Chapter Fourteen
Brooke worked very diligently not to think about the fact she’d kissed Zeke. She’d just set it aside. Pretended it hadn’t happened.
Because this was like some kind of backsliding. Calling Granger for help. Falling all over again for this man. It was . . . a past she’d left behind. She couldn’t fall back into it just because of some danger.
But it was a really good kiss.
And the fact of the matter was, she could keep pretending. She could convince herself Zeke hadn’t thought of her in four years. She could try to tell herself this was just chemistry and it didn’t matter.
But he had mint chocolate chip ice cream in his freezer.
She could convince herself she was being self-absorbed but knew Zeke had no great affinity for mint chocolate chip ice cream. It wasn’t in there because of him.
That meant it was probably in there because of her. Like the eggs with cheese. Like all the details he seemed to remember so easily.
It’s just food, Brooke. Get a grip. She didn’t have the time or space to figure out Zeke. Or why the things he’d said about North Star and family and her fears felt like keys unlocking everything she’d kept hidden away for so long.
Or why him holding her felt like home. Kissing him felt like she’d just been on ice for four years, waiting around for this. For him. When she hadn’t been.
She was relieved when Royal returned, no matter how angry he looked. He was here and she could stop thinking about Zeke and the past and focus on the important danger in their present.
“There was a tracker on my car,”
he said grimly. “Hart’s sending it in to have it tested. See if they can get something out of it. He didn’t seem too optimistic though.”
Brooke didn’t have the words for this development. She expected Zeke to say something, but he didn’t. Not even to blame Royal for leading someone straight for her.
Nonetheless, that’s what he’d done.
“It’s late, guys,”
Zeke said. “Let’s get some sleep. Reconvene in the morning with clear heads and maybe more information from Hart.”
Brooke glanced at Zeke, but she couldn’t quite read his expression. Except that it was soft. And he was being nice to Royal. And that almost made her cry.
“You can take the room next to Brooke’s,”
he continued. “It’s not in the best of shape, but there’s a mattress in there. I’ll rustle up some blankets and a pillow.”
“Grab your bag. I’ll show you where it is,”
she said to Royal. She didn’t look at Zeke. Not even to thank him. She should have, but she was feeling too soft. And she had to find some way to be strong.
So, she led Royal upstairs, showed him the room next to hers. It indeed wasn’t much, and she resisted the urge to offer to swap rooms. She didn’t have to be a martyr to him just because of her guilt. When he should be feeling guilty, if anyone did.
Besides, Royal didn’t complain. He dropped his bag. He turned to her and studied her face as he crossed his arms over his chest. “Something going on between you two?”
It made her want to laugh, which was a surprising development in this whole confusing night. Like Royal was trying to play overprotective brother when they hadn’t seen each other for so long, and never as adults. In her mind, he was still ten. Not this mountain of a tattooed man.
She supposed this was his way of caring, which made her response gentle. And the truth. Mostly.
“Not that it’s any of your business, but no. There . . . was, a long time ago. But not anymore.”
Royal made a considering noise, like he didn’t buy it, and maybe he shouldn’t since she and Zeke kept somehow falling into kissing each other. And she couldn’t blame Zeke for that, because she’d initiated the last kiss.
A really, really brain-melting kiss that had only ended because she’d been afraid of where it might lead if she let it. Because it would be so easy to be in love with him again, to lean into all that.
She couldn’t imagine surviving the heartbreak a second time. Maybe she was strong enough, but she was tired of the ways life seemed set up to break her. Her brother, case in point.
“Royal. Be upfront with me. What aren’t you telling me?”
He paused for a moment, but he didn’t look away. “Long story, Chick. And aren’t we supposed to get some sleep?”
He moved for the door, but she gave him a big-sister glare and he sighed.
“Those foster homes sucked,” he said.
That was neither here nor there. But she’d let him start wherever he needed. “That they did.”
He looked puzzled. “But you’re like . . . some fancy scientist-type person.”
