Knife & Flesh (The Night Horde SoCal Book 4) Page 13

  When he didn’t sit right at her side, she slid around the ledge seat to him and hooked a leg over his. He stretched his arms out across the edge of the tub. “What do you want to know?”

  “Is it always like it was last night? Is that what it looks like?”

  “Are you asking if I’m dangerous?”

  She didn’t answer, not in words. But her steady gaze told him enough.

  “No.” He looked away, across the quiet pool, as he answered. “I don’t think I am. A lot of it is like last night. I have nightmares that make me sick, and I need all the lights on so I can get oriented to my present. I get to where I can feel the desert on me, so I shower a lot—or swim, or get in here. The chlorine helps—the sense memories are totally different, and it keeps my head where it belongs and calms me down. When it gets really bad, I have anxiety attacks. At its worst, I can get pretty paranoid, and I dig in. I don’t know how to explain what’s going on in my head. It’s not like I forget where I am—it’s like that with the nightmares, but only then. Otherwise, when it’s bad, and I have an episode, it’s like I’m having all the physical and emotional reactions I had when I was over there, but I know I’m just standing in the checkout line at Raleys. But I don’t get angry or violent. I turn everything inward. I don’t explode, I implode.”

  She reached up and combed her hand through his wet hair. Soothed, he tipped his head toward her touch and closed his eyes. “Can’t you get any help? Medicine or therapy or something?”

  He sighed. “The first time I hit a bad patch, during my freshman year at UCLA, I went to the VA. I have medical benefits, and I got into a group and got some decent meds, too. It helped, and I went a long time—years—without much trouble. I thought I’d kicked all the shadows out. But they were just hibernating, and they’ve all woken up again. Things are different now, though. That kind of help isn’t an option for me anymore.”

  “Why not?” She’d been combing through his hair, stroking him all the while; now she stopped, her hand gripping a hank, making a fist against his head.

  He opened his eyes and locked with hers. “I carry other people’s secrets around with me now.”

  “You mean the Horde.”

  Now it was his turn to answer without speaking.

  “So you just suffer and tear yourself up, and your so-called brothers are okay with that?” The look she wore with those words was disbelief bordering on outrage, and Trick smiled at the thought that she felt defensive for him. A taste of the mama bear she was for Lucie.

  He took her hand from his hair and laced fingers with her. “They don’t want me to suffer. They don’t know any of this, and they’d do what they could for me if they did. But they wouldn’t be okay with me going off to unload all my troubles on a stranger. Just like I wouldn’t be okay if one of them did the same. They carry my secrets, too.”

  “But not this one. They don’t know this one.”

  “No.”

  “Not even your best friend.”

  “No.” If she asked why he hadn’t told Connor, he wasn’t sure he’d have an answer for her. Not because he didn’t trust his friend enough to let him know. Connor knew the story of the safe house, and if he knew about the PTSD, he would probably break his own back trying to help him. It was more that he didn’t trust himself enough to let himself be known. There was safety in the fact that his brothers, all of them, perceived him as mellow and levelheaded. There was power in that, too. And he was mellow and levelheaded, in reality for almost all the years he’d been Horde, and in perception still.

  She laughed dryly. “You define ‘best friend’ differently than I do, then.”

  “Maybe.” If she defined ‘best friend’ as someone from whom one had no secrets at all, then yes, he supposed he did.

  “If they care, and they don’t want you to suffer, why not tell them?”

  Pushing their joined hands underwater, he stared at the ripples and light for a long time. There was pain in the answer to that question, and he needed to find the will to say it out loud. “Because I’m ashamed. Everything that happened, everything I’m dealing with, I brought it on myself. My choices. My actions. I enlisted. I did my job. I made a choice every time I pulled the trigger. I blew that building and killed all those women and children. I didn’t know, but I didn’t question, either. I followed orders. I did my job.” Like he’d done his job when he’d killed Allen Cartwright, a man standing in a city park on a sunny summer day, wearing a tailored suit and a silk tie.

  Juliana made a quiet whimper, and he realized he was crunching her hand again. He let go and stretched his arm back across the edge of the hot tub. Leaning his head back on the concrete, he looked up at the night sky—the blank, dusky, dead sky of a world with too many people. “The way this all plays out—it’s me huddled on the floor. It’s weak. In some ways I think it’d be better if I turned into a rage monster.” He knew that was true. Demon was a case in point.

  But nothing that had broken Demon’s head had been his own doing.

  “Not for me, it wouldn’t. Not for Lucie.” She took hold of his wrist, pulling his arm back into the water, and smoothed her thumb over the open lock tattooed on his hand. “That’s what the shackles mean. And this open lock. You’re bound, but you have the choice to free yourself. You let yourself be bound. No one’s fault but your own—that’s what it says to you.”

