She rolled her eyes. “I’m fine. I have so much schoolwork still to catch up on. I can’t afford to take any more days off.”
Aidan paused with breakfast halfway to his mouth. “Um…you know what happened to you, right?” He cringed, like he hated the thought. “Or did the bump on the head - ?”
“I know exactly what happened to me.”
He took a bite, chewed slowly. “Okay.”
“You’re the one being weird about it.”
He swallowed. “I expected–”
“Crying? Screaming?”
“Yeah.” Some of the usual snark came back into his voice. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you how to be a girl?”
She twitched a thin smile. “No. I was raised by Dogs and the women who take care of them.” She glanced at the door, the freedom that lay down the hall. “I want to see Mercy.”
Aidan snorted. “Yeah. That’s not happening.”
She didn’t have any patience for him this morning. “Since when do you give a shit who I do or don’t see?”
There was a flash of some new aggression, something truer and meaner than his usual bad boy swagger, something more like Dad. “Since a member of this goddamn club forced himself on my kid sister.”
Anger boiled inside her, burning through the haze of painkillers, throbbing against the bruises on her head and face. “He’s never forced me to do anything in my life. Don’t you dare start rumors about him. It isn’t like that, and if you didn’t have your head shoved up your own ass all the time, you’d see that.”
His handsome face set at terrible angles, the temper churning behind his eyes. “You don’t get to talk to a member like that–”
“I’m not. I’m talking to my no-account asshole brother.”
They glared at one another, the cold room bristling with Teague energy, that restless heat and anger they’d both inherited from their father.
“I want to see him,” Ava said, finally.
“Too fucking bad.”
There was a sharp rap at the edge of the open door, and Ghost half-stepped in, looking drawn up and taller than he was, and about five years older, too, the lines and gray hairs prominent in the harsh light.
Ava waited for the girlhood fear to hit her, that high-resolution respect that had haunted her every misstep growing up. But it didn’t come. Her pulse was an unchangeable tattoo against the soft inners of her wrists as she met his gaze unflinching.
“You’re up,” Ghost said, mirroring Aidan’s words and guarded expression. “You feeling alright? How many fingers am I holding up?” He didn’t move his hand.
“I don’t have brain damage, Dad,” she said with a sigh.
He grunted. “Good for you. Too bad I can’t say the same thing.” And he stepped into the room, gesturing with a wide sweep of one arm, and Mercy walked in behind him.
Ava wasn’t sure if she stopped breathing, or if all the air in the room rushed to Mercy as he took a deep breath and let it out through his nostrils in a great, horse-deep sigh that did nothing to hide how rattled he was. His eyes landed on her, deep, dark wells in his shattered face. Ava wanted, needed to be touching him, and she didn’t care if her father and brother were there for it. She wasn’t the same girl who’d walked up to Carter’s front door yesterday; she was a wrecked shell all filled up with give-a-damn at this point. She was the girl who’d almost wanted the knife to go into Mason Stephens again. She was the girl who’d called off the beast, when Ghost hadn’t been able to. She was powerful. She was devastated.
Ghost and Aidan slid out of the room, something she noticed only once the door was shut. Then she could give all her attention to Mercy.
She held out her arms to him. “Come here.”
What Maggie needed was an Irish coffee. She settled for a cup of black from the McDonald’s drive-through on her way to the Stephens’ mansion.
The driveway was jammed-up with cars: Volvo SUVs, Lexus SUVs, BMW SUVs. The standards for this crowd. Maggie gave herself a grim smile in the rearview mirror; her plan had worked, and all the DAR members she’d called that morning had rushed to the rescue, here to swig Chardonnay alongside their fallen comrade, the embarrassed mother of the week: Carina.
Carina held court in her living room, a cavernous space done up in shades of cream and gold. She was in a cream dress, the exact shade of the sofa on which she sat, ropes of pearls dripping down the front. Her friends were in Friday night finery, shellacked and powdered.
Maggie pushed a hand through her tangled hair and touched up her lipstick before she stepped into the room, the proper amount of concern plucking her brows together.
