by Heather Long
One, because I was an asshole and if my dick had to behave, so did his.
Two, because even though Vaughn had his hard dick out in all its glory, she’d remained cuddled up to me.
So Vaughn was shit out of luck.
After breakfast, Rome pulled Sparrow out before she’d even finished her coffee or gotten anything to eat. And I wasn’t the only one irritated.
“Hey,” Vaughn said. “What the hell?”
“We’ll be fine,” Rome said over his shoulder. “She needs a break.” From what, he didn’t have to say. I had a feeling it wasn’t just a break from Freddie, but from all of us.
“I’m more worried about her being spotted.” I kept my tone even as I sipped my coffee. Rome had been there. He knew. We still hadn’t had much luck tracking down the source of the bounty. I assumed it had to be her family or someone close to them.
That didn’t endear any of them to me, because the kind of people a bounty brought to the table were downright dangerous. Rome poked his head around the corner and flipped me off.
That translated well. Fuck off, he had it covered. Blowing out a breath, I shook my head and checked the time. Jasper was overdue for a check-in.
“You have something you want to tell me?” Vaughn asked, and I spared him a look. Sounded like someone’s balls were aching.
Well, I’d feel worse if I hadn’t had to listen to them on and off for days.
Who was I kidding? No, I wouldn’t. Vaughn was a good guy, but every once in a while, it was good to remind him that he couldn’t talk himself into or out of anything he liked.
“Nope,” I said, draining my mug of coffee. “I’m running by the diner before I head to the shop.”
“I thought you were off today.”
Well, before Rome pulled his disappearing act with her, I had been. It was fine. I had a couple of old beaters I was rehabbing, and I needed some time to think.
“I’ll see you later.” At the entrance to the kitchen, I paused and glanced back at him. “Stick close for Freddie and keep an eye on the rats. They’re being extremely obedient lately.”
“Maybe because Rome knocked one of JD’s teeth out?” Vaughn said dryly. “And not all that long ago, Jasper took an axe to a guy’s hand?”
I shrugged. “Not the first time…well, maybe the axe.” The sword was put away neatly in my room. “Still, keep an eye on them. I got that itch at the back of my head.”
Vaughn frowned. “I put a GPS chip in her phone.”
That was good to know. Burners didn’t always come with them. Vaughn was pretty good with delicate work, including adding devices. “Thanks, keep track of her. I don’t think it’s her but…” I couldn’t shake the feeling. It had been there before her nightmare and that blood-curdling scream of despair ripped me out of a dead sleep.
I’d come through that door with a gun ready to shoot whatever was attacking her. The moment I’d touched her, she’d fought. I took the blows ’cause I needed to get through to her, but it was the sobs that killed me.
Absolutely fucking gutted me. Something had happened. Something she didn’t want anyone to know. We knew about the now very dead and gone partner. So if it wasn’t him, then what?
Fuck. “I’ll be back.” She’d begged me not to tell anyone, and I’d kept this promise. The quiet gratitude in her eyes when I said nothing that next morning and pointed out her room was dusty when Freddie noticed her reddened eyes made me feel like a jackass.
I was halfway to my car when my phone rang. Half expecting Jasper’s name to pop up, I paused at Doc’s. He’d taken a huge interest in Sparrow. I hadn’t said much because she also seemed to take a lot of comfort in him, still…
“Hey,” I said as I unlocked the car and slid inside. The Jeep was gone. Vaughn’s car was there, but Jasper’s was missing and the refurbished Jeep I’d fixed up a couple of years earlier was gone.
Probably better Rome took her out in a car than on foot. It irked though.
“You seen Jasper?” Well, so much for pleasantries. Maybe Jasper had been spending too much time with Doc. “He’s ignoring my calls.”
“He’s working,” I told him as I started the engine and scanned the warehouse. There were a pair of rats on guard duty. There should be three, and there he was walking out of the bathroom and zipping up his fly. All three of them were decent enough. “What’s up?”
“Raptor knows.”
All the blood in my body chilled at once, and I let out a long breath. A stream of curses danced through my brain, but I gave voice to none of them. “He was in solitary.”
“I’m aware, he’s not anymore. He’s also getting cut loose today.”
“What?” I barely managed a nod to the guys at the doors as they rolled up to let me out. The phone had transferred to the hands-free. “I thought he had…”
“It doesn’t matter,” Doc continued in a very guarded tone. Almost too guarded.
“What do you know?”
“I know you dumbasses should have found a way to get him a message.”
“He was in fucking solitary, how were we supposed to do that? Not every guard is on the take, and we’re supposed to be keeping it clean out here as much as possible.” Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
“Yeah well, he called me. He found out she was missing. It was literally the first thing he checked as soon as he was able to get news.”
“You told him.” It wasn’t a question.
“I thought he had a right to know, and he was going to lose his fucking mind.”
I slammed my hand against the steering wheel once, then sucked it up. “How is he getting out?”
“I don’t know. He just called me for a ride. He didn’t want to take the bus back in…”
No, that wouldn’t be safe. “Where are you?”
