2. Long Beach
LONG BEACH
Jamie
“You are my wean , Jamie! My child! How dare you walk away from me? I’m your mam! YOUR MOTHER!”
Annoyed at the shouts, I pulled my long blond hair up to keep it from teasing my tensed jaw as I strolled out of Big Brody’s office. My father’s office. But I no longer referred to the lad as such. Lad . I chuckled. I wanted nothing to do with Clan MacKenzie.
“Do not walk away, son!” Big Brody’s voice quivered with rage. Good . He was usually the easy-going one. Probably wouldn’t have torn the world apart to find his six-year-old. Not like my mother.
“Be back the day after …” I gripped both door handles and allowed in the fresh light of day. “… Never.”
On the front porch, I turned around. Man, it slipped my mind how into the holidays my mother got, and it appeared she hadn’t spared any expense for the Fourth of July celebration tonight.
My parents and brothers looked like the quintessential American family amid the Independence Day flags and a red, white, and blue wreath my mother had put up for the holiday.
Yep. The Good American Family. They weren’t.
They ran one of the most successful criminal enterprises on the West Coast.
I took one last long look at my family. Oohh .
That’s who was missing . Camdyn MacKenzie.
We shared the titles of the middle son …
until I had given up on my clan. The MacKenzies must’ve excluded Cam.
Perhaps to keep him from the guilt of not being taken as a child when clan enemies abducted me from that park around the corner.
In a voice relieved of all emotion, I muttered, “Thank you all for the intervention. I’ll keep everything you all have said in mind.
” My hands lifted in a salute, a last farewell to the whole lot of them.
At his father’s side, Little Brody’s face reddened, the vein in his forehead pulsing.
Little was a name those MacKenzies gave their son for some reason or another because only God knew if that bear of a man was ever so tiny.
There were six of them . Seven, if you counted me.
Smack dab in the middle. Son four. Little Brody, Leith, Camdyn, me, Lachlan, Rory, and Baby Jake, now twenty-three, I believe, and already had an advanced degree behind his name.
With a swagger, I descended the steps, putting distance between me and the MacKenzies and the trellises I’d once longed to use as my escape from their suffocating grip.
I hadn’t asked them to save me. I hadn’t asked for much from the people I no longer knew.
Seven days in captivity—an entire week. Why hadn’t it wiped away six years of them ?
I was about the age Baby Jake was now when I decided enough was enough.
As I removed the key fob to my Gladiator truck, the Hydro Blue Pearl paint gleaming in the sunlight, footsteps approached from behind.
A hand gripped my shoulder. I pivoted. Muscle memory sent the other man—whom some would call my second oldest brother, Leith—stumbling back a few paces when my hands slammed his chest. “Don’t touch me, lad . ” I made a joke of their dialect .
“Lad?” Leith scoffed, scrubbing a hand through his blond crew cut. “Okay, I get it. You’re not Scottish anymore. You’re just some random American.”
“Yep. It’s rather simple, really. Did you come out to discuss that? I thought I made myself clear when I walked out of their house. And”—my head tilted—“when I stood from that rollaway chair in your father’s office and sent it crashing through the French doors. Yeah, that just about sums it up?”
I should’ve walked away. But Leith might be the only MacKenzie boy I still loved.
I wanted to love Jake, but who could love a shrink?
Baby Jake hadn’t even started his supervised clinical hours and already seemed annoying.
Therapists got in your head too much. Besides, out of my older brothers, Leith never condoned the weapons and drug trafficking. He wasn’t so … bad.
As if he sensed it, too, Leith took a step forward. A muscle worked under his jaw. “Listen, I won’t say you’re breaking Mam’s heart.”
“Nan, you mean?” I referred to the woman by the name most everyone in Southern California called her. Most everyone who wasn’t on her hit list. When Nan MacKenzie wasn’t the matriarch of the Scottish mob, she baked delicious cookies.
That muscle jumped again. Leith put his hands together, breathing deeply. “We aren’t your enemy. Even though you disappeared for the last seven years. Almost a decade! The same blood running through my veins is?—”
“I wish …” I stepped close enough for my nose to press down against Leith.
Yes, I’d grown much taller and loved it.
At six seven—and now two hundred twenty pounds of raw muscle thanks to my seven-year career as a Marine, eventually becoming a Raider—I no longer felt like a reed blowing in the wind.