Did he think that was because she’d had a good experience? “Getting an education didn’t mean I was loved or taken care of, Royal. At a certain point, I was put in a position where failure was not an option.”
In some ways, she’d been grateful for the strictness of the final foster family she’d had in high school before she’d aged out. Their uncompromising and authoritarian methods had given her the ability to do something with her life. If she hadn’t had that, who knows where she would have ended up.
But it had been a hard, cold, four years in that home. Where even the whiff of a B could have gotten her kicked back to a group home.
“I guess I never thought . . .”
Royal trailed off, looking confused, but then he shook his head. “My point is, I hated them all. I never could fit in. I was always itching for a fight. So about the time I turned sixteen and I was back in one of those group homes, I figured I’d just run away and go back to the Sons. The system wasn’t too broken up by my absence.”
“Royal.”
“I didn’t go back to like belong or anything. I just thought about us. Growing up there. How bad it was, but how bad the foster shit was. So I figured . . . What if I went back? I could help kids like us. Be their inside protector. Without all the rules and school and constant interference by people who thought they were giving me charity. It was bad living with the Sons, sure, but not worse than being bounced around, knocked around. At least I had some . . . status there.”
He’d chosen to go back because a system had failed him. It was hard to blame him for that, but . . . “You could have also chosen to go into law enforcement or social work and helped, Royal.”
He snorted. “Yeah, right. Rules and me, Chick? We don’t get along.”
She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Her brother was telling her what had happened to him, what he’d done. And she wanted to hear it. “So, you went back to Dad?”
“Yeah. I convinced Dad I really wanted back. Wanted to be a part of it. I didn’t. I wanted to mess up his plans. I wanted to help kids like us. And the way they treated those girls . . .”
He shook his head. “I just always saw you. So I had to do something. I spent a year doing that, always so afraid Dad saw right through me while I tried to protect those girls. I was always waiting for a real end, but in retrospect, I guess I fooled him.”
A real end. Brooke looked at her brother, thought of Zeke. A death wish. The idea that if they died doing something noble, it would somehow make everything all right.
It made her want to cry for them. Maybe all of them.
But she could tell Royal all the things she couldn’t tell Zeke. Because this was her baby brother and he’d done something noble, even if she wished he’d gone about it in a different way.
“I love you no matter what. I’d have gotten you that lawyer even if you’d been in the wrong. I don’t know why it got kept from you that I was behind it, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is, I was going to support you no matter what. I always will.”
Royal sighed. “Because you think you owe me, Chick. And maybe I let you think that because it’s easy, but you don’t. We were both kids. Failed by a hell of a lot of people.”
Brooke had to carefully inhale then force herself to exhale at his words. She wanted it to be true, but . . . How could it be? She’d been older. She should have . . . fought harder. Done something. She didn’t know how to explain that to him, and he was talking about the situation at hand anyway. Not their past.
“I don’t think it matters how dismantled the Sons is. I disrespected Dad when I tricked him into letting me in then protected those kids. I embarrassed him in that circle. No amount of jail time is going to make him let that go, because it wasn’t about the Sons. It was about him and me, and me pulling one over on him. Maybe he’s still in jail right now. Maybe he has no ability to reach the outside, but I doubt it. I really doubt it. Men like that don’t just stop being sadistic, Brooke.”
It wasn’t that she disagreed with him. She remembered just how vindictive their father could be. That’s how he’d gotten Family Services called on him. How he’d managed to lose his kids no matter how the Sons had tried to wriggle him out of it. Because he’d been determined to make someone else pay for their lack of reverence. That had mattered more than any consequence to Jeremiah Campbell.
It was just that she hadn’t known her brother as an adult. And he stood there looking and sounding like a man. It was disorienting.
“He’s the only one who’d know you matter to me, Chick. Someone threatening you to me . . . it had to be him.”
“Or come from him.”
“Yeah. Look, leopards don’t change their spots. Maybe the Sons is gone. Maybe he’s in jail. But it doesn’t mean he can’t wield a certain group of people against us.”