“My place,” he said. “I closed the clinic for the day.”
“Stay there, I’ll pick you up.” Then I hung up before he could tell me no. I called Jasper next, but the call went straight to voicemail. He either had his phone off or he was out of range of a cell tower.
Fuck. At the beep, I said, “Hawk, call me back when you get this. I don’t care what time.” A part of me wanted to leave him the warning and a part of me knew better. We never left messages that might compromise anything.
It was just safer.
To my surprise, Doc waited at the curb when I pulled up. The look he gave me said he could have skinned me alive. He pulled open the passenger door at my arrival and eyed me. “Don’t ever hang up on me.”
“I wanted you to stay put.” I shrugged. “And I want to know what you told him. Exactly.”
“You can ask him,” Doc said as he slid into the car and settled in. “Where’s Little Bit?”
“She’s with Rome. And no, she doesn’t know. You called me after they left.”
“Wouldn’t matter if I called you before, you punks have had time to put all the pieces in a row and you haven’t.” He sounded so damn aggrieved.
“Why does this piss you off so much?” I swung back out onto the road and headed for the highway. We could grab food when we got to Camden. We had at least ninety minutes to get there, and I had plenty of gas.
He just shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“A lot of that going around, apparently.” I barely resisted rolling my eyes as I tightened my grip on the steering wheel. We needed a plan, not an argument. At the same time, Mickey J wasn’t just the kid who bailed us out when we got in over our heads anymore and we weren’t kids.
We hadn’t been in a long time.
“What’s going on?” Doc asked. “Freddie holding out?”
“He’s having good days and bad.” I had to bite back the retort of he wouldn’t understand, especially after the crap he’d given me. “As for the rest, it’s just shit…more shit than we need to deal with.”
Doc made some noncommittal sound, but he didn’t say anything. The silence filled the car, and even though I was tempted to turn on the music, I waited
him out.
“What’s eating you?” I asked after we’d gone thirty minutes without saying a single word. “For real?”
“Raptor,” Doc answered. “You kids…Jasper. The choices you guys all made.”
“They were our choices. We made them.” I wasn’t going to justify any of them, not to him. “Just like you made yours. You saw a way out and you took it. No different for us.”
“Are you shitting me with that?” Doc asked. “I’ll grant you guys are better than some, but you’re still a bunch of bangers who are playing at bigger business, cutting off the hold of bigger gangs and interrupting their trade. Not to mention, you’re slowly but surely extending your grip over this city. Don’t think I’m fooled by some of the moves you’ve been making.”
I didn’t confirm or deny anything. “We did what we had to do.”
“The mind that came up with this plan could have done a hell of a lot more,” he said with another long sigh. “All of you could.”
I chuckled. “Doc, you worried about us? Still?”
“You guys were family.”
“We still are.” I left the rest of that sentence untouched. As angry as Jasper was and as determined as he was to keep Doc at arm’s length, Raptor’s return was going to change a lot of things. “That’s why we stuck together.”
Why I stayed.
I could have taken the same out Doc had. I thought about it, every once in a while, what life would have been. But then I wouldn’t have been here when… Yeah, I just wouldn’t have been here.
“You guys should have told me,” Doc said finally. “I get it, Raptor was in solitary, but you should have told me that night you brought her in.”
“You didn’t need to know,” I said with a shrug. “I didn’t think we were keeping her.” Maybe I shouldn’t admit that, but it was something he needed to know. “But she’s better off here. She’s better off with us. Jasper was dead right about that, and if I hadn’t believed it before, I do now.”
“Why now?”
“It’s complicated.”
“That little fucker you guys were tearing apart? He’s dead, right? She said he was dead.”
I nodded. “He won’t touch her again.”
Doc nodded. There was a coldness in that nod, and more, there was a sense of satisfaction. “Did she get to see it? “
“No,” I snapped. “What the fuck, Doc? She doesn’t need to see that shit.” Hell, she’d already seen a couple of dead bodies, and that was two too many.
“Maybe she needs to see it when she was the one who suffered. Killing him probably felt good. He got what he deserved. But what about her?”
I opened my mouth to argue that, but I couldn’t. I snapped it shut. She didn’t need to see that side of our lives. That was literally the first thought that crossed my mind, but she had seen it. She’d seen it when those 19Ds had tried to go after her for no other reason than she was there. She’d seen it when those investigators tried to steal her out of the shop.
She hadn’t broken.
Then the image of her sobbing against me flooded my mind, and I squeezed the steering wheel. Was that what made her cry? She hadn’t seen that fucker die for real? She didn’t have the guarantee that he wouldn’t come back?
Fuck. Me.
There was no way to fix that.
A dull headache formed behind my eyes. “What would you have done?” Because really, if he thought he knew better, I’d like to hear it.
“I don’t know,” Doc said slowly. “I might still be skinning the little fuck.”
“He wasn’t so little.” Laughter escaped me. “And aren’t you supposed to be all about healing?”
“It would be therapeutic,” Doc said.
“And here I thought you didn’t agree with what we did.”
