Price of Angels (15 page)

              No way did either of the Teague women, or Mercy, or probably even Aidan want him at the family table.

- “but either way, I think you need a break. You’re tense.”

Michael took a deep breath. “Is that an order?”

“A suggestion. From one stressed bastard to another.” Ghost grinned. “You’re twitchy, and that’s not normal.”
Or helpful
, was the unspoken sentiment.

“I’ll think about it,” Michael consented.

Ava was pulling the cling wrap off the brownies when church let out, and the boys came into the common room.

              Aidan reached her first. “Shit. Are they poisoned?” He lifted one of her double chocolate brownies with green and red sprinkles, holding it to the light with a grimace. “Am I gonna die if I eat this?”

              “Of sheer bliss,” she said in a falsely sweet voice that she saved just for her brother. “They’re pretty good, if I do say so.”

              “What’s in ‘em?”

              “Chocolate chips
and
chocolate chunks. Hence the double chocolate brownies.”

              Tango joined them, and asked her with a glance if he could have one, waiting for her nod before lifting one from the plate. “They smell fantastic, hon.”

              “Thank you, Kev.” She sighed and looked at her brother. “Why can’t you learn from him how to talk to people properly?”

              He ignored her. “No, I meant, what’s
in
them?” He made a face and tilted the brownie toward her top side-up.

              “On them,” Ava corrected. “Those would be sprinkles, Aidan.”

              His face intensified in its disgust. “Why’d you do that?”

              “They’re festive that way.”

              “Yeah, man,” Mercy said, drawing up to the bar and knocking his shoulder into Aidan hard enough to set him off balance for a half-step. “It’s festive. Get with the program.” He took two from the tray, took a huge bite of one to prove to the others that they were not in fact poisoned, and then spoke around it as he chewed.

              “Writer’s block?” he asked Ava, face sympathetic.

              This was the third time in ten days she’d brought baked goods to the clubhouse for all the guys. “Really bad,” she said. “My brain won’t cooperate.”

              “That’s the baby,” Briscoe said. “My Darla couldn’t focus on anything when she was pregnant with Ethan. She messed up the checkbook once, and then thought we were five grand short when it came time to pay the credit card bills.” He rolled his eyes, then offered her one of his friendly, gap-toothed smiles. “It’ll get better.”

              “Sorry.” Mercy leaned over to kiss her forehead. “Brownies are good though.”

              Aidan had finally taken a bite of his, and shrugged, forehead smoothing in surprise. “That’s not bad.”

              “You dork, you ate the cookies I made earlier in the week.”

              “Those were yours?”

              “Ava,” Ghost said, appearing beside her much like his club nickname suggested. “Are you trying to win some kind of old lady award? I keep telling you we don’t have one of those.”

              She bit back on a smart retort. He’d questioned her just a few days ago about the time she spent cooking, and the time she spent with her mother, and at the clubhouse. He was worried, in the same old Ghost-way, that she had given up her grad school and author dreams for Mercy. “Dad,” she’d told him, “no one wants me to pursue my writing more than he does. I can balance it. I can be an old lady and a writer too. Stop worrying.”

              He’d never stop, though.

              “I made too big a batch,” she said now. “I didn’t realize till they were in the oven that the recipe said it served twelve.”

              “And we’re glad for it,” Dublin said, coming to take one.

              “She’s working on a new story right now, aren’t you, baby?” Mercy said. To Ghost: “She’s gonna enter it in a writing contest. Where is it? Seattle?”

              Ava nodded.

              She could tell Ghost still flinched a little every time Mercy called her some pet name. And that was only hearing the tame, in-public ones, that had nothing to do with her eagerness in bed. Poor Dad. He was never going to relax.

              But he nodded, said, “That’s good,” and gave them both an awkward smile before he walked off.

              When the others were gone, brownies in hands and mouths, Mercy dropped his voice to a conspiratorial volume and said, “He’s just sore I keep calling him Gramps.”

              Ava grinned. “I thought you liked Papa T?”

              “Hmm. That’s too nice for him, isn’t it? Makes me think of someone with a bald spot and a spare tire.”

              She shrugged. “I like Poppy.”

