12. Harper
HARPER
Outside the warehouse, I marched right up to the Jeep and started kicking the driver's side tire. “Fucking bastard, always ordering me around. Who the fuck cares what you think? I’m not your stupid doll! Think you can play with my emotions telling me I’m a good girl, then turning around and yelling at me!
Yeah, well, you pig-headed, grumpy, poo-poo head with a god-like body, I don’t need you! ”
The last kick, I missed and slipped, falling on my ass to the gravel of the parking lot. “Fuck. I just want to go home.” I cried, not bothering to get up.
A shadow crossed over me a moment before Ghost’s concerned face appeared above me. “Angel… you good?”
“Of course, I’m not good. Look at me! I’m pissed off and lying in the dirt of a warehouse owned by one of the biggest drug dealers in this country.
How could I possibly be good?” I shouted, taking out my anger on him.
“Why couldn’t you guys just leave me where I was?
I’m not cut out for this kind of life. Dax, on the other hand, is perfect.
Maybe you should change your mind and pick her to be your person, not me.
I mean, all we’ve done since being together is fight. ”
Ghost surprised me by laying his ass down on the ground next to me. He lifted my head so I could rest it on his arm instead of the gravel, making sure I was comfortable.
Who were these men? No one did shit like that for another person.
“Look, Harper, I can’t tell you what to feel or how to think, but to me, the fact we fight all the time is a good sign,” Ghost shared.
I turned to look at him, utterly confused by his statement.
I went to argue, but he put his other hand over my mouth.
“Nope, you got your turn to say whatever you wanted, now you get to listen.”
I licked the inside of his hand, trying to gross him out enough to let me go, but he smirked. “Angel, I want your tongue on me anytime, anywhere you like. Also, for you to think a little spit would work when I have two brothers is insulting.” Begrudgingly I grunted in agreement.
Never having had siblings, I didn’t know from first-hand experience how that all works, but Dax had told me enough stories of her and her twin to get an idea.
“Are you going to listen to me now?” Ghost asked, still keeping his hand on my mouth. Nodding, I agreed to his request. “Wonderful, I’m going to remove my hand, but if I need to shut you up again, I will.”
Mouth released, I rubbed my face with the back of my hand, trying to get all my own spit off of it. “I promise to listen. Go ahead.”
“Have any of the others talked about our childhood?” he asked, shocking me. That was not at all where I assumed this was heading.
“No, not really. I know it’s the three of you, and you don’t have any other family you know of,” I shared.
He nodded before taking a deep breath. “Our mom was a disaster from day one, or that’s what our social worker told us.
She cleaned up long enough to have us, but once we were out of her womb and she could collect government help, she was back on the drugs.
People we’ve talked to and our own experiences with her made us think she was mentally ill…
like needed to be in the care of a doctor, not her three kids.
We lived in a neighborhood where no one gave a shit.
So when she finally overdosed when we were thirteen, we’d pretty much been taking care of ourselves as it was since the age of… oh, I don’t know, eight.
“Magnus took the role of being the parent, learned how to cook, made sure we all had things we needed, and tried to keep child services from taking us. When we found mom dead in her bed one morning, we packed up our shit, went to school to avoid raising suspicion, then left town. We found the stash of money she made from giving dudes blow jobs behind the dumpster of our crack house apartment building and used it to buy bus tickets out of there. We all voted on going someplace warmer with a bigger city than Oklahoma City, where we were raised and ended up in California.” Ghost paused as if he was reliving that time in his life before he started again.
“We started out as thieves, stealing what we needed to stay alive and fed. We tried not to hit the same places and only went for bigger stores that could take the hit, not mom-and-pop shops. As time passed, we got a reputation for being good at our skills, and local gangs would hire us to do jobs. Somewhere along the way, we found Sage. A pretty young girl who’d found herself on the streets at the age of fifteen…
we were sixteen at the time and took her under our wing.
She was with us for two years before she was killed.
A job we were on went bad. We’d been set up by a rival gang, and because she was our lookout and tried to warn us, they shot her.