“I didn’t say that, I just said she should have had the opportunity to see it. And you should have cut his dick off.”
“We did.”
He cut a look in my direction. “Good.”
Well, at least on that we agreed. It was the last we said on the subject. We still had another thirty minutes to go and then… Well fuck it all, I really didn’t know what happened next.
Raptor was coming home. It was about damn time and it worried the fuck out of me all in the same breath.
Us
Rome
“You could come, you know,” Liam said for the fourteenth time since he’d met with the O’Connells. “They know I’m a twin, and I told them I wouldn’t go without you.”
I shrugged. “They don’t want me.”
“They don’t know you.” Liam folded his arms and leaned against the wall of our room. I didn’t look up from my sketchbook. I almost had the look of her face right. “You could try,” he said softly. “Just this once. For me?”
The last two words halted my pencil. “Liam, I’m not like you. I like it here. I like our friends. I like—”
“Being left alone,” he said, finishing the thought for me. “Where no one has any expectations and you can do what you want. But we could have a family again…”
“I have a family.” Resuming my focus on the sketching, I refused to look at him. I didn’t want him to see the fact I’d already made peace with him going. He needed the challenges. He would thrive. They could give him a lot more than they could give me. “You’re my family. The guys are our family. Whether you stay or go, nothing changes between us.”
“Goddammit, Rome,” Liam snarled as he stomped over to the bed, then froze. He’d seen what I was sketching. “Dammit.” This time, the curse came out a lot softer, far more resigned.
It was Liam with the O’Connells. They looked happy.
So did he. But he wouldn’t let himself be happy if he thought he was abandoning me.
“I don’t want to do this without you,” he admitted as he sank down to sit on the floor next to the bed. I rolled on my side and touched the back of my head to his. His sigh weighed on me. “You think I should.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Why the hell do you think I’d choose them over you guys?” The wounded note hit me, and I sighed. “I wouldn’t. Ever.” His sigh echoed my own. “That’s not what you’re saying, is it?”
We sat there like that in silence.
“No, you want this for me. Why?”
“Because,” I told him softly. “You were built for that life. You could do amazing things. Just because you go home with them, it doesn’t change who you are, just what you can do.”
I’d thought about this a lot. The foster parents, they didn’t like me much. Too different. I didn’t react like the other kids. I was too quiet. Kept too much to myself. There were always criticisms, quietly offered and never mean, but I heard them.
I heard them all.
They weren’t wrong.
“Rome…”
“I know.”
And I did.
“You’re my brother.”
“Always,” he swore aloud, not that he needed to. “You’re my better half,” he said without an ounce of irony. “I won’t go if they take me too far from you.”
There it was. He did want to go. Even if he hadn’t been able to admit it to himself. He wanted the opportunities the O’Connells offered him. He liked the couple. Genuinely.
“Will you think about going with me?”
I couldn’t lie to him. “No,” I murmured, then rolled back to where I’d been sketching and went to work. “I don’t belong there.”
“You belong anywhere I am.”
“Then I’ll already be there, won’t I?”
I glanced at him, and our gazes locked. This was absolutely the last thing he wanted, the desire for more conflicting with his need to stick with me, but that was why I could do this.
He would leave for us.
I would stay for us.
Because, as always, we were us.
Chapter 27
Emersyn
When we left the clubhouse, all Rome said was he wanted to s
how me something. The quiet intensity he delivered the request had made me say yes without hesitation or a second thought. Vaughn’s disappointment weighed on me as much as his lingering stare when I gave him a quick kiss farewell to follow Rome.
Whatever Rome wanted to show me was not in town, or at least not close, because we took a car. I had on a hat and sunglasses with a heavy hoodie to hide my face. As it turned out, the spot he wanted to go was down the coast from Braxton Harbor. I was glad for the breakfast and coffee he picked up for us, because we made a picnic of it, sitting on a large rock below an overpass that overlooked a stony shoal. The water washed pebbles were all different shades, and the sun glinting off the water made them glitter.
We’d had to climb down from where he parked, following a shallow set of sheer steps with only a rope for railing. Rome had on a heavy backpack and he went first, but I had no trouble navigating it. At the base, I discovered exactly why this was one of Rome’s favorite spots.
On the underpass, still half shrouded in shadows, were massive paintings. There were ropes attached to the underpass, and I had a feeling the climbing harnesses he’d pulled out of the pack were for those. I studied one as we ate, trying to make out the different features, though half of it was still too dark to truly make out.
They were people.
I had to think they were the Vandals, maybe. Hey… “Are you the reason that you guys are called the Vandals?”
He quirked an eyebrow at me, and a smile flashed across his lips before he hid his mouth by taking a drink of coffee. “Do you think the paintings are vandalizing anything?”
Laughing, I shook my head. “Only in the absolute best ways.”
The softness of his chuckle stroked over me. Between the warmth of the sun on the rocks and the sound of the waves gently lapping against the rocky shoal, a kind of peace invaded me. Maybe I was still too raw from the all too realistic nightmare. At the same time, the thought of any of them handing me over to my uncle made me sick to my stomach.
