Never had she been so glad to stow away her writing before. When her professor dismissed her, she left the AC-chilled meat locker classroom with a skip to her pulse and went outside to meet her man.
But the figure leaning against the bike rack, who straightened as she appeared and came toward her, was decidedly not her man.
He was the man she’d given up.
“Ronnie,” she said, startled and hearing it reflected in her voice. “Wha…what are you doing here?”
He was painfully pretty in her eyes this morning, every hair and khaki crease in perfect place. So cosmically different from everything she’d ever found sexy. “You wouldn’t talk to me,” he said, his smile almost sheepish, “so I thought I’d come run into you. You can’t hang up on me this way.”
Her headache was instant, throbbing in her temples and eyelids. “Jesus,” she whispered.
He stepped in closer, blocking the light. “What?”
“Nothing,” she sighed. “Look, Ronnie, to be honest, I don’t know where all this…passion, for lack of a better word…is coming from. I’m sorry about the way things happened, but I didn’t think you would be that upset.”
He frowned. “I’m not upset. I’m confused.”
“You didn’t seem confused the other day, when you were telling me how unbearable you find me.”
“Okay…maybe I was upset then. I had a moment. Not like you haven’t had a few lately.” He lifted his brows, encouraging her to agree with him.
She was suspicious, suddenly. “No. Two days ago, you were done. What changed your mind? You could do way better than me.”
“Ava–” He reached for her arm, a move she evaded with a quick step back. His expression hardened, making him look like a polished statue come to life. “You don’t want to throw away what we have. You’re just trying to punish me for what I said. I’m sorry. Let me–”
She took another step back, folded her arms across her middle. “Why are you acting like this?” Fear crawling down her arms, up her neck. “You don’t like my family, you don’t like the club, I’m not even sure you like me. You can’t spend ten minutes with me without being on your phone. You’re texting another girl, aren’t you? Whatever,” she said, not letting him answer. “I don’t care. Just like you don’t care. So what are you pushing for?”
When she reached to flip her hair over her shoulder in mindless irritated twitchiness, his eyes followed the movement. They latched onto the side of her neck. Too late, she remembered the tiny mark there, the little dark place where Mercy had pressed his mouth and sucked at her skin last night, in the side yard. They hadn’t taken things too far, but she’d delighted in the kissing, the reckless teenage pawing at one another. She’d never had that with him, not a true teen romance, but something heavier and more high-stakes from the first.
She clapped her hand over the mark, but it was too late, a grim smile blooming on Ronnie’s face.
“So that’s it then. You went running back to your biker.” His smile widened in a nasty slice, teeth gleaming white in the sunlight. “Here I am feeling guilty, and you’ve been throwing yourself at that Neanderthal. You bring me home to meet your parents” – he took an aggressive step toward her – “and you fuck some other guy? Once a slut, always a slut, huh? You just can’t rise above bad breeding, can you?”
Ronnie’s shadow seemed to grow; Ava tipped her head back. No, it hadn’t grown, it had been covered, by a taller, larger shadow: Mercy’s.
“Ronnie, Ronnie, Ronnie.” At the sound of his voice, Ronnie went rigid, expression frozen, fear flashing in his eyes. “You really shouldn’t have said that, my man.”
He made an evasive move, but Mercy was too large, too quick. He grabbed him by the collar and lifted him up off his feet, turning him, bringing his other hand up to grasp Ronnie by the throat.
A passing group of girls gasped.
“Whoa!” someone shouted.
“Oh my God!”
“Dude, check that out.”
“Mercy,” Ava hissed. “You have to put him down.”
Mercy wasn’t paying attention. He grinned into Ronnie’s face, tendons standing out in his arms as he lifted the shorter man up so they were on eye level. “Let me explain something to you, Ron,” he said, voice low and velvet, dark and Cajun-flavored. “That girl over there? She’s too good for you. She’s too good for me, too, but I’m smart enough to know that, and thank God she gives me the time of day. You? You’re stupid. So try to get it through your skull what I’m about to tell you. If you dare insult her ever again – you so much as give her a dirty look – you’ll be in a wheelchair. You touch her, and you’ll be in a pine box. Do you understand? I will fucking end you. Leave her alone.”
