Walk For Me: Club Avalon Book 4

by Kay Elle Parker

  Inhaling slowly, aware of his smoke-irritated throat and lungs, Atticus indicated and pulled the van off the road. He left the engine running as he shifted in his seat, his eyes scanning the area and the sudden surge of city life wakening. The daytime civilians were starting their day.

  “I realize I’m being a hard ass,” he said conversationally, meeting Jasper’s eyes, then Thane’s. “I didn’t pull you in on this, Thane, because I know your feelings on…well, this. Taking a life. You have a new beginning with Connie, a fresh start not stained with blood, and it needs to stay that way. Hiring you as a PI was the best way to include you in the family without jeopardizing your mental health, or your relationship. It’s not because I don’t know your worth or your capabilities—trust me, you’d be heading the team if wet work was what you wanted to do. Is it?”

  Amber eyes caught the sunlight, gleaming like a tiger’s. “No. I don’t mind stepping in once every so often, but Connie is more important than missing the feel of a rifle in my hands or looking down a scope.” His boot tapped the case. “My damned leg buckled twice on the stairs in that apartment block. Sniping is a fit man’s game and I’m…over the hill with scars to prove it. A quiet life with Connie is perfect.”

  Atticus breathed a sigh of relief. Fighting with the Domme wasn’t on his agenda, and he was eternally grateful he didn’t have to cross that bridge for this. Connie could put up a damned good fight when she felt passionately about something—her Dom-slash-sub was someone she would turn feral to defend. “Okay, then. I owe you my life, Thane. I owe you Jasper’s life. Two debts that can’t be paid. Saying thank you doesn’t cover it, but…” He reached over and held his hand out, shaking Thane’s as their palms met. “Thank you.”

  “You gave me Constance. She’s all the thanks I’ll ever need.”

  “Well, consider yourself reprimanded,” Atticus told him, releasing his hand so he could shake Jasper’s. “Don’t expect me to be quite as lenient if you take a shot without the green again—I’m a lot fucking faster with a flogger than your Mistress.”

  “Understood, Sir.”

  “One question,” Jasper interjected as Atticus pulled back onto the road. “If you were dressed as a junkie, where the hell did you leave those clothes and find a fucking suit?”

  In answer, Thane worked at the knot of his tie, leaving the ends dangling down his chest as his fingers popped open the buttons on the suit jacket, then the pristine white shirt. “Ripped a few holes in an old T-shirt and rubbed it in some dirt. Same with a pair of shorts. Scuffed my boots up and pulled a shitty baseball cap on.” He kicked the gun case again. “Had to take some of the protective padding out of here to fit the suit in, but I didn’t have time to strip once I took the shot, so I just tossed this on over the top.”

  Atticus heard Velcro rip and chanced a glance over to see his friend yank apart a hidden seam running down the side of his pants leg.

  “Stripper pants?” Jasper crowed in delight. “Fuck me, he’s wearing stripper pants!”

  It was, Att decided, so nice to see a lighter side of Jasper emerge from the clusterfuck that had almost ended him and Anarchy before their story began. The sassy little sub was the sadist’s saving grace, and personally, Atticus couldn’t wait to see what they accomplished together in the next twenty years.

  He frowned as his phone buzzed in his pocket. As a matter of protocol, it was on silent, and everyone involved in the op knew not to call him unless it was an emergency—the earbuds were supposed to be their only method of communication.

  Alicia.

  Lifting his hip, he shoved his hand into his pocket and yanked his phone free, answering the call after a brief glance at the screen. Heart in his throat, he said simply, “Jules.”

  *

  Women were insane.

  Sitting in her nook at the kitchen counter, Alicia listened to Connie and Anarchy arguing over breakfast as though war would break out because there was less nutritional value in toast than there was oatmeal. So far, their voices hadn’t lifted, and their tones weren’t quite triggering her instinctive fear of antagonistic behavior.

