“Yeah, well, I’m sending Rottie down with your brother. They’re heading out within the hour and riding straight down.”
A prickling went up the back of her neck. “Rottie? Dad, the entire New Orleans chapter is at our disposal if we need them.”
He made a snorting sound. “None of them can do what Rottie does. This is club business, Ava, don’t worry about it. Expect a call from Aidan when he gets in town.”
After a bewildered goodbye, she handed the phone back to Mercy at Ghost’s instruction. She sliced bread from the baguette and laid the pieces onto the stove top to warm as Mercy had some final argument.
It was a massive relief to hear the phone settle into its cradle with a decisiveclick.
“Christ,” Mercy said, rubbing both hands across his face and back through his loose hair. “I feel like I just got sent to the principal’s office.” He dropped his hands and glanced at her. “Course, I never did that. But I assume it sucks.”
“Big ones,” she assured, smoothing butter across the warm bread.
He came to inspect the breakfast she’d laid out on the counter. It wasn’t much: just the bread, bacon, yogurt the O’Donnells had stocked for them, and fresh strawberries. “See?” he said, smiling. “I knew there was a chef hiding in those typewriter hands of yours.”
She snorted. “Hardly. And by the way, no one writes on typewriters anymore.”
“Your old man’s right. You’re a smartass.”
She wasn’t going to get distracted with the back-and-forth; she had two items on her agenda. “What was he talking about, sending Rottie down?” She glanced back over her shoulder and saw Mercy’s expression tweak with concern. The dark circles were even more noticeable close up like this. “What’s he sending a tracker for?”
He snagged a strip of bacon and made a thoughtful face as he folded it into his mouth and chewed. He glanced at her, weighing things in his mind. He was trying to decide, she realized, whether he should talk to her about club things. That had never been a dilemma for him. No matter how much he’d loved her, he’d never budged on that front.
Maybe marriage had shifted things a little. Maybe being his old lady messed with the delineations in his head.
Finally, he swallowed, looked resigned, and said, “Larsen disappeared.”
She tried to swallow and her throat wouldn’t work. “Maybe he finally came to his senses. Got spooked and took off.” But she knew it was a weak hope, and Mercy shook his head.
“From what your dad said, Larsen set up the rest of his club to take a fall, as a distraction so he could skip town. He and his officers are missing. When I told your dad about what happened last night – he’s convinced that was some sort of scout. Larsen may have wanted the Carpathians to become the only MC in Knoxville, but there’s one thing he wants more than that.” He smiled ruefully. “My head.”
The fear that took hold of her was on old one, a fear that had visited her when she was a child, when Jasper Larsen’s father and uncle had forced open her bedroom window and slid in with the smell of rain to kill her in her bed.
“My guess,” Mercy continued, “is that he realized his club was headed for the shitter, so he decided to at least get what he really wants. Revenge. Ghost thinks he’s headed here. Rottie talked to a gas station clerk who saw a man in a plain white van matching Larsen’s description filling up late last night. He went in for smokes; guy got a good look at his face.
“So Ghost is sending Rottie along to try and sniff him out, somewhere between here and Knoxville. Get to him before he gets to us.”
“I thought this place was impossible to find,” she said, pulse beating in her ears.
He gave her another lopsided non-smile. “That guy from yesterday found it. Not as secret as I thought, I don’t guess.”
“God.” She pressed her knuckles to her lips and bit at the inside of her cheek, trying to fight the welling panic back. “Should we run?” she asked, voice muffled by her hand. “Take off right now and go…” Where? She had no idea.
Mercy shook his head. “I still think it’s safe here. And I’ve got the advantage over them. I know these swamps. This place’ll eat a man alive if he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
Eat him literally, she understood, after last night.
He stepped in close, leaning over her. “I promise you,fillette, that I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
She tipped her head back to look up at him. “It’s not me I’m worried about.” She lifted her hand and pressed it to his forehead. She didn’t have her mother’s years of experience feeling faces and gauging temperatures, but she didn’t need it. He had a fever, and not a subtle one. “Let me see your shoulder,” she said.
He backed away from her. “No.”
“It’s infected, Mercy, you know it is.” She took a step toward him. “You’ve got a fever. You feel like shit, don’t you?”
“I feel fine.”
“Don’t give me that tough guy shit. We need to get you to a doctor. You need antibiotics.”
