Page 141 of Fearless

“Yeah. Probably.”

But Ghost knew. He knew, and at this point, Mercy didn’t care.

“Hey, it’s me. Just checking in. Wanted to know if you’d like to grab dinner. Call me back.” Ava disconnected the call and tossed her phone into her purse. Ronnie hadn’t answered, and she figured it wasn’t because he was busy.

She’d come home, she’d showered, and under the hot pounding jets, she’d felt the guilt begin to spread, plucking at her tattered nerves, making her feel like an absolute bitch. She didn’t want to be a cheater, a liar, a girl who had secret desktop sex.

She toweled her hair and resolved to let it air dry. She went into the kitchen and dug a box of Famous Amos from the back of the pantry, was eating one tiny cookie after the other standing up against the counter when Maggie came in through the back door in an agitated rush.

“What in the hell were you thinking?” she demanded, throwing her purse onto the counter.

“I thought Jackie or Nell could give you a ride home. I’m sorry.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it.” Her eyes were flashing, bright hazel shards, pulse fluttering in the little hollow at the base of her throat. “You are a smart girl, Ava,” she said, advancing on her a step, hands going to her hips, hair beginning to slip from its up-‘do. “You are too smart to let this happen again, and you know it!”

“Let what happen?” Ava squirmed inwardly. She set the box aside and the cookie on her tongue turned to cardboard.

“How, in the middle of all the shit going on” – big, wide gesture to the world around them – “could you be thinking about Mercy right now?”

It was too late for lying at this point. Bag open, cat out. She drew herself up, folded her arms across her middle. “Because I always think about Mercy when things go to shit,” she said. “Because I spent years and years trusting that he would be there when things were awful and scary. It’s instinct, Mom, and I can’t change that, no matter how bad I want to. When Carpathians are after us and the demonic mayor has leverage over me, and members are dying and I’m being tailed by prospects, then, yeah, I think of Mercy. Sometimes…” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “Sometimes I just need to feel like I used to, when everything wasright. I don’t expect you to understand that.”

Maggie didn’t falter, but pressed on, relentless. “You have a boyfriend! What about poor Ronnie? Are you going to tell him? Or are you just going to hope he doesn’t notice the next time you come to bed smelling like someone else?”

“Why do you care?” It was another little stab of pain, on top of what the day had already dealt her, to hear that her mom held no empathy for her situation. “You didn’t care when I was seventeen, when I was getting pregnant, but you care now?!”

“You’re fucking up,” Maggie accused. “You know you are.”

“Gee, I wonder why, when I’ve got such stellar role models around me to learn from.”

“That’s no excuse–”

“Oh, I know, do as you say, not as you do, huh?” She shoved the cookie box, just to have an outlet, satisfied by the way it skidded across the counter and slammed into the microwave.

Maggie didn’t look like herself; she looked lined and weathered and stern in a way that was nothing like her usual force-of-nature turbulence. She looked like a typical, angry parent, and nothing like the champion who’d held Ava and rocked her while she sobbed, in Mercy’s abandoned apartment five years before.

She said, “Maybe you shouldn’t have come home, if you were going to throw everything you’ve worked for away on the promise of a casual fuck.”

Ava stared at her toes and felt the tears building, the painful burn in the back of her throat.

What in the world was happening?

Maggie’s boot heels struck the tile loud as gunshots as she left the room.

Thirty-Two

The Carpathians’ compound had an air of something…wrong about it. That was the only way Mercy could think to describe it. The old Milford pool hall was standard issue corrugated steel, with chain link fence, cracked pavement yard, security lights on high power poles.

But the club’s top and bottom rockers and center emblem had been rendered in colored neon signage along the side wall. It was bright, obscene really. And classless. All those identical, airbrushed bikes stacked up like dominos at the front doors, the shiny new fleet vehicles: white panel vans, construction-grade Chevy pickups. A vulgar display of money, contrasting the weeds sprouting through the cracks, the built-up crud on the steel siding.

No one from this crew came from privileged backgrounds. None of them had jobs to speak of, save those working the stolen mattress store across the street. Who’d bankrolled the bikes, the cars, the neon? This place contrasted so strongly with the humble, tidy splendor of Dartmoor that it was difficult to rectify its existence. The Lean Dogs were working class and proud and didn’t put on airs. The Carpathians were some mongrelized blend of pure trash and hauteur. They might have patches now, they might call themselves a true MC, but they were pretenders.

The fact that they posed a threat of any kind was disgusting.

The three of them stood on the roof of a wrecked Pontiac in the scrap yard next door, peering over the fence through the holes in their ski masks. All in black, no colors. LDMC S.W.A.T. team.

Rottie pushed a button on his watch and the face glowed green. “Tell me when you see the red light on the camera. Then we book like hell up against the wall.”

Mercy squinted through the dark. “Now.”

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