Ava felt Leah’s elbow in her ribs on her other side, and could imagine her friend’s message:Tell your mom about Mercy.
But she couldn’t. Because there wasn’t anything to tell.
Fifteen
Five Years Ago
Ratchet pushed his reading glasses up onto his shaved head and frowned down at the blue Wild Bill tablet in his palm.
“Thoughts?” Ghost asked him.
The secretary set the little pill back on the bar in front of him. “If it’s sending people into grand mal seizures – killing people” – he glanced up at the gathering of brothers around his stool – “then I’m gonna guess this is a mix of prescription drugs, narcotics, and something inorganic most like.”
“And that means what?”
“It ain’t baking soda, that’s for sure.” He scraped the tablet into a tiny paper packet and slipped it inside his cut. “I’ll take it round to Jesse,” he said of his cousin who worked in the lab at the hospital. “See if he can do some tests on it for me.”
“The hospital will have tested what was in the Stephens kid’s blood,” James said, “but yeah, let’s see what Jesse thinks too.” He looked at Ghost. “Fisher broke our arrangement.” He said it in his usual placid style, but everyone present knew what he was getting at.
Ghost considered a moment. “I think he’s still useful. For right now, anyway.”
James nodded. “I won’t have him sell that shit in our district, though.”
“No,” Ghost agreed. “We’ve got too many assets at stake these days.”
There were murmured agreements. Fisher was one of many of his kind – dealers the clubs had liens against, who relied on the generosity and mercy of the club, left alone so long as they kept to the fringes. It was a way in which the Dogs could control the counterculture – bending and manipulating it to suit their own needs, maintaining an illusion of legitimacy with the masses.
“Leave it to my sister,” Aidan said, “to bring shit raining down on the club.”
Mercy squashed his instant spike of anger. He liked Aidan – he loved him; they were brothers – but it was Ava he’d spent nine years protecting. It was Ava who’d talked with him for hours about things his brothers didn’t care about, like the poetry his grandmother had so loved. He remembered Ava at twelve, cross-legged on the floor while he cleaned his guns at the table, reciting Wordsworth to him. Poetry was soothing. Poetry was peace amid the raucous fury of his mind. Ava could read Blake, Yeats, and Robert Frost to him without a shred of self-consciousness. The groupies didn’t want poetry, not girls like Jasmine, no. They wanted to be fucked and slapped and treated like shit.
Just like his mother.
Stop, he told himself. He didn’t need to go down that mental path. It was littered with broken glass and flat tires.
Ghost said, “Watch yourself,” to his son. “This isn’t her fault. Mason Stephens has been after us for a long time,” he told all of them. “This thing with his kid gives him a little more leverage, but that’s all. Nothing’s changed.”
“Right,” James agreed. “It was only a matter of time before the little shit became a problem. The kid, I mean.”
He was met with nods.
Tango gestured to the security monitor and said, “Heads up.”
There was a Mustang parked in front of the clubhouse, and Mercy recognized Ava’s blonde football-playing student climbing from behind the wheel.
“I’ve got it,” he said. “That’s Ava’s football dick.”
Ghost nodded, his trust immediate and complete.Go take care of it. You look after my girl. He didn’t for a second suspect…He didn’t ever wonder…
That trust should have been flattering, but in the moment, it just pissed Mercy off.You don’t have a fucking clue, he thought, conjuring the first ever bitter resentment of his vice president.She’s throwing herself at me and I’m two seconds away from giving in, and you don’t even see it.
The afternoon was blazing out in the parking lot, and Mercy hadn’t properly stowed his pointless energy by the time he crossed paths with Carter Michaels.
“You lost?” he asked, and took satisfaction in the way his shadow fell across the kid, the way Carter’s face blanched.
To his credit, the blonde took a step back, then gathered himself and said, “I wanted to check on Ava. Make sure she was alright after last night.”
“How’s that any of your business?”
