Maggie was silent a beat. “It was what you deserved. The threat was the thing that got it for you. What use is having power if you can’t use it to get the justice you deserve?”
Ava didn’t answer because she couldn’t without sobbing or puking. She felt dirty and used. Betrayed. Those five years getting her degree, and it had been built on a bribe and a threat, on club power. She felt like all her sturdy ropes had been cut, and she was floating out to sea.
Maybe it had never been about her being different. Maybehomewas different.
At the clubhouse, she threw herself into making coffee, setting out plates, fetching for Jackie, Bonita, Nell and Mina, avoiding her mother, prepping for the handful of Nomad and out of town members who would come to pay their respects at the wake. She made cold cut sandwiches and arranged them on platters, flicked mustard specks off her shirt and kept tossing her hair back to keep it out of the way.
The guys trooped in, all loud boots and throat-clearings. The mood was sober, respectful. Ava had no doubt that by the end of the night, that would have changed, once they broke out the hard liquor and started swapping stories.
She was setting a platter down on the bar when Mercy materialized in front of her, not there one minute and then standing in front of her the next. He opened his mouth to say something –
And she fled. She hated herself for the weakness, but she couldn’t take another emotional roller coaster ride right now, she just couldn’t. Nothing Mercy could say would help; he could only hurt her worse. And when nothing about her life felt controllable, she could at least control where she stood – or ran. Because she was running by the time she went through the clubhouse door.
The wind had kicked up, a hard shove against her chest as she ran into it. The clouds pressed low, gray and fat with rain, swirling in turbulent arcs against one another. She felt the fine mist against her face; felt the growl of the thunder in her bones. The storm was going to be wicked when it finally broke.
She didn’t know where she was going, only that she had to get away. She made it halfway to the bike shop, was right in front of the central office, when she heard Mercy say her name.
“Ava.” He was at her heels, of course, because his long legs took such massive strides.
She whirled and her hair streamed across her face; she shoved it roughly back and felt a bobby pin come loose. There was Mercy, huge and illuminated by the eerie under-glow of the clouds. Lightning forked through the sky behind him, prophetic, atmospheric. His eyes were black.
“What?” she snapped, voice near to breaking.
He was wearing a plain black t-shirt that clung to the heavy muscles of his chest and arms, dark jeans with grease stains on the knees. Silken wisps of hair came loose from the queue at his nape and fell across his forehead.
“I wanted to say hi,” he said, and Ava couldn’t stop the disbelieving laugh that burst out of her.
“You chased me across two parking lots to say hi? Are you serious?”
His expression tightened, jaw clenching. “I said I didn’t want things to be weird with us, didn’t I? I’m just trying to be friendly.”
“Friendly,” Ava fumed, “is waving across the room.Friendlyis smiling. Running me to ground like some kind of prey animal, with that look on your face, isstalkery, Merc. Do you not see the difference?”
Thunder crashed over them, and in its wake, Ava heard the slow whine of the city’s tornado sirens cranking up. The first fat drops of rain splattered on them.
“Oh, fabulous,” she said. “I’m about to be sucked up like Dorothy, and the last conversation of my life will have been withyou!”
Mercy had the gall to smirk at her. “You’re welcome, sweetheart.”
And then the rain turned loose, like someone had tipped a bucket over, thick white sheets of it coming down too fast for comprehension. Ava felt something like a bee sting on her bare arm, and then another. It was hailing. One of the ice pellets beaned off her head and she yelped in pain and surprise.
“Come on,” Mercy shouted above the deluge. His big arm came around her and he hustled her to the door of the central office and through it, slamming it behind them.
Through the raised blinds, Ava saw the hail pinging off the pavement outside, the torrential rain, the fervent slashes of lightning. She could still just make out the sirens, above the constant slap of raindrops on the flat roof.
“We’re lucky the door wasn’t locked,” Mercy said, running his hands along his pulled-back hair, smoothing the rainwater against his scalp.
“Mom had to…” What had Maggie needed in here again? Whatever. She didn’t remember or care. “Something. She unlocked it when we got back from the funeral home.”
“Hm.”
Mercy rested his forearm against the window and peered through it at the leaden sky. The rain fell in earnest now, dancing sheets of water too thick to see through. The clubhouse was an indistinct blur, just the line of the roof visible above its hulking shadow. “It’s really setting in,” he murmured, his breath fogging the window. His profile, limned in silver by the storm light, looked sharp enough to cut the glass from where she stood.
Ava turned away, arms banded tight across her middle, teeth beginning to chatter as the AC stole over her damp skin. “Jesus Christ,” she muttered, grinding her jaw, as she glanced down and saw the way her soaked shirt had glued itself to her torso. The little blue flowers on her bra were starkly visible through the sheer, waterlogged fabric.
“What was that?” Mercy asked.
This felt orchestrated, somehow, like he’d called down a tornado, all those vivid tongues of lightning, just for another chance alone together, to insult and torture her. “I said ‘Why am I always wet when we’re together,’ ” she snapped, too aware of that first night in the dorm room, vodka all down her front.