Then he threw Ronnie, tossed him backward onto the sidewalk so he landed with a sharp yelp sprawled on his back across the concrete. Ronnie, as it turned out, wasn’t stupid. No defiant look, no saving face; he scrambled, gasping, onto his hands and knees, crawling, then running away as he finally lurched to his feet.
“That wasn’t necessary,” Ava scolded as they earned dirty, startled looks from the passing crowds. But her heart was thumping in her throat, the hair standing on end at the back of her neck, and she really wanted to dive into his arms and feel his solid strength against her.
Mercy’s jaw could have cut glass. “Oh, yeah it was.” He was staring after Ronnie, brows tucked low over his eyes.
Something shiny on the sidewalk caught her eye. “His phone,” she said, stooping to pick it up. “You knocked it out of his pocket or something.” She scowled. “I ought to look through it and see who the hell he’s been texting so much.”
As Mercy came to stand beside her, she did just that.
And the bottom dropped out of her stomach.
They waited almost two hours for anyone to leave the Carpathians’ clubhouse, both of them having to go into the Chinese takeout place they were parked in front of to take a leak and buy sodas. Finally, three bikers left, headed into town, and it was more promising than they’d hoped: Larsen, his VP and sergeant.
Ghost dropped his cigarette out the window, started the truck, and followed at a careful distance. In their 2002 nondescript Ford, they went unnoticed, sliding around the corners in the heart of the city as the three men in wolf cuts drew the alarmed glances of pedestrians.
Larsen and his boys led them into a transitional neighborhood, where tumbledown bungalows were being renovated into posh city dwelling for the hipster elite and the moneyed college students, to a small khaki-colored house with brick-red trim and a lawn company-maintained yard of tidy round shrubs and cropped grass. There was a BMW parked in front of the single-bay garage, so Larsen and company parked on the street, making a big show of taking off helmets and gloves. Larsen shook out his blonde hair with obvious relish, loving the way the woman next door was watching them goggle-eyed as she watered her veggie garden.
Ghost parked behind a Subaru across and down the street a hundred feet or so. “Camera,” he said, opening his hand for it.
Aidan pulled the Canon from its bag in the floorboards, ensured the telephoto lens was in place, and passed it over.
Ghost put it to his face and the lensed clicked and whirred as he adjusted the focus.
The front door of the house opened as the three Carpathians approached, and out stepped a young man in real Polo everything, face screwed up in a black scowl.
“Mason Junior,” Aidan said, and cranked his window down, leaning toward it to see if he could catch a hint of conversation.
Turns out, it wasn’t hard.
“What the fuck are you idiots doing here?” Mason asked, hands landing on his hips as he took a stance on his front stoop. “I told you not to come around here.” He made a sweeping gesture to the street.
“Then answer my calls sometime,” Larsen shot back. “I’ve been calling you all morning.”
Mason sneered at him. “I don’t have time to babysit you, Jasper. I told you to leave a message with my s
ecretary, and I’d get back to you.”
Larsen stepped in closer and their voice dropped, just aggressive murmurs and hisses from this distance. The massive meatnecked sergeant at arms folded his arms and took up a guarding pose at the edge of the yard, scanning the street with slow head turns.
The camera fired, a volley of rapid shutter snaps.
Ghost said, “Like I needed another reason to want this kid dead.”
Ava was glad to hand the phone over to Collier. The weight of it burned her hand, sent rippling numbness up her arm. She shuddered as she passed it into the VP’s hand and then rubbed her palm against the leg of her jeans, trying to work some feeling back into it.
Collier frowned as he scrolled through the outgoing texts she’d discovered on Ronnie’s dropped cell.
She closed her eyes, and discovered, to her horror, that they were tattooed in white against the insides of her eyelids:
Sleeping with F. Lécuyer again. Will try to make contact with her again, but not optimistic. Unreceptive last few times we talked.
