Stella herself came out to see them, big white flour handprints on her black apron. She had grand twists of iron gray in her gorgeous raven hair these days, a smattering of crow’s feet and laugh lines, but her rich Italian complexion was still dark and beautiful, and the age markers added character.
“Julian told me,” she said, propping her fists on her wide hips, “that little Ava Rose was back and she had a gorgeous boy with her. And I said to him, ‘Why am I just hearing about it now?’ ” She wagged a finger at Ava. “You’re supposed to come see me immediately when you get back in town!”
Ava laughed. “I’m so, so sorry, Stella. It won’t happen again. This is Ronnie.” She gestured to him. “Ronnie, this is the best chef in all of east Tennessee.”
Stella rolled her eyes at the praise before she locked them on Ronnie. “You’re cute. How old are you? What do you do for a living? Do you make enough money to take care of this one?”
Ronnie turned hot pink and Ava glanced away to hide her smile…only for her gaze to collide with that of someone standing on the street.
A scrawny, pale-haired man in a too-large MC cut stood on the sidewalk, hands jammed in his jeans pockets. He looked to be frozen mid-stride, and he stared at her with what she could only call a dawning recognition; he was assessing her, eyes raking over her in a frank inventory that left her feeling exposed and a little bit violated. Like he was cataloguing her, taking down all the details in shorthand in his mind. She wanted to look away, but didn’t dare.
When he finally turned and set off down the alley, she caught a glimpse of the back of his cut: the Carpathians, Tennessee, the snarling werewolf.
She shuddered hard.
“Ava,” Ronnie said, and she snapped back to attention. “Yes?”
Stella was shaking her head, lips pursed. “Head in the clouds. You must really have it bad for this one.” She hooked a thumb at Ronnie. In a stage whisper, she said, “Good, because if you don’t want him, I might.”
“Um…” Ronnie couldn’t blush any deeper; it wasn’t possible.
Ava smiled and hoped it looked genuine. “I think I’ll hold onto him for now, Stella.”
“Suit yourself.” She threw up her hands and turned. “I’m back to my kitchen to slave the day away.”
“The muffins are amazing,” Ava called to her back, and earned an over-the-shoulder wave in acknowledgement. She turned to Ronnie, glad to find his color returning to normal. “So now you’ve met Stella.”
His brows lifted. “Every time I meet someone new, I’m even more convinced I’ve fallen into a Tennessee production of Our Town.”
“Ah. You get used to that feeling. It’s called being in Tennessee.”
He grinned. “I thought Georgia had prepared me for this.”
“And that’s where you went wrong.”
He lifted his fork again. “She can cook the hell out of breakfast, though, I’ll give her that.”
Ava nodded.
“Yo, sis.” Aidan’s shadow fell across their table before she registered his arms draping over the railing. “Taking your poodle for a walk this morning?” His shit-eating grin was reminiscent of all their childhood fights, and she didn’t know if she wanted to laugh or slap him.
“Funny, I was just about to ask Tango the same thing,” she said, grinning back, and saw Tango’s congratulatory smile over her brother’s shoulder.
“I didn’t miss you.” Aidan reached down and snagged a strip of bacon from her plate, folding it into his mouth. “So didn’t miss you.”
“Back at ya. So, what are you guys really doing here?” She shot him a pointed look. “I saw a lone wolf wandering around and thought maybe he was looking for you.”
Aidan’s smile tightened a fraction, a quick show of regret that she’d seen the Carpathian. “Yeah, maybe he was. But that’s not something you ought to worry about.”
The grin rebounded and he clapped Ronnie hard on the back. “You’ve got your guard-poodle to watch out for you.”
“Ass,” she accused.
“It’s a damn fine one, isn’t it?” He smacked himself as he turned to head down the sidewalk.
Ava sighed.
“Bye, hon,” Tango told her, a little rap of his knuckles on the railing in farewell.
“Bye, Kev.” She gave him a genuine smile. “Don’t let his fine ass blind you.”