  Connie had arrived at just after six a.m. with heavy eyes and a subdued smile, a similar expression to the one Anarchy had started wearing not long after her call to their friend. With a soft tsk of disapproval, she’d subtly taken charge by ordering everyone back to bed for a few hours, which resulted in what amounted to Alicia’s first ever sleepover.

  Luckily, Daddy’s bed was large enough to sleep six, so three women weren’t an issue.

  No one would tell her where Atticus had gone with Jasper. When she’d asked, the answer was always vague. Dissatisfied with the non-answers, she’d pretended to fall asleep a few minutes after the women climbed into bed on either side of her.

  The whispered conversation over her head had harvested more information than she’d wanted to know—and wouldn’t that teach her not to eavesdrop in future—instilling a thick, viscous terror inside her for her Daddy’s safety.

  Like the white, shining knight she’d once dreamed about as a child, he’d ridden into battle with Jasper at his side. A battle he stood no hope of winning, not against the kinds of people her parents had banded together for their own nefarious purposes.

  The gang her parents had started before she was born was now something more than she believed possible. She feared for anyone who walked the same streets as them, the innocent people exposed to secrets and lies, greed and corruption.

  Killing her parents hadn’t stopped the spread of their evil.

  It had scattered it far and wide.

  Connie had told Archie about a reported explosion in the warehouse district, one that had destroyed an entire building. The resulting fire was on the brink of becoming uncontrollable, a second building already alight by the time the fire crews arrived on the scene.

  And then there was the body.

  Just one.

  No mention of male or female, or how the person died.

  Added to that, Thane had decided to join the fray, leaving all three women wondering if their men would be coming home ever again. It was a horrible feeling to process, one she hadn’t yet mastered two hours later.

  Alicia tried to tell herself that if ten days of happiness was all she’d been given in this horrible life, then she would remember every moment of those days until the day she died. But she knew from experience that it never worked like that. In time, Atticus’ face would fade until only a silhouette remained. The clarity of his voice, his laugh, would quieten until she couldn’t hear it anymore.

  Memories died, same as everything else.

  If ten days of happiness was all she got, she didn’t want to live anymore.

  How could they be acting so normal, she wondered, watching the black fog drift in sneaky wisps across the kitchen floor. How could they be bickering over food when their lovers, the men they loved, had gone into a battle where the odds were hopelessly against them?

  Unable to stand it, Alicia pushed herself away from the counter and out of the kitchen, struggling to hold back the horrible pressure straining her chest and throat. She didn’t stop at Daddy’s bedroom, or his office. The scent of him would push her over the edge.

  In the vee of her thighs, Mr. Bear was a sad reminder that all she’d have left if Daddy died was the fluffy stuffie.

  There was no place for her, was there? Braun didn’t want her, that was perfectly clear. Bodie was, for all intents and purposes, a stranger in Alicia’s life, one of those faded memories from a time when they’d been sisters depending on each other to survive the horror of their parents. Now Bodie was all grown up, living with a man who cared for her in the way she deserved, with a baby on the way.

  Nope, no room for the cripple there.

  Jasper and Anarchy didn’t know her well enough to invite her into their home. They were in love, in need of their privacy, and didn’t need a stray messing up their relationship.

  Everywhere Alicia looked, the people around her were f
inding their other halves and setting off on wonderful journeys to discover who they were when they were with the ones they loved, and who loved them equally.

  She stopped in front of the games room doors and pushed one open so she could squeeze her stupid chair through the gap. Closing them quietly, she locked them with a twist of her wrist, leaving the key in the lock. She didn’t want or need company.

  Connie had tried her best to help her, once. Everyone already knew how that had ended, and Alicia doubted even the laidback Thane would consent to taking that thorn back into their home. Because that was what she was—a thorn in everyone’s side, irritating until she became an infection that burrowed under the skin and poisoned the people around her.

  The first tear fell, was viciously swiped away.

  If Daddy died, there was nowhere left for her to go. Her disability money wouldn’t stretch far enough to support her. She didn’t know how to cook or clean, although she could learn how to do all that and more. Her social skills were pathetic, her reading and writing was still at kindergarten level, and she had nothing to offer to society that was in the least helpful.

