through. She shifted closer to him in a practiced move that was no longer conscious, just instinct.
“I heard about Andre.” She didn’t apologize; they’d reached a point in their marriage at which they no longer offered platitudes, but a quieter, more intense understanding.
Ghost exhaled; she could hear the exhaustion in his breath. “Collier’s heartbroke. Everybody’s mad as hell. I’m mad as hell,” he amended. “Jesus. I thought we were done with this bullshit.”
“I know, baby.”
When Maggie met Ghost for the first time – when she was sixteen, propped up against the wall in front of Leroy’s, wearing short cutoffs and red lipstick – the club had been entrenched in the typical outlaw pursuits of the one-percenter l
ife. Selling guns, drugs, and protection services, they’d been the sort of “undesirable element” the city had wanted to eradicate. They’d been as outlaw as outlaw got, unrepentant in their sinning. She’d smelled the wicked coming off of the man who would become her husband; it was smoke-scented, vivid and acrid against the clean-scrubbed autumn air.
But even then, Ghost had been working toward a more lucrative, legitimate way to make bank, one that would give him the means to support his son and eat something besides ramen. In those first forbidden years, in the pensive, post-coital moments, he’d confided his dreams to her: a business. A whole fleet of businesses. A way for the club to stand on its own without help from the underbelly. A way for the club to survive. That had been his driving passion: the survival of his club.
“We can’t keep doing this,” he’d told her. “There has to be a smarter way.”
The bike shop had come first. Then the trucking company. By the time Ava was two, the Dartmoor property had been purchased. Walsh had come along, and with his help, the finances had been refined, and Dartmoor had grown again, becoming more profitable than Ghost had ever hoped.
James may have been president for a long time, but it was Ghost who’d brought about the evolution of the club into a sustainable entity. He’d elevated it. And it was that ambition in him, the drive, that Maggie had fallen in love with.
“I’ll take up a collection,” Maggie said, “for his kids.”
Ghost rubbed her upper arm. “Yeah. That’d be good.”
“I’ll call Flanders tomorrow and get the funeral set up.”
“Call Jackie first. She’ll want to help with the details.”
“Of course.” Maggie rolled away from him, sat up and clicked on her lamp, pulled pen and notepad from her nightstand drawer and began making a list, squinting against the light.
“Do that in the morning,” Ghost said, and she heard the underlying request. He didn’t want Maggie the MC old lady beside him; he wanted Mags his wife.
“I’m afraid I’ll forget,” she said, hastily scribbling a last note. “There.” She set the pad on the nightstand and turned off the lamp, slid down into the covers again.
Ghost turned her into his arms and his mouth sought hers in the dark, the sort of unhurried kiss that was a need for comfort.
When he pulled back, he said, “I’m glad Ava’s home. Even if she’s got shit taste in boyfriends.”
Maggie snorted and snuggled her face into his throat. “She’s trying to be normal. We should probably encourage that.”
“Not if normal means dating assholes like that.”
Maggie sighed against his bristly neck. “Well, you didn’t like it when she tried to do things the MC way.”
Ghost went very still against her.
Maggie bit her lip, not sorry she’d gone there, wondering what he’d say in return.
When he spoke, his voice was cold and flat. “That’s because it wasn’t the ‘MC way.’ It was just sick.”
In the dark, Maggie rolled her eyes. Ghost’s reaction to Mercy and Ava had been that of a typical father, amplified by the club, amplified further by the fact that Mercy had known Ava since she was eight-years-old. Maggie herself had been horrified, but in a distant, removed part of herself that was ruled by logic. Her heart had understood and asked no questions, even if she should have rejected the pairing with every fiber of her being. Mercy and Ava were connected in a way that Ghost couldn’t comprehend…and that couldn’t be snuffed out by separation. Inhabiting the same city together would have devastating effects, even if the two of them were in denial now.
But she said, “Well, she’s with Ronnie now.”
Ghost murmured something she couldn’t hear, and kissed her forehead. “I oughtta lock her up.”
“Spoken like a true idiot father,” she said, and kissed the side of his throat. “You’ve got bigger fish to fry right now, baby.”
“Yeah I do,” he said grimly. “I just gotta be president first.”
Ava spent almost three hours pretending sleep might come. She heard her father come home, his soft tread through the house, and the closing of the master bedroom door behind him. At five, she listened to the paper hit the front stoop and pushed herself out of bed. In the dark, she found clothes by feel, dressed, and slipped across the hall to brush her teeth and wash her face. Without waking Ronnie – he slept with one leg dangling off the couch, his blanket wadded on top of his stomach – she went into the kitchen and put the coffee on. Barefoot, she disengaged the door locks and stepped out into the black of morning, to retrieve the paper in its plastic sleeve from the stoop. It was a Saturday, and the neighborhood was still deeply asleep, almost haunted in its dark silence. A bat fluttered through the cloud of moths beneath the streetlamp, seeming clumsy, but deadly in his accuracy.