  If anyone else had ever understood that ink, no one had ever said so. Speechless and overcome, Trick could only stare into the dark, brimming depths of her beautiful eyes and hope she saw what it meant to him that she understood.

  Without saying more, she turned and straddled his lap. Raking her hands through his wet hair, she leaned in close and whispered, “Trick Stavros, you have too much hurt.”

  He smiled and bent his head until their foreheads touched. “Life is pain, princess.”

  She laughed, and the heaviness of the mood was broken. “As sources go, I don’t know if The Princess Bride is as profound as Kierkegaard.”

  Pleased that she’d recognized it, he laughed, too. “You’d be surprised.”

  When he kissed her, she leaned into him eagerly and opened her mouth, leading them away from pain and into passion. As they clung to each other and their bodies began to flex and rock under the hot, roiling water, Trick had a dawning understanding: he felt better. There was something like a sigh in the back of his mind as his weary psyche found a place to rest. He knew it wasn’t over, that saying the words aloud to Juliana hadn’t been a magic fix—hell, it might turn out to be a trigger—but he also knew he wasn’t alone. He had a place to go. He had someone in his corner.

  That understanding was powerfully erotic. Even in the near-scalding water of the tub, he was heavily hard. When Juliana’s hand reached down to squeeze his length through his shorts, he leaned out of their kiss so he could look her in the eye. Seeing that she felt the same need, he nodded, and she opened his shorts and pulled him out. He moved her bikini bottoms out of their way.

  They fucked—no, they made love—in the hot tub, in full view of about a dozen apartments. They were quiet and close, and their eyes never left each other. They might as well have been the only people in the world.

  ~oOo~

  Just after five o’clock on Sunday evening, Trick paced back and forth in Juliana’s living room. Her ex had buzzed at four-fifty-eight, thereby thwarting Trick’s fantasy of hunting the motherfucker down. That would have been a death he could have lived with. Lucie was home, though, and that was much better. A relieved Juliana had gone out to collect her.

  She’d insisted he stay inside. She didn’t want Mark to see him with her on Sunday after the scene they’d played on Friday. He understood, and he made himself not be offended. But it was driving him a little nuts to be in here, powerless, while she was out there with a man who’d hurt her more than once. Fuck, he’d hurt her so badly he’d put her in the hospital.

  Through the living room window, he saw them coming. Lucie was wearing a pair of Min
nie Mouse ears and beaming happiness like a beacon. Seeing her joy, Trick’s conviction that he could kill her father without guilt faltered. Juliana, walking behind, looked flushed and stressed, and again he felt the impulse to do violence on the bastard. His head rocked with tension.

  He went to the door and opened it.

  “Trick!” Lucie ran in and hugged him, Mr. Bananas trapped between them. “You’re here! I missed you! I thought you were mad at me but now you’re here and you’re not mad. Guess where Papi and Nikki took me! It was so fun!”

  She was wearing a Minnie Mouse t-shirt to go with her ears. “I don’t know. The dentist?”

  “No, silly! The dentist isn’t fun. My dentist gives me glow-in-the-dark stars, though, because I’m good and open wide and don’t squirm. Disneyland! I went to Disneyland! Nikki wanted to see all the princesses. I thinking they’re kinda boring, but they have pretty dresses. Mami and me were zombie princesses for Halloween last year. I liked the rides. And Mike and Sully were there. I like them. Can we have pizza for dinner? Can Trick have dinner with us?”

  Juliana laughed. “Okay, mija. Go unpack your stuff, and I’ll order a pizza. I think Trick can stay for dinner. But we have to do our Sunday things, too, don’t forget.”

  Hearing her refer to their ‘Sunday things,’ Trick was overtaken by a blast of insight: it had been exactly one week, and only one week, since Juliana had told him that they couldn’t even be friends and taken Lucie from his apartment.

  He was already grinning, listening to Lucie’s excited chatter. Now he laughed. What a week. What a weekend.

  Lucie took her pack from her mother. “I didn’t forget. I just had fun with Papi and Nikki and want to tell you. And I want pizza and Trick to stay.” She kept up her monologue as she headed down the hallway to her room. “I have a hamster in my room there now. His name is Tony. He’s brown and white. He’s a dwarf hamster so he’s teeny tiny. I wanted to bring him home, but Papi said no. He says he’ll keep him company when I’m not there.”

  As he watched her go into her room, still chattering happily, Trick knew he loved that little girl. He loved this little family. He wanted it to be his, and he would protect it—them—with his life, with his soul.

  When Lucie was safely in her room, he caught Juliana’s hand and turned her toward him. “You look stressed. What happened?”

  “Nothing. He’s just a jerk. I’m always stressed around him.”

