“Bullshit,” he said, gently. “Look, you don’t want to hear this, but I could tell, before we came here – I could tell all along – that you’ve got…some skeletons. I could tell that. You’re careful. You were nervous with me.”
She shot him a hateful, sideways glance, but he pressed on.
“And that has never bothered me, I swear. But when we got to Knoxville, you changed. You got more careful, more nervous. I feel like we’re going backward here. I know something happened to you, and I know it was pretty bad to shake you up like this. And I want to help you, but I can’t do that unless youtalk to me.”
“You don’t want to know.”
“It may be your decision to tell me, but it’s my decision whether I want to know, and I do.”
She sighed, exhausted now.
“Ava, please.”
She regarded him a long moment, the story pushing at the base of her throat, studying the deep confusion in his expression.
She would tell him some of it, she decided, because she was at the end of her rope with not-telling. The parts that were safe to tell. The parts that were about Mason, and Ainsley Millcott, and being a kid who was different.
The parts with Mercy, though, she’d keep to herself. Because even if she loathed the man now, she would never allow someone like Ronnie into those sun-warmed moments in her room, with nothing but innocence and trust between her and the man she’d loved more than anything.
That was when, sitting in front of the ice cream parlor, she knew that she’d never love Ronnie, and that there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.
Thirty-One
Monday. Funeral day. Ava sat up before her alarm went off at six with a strange weightless feeling in her stomach. She’d been to almost a dozen such funerals, but never because of murder, and never after such a strange few days as these last few. MC funerals were bedecked in pomp, steeped in nostalgia, works of art, really, and for the first time since coming home, she woke up and felt almost like her old self. Like the club daughter, instead of the country club girlfriend.
The second her feet touched the floor, in the chilly dark of her room, the energy began fizzling in her veins, that strange, morbid excitement. A member was dead. Bring out the bikes, say all your prayers, give thanks for your once-percent blood. And so it always went.
The pipes hummed with water flow, Maggie and Ghost already up and shuffling around, getting ready for the day. Ava felt something deep inside her, some unseen finger touching down on the clicker of a stopwatch. Like this day was about moving toward some finish line. She didn’t let it press her back under the covers and swallow her up, but she took note of it, nodded to herself, and stood up.
She showered, did her makeup, arranged her hair: loose waves, the mass of it pulled back at the crown and held off her forehead with a series of bobby pins. She dressed in a very fitted black pencil skirt that hit just above the knees, sheer black shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons, tucked in at the waistband of the skirt, her pearl studs, and her staple pumps. She folded back the shirt cuffs slipped Grandmother Teague’s pearl-studded bangle over her left wrist, the cool metal reassuring against her flushed skin.
Maggie was already in the kitchen when she arrived, in an elbow-sleeve black velvet dress with a deep scooped neck, over-the-knee boots, her hair tied up tight and her throat spangled with thin silver necklaces. She looked beautiful and inappropriate, and carried herself in a way that showed she didn’t give a damn.
“Good,” she said, as Ava entered. “We need to leave in five minutes.”
“Do I need to carry something out to the car?”
“That box there. Put it in the truck; we’re taking it so everything will fit.”
She was halfway through the living room with it when Ronnie sat up from his makeshift couch bed, pushed his hair back and asked, “What’s going on?” around a yawn.
“The funeral,” she explained, balancing the box one-handed and turning the front door deadbolt with the other. “Mom and I have to set up at the funeral home and the clubhouse for afterward.”
“Oh. Right.” He blinked the sleep out of his eyes and looked at the floor.
Ava frowned to herself as she stepped outside. He’d been distant since their conversation outside the ice cream parlor the day before, not unpleasant, just removed. She’d told him about Mason harassing her over the years, about the culmination of his antagonism in his almost-rape at Hamilton House. She’d left out her miscarriage, and any mention of Mercy, and thank God, because just hearing about her assault seemed to have shaken him badly. No way could he have handled anything else.
Ghost was all in black, she saw when she returned from the truck, his black button-up over his darkest jeans, his boots spit-polished and his hair dressed in gelled, rugged spikes. He looked handsome and stern, presidential. He was grim-faced as he kissed her on the cheek. This wasn’t anything he’d wanted to do so soon in his presidency: host a burial.
“How many chapters coming?” she asked on her way to the next box.
He shook his head. “Just some Nomads who were in the area. I’ve got a bad feeling about today and I didn’t want to drag anyone else into it.”
Her stomach squeezed. He was anticipating some trouble from the city, given Mayor Stephens’ newspaper headline story. No sense getting more than one chapter locked up if it came to that.
“You look good,” Maggie told Ghost, smoothing her hands down the front of his cut. “Very in-charge of things.”
His thin smile said he knew what she was doing, and appreciated it. He kissed her and slipped out the back door.