She didn’t like it at all, but Royal was right. “Did you tell all this to Thomas?”
“Bits and pieces. Hart seems legit, for a cop, but . . .”
“I need you to tell him. Everything. Anything. No matter how little. We can’t protect you if we don’t know what this is. The police can look into Sons’s things. They can look into all Dad’s prison records. They can really dig into this and keep you safe in the process.”
“What about you?”
“It’s not about me. You said so yourself.”
“No, I said our father is the only one who’d know that to hurt me he only had to get to you. That means you’re in danger. I don’t think he’d be too broken up about hurting you again, Brooke.”
She didn’t like the way her brother used her real name, though she couldn’t pinpoint why. Only that it made this all so much more serious, when she didn’t want him worried about her. She couldn’t be a burden to him when . . .
Zeke’s words from earlier came back to her.
You’re always so afraid. That you might ask too much. That you have to walk on all those eggshells your foster families made you walk on. That if you’re not perfect, people will turn you away.
Maybe she felt those things, but was it really wrong? Except she’d failed Royal before, and here he was and . . . It didn’t matter. This wasn’t about her. Even if she got caught in the crosshairs. “Okay, maybe, but—”
“You going to tell your boyfriend?”
She sighed. There was no point explaining, again, that Zeke was just . . . Zeke. Maybe the old feelings were still there, but . . . There was no ending that wasn’t the exact same as four years ago.
Even if Zeke acted like he understood his mistakes. Even if he understood her. Even if he’d changed from that angry, edgy, desperate-to-act man.
Brooke was the same.
“Here’s the deal,”
Royal said when she didn’t answer. “I’ll tell the cops everything, if you tell Zeke everything. No point leaving that guy out of it when it’s clear he’ll protect you.”
“I’ve asked for his help in that department because he’s perfectly capable, but—”
“He’d lick your boots, Chick. That’s the only reason I’m under this roof, the only reason I haven’t messed with him. He’s only mixed up in this to save you from it. For whatever reason, that’s your deal, but it’s true.”
That left her feeling too . . . something. Hopeful, probably. “We really do need to get some sleep.”
He nodded. “That’s fine. As long as we have a deal.”
Brooke blew out a breath. Was there any point arguing? Maybe it was really best that everyone knew everything. “Fine.”
“I’ll talk to Hart tomorrow.”
She nodded and then left him in the room, not sure what else to say. What else to do. Everything felt like such a jumble. One she couldn’t list or organize or data point her way through like she had with studying the skull.
Still, she got ready for bed. Crawled into the nicer one than her brother’s. She was exhausted and needed rest, but her mind whirled.
She thought about Zeke in his bedroom downstairs. Far away from Royal. Far away from the heavy things weighing her down.
He’d always been a safe place to land.
Except that whole time when he broke up with you and left you to pick up the pieces on your own.
But she wasn’t that girl anymore, was she?
She could practically hear her old therapist’s voice. Beware self-destructive tendencies brought on by overstressing yourself to be perfect in everything and make everyone around you happy while ignoring your own happiness.
That’s essentially what Zeke had accused her of as well. Because she did one of two things. Contorted herself for people or isolated herself from people.
She didn’t think she’d done either with Zeke the past week. Wasn’t that funny? And if she were to put her own happiness in the mix, wouldn’t that include a late-night trip down to Zeke’s bedroom? Because she was well versed in the ways that could make her happy.
Temporarily.
Like ice cream.
The ice cream he’d bought, thinking of her, whether he’d been conscious of it or not.
Zeke tossed and turned. Even though he’d been the one to suggest sleep, it felt too much like sitting around waiting for something to happen. Something to happen to Brooke.
He sat up, and the only reason he didn’t reach for the gun on his nightstand was the little flash of something red he saw in the moonlight.
Brooke.
He pushed into a sitting position as she entered his room, and then she just stood there, a foot or two away from his bed.
