Chapter 18 Emory
EIGHTEEN
EMORY
They rolled out along the highway, a pejorative for two dusty lanes with nothing to see and nowhere to go except Las Vegas. Emory glanced at Amelia in the passenger seat. Grief had imparted a haunting stillness in her. She wore it like armor and settled comfortably in the silence between them.
When she lost her mother, he said nothing about it because his words would’ve come out of order. Demands before apologies, upside down and inside out. She made his pulse rise and blood boil, so Emory withheld condolences lest he dish them out hot and jaded.
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t once been knee-deep and sinking in the same devastation, though. He owed her something. Commiseration, at least.
“About your mom,” he said and shattered the silence, “I lost mine too. I was eight.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Amelia replied but declined his gaze.
“I wasn’t looking for sympathy. I just mean I know how hard it is.”
She looked over at him and even went to speak but must’ve thought the better of it. Emory waited. Nothing came, though, only the rising tide of frustration on his end and a vast sea of reticence on hers.
“Look,” he said forcefully, “this will go easier if you try, even a little, to trust me.”
Emory trained his eyes on the road, but in his periphery, Amelia crossed her arms and stared. What did he expect? Some ground, maybe more frigid resistance, but certainly not her honeyed voice firing back a piece of her mind.
“This will go much easier if you understand that kidnapping people and forcing them to go on your little field trips doesn’t inspire trust.”
Emory faltered, flat on his face and tongue-tied too. He licked his bottom lip and gripped the wheel.
“I didn’t kidnap you, and this isn’t a field trip.”
“You kidnapped me.”
“I didn’t.”
“Well, I don’t want to be here, so what would you call this?”
The sun pounded through the windshield. Emory cranked up the air, as much to buy time as battle the heat.
“An obligation,” he said with as much authority on the matter as he could muster. “Sometimes we gotta go places for our own good. Like, fuck, I don’t know.” He scratched his chin and sighed. “I don’t like going to the post office, but I do it ‘cause I have to.”
The reasoning was weak, the explanation flawed, the analogy stupid. He knew that, even without Amelia’s perplexed look that seemed slightly embarrassed on his behalf.
“This isn’t like the post office. Besides, you don’t go to the post office.”
Her certainty incensed. What the fuck did she know about him?
A bead of sweat trickled down Emory’s temple. He swiped it away with a rough hand and snapped on a short fuse.
“I buy stamps just like everyone else!”
She laughed then.
Amelia Havick laughed at him.
No one laughed at him.
No one.
They supplicated, placated, measured every word, regulated each movement. Curated to appease, it drove him insane. Not her. She didn’t give a shit who he was, so she laughed; not mocking, just gently amused. It dispelled enough of the tension that Emory conceded where he could.
“Fine. I brought you here against your will.”
“It’s call kidnapping.”
“It’s your turn,” he demanded, more churlish than intended.
“My turn for what?”
“Compromise.”
Amelia unfolded her arms and traced her fingertips along the hem of her skirt inching up her thighs. Emory’s heartbeat quickened as his eyes followed her fingers. Fuck, don’t start that. At the end of his rope, he couldn’t handle the tease.
He remembered well the way she tasted, how her beautiful face contorted in pleasure when she came. That memory existed on the edge of his thoughts and waited for quiet moments to invade.
“Compromise.” Amelia lingered on the word and studied the barren horizon dotted with brush. “For right now, I believe you’re probably the least likely to hurt me of the people who want to.”
Emory expelled a quiet laugh. “Any more caveats you wanna cram into that statement?”
“Fine,” she said and rubbed her arms blanketed with goosebumps. “I acknowledge that you’re protecting me.”
Amelia turned to him with a shy glance through dark lashes. When the road demanded his attention, Emory looked away and turned down the air conditioner.
“Mirabelle told me you have a brother,” she said, the statement imploring with a latent question she didn’t have the nerve to ask.
“Had. I had a brother.”
“Is he missing?”
Emory shook his head and scanned the rearview mirror where the black caravan carried on like a funeral march.
Missing implied they wanted Ivan back because hearts ached for those who’d never come home.
Ivan would know. How many girls had been plastered up on posters because of him?
“MISSING,” read bolded letters from desperate families, and Ivan the Butcher more than earned his epithet.
He claimed those girls’ lives then took their stories to his grave.
“No. He’s dead.”
Amelia’s lips pursed and eyes darted across the dashboard as if chasing a thought.
“I’m sorry. Mirabelle made it sound like he was still alive. I must’ve misunderstood.”