              Mercy’s face split with the most evil smile. “Poppy? Oh, that’s it, then. Poppy. Pretty pretty Poppy.”

              “As in Pop, not as in the flower.”

              “Too late, I’m already visualizing it.” He sat down on a bar stool and reached for another brownie. “Poppy. You’re brilliant, you know that?”

              “I’m sure Dad will think so too.” She shook her head.

              A flicker of movement behind Mercy drew her eyes, and she was startled to see Michael approaching them, his walk silent across the boards, his expression something more careful and emotional than the usual Terminator mask.

              She was mildly shocked. He’d never spoken to her, never come willingly toward her, never eaten any of the baked goods she’d brought in for the boys. And yet it appeared that he was about to do all three, coming up to the bar, making eye contact with her.

              Mercy turned toward him with a mixture of surprise and veiled hostility.

              Ava spoke before Mercy could. “Michael. Hi.”

              He nodded. “Hello.”

              Ava nudged the plate toward him. “Brownie?”

              He glanced down at the offering, then back at her face. If he saw the way Mercy was glaring at him, he didn’t acknowledge it. He stared at her a long moment, until Mercy cleared his throat rudely and Ava had begun to twitch inside her sweater, the heavy weave suddenly itchy beneath his intense scrutiny.

              Finally, he said, “Can I ask you something?”

              “Sure.”

              And then he just stared some more. Saying nothing, not even blinking.

              “What do you–” she started.

              He pulled back and turned away, striding through the common room and down the entry hall toward the front door.

              “Fucking creep,” Mercy said, glaring after him.

              Ava touched the pulse point in the side of her neck, felt the rapid tattoo adrenaline and fear had brought on. “Something’s up with him.”

              “Yeah, he’s a fucking creep.”

              “No…something else.”

Eight

She would be better off, Holly reasoned, to stop thinking about him. She would put him from her mind, stop engaging him if he came into the bar, and let him fade slowly from her every waking thought. She would stop penning his name in her journal, stop seeing it printed in her slanted, masculine handwriting each night. She’d ask one of the other girls to take his drink and dinner order. She’d do what she’d always done best: make herself small and unnoticeable.

              A great idea in theory. But when he came into Bell Bar at his usual time, he wasn’t carrying a book, and his gaze wasn’t fixed to the floor like it always was. He took his table, and she felt his eyes come straight to her across the dim interior, locking on like laser guided missiles.

              She felt a weakness ripple through her, a softening of muscles, a clawing desperation. She didn’t want to stop thinking about him. It wasn’t just about him being The One anymore, the perfect killer. Mostly, it was just about him, and the way being around him made her want to be around him more.

              Was this what normal women felt for normal men? Or was this just as twisted as every other part of her life?

              He wanted her to come to him – that was plain by the way he watched her. But she wasn’t going to hop to. She’d done plenty of that in the past, out of fear, and necessity. She’d followed orders to stay alive. But she wasn’t afraid of Michael.

              She felt the tiniest flexing of power inside herself. He didn’t own her, control her. She could make him wait a second. He, in his calmness, steadiness, his self-assured masculinity, had given her the gift of that tiny power. And because she was so grateful for that, she finally went by the bar, picked up his usual Jack, and went to his table.

              His eyes were still fixed to her face.

              She tried to appear calm, indifferent. “Something to eat?” she asked, setting the whiskey in front of him.

              “A burger. I don’t care. Something.”

              So unlike him.

              Holly nodded, and turned to walk away.

              “Hol.”

              The shortening of her name froze her to the spot. She dampened her lips, lifted her brows, tried to keep her voice steady. How stupid, she thought, that something like a nickname should leave her breathless and giddy.

              “Yes?”

              “The food can wait. Sit with me.”

              It was both an order and a request, the harshness of his voice softened by the fractional lifting of his brows.

              She couldn’t have refused if she’d wanted to.

              Holly slid into the booth across from him, tray leaning absently against her leg. She didn’t speak, but waited for him to say whatever it was that was burning inside him, forcing him to breach all his protocols.

              He downed the whiskey in one gulp without flinching, and said, “I want you to tell me about them. The men who you…” Elegant gesture.
Wanted me to kill
. “What did they do to you, Holly? Why did they follow you here?”