Meanwhile his heart clattered against his chest like its own independent being.
“Everything okay?”
he asked, his voice rusty.
“Yes,”
she said calmly. Firmly. “I was just talking to Royal when we went up, one-on-one, and we made a deal. He’d tell this all to Thomas, if I told it all to you.”
Zeke wasn’t sure what to expect “this all”
to entail, but he was more taken off guard by the fact Royal had suggested such a deal. “Why did he want you to tell me?”
“Well, he seems to think you’ll protect me.”
Zeke didn’t think Royal had a particularly high opinion of him, so this was interesting. “He’d be right.”
“I know. That is why I called you in the first place with this whole mess.”
She moved closer to his bed and then, to his great surprise, took a seat on the edge of it. Her hip touched his knee. Only a sheet between them.
He knew he couldn’t sit there and ruminate on that, so he tried to focus on the facts. “So, what is this whole thing you have to tell me?”
She relayed Royal’s involvement with the Sons before he’d gone to jail. Royal’s relationship with their father and why their dad might make Royal, and thus Brooke, a target. It felt a bit like being back in North Star. Trying to untangle the petty infighting in the Sons. Make sense of where the real issues stemmed from.
And what the real consequences would be from angry men with more weapons than sense, and so much anger and bitterness it had stamped out any empathy they’d been born with.
It was never simple, and almost always involved the outsized egos of awful men.
“It won’t be the Sons,”
Zeke said, trying not to be too aware of the fact he wore nothing but boxers and she was sitting on his bed in a dark room late at night. And it would only take peeling that sheet away for them to be touching.
The desperate, pounding need to touch her would have been distracting if he wasn’t such a professional. Or so he told himself.
“They don’t have that kind of reach anymore,”
he continued. “But there are other groups, other ways for a man to wield control from prison. I don’t like it. Royal’s right. You’re both in danger and targets, until we figure out exactly where this threat is coming from.”
“This isn’t what you signed up for.”
For a moment, he just stared at her shadow. Did she really not understand? “Brooke. You can’t be serious. I signed up for you.”
She didn’t say anything, and he couldn’t see her expression in the dim room. When she didn’t attempt to speak at all, he set out to reassure her. “You and Royal are safe here. We’ll make sure of it.”
She took one of her long, careful inhales. Let it out slowly. It reminded him too much of a time long gone, when she was just . . . in his life. In his bed. He’d wake up or fall asleep to her doing her deep breathing, so sure it “centered” her.
Still, she said nothing. Still, she sat on his bed.
Zeke waited for whatever else there was, but she just . . . never said anything else.
“This . . . couldn’t have waited until morning?”
He wasn’t about to lie to himself. He was prodding.
“I suppose it could have. But I can’t stop my brain from whirling in the same ridiculous circles, and I just couldn’t lay there anymore marinating in my own . . . unsolvable problems. So, I figured I’d tell you.”
“Ah.”
He waited. She didn’t leave. Didn’t offer anything else. “Well, you’ve told me.”
“Yes,”
she agreed. And didn’t so much as shift a muscle as if considering getting up.
He had a few options. The smart one would be to maintain his silence. Wait for her to say whatever she wanted to say, do whatever she wanted to do.
Had he ever been able to maintain smart when it came to her? No. Because even when he’d made what had felt like the right decision at the time to put distance between them years ago, he’d handled it badly. He’d hurt her badly.
If he was smart, if he was strong, if he was actually any of the things he prided himself on being, he’d have the control to keep his mouth shut.
But he was nothing he thought he was or wanted to be when it came to her. “Are you trying to tell me you came down here looking for a distraction?”
She made a little noise. Not quite a laugh, but close. “Maybe.”
She shifted. She touched his chest and flattened her palm over his heart. “Yes, that is what I’m saying. Going to kick me out?”
He circled his fingers around her wrist, pulled her into him. Over him. “I’d be your distraction a million times over, Brooke. No questions asked.”
And he spent the night keeping that promise.