He chuckled as he followed his friend.
When she glanced back at Ronnie, she said, “Our Town, huh?”
“Our Town on crack.”
The sound of a hand slapping down on the tool chest beside his left ear was like a grenade going off inside his head. Mercy ground his molars together and wasn’t surprised to find Aidan dropping down onto the wooden bench beside his work space.
“I’m curious,” Aidan said, pushing his shades into his curly hair, grinning, “how much alcohol it takes to get a six-five Cajun drunk enough to make a damn fool of himself in public.”
“Enough to put you under the table twice.”
“Don’t doubt it.” Aidan dug his pack of smokes from his cut pocket, but didn’t light up. He turned it in his hands, flicking the top, just to have something to do with his hands. “It’s Sunday,” he observed, nodding toward the bike Mercy worked on.
Mercy shrugged. “Not much else to do.”
Aidan’s face shifted, a subtle change in his energy that told Mercy this conversation wasn’t going to be as casual as it had seemed at first glance, and he wasn’t going to like it much. “The prospect said my sister and her boyfriend were there.”
Man, fuck that prospect. Mercy withdrew all his internal promises of support for the kid. “They might have been,” he said, off-hand, reaching for his wrench. “I wasn’t really paying attention.”
Aidan sighed, and sounded more like his father than he probably knew. “Merc.”
Mercy gave him the stare-down. “What?”
Unperturbed, Aidan returned the stare. “None of us like that snotrag boyfriend of hers, okay? But…she’s doing good these days.” For a second, his eyes were Ghost’s eyes. “You need to just leave her be, man.”
His mind went back to Friday night. She hadn’t even been in town twelve hours, and he’d laid hands on her. It was pretty fucked up if he thought about it.
He lifted his hands. “I am.” If there was a defensive bite to his voice, so be it. “You think I don’t have enough shit to worry about?”
“I think I misjudged you, five years ago,” Aidan said, levelly. “And I won’t make that mistake again.”
Mercy watched him rise and walk away, stunned.
Wherever she was, whichever city or state, whatever mood she was in, there was nothing like a book store to fill her up with happiness. Her favorite in Knoxville was Fourth Down, a tiny, cramped shop that boasted selling second-, third- , and fourthhand books of all genres, just around the corner from the university, the wall behind the register hosting a huge, artistic shot of Neyland. In this shop, she didn’t have to slog through the double-spaced, fast-read novels that leapt off the center displays in the chain bookstores. Here was where she found fat paperbacks with curling covers, cramped print, and coffee stains on the edges of the pages. Here were her favorites from the nineties, the lyrical novels that redefined genres. Here was where she stumbled across faded hardbacks with handwritten dedications in the fronts, that collection of Kipling poems dedicated to Martha, dated 1917. Fourth Down smelled of ink and dusty paper, collapsing bindings and musty cardboard covers. Dust motes swirled in big sprightly columns in the narrow shafts of sunlight that came in through the high windows. It was a magic place: books on shelves, on stools, in stacks on the floor, spread out in heaps on tables, piled to the ceiling between the windows. Shopping here always brought to mind the scene from Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf digging through scrolls at Minis Tirith.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” she asked, voice dreamy, as she floated down an aisle and passed a finger along the spines of the books.
Ronnie fo
llowed a few steps behind. “It smells like–”
“Heaven?”
“Old people, I was gonna say.” He made a laughing sound in his throat. “You really do love books, don’t you?”
She sighed to herself. Once upon a time, she hadn’t ever had to explain that to her man. Once upon a time, she’d been stupid.
She turned, and found Ronnie staring at his phone, head down, completely unenthusiastic about the wall-to-wall books around them.
Ava resumed her walk, leaving him to Twitter or Facebook or whatever the hell had held him captive since they’d arrived in Knoxville. In a small, back part of her mind, she knew she should have been worried that he was texting another girl, that he was running around on her. But the realization that she didn’t care if he was – that was overpowering. That propelled her down the aisle, deeper into her haven of books.