Ava went back inside, into the kitchen again, setting the paper on the table and pouring it from its sleeve, watching the pages rustle, feeling like an intruder in this kitchen in which she’d grown up. It seemed wrong to her, in ways inexplicable, to come back home and ask to be taken in by people she’d left behind. College had always felt like abandoning her family, no matter how insistent they’d been in telling her they wanted her to go. “I never had a chance to go to school for free,” Ghost had said, and stamped her tender feelings about departing with another layer of guilt. Leaving Knoxville had felt like a statement she’d never wanted to make: that the wide world had something better to offer than her people did. That had never been true in her mind, but being back here now left her melancholy, alone like this in the early morning hours.
Because it felt like the charitable thing to do, she rummaged in the cabinets and began laying out the ingredients she’d need to make a big pot of oatmeal. She liked cooking – it was homey and domestic, Southern and comforting, a way to show the men in her life that she cared. Ghost wouldn’t sleep late, she knew, not with what had transpired last night, and this would be a way to earn her keep, making everyone breakfast.
Once she had the oats on, she took a mug of coffee to the table and sat, flipping the paper over idly and scanning the headlines.
The top one caught the breath in her throat, and sent her hurtling back through the fields of her memory.
Back to Mason Stephens threatening her with the impending governorship of his father, all those park bench and bus stop ads.
Back to Stephens’ loss and Mason’s more treacherous assaults against her as they grew older.
Back to a hideous night in which her unswerving love for Mercy had proved her salvation…and damnation.
Back to a vague mention of the mayoral race her mother had made on the phone a few months back.
All the way to the present. To the words before her, and the chain of events they would inevitably kick off.
Gang Violence in Our Own Backyard; Mayor Mason Stephens Vows to Shut Down the Lean Dogs
Nine
Fourteen Years Ago
Maggie closed her car door with her hip, juggling purse, umbrella, grocery sack, and keys as she tried to keep dry beneath the onslaught of drumming rain. It was a murky night, colors and shadows running together in an underwater gloom. Standing in her driveway felt like being at the bottom of the river, the wind like water currents, the visibility almost zero.
Poor Dublin: as one of the newest, youngest members, he had been designated her tail for the day, and was slopping through the rain on his bike. She couldn’t imagine how he was seeing through his nighttime riding goggles in this mess. The headlamp of his Harley cut a dim swatch through the inky black; the raindrops flashed silver in the beam.
“Thanks,” Maggie called, tossing him a wave.
He started to swing his leg over the bike and she sighed and headed up the front walk. She didn’t need him to walk her in, but whatever. She was tired of arguing with bikers. Her feet hurt; her back hurt. She was exhausted, and sick to death of walking through her daily life worried that an AK muzzle would sprout from a car window and bullets woul
d pepper the air. Her steps were dogged by Dogs, the irony hilarious and terrifying at the same time. The club was at war, and as a general, Ghost was needed on the front lines. Which meant the underlings were on watch dog duty. Which meant as she sold pansies and pallets of sod at McMurray Nursery, a Dog was never too far off, waiting and watching, guarding.
In the dark, she almost ran into the bike parked in front of the garage, and the rain boots she’d worn to work splashed through the sidewalk puddles. She turned up her nose at the pale, bloated worms that wriggled in the larger pools of water.
Dublin followed her, ducking beneath the stoop and waiting as she unlocked the front door.
“Go on,” she told him with a shooing gesture. “Go get out of this weather. And be safe.”
He dipped his head. “Yes, ma’am.” And jogged back to his bike.
Maggie elbowed the door open, snapped her umbrella closed, dropped it on the front step, and entered the house shaking raindrops from her ponytail.
Slowly, as the paychecks rolled in and the club’s legitimate interests expanded, she was adding flavor and comfort to their modest ranch house. In the narrow entryway, she’d just added an antique hall tree, with spotted mirror, coat hooks, bench, and storage cubbies. She set her grocery bag on the bench, toed off her boots, hung up her soggy hoodie, then grabbed the bag and headed into the living room. She halted in her tracks as her eyes fell on the scene before her.
On the living room sofa, the TV throwing blue panels of light across them, Mercy sat with his socked feet on the coffee table, one hand on the remote, the other resting on Ava’s tiny shoulder; Ava lay on her side, curled up like a cat, her head resting on Mercy’s thigh. It was a familiar pose, one that Ava usually took up with her father. Tonight, it was her watcher and protector that she slept against. And Mercy, for all the terror of his face and form, had the air of a great beastly mastiff as he encircled the girl with one large arm and looked both relaxed and ready to eliminate anything that dared threaten her. The still shot of them together like that spoke to so many things: a protectiveness, a sweetness, some deep tenderness in him that was touched by his small charge. Something wicked and primal in the misunderstood man reacted with pure delight to Ava’s childish wonder and instant acceptance. Maggie had heard them talking together, Ava usually sounding the adult and Mercy the awkward kid.
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