  A leech sucking on the vein of other people’s generosity and kindness.

  Her hands trembled on the wheel rims as she moved over to the couch and found the remote for the screen. It took her a few minutes of frustration to work out how to pull up the music channels—Daddy had avoided teaching her how to use those.

  The empty hum of the speakers told her she’d done something right at least. She found what she was looking for, but the press of a button had soft, classical music filtering into the room. That wasn’t what she needed. She wanted a song that drove a knife into her heart and stopped the unceasing pain. Music that surged through her veins and cleansed the fear.

  Lyrics that spoke to her, guided her, lifted her away to where thoughts didn’t exist.

  Fumbling through the channels, she stopped on one that seemed promising, listening to the opening notes of a song that pounded into her head. Squinting at the writing on the screen, she managed to spell out Popular Monster before the title flashed off the screen.

  She sat there while the song played, hating the world, hating herself more.

  Why was she like this? Was one stupid moment as a child heinous enough to sentence her to a lifetime of burdening everyone who came in contact with her? Because of her, good men were out there somewhere, facing unmentionable foes.

  One body meant nothing.

  The lucky one, the one destined to be found and grieved, buried properly.

  What if there were more inside that decimated building, the flesh burned from their bones, those bones crumbling to ash as the fire raged? Nothing to bury, no body to say goodbye to, no closure.

  The song ended, replaced by another, but she needed that one. Just that one, over and again. She flipped from channel to channel, but couldn’t find it again. She felt her temper rise, shackled by the lazy tendrils of black fog, and threw the remote at the wall. It connected with a crack, splintering into two plastic pieces and leaving a dent in the plaster.

  The screen blinked off.

  Fuck. Now she’d broken that, too.

  Trapped in silence, Alicia dragged herself onto the couch, curling up as best she could with Mr. Bear. She stared at the big, black screen and watched the fog seep from the glossy surface, filling the room with despair.

  How did people cope with death? Was there a safe, sane method of coping with having her beating heart torn from her chest and pulverized in the fists of fate? Because, honestly, it seemed there was no way back from that level of physical and mental anguish.

  It really was incredibly simple to add up all the negative points and find a solution.

  Time was such a funny entity. Only ten days had passed since Atticus had come for her, whisked her away and shown her what it meant to be loved. Only ten days of freedom. Yet it seemed like she’d been here for months.

  Two weeks ago, she’d laid in a filthy bed, stinking of urine and shit and bile, contemplating death and inviting it to come and carry her off into the night. Suicidal thoughts had been her companion for years, starting about the time she realized there was no escape from her father or his nocturnal visits. They’d circled her head every night from adolescence to present day, biding their time to guide her to doing something about her situation.

  Atticus kept them at bay.

  One by one, the threads holding her world together began to fray.

  “Alicia, sweetheart, are you in there?” A soft knocking on the door accompanied the quiet question. The door handle rattled as Connie tested it. “Archie, she’s here. It’s locked.”

  That was all Alicia heard. Either the women had decided to leave her to her fate, or her brain was doing an exceptional job of shutting out the world. The rate at which the black fog appeared to fill the room told her that her system was functioning on overtime.

  Closing her eyes, she ignored it for as long as she could.

  It was never long enough.

  Only a few minutes passed before she thought of death and the questions it brought to the surface. Questions she could never ask, because everyone thought she was suicidal and morbid. Well, she supposed they were half right—over the past fourteen years, she’d learned that there were circumstances that could push her to that edge and look down into the chasm without blinking.

  People didn’t fear dying, she’d come to understand. Most people thought they did, that they were scared of the unknown. After all, there was nothing to say there was another life after this, that there was heaven or hell in existence. Not knowing what comes next seemed to be the crux of everyone’s inner terror.