She was in the mood for something dark and Gothic, some tale peopled by steep-roofed houses and ominous cloud cover. What she got instead was a near-collision with a dark-haired young man studying the paperbacks laid out on a table the next aisle over. He glanced up at the muffled sound of her heels on the old carpet, and her heart lurched up her throat.
He had long since lost the shine of health and popularity, was thin, pale, and smudged under the eyes, but Mason Stephens Jr. still cut a rich-boy figure in his J. Crew and khakis, his hair long on top and parted on the side, carefully combed down with paste.
Unlike her, he didn’t evidence surprise at their sudden meeting. His eyes fastened to her in the way she remembered and hated, and a slow smile spread across his lips that brought up all the old repulsion, like her breakfast was trying to make a break for it.
“Teague,” he said, voice still oily, that little taunt, like he had a secret he wouldn’t share. “Look at you, all grown up.”
She cast a furtive glance down at her outfit, the skinny jeans, elbow-sleeve sweater, and the high-heeled sandals Ronnie said he liked best. Straight out of a Macy’s catalogue, all of it, with her hair in tidy dark waves down her shoulders and just a hint of lip gloss. She knew she didn’t look like the girl Mason had threatened to rape in Hamilton House five years ago. She knew she looked weaker than that.
The nausea doubled, the salty saliva flowing beneath her tongue. Her stomach cramped and her pulse accelerated; the fine hairs on her arms prickled and she felt the first blush of panicked sweat at her throat and breasts. It was like her body remembered him, what he had done to it, and it was telling her to run, run, run!
But she lifted her chin and said, “Did you learn how to read since I saw you last?”
“Ooh.” He mimed fear, hands raised. “Kitty’s still got claws.”
Five years ago, when he’d finally been released from the hospital, Mason had transferred to a private school and Ava hadn’t so much as passed him on the street afterward. Ghost made it clear that he and Stephens Sr. had come to some sort of arrangement: she and Mason would be kept apart, and everyone would pretend that night in Hamilton House had never happened. Ava hadn’t thought to run into him here, like this. She’d figured he was married, or in rehab, or living in Aruba by now. What would someone with Mason’s wealth and contempt want with Knoxville at this point?
She didn’t know, but she didn’t have the stomach for him. Time, it turned out, didn’t heal all wounds or assuage all hatreds.
Ava turned, to go back the way she’d come, when Mason said, “Did you hear my father’s the mayor?”
Let it go, her common sense told her. Just keep walking.
But she glanced over her shoulder and said, “Finally? Hasn’t he been running for some kind of office for twenty years? Guess it’s true what the old story says: the slow one always wins the race…eventually.”
Mason remained as unflappable as ever, still grinning. “Well, sugar, I hope you went away to law school, because your Little Doggies are about to be in major fucking trouble. It’d take a miracle to keep the lot of them out of jail.”
“Mason, Mason,” she said, clucking her tongue. Inside, she was shaking, but she said, “You keep threatening that. How ‘bout you deliver or shut the hell up already.”
When she pulled her head around, Ronnie was standing in front of her, phone forgotten for the moment in one hand, his gaze trained on Mason, mouth plucked sideways in a frown. “What’s going on? Is this guy bothering you?”
“He’s always bothering someone.” Ava grabbed the front of his shirt and steered him back around the aisle. “Guess it was my lucky turn,” she said, loud enough for Mason to hear, and kept urging Ronnie back toward the exit.
Once they were in the next aisle, she snatched up Ronnie’s hand. “Come on.” And she towed him along after her, nearly jogging by the time she pushed through the door and out onto the sidewalk.
She didn’t stop until they were two shops down, and then she collapsed onto the bench in front of the ice cream parlor, panting, trembling, clutching her knees to keep her hands steady as she leaned forward and fought the awful tide of nausea.