              She felt panic welling at the idea of telling him. But she felt something else, too: a relief, so profound she could cry, lingering at the horizon. He wasn’t giving up on her after all. He’d come back around to the idea. He wanted to know. And if she told him, it might ease this awful ache of knowing her own past. Living with what had happened was exhausting. She would never want to burden someone with her story, but Michael wasn’t
someone
. He was the sergeant at arms for the Lean Dogs MC, and he’d seen his share of horrors, no doubt. She held such hope that this outlaw might understand her outsider soul.

              She leaned toward him. She wanted to touch him, but refrained. “Not here. Can you wait till I get off tonight?”

              He nodded. “I’ll follow you home.”

              The earnest attention in his hazel eyes was too much. She did touch him, reaching forward to briefly close her hand over the back of his. Then she left, before he could retract his interest.

There were a handful of lights on at the Victorian mansion, including the lamps Holly had left blazing in her attic loft, the tiny Christmas tree twinkling behind the fogged glass.

              Inside, there were the faint sounds of music, and the smell of sweets baking.

              “Mrs. Chalmers has insomnia and does night baking,” Holly explained. “And Eric never sleeps, I don’t think.”

              He followed her up both shadowed stairwells, the old house creaking under their feet. Muffled human noises from the other tenants: a cough, a murmur of a voice, a door closing, water running, TV rumbling. Did no one go to sleep in this place? It was almost four.

              Oh well. This way, nobody would be disturbed by them moving around in the attic.

              The loft was almost too warm, and Michael peeled off his jacket, hung it up on one of the pegs inside the door.

              Holly took off her jacket too, and kicked off her uniform sneakers, but she didn’t go change clothes, as he expected. She was drawn tight as a bowstring tonight, nervous and furtive, and exhausted because of it. She walked to the kitchenette, pulled a bottle from an upper shelf, and took a long slug from it as she walked back toward him.

              It was Crown Royal, he saw the label as she reached him, and she was drinking it straight down like water.

              “That’s some nasty shit,” he informed her. He felt clumsy and awkward, here in her personal, feminine space, with her in such a fragile state.

              She shrugged. “All of it’s nasty. It gets the job done.” She sat down on her peach sofa, curled her bare legs up under her, tugging at the hem of her silk shorts. She clutched the bottle into her middle. “Sit,” she said, and he did, settling beside her, an arm’s length between them.

              Holly let her head fall to the side, against the back of the sofa. It was wearing her out already, thinking about what she’d say to him. The lamplight caught the shadows beneath her eyes. She looked small and pretty, like he could pick her up in one hand.

              “Your father, your uncle, your husband,” Michael said, recalling what she’d said before.

              She nodded, silken hair rustling against the sofa. “Some of their friends were involved sometimes, but I never knew their names. It was usually too dark to see their faces.”

              Michael felt the slow, even pounding of his heart against his ribs. He didn’t want to hear the story she was about to tell him. The dread was already building in him, swirling like bile at the base of his throat. But he needed to know how bad it had been. He needed to have this justification for what he was fast realizing he had to do.

              “What did they do to you, honey?” he asked, quietly, his shoulders stiff with anticipation.

              She closed her eyes a moment, pain lining her face. “Promise me something first.”

              He waited until her eyes were open, and nodded.

              “Try – at least try, please – not to hate me, after I tell you.”

              “I won’t.”

              Her smile was small and wry. She took a deep breath. “My mother fell in love with a monster…”

Holly had a handful of precious, closely-guarded memories of her mother. Lila Jessup had been slight, almost boyish, with lush tangles of dark hair that were always catching in the wind. She was soft-spoken, always-gentle. Trapped in the old farmhouse out in the woods, with no one but her husband and daughter for company, she had been far from depressed. She loved nature; she knew the name of every songbird, every tree and tiny sprouting flower.

              She took Holly by the hand, and together they walked the wooded trails, passing in and out of golden shafts of sunlight, freezing at the sight of a doe and fawn passing through the trees, staying so silent the mother deer never noticed them, and they could marvel at the fawn’s perfect blanket of white spots.

