Page 105 of Fearless

“And he almost killed Ava!” He hadn’t meant to shout, but that was happening anyway, the anger coming up in red waves inside him, a flood tide he couldn’t resist. “I’d kill a hundred kids, and you know what’s sick? You know that, and that’s exactly why you put me in charge of her nine years ago. You knew I’d do anything–”

Ghost’s hand landed hard on the table, a slap like a gunshot.

Mercy forced himself to quiet. He’d stepped out of line, and he knew it. But he couldn’t stop it. In a calm, flat voice, he said, “So I don’t get to defend myself.”

“What part of you putting your dick in my little girl can you defend?”

No part of it. It was indefensible. Mercy could feel his defiance fading away, the drain pulled on all those waves.

“You knew,” Ghost continued, voice a snarl, “that it was sick as fuck the first second you put a hand on her. How did your brain digest that, Merc? Huh? How was it okay to have sex with a child? Were you just waiting, and you couldn’t control yourself anymore? How stupid am I” – dramatic gesture to himself – “to think I could introduce you to my eight-year-old–”

“Nothing happened when she was a child,” Mercy bit out. “Nothing. It was never like that.”

“She’s still a child! And I fucking trusted you.” Ghost pushed his hands through his hair, his expression tortured. Yes, he’d trusted Mercy, because he was too caught up in other things to bother with his own daughter, and he’d been totally blind to the subtle shifts in energy between the two of them. He’d had no idea, not until two nights ago in the hospital, and he was as ashamed of his own oversight as he was furious with what had happened.

“Yeah,” Mercy said in a low, dark voice. “You trusted me. What made you think you could trust some Cajun trash who cuts men up for a living and tosses them to the gators?”

How had any of them ever trusted him? After what happened to Oliver Landau in the tar paper shack in the swamp. How did Ava offer herself up to him with nothing but absolute love and trust?Thatwas the sickening part – that any of them thought him human.

Mercy watched the same thought reflected in Ghost’s dark eyes. Then the VP turned away, pacing toward the wall. He reached to straighten a framed photo of the original London chapter, a grainy, black-and-white shot taken in front of Baskerville Hall, not long after the second World War. There was a copy of that photo in every clubhouse all up and down the US east coast.

The tension in Ghost’s body was graceful, as he took a drag off his forgotten cigarette. His voice composed again as he said, “You can have a week. Get things in order, get rid of your apartment, pack your stuff up, hire a moving van, whatever. And at the end of the week, you’ll go back to NOLA as planned. And before you leave, you will make Ava understand that this thing – whatever the fuck it is between you two – it’s over, for good.”

“She’s stubborn. She won’t accept that.”

Ghost turned and nodded; his face was a harsh, unreadable mask, his eyes the only thing alive. “Which is why you will make it undeniably clear that you don’t want her, won’t have her, can’t stay with her. You will break her heart into a hundred pieces if you have to. You will insult her, make her cry. You will kill that relationship, torture it to death.” Quick flick of a bitter smile. “That’s your area of expertise, after all.”

Mercy met his stare unflinching. He breathed a laugh. “You really don’t even think I’m a man, do you?” He heard the sadness in his voice, and knew his accusation to be true. “You think I would do that to her because you told me to. I really am just a dog.”

Something shimmered deep in the centers of Ghost’s eyes, some last second-guessing of this plan he’d devised.

“You think I don’t love her,” Mercy said. “You really don’t pay attention, do you?”

Insubordination. It hardened Ghost’s mouth, pushed him through the doubt and forged him ahead in his directive.

“I think you’ll ‘do that to her,’ ” he said, “because otherwise, I’ll liquefy her college fund and put it toward our next run.”

Mercy felt the breath catch in his lungs.

“When she graduates high school, she won’t have a job at Dartmoor waiting for her, and she won’t have the money to go off to school. She can go work the register at Leroy’s, buy her clothes at Walmart, cook you three squares a day on a hot plate because you can’t afford to get the stove fixed. I think you’ll do exactly what I tell you to, because if you love her, you’ll want her to have the chance to go to college, and you won’t want to poison her life with the likes of your own.”

Mercy swallowed hard, his throat scraped-raw and sticking together. What would happen, he wondered, if he launched himself across the table and put Ghost’s head through the wall paneling? The club would execute him, sure, but he’d go to his grave with satisfaction.

And then he thought about Ava’s soft, lilting recital of Shakespeare’s love sonnets, the foxed edges of her paperback copy ofThe Hobbit, the way her eyes glowed when she talked about the stories she wanted to write.

“Avaneedsto go to college.”

“I know.”

“You wouldn’t deny her that just because of me.”

“I would do anything,” Ghost said.

Mercy glanced down at his hands and saw that he was gripping the edge of the table so hard his knuckles had gone white. His nails digging in had added to the patina of scratches on its gently polished surface.

Ghost said, almost kindly, “You’ve hurt her enough. Make a break, and step away, or you’ll hurt her the rest of her life. If you really do love her, you know I’m right.”

Mercy saw it unfold in his mind, in all its predictable horror. Without a degree, without financial support from her parents, Ava would rely totally on him. And he would try – Christ, he’d kill himself trying – but it wouldn’t be enough. He could see her with her chin in her hands at his tiny apartment table, disgusted with her own bad cooking, exhausted and depressed and reading a book she could have written herself ten times over. She was ambitious about her art; that was something he’d always adored about her, that safe normalcy of healthy dreams. But with him, they’d never come true. And how long would it be before she resented him for that? How long before each touch felt suffocating?

---