That was the first, the most recent, and from there, moving backward as she’d scrolled down:
No go. Dogs came to repair tire. Ava not alone. Will try something else.
M took care of tires. Will buy me some time to talk to her. Will let you know.
Fine.
I can’t do this anymore!!! I’m pulling the plug. Fuck this. I can’t deal with her. She wants Lécuyer, let him have her. I hate the bitch.
At some point between that message – sent the morning she’d stopped by his apartment – and the following, either a phone or face-to-face conversation had taken place, in which Ronnie had been reassured and put back on course.
The texts were unending, dating back months, in intervals, and regular, almost every ten minutes, since she’d arrived back in Knoxville. Ronnie had been reporting her habits, schedules, moods to someone labeled Chief in his phone. Interspersed were tidbits of club history and goings-on, things he’d observed or benign things she’d told him. He’d texted news of Andre’s stabbing the night of the party, as well as a threat she hadn’t known her mother had made to Ronnie, that first night, telling him to watch himself. Ronnie’s fear had been evident in the texts, as well as his reluctance to continue reporting.
“Christ almighty,” Collier whispered, and Ratchet and Tango crowded at his shoulders, trying to read the tiny phone screen type. The VP glanced up at her ashen face, his own paling. “Do you have any idea who this Chief is he’s talking to?”
She shook her head, unable to speak, throat clogged with bile and tears and the bitterest disgust.
Collier shook his head and kept reading, thumb scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. “Is there any chance your boyfriend’s a cop?”
“Ex-boyfriend,” Mercy said firmly. His hand was heavy and warm at the curve of her waist, and possibly the only thing holding her up on her feet. “And no.” His voice sharpened, threaded with insult. “Of course she didn’t think he was. She’d never have brought him around here if she did.”
His defense of her gave her something to focus on. She laid her hand over his and managed to swallow. “No,” she said in a choked voice. “He majored in marketing at UGA. He’s not a cop.”
Ratchet sent her a sympathetic smile. “Honey,” he said, tone gentle, “that’s what this looks like, though.”
She shook her head, at a total loss. Yes, that’s what it looked like. It looked like the man she’d been sleeping with for almost a year had been reporting on her, like he was an undercover agent, infiltrating her life.
Beside her, Maggie rubbed her arm, the numb left one that had held the phone. “Ava, what grad school program was he applying to?”
She thought…thinking was hard. All she wanted to do was throw up. She wanted to vomit until her insides were clean, until every meal and look and laugh and touch she’d ever shared with Ronnie Archer had left her for good. “He…he wanted to get into law school. Business law. He wants to go into business law.”
Tango hissed, his grimace telling.
“Damn,” Collier said. He switched off the phone and let out a huge breath. “I’ll have to show this to your old man,” he said, almost like an apology.
Ava nodded, swallowing at the emotion lodged in her windpipe. “I want you to. Whatever he was doing – whatever this means – I want Ronnie to pay for this. I trusted him, I…”
She really was going to be sick.
She broke away from Mercy and her mother, fleeing out the front door of the clubhouse, swatting at Ares as he tried to follow her. She slammed against the door and fumbled the knob, staggered out into the sunlight drawing in huge gulps of air. She tasted salt on her tongue, felt the cold sweat break out down her back and under her arms.
“Oh my God,” she breathed, letting her head fall back, fighting the nausea, staring up at the bright ball of the sun. Burn it away, she pleaded. Burn away all the evil he touched me with.
Slowly, the wave passed, and her breathing evened out. She shivered hard, chilled down to her bones, and rubbed at her arms as she opened her eyes.
The last thing she expected to see was Carter Michaels standing in front of her, white envelop clutched in one hand, in his Leroy’s shirt and slip-resistant work shoes.
“Hi,” she said, because it was the only word that popped into her head.
He lifted the envelope. “I need to show you guys something.” Small frown. “You’re not gonna like it.”
“Par for the course,” she muttered.