Because of my time in the military, my presence dominated any space I occupied.
“I once wished I were never born. After Uncle Nolan rescued me wh en I was six, I was this weak thing, not even human. A clingy parasite not fit for life.”
“That’s not how anyone saw?—”
“ ‘Make sure Jamie takes his pills.’ ‘Make sure the boy uses his breathing techniques.’ ‘Little Brody, if you’re gonna watch people hump on the telly and Jamie’s home, don’t do it in the den.
Do it in your room, son.’?” I mimicked Mam as best as I could with a much deeper baritone.
“Your mother admonished Brody about his viewing choices when I was fourteen, I believe. I’d trembled while standing in the archway to the den.
She’d just skinned tatties for bangers and mash.
Little Brody had some R-rated movie on. I suppose other fourteen-year-olds hid magazines under their bed while I couldn’t move, except for how my entire body trembled uncontrollably. ” A laugh barked from my tensed lips.
“That was then, Jamie. You’re the big three-oh. Thirty . A grown man. You’ve had a girlfriend.” Dude’s expression showed uncertainty.
“Listen, I don’t understand you all’s need for an intervention.
I haven’t crossed paths with anyone in Clan MacKenzie in over seven years …
” A flash of a memory made my eyes close.
Devi … I didn’t save that girl. That asinine prostitute, with corky hair and a mouth that soured compared to her honey skin.
But now, there was someone else I could rescue.
I tapped my knuckles against Leith’s chest. “I could use your help, actually.”
“What is it? Anything,” Leith promised. In his early forties, he was now dependable.
Had a good head on his shoulders ever since he met his wife—they were kids then.
He wasn’t involved in all Clan MacKenzie affairs.
His parents’ Sundays were spent at church, while their basement hosted torture fests for the rest of the week.
I glared at the distant sun and then met Leith’s gaze. “What if the MacKenzies knew that my abductor …? What if?—? ”
“ The MacKenzies . Jamie, you are a Mac—” Leith slammed his own mouth shut.
“Listen to me , Leith.” I roughed a hand over my face, feeling the cool breeze from the coast, but it couldn’t lower the anger that rose into a heated rage. “What if your parents knew I wasn’t the only child my abductor had taken? What if those Scottish mobsters knew about the others?”
Leith paced the sidewalk, striking one hand against the other. “What others!”
“ Weans , as your mother would say; other chil?—”
“Are you off your medication?” came another voice, deep with accusation. “And what do you mean, Leith’s mam?”
I threw a quick glance at Little Brody, who scratched at his beard. Ahh, the clan’s namesake wouldn’t sit this one out. So predictable.
My attention returned to the less morally corrupt of the two. “Leith, meet me at Michie’s if you want to continue this discussion.” I strolled around the matte grill of my Gladiator. I climbed into the truck, and Leith rounded on Brody.
“I had our bràthair talking. Why did you mention—” Leith’s Scottish accent leaped from his chest as I slammed the door shut.
I presumed he was asking why Brody mentioned the medication.
Yep. A sore topic. My knuckles tightened around the steering wheel.
Brody, Leith, Cam, did you make sure your baby bràthair took his medication?
The anxiety meds and all the other pills the MacKenzies popped into me went for a swim in the toilet the second I considered joining the military. The mental health diagnoses that would’ve barred me from the Marine Corps, well, I got them to vanish too. Devi had died. And I’d …
I’d needed the rigorous training the military offered. Now, I needed Leith to meet me somewhere he detested.
Michie’s .
Twenty minutes later, I entered the sleek bar, passing plush chairs with mostly Japanese men in them, who wore suits, even on weekends.
At the bar, I ordered a Coke and glanced over my shoulder. C’mon, Leith . The guy should’ve gotten in his car the second he put Brody in his place. I had even sat in the parking lot for a while before coming inside.
The bartender placed the Coke in front of me and leaned her elbows on the counter as if to tempt me with her swoop-necked blouse. “Waiting for someone?”
“Yep.” I glanced toward the door again. Best not to give her any ideas.
While those MacKenzies had questioned my sexuality in my early twenties, I’d never wanted anyone.
No, wait . I had a thing for Camdyn’s wife back in high school and had almost gotten her away from him with a pack of Nutter Butters.