For almost a year, Ronnie had pretended to be Ava’s boyfriend, reporting back to his cousins, father, and some agent named Grey with any tiny bits of club intel he gleaned.
Not that all that pretending hadn’t had benefits. Ava was a pretty, smart girl, wasn’t she?
It was Mason that Mercy made squeal the loudest. Mason, who’d killed his unborn child. And then he’d ended it, and Harry and Littlejohn had come to clean up the garage.
“Spotless,” Ghost told them, and they nodded.
Walsh had written it all down, expressionless throughout. He’d put on paper the revelation that it was Ronnie’s father, William, who was buying up Main Street real estate in Knoxville. He wanted to come back to his home town. He planned to run for mayor once his cousin Mason had moved on to a senate race. Together, they would aid one another in their political endeavors. They would use the Carpathians to do the dirty work of putting any straggling Dogs in the ground, and then they’d wipe out that club too. A gang war ended, a city free of organized crime at last.
A beautiful plan.
Two dead boys, hanging limp against their duct tape bonds, “Ride the Lightning” screeching above their corpses.
A narrow fissure of deep orange lay along the tops of the trees against the predawn sky when they began the walk back to the clubhouse. Ghost halted Mercy halfway there, his face lined and tired in the lingering shadows.
“The feds will come looking for him, when he doesn’t check in,” he said with a deep, bone-weary sigh. “And they’ll want to talk to Ava.”
Mercy had been thinking that, the knowledge growing heavy against the back of his mind. As the bloodlust faded, replaced by an awful fatigue, a painful thirst for a strong drink, and a lust of a very different kind, he accepted the consequences of Ronnie’s death. “Not if they can’t find her,” he said, brows lifting, pressing home his point.
Ghost tilted his head. “She won’t want to take time off from school.”
“She’ll get over it.”
Ghost looked like he almost smiled. “That sounds like my line.”
“That’s the thing,” Mercy said grimly, “I can play father, if I have to. If that’s what it takes.”
Ghost’s eyes rested on him a long moment, studded deep in the centers with a hatred that was going to take years to wear down. It was nothing but paternal, that awful knowledge that his little girl was grown up and that any man saw her in a sexual light. He would have hated anyone in this instance, and Mercy knew that; he thought maybe Ghost was starting to know that too.
“Do you trust me?” Mercy said.
Ghost sighed. “You’re the only one I trust, bad as I hate it.” He scratched at his scalp, down his neck, like his skin was as exhausted as the rest of him. “They’ll expect her to hide, and they’ll expect it to be within the club.”
“They won’t find us in the swamp. You can’t navigate those bayous unless you were born in them.”
Ghost nodded. “Yeah.” He looked at Mercy with unmasked pleading. “And here I asked you back because I needed your help with the Carpathians.”
“What’s more important to you?”
“My daughter,” he said without missing a beat. “Always my daughter. Nothing can happen to her, Merc. I won’t tell my wife I let her baby get hurt.”
“Whiskey for breakfast,” Ava said, bringing her glass to her lips and taking another sip. The golden liquid burned all the way down, a welcome pain that kept her in the present, and kept her mind from spinning back to black places.
“Nothing better,” Maggie said, refilling her own glass from the bottle of Jack on the coffee table in front of them.
The black leather sofa in the common room was soft, warm from their body heat. If she leaned her head back and closed her eyes, she could probably go back to sleep.
She glanced over at the still-sleeping Carter. “Dad’s going to offer him a job,” she predicted.
“You think?” Maggie asked, true note of curiosity in her voice.
Ava felt weighed-down with wisdom, like contemplating the horrors of her social life had lent her a foresight. She knew it would fade, this inner calm and sense of knowing. But for now, the whiskey was fueling it. “I think he’ll offer for him to be a hangaround. Carter’s proved himself more than once in the last five years. And he obviously doesn’t have anywhere to go or he wouldn’t be asleep on our couch.”
“Hmm.” Maggie sipped her Jack slowly, with the grace of a practiced drinker. “Maybe so.”
They both tensed at the sound of the door opening.
Walsh came in first, with his notepad. He went to the bar, climbed onto a stool and leaned over to nick a bottle of warm Smirnoff from among the extra stock waiting to be refrigerated. He broke the seal and took a sip straight from the bottle, settling in to tidy up the notes he’d taken, pen in one hand, the other curled around the vodka.