Sage and Magnus were in love, and they’d fought for two days about her helping us on this job.
It was one of the biggest we’d had, and it was super risky.
“Jaxson and I voted for her help, knowing it would take all three of us on the inside, and she knew how we worked. Finally, Magnus relented, and she was allowed to be our lookout. The fact that Magnus hadn’t protected her and she got killed changed him.
He blamed himself for letting her come on the job and never once let Jaxson and me take part of the responsibility for talking him into it. You wanna know why?” Ghost asked.
Tears pricked my eyes as I pictured this story in my head. “Why?”
“Because he was the leader when it came to jobs. We might vote on which ones to take, but once we are on a job, he is the law. The two of us follow his command without question. Magnus is a brilliant mind for this kind of thing, and he let her come with us. He’s always been a controlling poo-poo head, as you so aptly put it, but after we lost Sage, it became ten times worse,” Ghost shared with a sigh.
“He’s never once forgiven himself for her getting killed.
I also think, in some ways, he blames not being able to save our mom either.
She was fucked in the head, there was no doubt, but he did everything to keep her alive and healthy.
Flushing her drugs when he found them, pouring booze down the drain.
He would even take her beating when she raged at him for it, all the while she was calling him names of people we’d never heard of before.
She’d mutter and argue with herself, screaming at the wall like someone was standing there talking to her, but nothing worked.
Then she would leave for days going on benders, so Magnus stopped, and she started to come home more often.
Then a few weeks later, she was dead. So when you add up all those things in a kid’s life before he even reaches adulthood, it’s bound to leave some scars.
Our big brother protected us from so much but doing so left him a wreck. ”
Slowly, I sat up and looked down at Ghost. I could see the past lingering in his gaze as he searched my face.
Reaching out, I cupped his cheek and wiped the tear that leaked out of his eye.
“You went through the same things, too, you know. He’s not the only one entitled to be a little bit of a disaster. ”
He turned his head, kissing my palm. “Thanks, angel, but I think we can only allow one person in the family to go off the deep end. He’s earned the right, but having you here helps as much as it brings up old hurts.
If he didn’t truly care about you, he would never get that upset.
As any good assassin can tell you, the only way to survive what we do is to turn off the part of you that sees people as human.
Grumpy old Maggie can’t see you as anything but human and someone that, if they get hurt, will absolutely make him lose his shit.
You really want to know how he feels about you?
Put yourself in danger and see what happens. ”
“Would that person live after I did that?” I asked speculatively
“Not a fucking chance, but you would get your answer loud and clear,” Ghost answered with a grin.
“Come on, the only one who is going to get him out of the foul mood he’s in now is you.
He doesn’t give a shit what we think about him.
Nope, the only true north he has is you, and I would bet right about now he thinks he’s fucked everything up for good. ”
Getting to my feet, I reached out and pulled Ghost up before rolling my eyes. “God, is he always this dramatic? I feel like I’m gonna need to remind him I’m the woman in this relationship.”
“Pump the breaks there, speed racer. Did you just admit we’re in a relationship?” Ghost asked, leaping in front of me, holding out his hand.
“Don’t push your luck. If anyone asks, I still might deny it on principle,” I answered, stepping around him and back into the gym.
Once my eyes adjusted, I spotted the other two in the back corner near the row of punching bags.
Jaxson stood to one side, watching his brother with a worried look as Magnus was as still as a statue but for his heaving chest. Blood was dripping from his hands, and one of the punching bags was stuck in a dent in the wall leaking sand.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out what happened.
Approaching him from the side, I took one of his hands in both of mine, examining his busted knuckles. “Damn, you sure did a number on yourself. Can one of you locate a first-aid kit?” I asked, looking at the other two.
Tugging on Magnus’s hand I was still holding, I led him over to a weight bench, making him take a seat.
He still hadn’t said a word to me, but I wasn’t really interested in hearing what he had to say right now anyway.
While Ghost gave me the background of why his brother acted the way he did, that doesn’t excuse him from treating me the way he had been.