“Ava?” Mercy was coming for her, his footfalls rapid as his long legs brought him up behind her. She could tell when he recognized Carter; he gave a blowing snort like a horse. “What do you want, QB?”
Ava elbowed him. “What is it, Carter?” she asked.
He pulled something from the envelope – it was a large legal envelope, eight-and-a-half by eleven. What he handed to her was a photograph, a class of students arranged in kneeling, standing, chair-standing rows in the elementary school library, the teacher and para-pro framing the class one on either side. The children wore bright colors and straight-leg jeans: kids in the nineties.
“What is this?”
“My second grade class,” Carter said, stepping in closer and pointing to his seven-year-old self, tow-headed and adorable in elastic-waist Levi’s and striped t-shirt. “Your boyfriend came in the store today–”
“Ex-boyfriend,” Mercy said.
Carter nodded. “And Leah was there. She said his name was Ronnie Archer. I knew I knew that name.” His index finger shifted, moving to the upper right among the rows of students. “He was in my second grade class.”
Ava’s eyes flipped wide as she took note of the small, baby face of the little brunette boy Carter pointed out to her. Softer and rounder in youth, there was still no mistaking Ronnie’s face. She checked the bottom of the photo, the list of names, just to be sure. There it was: Ronnie Archer.
“How…?” She glanced helplessly at Carter, reeling.
He gave her a gentle non-smile. “We were part of the same circle of friends that year,” he explained. “Him, Beau, Mason and me. Ava…Ronnie is Mason’s cousin.”
Thirty-Seven
Carter stared down the entire club, and to his great credit, he didn’t shrink, or duck his head, or slump his shoulders. He stood straight and looked each of them in the eye in turn, his focus centering on Ghost, as it should.
“Explain it to me,” Ghost said. “Because I’m angry enough to rip heads off with my bare hands.”
Without blinking, Carter said, “Yes, sir,” and launched into it.
Ava didn’t listen, because she couldn’t bear to hear it again. Let’s play Six Degrees From Mason Stephens. How close are you? Closer than she ever would have thought possible.
According to Carter, the Archer family had lived in Tennessee up until Ronnie turned eight, at which time they’d moved to Georgia so Mr. Archer could take a profitable job. Ava, not a part of Ronnie’s first or s
econd grade classes, had never met him, and Ronnie had never breathed a word about living in Knoxville before his family moved to Atlanta.
Why would he? He’d been hiding so much from her, after all.
She swallowed against another wave of nausea. The urge to be sick came and went, stronger each time, tugging harder at her stomach. She leaned forward and put her head between her knees, took a slow deep breath and let it out through trembling lips.
Ronnie was Mason’s cousin.
Mason’s cousin.
She’d dated Mason’s cousin.
Slept with mason’s cousin.
Brought him home with her, into her family’s house, into this clubhouse.
Hadn’t she had any idea? Carter had wanted to know.
No, because of the club, she’d never jumped on the Facebook bandwagon. She’d never asked Ronnie about his extended family – and it was extended. Mason Senior and Ronnie’s father, William, were first cousins, which made the boys…some kind of cousins.
Hadn’t Ronnie ever done anything to make her suspicious?
No, because she didn’t know enough about non-club men to know what counted as normal.
The shame was relentless, washing over her again and again. She wanted to take a shower until the top layer of her skin had been scrubbed away. Wanted to cut off all her hair, because Ronnie had touched it.
She was up out of her chair and moving toward the dorms before she could register thinking it. Only when she heard the heavy footfalls behind her did she realize she was halfway down the hall, and that Mercy had followed her.
When his big hand closed around her elbow, she tried in vain to jerk away from him.
“Don’t touch me.” Her voice was high, strained, wavering. She turned, trying to twist loose, pushing at his chest with both hands. “Mercy, don’t touch me.”
He held her fast. “Why not?”
“Because how can you?” Her voice broke and she gasped, desperate to stop the tears before they got started. It wasn’t working; her vision blurred. “How could you touch me after you learned that I’d been with him, and that he’s…he’s…oh, God.”
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