  In actuality, it seemed to Alicia that the true fear was leaving those they loved behind. Family, friends, pets, a life that might have been passing by swimmingly before it was cut off at the knees. None of it mattered in that moment when the heart stopped and the life drained from a person’s eyes, and yet all of it was so vital, because when it came down to the finish line, it was the only mark that person left on the world.

  How pathetic that her mark consisted of a smudge, easily washed away like bug smears on a windshield. Her only family was a sister who’d moved on with her life, oblivious to the sacrifices Lisha had made to keep her safe from their father. She had less friends than she had fingers on one hand, and she’d never known the pleasure of a pet.

  Ten days of happiness, she reminded herself. Ten days she would never have had if Atticus hadn’t come for her. In an alternate universe where she’d stayed in the facility and he hadn’t cared enough to rescue her, she’d have died in that stinking bed, humiliated and starving, bald and raw.

  Ten days was a blessing.

  “Alicia. Hey, sweetie.”

  Anarchy’s voice was a lot closer than it should have been. She blinked her eyes open, sure she wouldn’t see anything but the black pit, but a sad brown gaze stared back at her from a pretty face framed with locks of blonde hair.

  Oh, how she wanted to ask if Archie knew who was dead yet.

  “Come on, let’s sit you up.” Anarchy’s hands stroked her arms as she tried to pull her into an upright position.

  “Leave her, Archie.” This time, it was Connie’s voice, snapping through the fog in a tone Alicia had never heard her use before. Deeper, sultrier, commanding. “No more coddling her—leave that to her Daddy. Sit up, Alicia.”

  No, she thought wearily.

  “Connie, look at her. She’s hardly fit to—”

  Alicia watched, mesmerized despite herself, as Connie glared at the little blonde, then jabbed her finger at the nearest chair. What was even more confusing was that Anarchy clamped her lips together without a word of protest, and dropped into the seat.

  How the hell had they gotten through a goddamn locked door?

  “Now, little miss, I mean it. Sit yourself up and snap the hell out of this.” Stepping up to the couch, Connie folded her arms and turned that glare on Alicia. “We’ve been through
this before, you and I, too many fucking times to count. I’m done with being the nice psychologist, trying to sympathize with what you’ve been through and making both of us sick with the effort. Now sit up.”

  If this wasn’t the nice psychologist, then who the hell was she? This version of Connie was meaner, sterner, and completely in control. There were dark circles beneath her eyes, stress lines around the edges, but those eyes…the gray was dark and stormy, the expression in them stating with perfect clarity that Connie would no longer put up with her shit.

  Like a tuning fork pinging off the right frequency, Alicia felt her body respond to the command, pushing herself up until the back of the couch supported her spine. She dare not look the woman in the eye—it suddenly seemed disrespectful to do so when Connie wore this persona.

  “Good girl. I’m not going to talk at you all day, Alicia. I’m not going to lecture you. If you want to speak, we’ll listen without judgement.” Connie’s head tilted, her fall of hair cascading over her shoulder. She hadn’t even taken the time to tame it after she’d woken up. “If you have questions, we’ll give you the answers you need.”

  Clutching Mr. Bear to her chest, she blurted, “Who are you?”

  “The same person you’ve always known, Alicia. I’m sure Atticus has explained that I’m a Switch, yes? Well, this is the Domme side of me. Think of me as the female equivalent of Jasper.”

  Alicia’s eyes damn near popped out of her head. “You’re a sadist?”

  “That’s something you’d have to ask Thane.” Pain flickered through those gray eyes for a second before the dominance masked it. “Sadistic tendencies, perhaps, when needed. Next question.”

  “Is he dead?” Lisha glanced at Anarchy. “Are they all dead?”

  “Little ears hear everything they’re not supposed to,” Connie muttered. Unfolding her arms, she sat beside Alicia and dragged her fingers through her hair. Her tone gentled several times over. “What do you know?”

  Hesitantly, sure she was going to be shouted at, Alicia relayed everything she’d heard being whispered between Connie and Anarchy earlier that morning. She flinched when Connie lifted her hand, then relaxed as she simply ran it over her face. The look the Domme shot Anarchy was resigned.