  “Jules…” He couldn’t tell whether to believe her or not. No doubt the guy was a jerk—his fucking smirk was burned into Trick’s retinas. But if he’d put a hand on Juliana or threatened her…

  She cupped his face in her hands. “Honest. It was an uneventful meeting, I swear. I just get tense around him, after everything.”

  Okay. He believed her, and the live wire buzzing up his spine lost its juice. He took one of her hands from his face and kissed her palm. “I hate that you were out there alone.”

  “You would have just made things worse. I have to figure out how to tell him about us, and not while Lucie is around.”

  “Not while you’re alone with him, though. Promise me that.”

  “I promise. I never want to be totally alone with him ever again in my life.”

  Trick didn’t want that, either. He decided he’d ask Sherlock to do some poking around in Mark Stiles’ life. Maybe there was something he could do to put a leash around that bastard’s neck.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Juliana’s desk phone buzzed, and she picked it up, surprised to see the light for an outside line. The desk phone almost never buzzed an outside line these days. Everybody used cell phones or, if they didn’t have that number, got patched through from reception. “Emily Garcia’s office.”

  “You sound so professional.” Lisa, her best friend, drawled in her ear.

  Juliana tucked the phone between her ear and her shoulder and got back to typing. “Well, that’s because I’m at work, and you’re calling my work phone. Why?”

  “Because you never answer your cell at work unless it’s about Lucie. I’d have to hack into her school line to get you to answer.”

  “That’s because I’m at work. You could leave a message and I’d call you back at lunch. Like always.”

  “Yes, but this is about lunch. Like us having it. Together. Today.”

  “I can’t, Lisa. Payday is Friday. You know I’m on fumes the last few days before payday.” She hoped Lisa wouldn’t take that reminder as an excuse to lecture her about not taking Mark for more child support when he’d gotten his new, much better paying job the year before.

  “No, you can, because it’s my treat. I won some dumb company contest and have a gift card to that new Frenchy wine bar downtown. La Belle Vie. Downtown…which means close to your office. You could walk, meet me there, we have a little glass or two of vino with our pretentious salad. That’ll improve your Monday, right?”

  Lisa worked as a sales manager for an office electronics company and did much better financially than Juliana did. She was always trying to treat, but Juliana could rarely have afforded to reciprocate, and she didn’t want to be the charity friend, so she was always refusing to let Lisa treat. She wondered if this gift card story was true.

  They’d been friends since middle school, had graduated high school together, and Lisa’s family had taken Juliana in after her parents were deported. They’d all been at her party and had witnessed the whole horror.

  “I can’t come back to work drunk, Lisa.”

  “Not drunk. Relaxed. Grendel’s mother is in court all day, right? Who’d know? Come on. You blew me off all weekend, and I want to know why. I was all ready to be supportive and get you drunk while Dick Assface had our girl. That go okay?”

  “It went fine, and I didn’t blow you off.”

  “You did. You didn’t answer your phone the whole weekend.”

  “I did too.”

  “One text the whole weekend. I’m fine. Love you. That does not count. How many calls and texts did I send?” Five calls, ten texts, was the answer. “You owe me lunch. Today.”

  Juliana wanted to sit with her friend. Trick might not tell his best friend everything—or, apparently, anything important—but she did, and she was near to bursting with the need to share. “Okay, okay. I’ll see you there.”

  “Damn right, you will. Noon.”

  She had a mountain of research to summarize for Emily before she went anywhere. “Make it twelve-thirty. I have to get—”

  Lisa cut her off with a loud huff. “Yeah, yeah. Fine. Twelve-thirty. But I get a full hour.”

  ~oOo~

  Juliana ran late, and when she got to the table, Lisa had a nearly-empty wine glass on the table in front of her. Another full glass of red sat at the seat across from her. Lisa stood, and they hugged and did an air kiss, both cognizant of their hair and makeup.

  “God, you look good,” Lisa sighed as she dropped back to her seat. “You always look like Oscar de la Renta just dropped you off in his limousine. I don’t know how you do it. I mean, I do. I’ve seen the magic happen. I’m just jealous.”

  Juliana was wearing a black pencil skirt and an olive green silky blouse. Neither piece was anything special. The skirt was a remade Goodwill find, and the blouse she’d made in a weekend, just a simple menswear cut. What made her outfit today shine, she knew, was accessories. A multi-strand necklace of green glass and silvery beads, with matching earrings—discovered tangled in a cigar box at a yard sale. Her mother’s heavy, hammered-silver cuff bracelet—she wore it almost daily. A wide black patent belt and classic black patent peep-toe pumps—both from a vintage boutique in Madrone. Her Jackie O sunglasses had come off a rack at the drugstore. The whole ensemble had cost under a hundred bucks.