“You didn’t. Mirabelle could stand over his rotting corpse and still not believe he’s dead.”
“What was his name?” Amelia asked, too intrigued by the topic for Emory’s liking.
“Ivan,” he reluctantly replied.
Like his dad, Emory believed to name evil was to conjure it. Ivan’s name was a malediction, and his brand of evil particularly heinous. Amelia didn’t know that, though her outsized reaction of worried eyes and knitted brows might have suggested otherwise.
“You know him or something?” Emory chuckled to lighten the mood.
She shook her head. “No.”
Liars overcompensated. They said too much, reacted too big. Amelia did neither but still sheltered something worth protecting. If he pushed, she’d deny, so Emory filed that away for a revisit once he paved clearer in-roads.
“Enough about him,” he said. “Tell me about you.”
“What about me?”
“Whatever you want to tell.”
“You mean the things you don’t already know from keeping tabs?”
Emory sucked in a sharp breath. Another battle of wills, was it? He readied the calvary for all-out war, but Amelia’s words were empty of the accusation that could’ve been there.
“It’s a joke,” she assured with a pretty smile. “A bad one, but maybe you shouldn’t tell people that you keep tabs on them.”
“Sounds like you’re telling me how to do my job.”
“Sounds like someone needed to.”
Emory laughed, oddly enchanted as the girl doled out jabs sweetened with humor.
“Fair enough,” he said. “So, what’s Amelia Havick’s story?”
She shrugged and eyed him with the last vestiges of apprehension.
“There’s not much to say. No adventures unless you count college in Eugene. That’s the farthest I’ve been from home.”
“You regret not going farther?”
“Not really. That place was good to me. I used to go to the library, to this secluded spot by the reference books no one reads. I’d study, write, daydream. It overlooked the woods, and the fog rolled in whenever it rained. It felt safe, peaceful. I think of it sometimes when I can’t sleep.”
Emory soaked up the sound of her voice—timid in some ways, bold in others; calm and captivating. Mirabelle claimed he and Amelia were alike, and if he’d just come in easier, he’d see it too.
He sweetened on her with a stomach flip and an exchanged glance where she regarded him more gently too.
“I like that,” Emory said. “I grew up in Northern California. I miss the coast, the redwoods.” He gestured to the arid landscape. “This isn’t my scene.”
“I can see that.”
Amelia shifted toward him. The sunlight caught in her hair and warmed her perfume. Emory breathed in the floral sweetness, something like ice cream in a rose garden.
“Alright, what else? You break any hearts in Eugene?”
Amelia thought it over until a conspiratorial smile formed on her lips. “Almost. I have a secret.”
Make her sing. Her song would start like that, the willing surrender. Emory wouldn’t have to coax it out of her. All he had to do was cede the stage and listen.
He put some grit in his voice and charm in the glance he gave.
“Let’s hear it.”
“My junior year, I won first place in the pie contest at the county fair. I entered as a joke and forgot I was on the hook, so the pie was store-bought. Everyone raved about it, thought I was an amazing baker. I’m not. It was a scam.”
Amelia broke with effervescent laughter. Even her secrets were saccharine. Maybe that’s why she invited him in, batting her lashes for the beast at her door. He’d normally ridicule that kind of naiveté in others, but she wasn’t stupid, and it wasn’t a ploy.
“Unbelievable. Were you exposed?”
Amelia nodded with mischievous pride. “Oh yeah. Big scandal. Broken hearts.”
She bit her bottom lip so full it had a crease at its center. More shy than seductive, it suited her so goddamn well; that nervous flutter of her lashes and the flustered breath passing her lips. It fucking wrecked him.
Your move. Make it count.
With his elbow resting next to hers, Emory leaned a little closer. He had her where he wanted. Why then did it feel so cheap?
“I’m sure you spared your old man some heartache if the worst thing you’ve ever done is rig a pie contest.”
Amelia’s joy, fleeting as it was, disintegrated, and she stared at her hands clasped tight in her lap.
“He’d beg to differ.”
“Why’s that?”
“I didn’t want to go to Harvard. My dad arranged the internship with Burt, said it’d put my doubts about law school to rest. It didn’t. Halfway through, I told him I’d already dropped out and had an editing job lined up in Arizona.”
“Why Arizona?”
“I don’t know. I liked the light there and the heat. I thought I’d feel better with warmer weather. Maybe I sensed it’d be good to me. I wanted somewhere to belong, the freedom to write and breathe and just be.”