“Ava. Hey, hey.” Ronnie dropped down next to her and laid his had in the middle of her back. “What’s wrong? What did he say to you?”
She shook her head, choking on her gag reflex. “Nothing. Nothing, he – that’s the mayor’s son.”
His fingers flexed, back and forth, a light massage against the ridge of her spine. “Stephens?”
“Mason Stephens Jr.” She gulped in a deep breath of air, flavored faintly with waffle cone sweetness. If she breathed through her nose, she could smell chocolate, rich creamy ice cream, low tang of mint. It was helping, somehow, the clean fresh scent of the ice cream. “He…oh, shit, nevermind.” She sat up and leaned back against the bench; the street wavered in front of her a moment as her equilibrium shifted.
Ronnie was studying her with a concerned notch between his brows, lower lip caught between his teeth. “Ava, for the love of God, what is going on with you?”
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit,” he said, gently. “Look, you don’t want to hear this, but I could tell, before we came here – I could tell all along – that you’ve got…some skeletons. I could tell that. You’re careful. You were nervous with me.”
She shot him a hateful, sideways glance, but he pressed on.
“And that has never bothered me, I swear. But when we got to Knoxville, you changed. You got more careful, more nervous. I feel like we’re going backward here. I know something happened to you, and I know it was pretty bad to shake you up like this. And I want to help you, but I can’t do that unless you talk to me.”
“You don’t want to know.”
“It may be your decision to tell me, but it’s my decision whether I want to know, and I do.”
She sighed, exhausted now.
“Ava, please.”
She regarded him a long moment, the story pushing at the base of her throat, studying the deep confusion in his expression.
She would tell him some of it, she decided, because she was at the end of her rope with not-telling. The parts that were safe to tell. The parts that were about Mason, and Ainsley Millcott, and being a kid who was different.
The parts with Mercy, though, she’d keep to herself. Because even if she loathed the man now, she would never allow someone like Ronnie into those sun-warmed moments in her room, with nothing but innocence and trust between her and the man she’d loved more than anything.
That was when, sitting in front of the ice cream parlor, she knew that she’d never love Ronnie, and that there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.
Thirty-One
Monday. Funeral day. Ava sat up before her alarm went off at six with a strange weightless feeling in her stomach. She’d been to almost a dozen such funerals, but never because of murder, and never after such a strange few days as these last few. MC funerals were bedecked in pomp, steeped in nostalgia, works of art, really, and for the first time since coming home, she woke up and felt almost like her old self. Like the club dau
ghter, instead of the country club girlfriend.
The second her feet touched the floor, in the chilly dark of her room, the energy began fizzling in her veins, that strange, morbid excitement. A member was dead. Bring out the bikes, say all your prayers, give thanks for your once-percent blood. And so it always went.
The pipes hummed with water flow, Maggie and Ghost already up and shuffling around, getting ready for the day. Ava felt something deep inside her, some unseen finger touching down on the clicker of a stopwatch. Like this day was about moving toward some finish line. She didn’t let it press her back under the covers and swallow her up, but she took note of it, nodded to herself, and stood up.
She showered, did her makeup, arranged her hair: loose waves, the mass of it pulled back at the crown and held off her forehead with a series of bobby pins. She dressed in a very fitted black pencil skirt that hit just above the knees, sheer black shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons, tucked in at the waistband of the skirt, her pearl studs, and her staple pumps. She folded back the shirt cuffs slipped Grandmother Teague’s pearl-studded bangle over her left wrist, the cool metal reassuring against her flushed skin.
Maggie was already in the kitchen when she arrived, in an elbow-sleeve black velvet dress with a deep scooped neck, over-the-knee boots, her hair tied up tight and her throat spangled with thin silver necklaces. She looked beautiful and inappropriate, and carried herself in a way that showed she didn’t give a damn.
“Good,” she said, as Ava entered. “We need to leave in five minutes.”
“Do I need to carry something out to the car?”
“That box there. Put it in the truck; we’re taking it so everything will fit.”
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