              They clipped flowers and carried them back to the house to arrange in old jelly jars and sweet tea glasses, set up in the window above the sink, so the sun shone through the water and translucent petals. Lila knew which berries were safe to eat, and she baked them into pies and tarts. She stood behind tiny Holly, helping her roll out the dough with the floured pin, holding her little hands steady on the knife as they cut the lattice strips for the pie tops.

              Holly’s father, Abraham, was a handyman, on the road all day every day looking for work among the local farms. Fixing a fence here, installing a new bathroom sink there, mowing grass in summer and shoveling snow in winter.

              On Sundays, he held a bible study group in their living room, somber men in pressed plaid shirts talking about the King James version for hours, smoking cigarette after cigarette until the entire house was swimming with the exhalations. Those were the days when Lila took Holly down to the pond, where they hunted for frogs and minnows. And inevitably, Abraham would come looking for them, and he’d grab Lila by the arm, squeezing until Lila’s skin was red, and take her back to the house.

              Abraham’s brother, Holly’s Uncle Jacob, stayed with them often. He didn’t work, and spent his afternoons on the sofa, watching soaps and calling for Lila to bring him another beer, to rub his feet, to treat him “like a good sister should.”

              A horrible memory, one Holly couldn’t shake: She came bolting into the house, pigtails flying behind her, clutching a bundle of wildflowers for her mother. Down the long cool hallway from the front door, Holly stepped into the kitchen, and tried to make sense of what she saw.

              Her mother stood at the kitchen sink, hands braced on the porcelain edge, eyes fixed on the window, face blank and lifeless. Her legs were spread wide, and her dress was hiked up to her waist in back, so her pale legs were bared up to her round white bottom. Jacob stood behind her, right up against her. His jeans were unbuttoned. His hips thrust forward, again, again, a fierce gyration, almost like he was dancing. He panted, and grunted, his face pressed into Lila’s hair. His hands clutched at Lila’s thighs, leaving dark bruises. And Lila rocked forward with each movement, swaying in time to Jacob’s hips.

              Neither of them noticed small, silent Holly standing there.

              “Say you like it,” Jacob growled. “You say you like it, bitch!”

              “I like it,” Lila said in a high, breathless voice, as devoid of emotion as her face.

              Holly fled, running out of the house, across the yard, into the forest until she thought her lungs would burst. She sank down onto the dirt path, and sobbed into her hands, the flowers scattered at her feet, the songbirds trilling in the trees above.

              Lila found her just before nightfall, her smile its usual warm reassurance. “Come on, darling. It’s dinner time.” She took Holly’s hand and pulled her up, and Holly didn’t dare mention what she’d seen, though Lila’s eyes were sad, like she knew anyway.

              It grew worse after that. Lila’s dress torn open in the front, her lip split, Abraham zipping up his jeans in the middle of the living room on a Saturday afternoon, Holly unseen in the doorway.

              At night, when she should have been sleeping, Holly saw Jacob go into the bedroom with both her parents. Heard the door lock. Heard the incomprehensible sounds from within. Saw her mother’s bruised wrists the next morning.

A Saturday. Cold kitchen. No sign of Lila. Abraham and Jacob sat at the table, smoking, foreheads heavy with creases.

              “What’re we gonna do?” Jacob asked. “Dig a hole?”

              Abraham glared at his brother. “We wouldn’t have to do anything if you hadn’t covered her damn mouth.”

              “You did it too!”

              “But I didn’t suffocate her!”

              Abraham tapped the ash off his cigarette onto a teacup saucer and sighed. “We can’t just leave her up there.”

              Holly crept up the stairs on her tiptoes. To her parents’ bedroom. Door ajar. Narrow ribbon of light slithering across the hall floor.

              The door swung inward with the lightest touch. Sun pouring through the bare windows, framing the wooden bedstead. Ropes at all four posts. Lila, pale and limp, lashed to the bed, naked, her skin tinged with blue. Eyes open, glassy. Mouth agape. Like she was screaming. But her skin was cold, cold when Holly touched her.

              “Mommy?”

              But there was no response.

An unmarked grave in the forest, a place where the dirt was fresh and wet on top. No explanation from anyone.

              Jacob moved into the house permanently.

              Holly scattered wildflowers over the place where her mother was buried. She sat in the woods for long hours, watching the deer come and go, watching the fawn grow into a young buck with tiny buds for antlers.