Shame came like a blow to Emory’s chest. He’d gotten off on a technicality—no, he wasn’t the one who kidnapped her—but had no claim to innocence. He’d derailed her life and mocked her dreams.
“What do you write?” he asked, atonement for the mess he’d made.
“Mostly little poems. The things I’ve seen or places I’ve been. Nice memories. The people I love. Dreams I have. That sort of thing.”
“Not so little.”
With sorrow in her eyes, Amelia smiled. “Not to me.”
“But to Cal.”
She nodded. “God, he was so angry, the things he said.”
“What did he say?”
Amelia stiffened with cool poise. No one ever hid their pain as cleverly as they thought, though. Emory read her fine print—Cal had fucked up good—but everyone had their limits, the things that hurt too much to speak. That was hers.
“Look, I’ll never be pals with your dad. Nothing you can say will make me hate him more than I already do.”
Amelia drew a long breath then spoke quietly, as if it were the first time she’d repeated her father’s words.
“He said I was a failure and a disappointment and that he couldn’t wait until I was some other man’s problem and he could wash his hands of me.”
The cruelty stunned, even for Emory. God only knew how many times his temper had bested him. Still, he couldn’t imagine saying that to someone he loved.
“Fucking prick. What’d you do?”
“Nothing. I cried and didn’t talk to him for weeks.” Amelia smoothed down the hem of her dress, and Emory battled the instinct to reach for her hand. “He was out of line, but he’s a good man.”
Everyone knew what kind of man Callum Havick was—tenacious and unwavering in his convictions, the way he chained himself to the blind might of justice. A good man, maybe, but who was she trying to convince? Not just Emory, it seemed.
“A good man wouldn’t make you cry,” he said out of spite, though the hypocrisy wasn’t lost on him.
“You made me cry.”
“I don’t claim to be a good man.”
It was half a joke, but Amelia studied him as if weighing what little she knew of his heart against his sins.
“I’m not sure you’re a bad man either.”
“The jury still out?”
“Might be,” she laughed.
A grin deposited some ache in Emory’s cheeks. “I guess I gotta win you over then.”
“What’s the plan?”
He glanced at her and answered sincerely, “To be sweet to you.”
“I’d like that,” she said with a smile.
Unrehearsed, it went much better. Amelia must’ve thought so too and relaxed in her seat. The lines on the road had melted into a daze, but the highway gained lanes, and the traffic picked up too. They’d arrive soon, and Emory owed her more than just sweetness.
“About that night,” he said, vaguely aware they’d had so many rough nights and he ought to specify. “The first one. What I said in the basement lounge. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
It tasted like a lie, sounded like one too. Hadn’t he meant to break her down? Apologies chased with lies were as good as useless. On her level, he said all that mattered for him to say.
“Okay, I did mean to hurt you, and I’m sorry for that too. You didn’t deserve it. I was a dick.”
“You were,” Amelia agreed, no bullshit on her end either, “but I forgive you.”
“Good. And, for the record, I like your stories.”
“Really? They’re kind of simple.”
“That’s the appeal,” Emory said and took their exit. At the end of the off-ramp, he stopped at a red light. “People make things too complicated. Simple is better.”
In his world, others tried to impress with stories of death and darkness, a means to relate as if the scars they wore were prizes to be won. He dealt with enough darkness. Lonely at the top, Emory craved the light.
Amelia stared at him with placid curiosity and perhaps divined the parts missing in him, his soul sick of violence.
“Your life is awfully complicated for a man who likes simple things. Could you ever leave this and have a simple life? That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
No one had ever asked him that before—not Mirabelle nor Liam, not even Jack—and he’d never answer honestly if they had.
The sacrilege would be too great, the cost of walking away too staggering.
Emory contemplated the cracked and broken landscape out the windshield.
He thought of his home, where he belonged in the world, and it wasn’t there.
“I’m sure it’s not that easy to just leave,” Amelia continued, a gracious means to skip past that part because he was the one folding in now with pain he couldn’t talk past. “I guess that’s why you like simple things.
Maybe sometime you can tell me your simple stories, if you have any.
And if not, just make them up, and you can pretend for a little while that things aren’t so complicated. ”
“I’d like that,” Emory said and regarded Amelia with renewed fascination.
On his level too, she paid him no deference in hopes of currying his favor or seducing his affection, and Emory no longer wanted anything from her either. Enough was enough. She didn’t have to sing.
Behind them, a car blared its horn.
The light was green.