Chapter 64
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Fiona
For several seconds after Angel lowered his gun, nobody seemed to know what to do with me.
That was probably unfair. Nobody seemed to know what to do with any of it.
Mac lay face down on the floor with blood spreading beneath him.
The table Jasper had driven him through was broken in the middle, one leg kicked halfway beneath the couch.
Something ceramic had shattered near the kitchen, leaving white pieces scattered across the boards.
Jasper stood beside me with blood drying at the corner of his mouth and one side of his face already beginning to swell.
Men filled the doorway and porch, all carrying the kind of tension that said whatever had happened outside had been almost as bad as what happened in here.
And ten feet away stood my father.
My biological father.
Angel.
The man from the picture. The man whose face I had stared at until I knew the lines around his eyes and the shape of his mouth, searching for something that might tell me whether we belonged to each other.
It had been easier when he was trapped inside a photograph.
I could put the phone down when it became too much.
I could hand it back to Jasper and decide I would think about him tomorrow.
There was no putting this away. He was real.
He was staring at me. And he had just killed a man because that man pointed a gun at me.
Jasper’s hand tightened around mine. Not enough to pull me anywhere. Just enough that I felt him. I looked at his face instead of Angel’s, and the blood, swelling, and split lip snapped something into place inside me. “You’re hurt.”
Jasper blinked as if the possibility hadn’t occurred to him. “I’m fine.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“Mostly Mac’s.”
I stared at his mouth until he sighed.
“Some of it’s mine.”
“Jasper.”
“He looks like shit,” Gator said from somewhere behind Angel.
Jasper’s eyes narrowed. “Thank you, cousin.”
“Just tryin’ to be helpful.”
“You could start by shuttin’ the fuck up.”
“That ain’t really one of my gifts.”
The exchange should not have helped. It did.
Something about Gator being ridiculous while there was a dead man on the floor and my father standing in the doorway made the world feel fractionally less tilted.
Maybe that was what people like him did.
They wedged humor into the cracks because otherwise all the ugly things would have nowhere to go.
Angel looked toward Gator. “Any more?”
The question changed him. The uncertainty I had seen when he looked at me disappeared, replaced by the man I suspected everyone else knew. His shoulders settled. His attention sharpened. He looked like someone who had spent a very long time being dangerous and had never once apologized for it.
Gator shook his head. “Just the four.”
I looked toward the open doorway, then back at him. Something in the way he said it made the answer feel unfinished. “They’re dead?”
Gator rubbed a hand over his beard. “They came into my bayou armed and huntin’ Romeo’s wife, Chère. They weren’t leavin’ it.”
My gaze shifted toward Jasper, but he didn’t look surprised. Neither did any of the men surrounding us. Apparently, there were questions I was better off not asking, but unfortunately, I had never been particularly good at leaving those alone. “What are you going to do with them?”
Gator glanced toward Thore.
Thore shrugged. “Feed ’em to the gators.”
I stared at him.
Jasper muttered, “For fuck’s sake.”
Gator sighed. “Man really needs to learn there are some things you don’t explain.”
“They won’t be found,” Angel said, and somehow his calm certainty ended the conversation more effectively than anything else could have.
I looked at Mac’s body again and remembered Rosewood.
Nash had squeezed my shoulder as I turned toward the door, and before I reached it, Mac’s gaze had landed on me.
He hadn’t moved or said anything. His attention had simply settled there, cold and direct enough that the back of my neck had prickled.
I had wondered then if I was imagining the threat because of everything else happening around me, but every instinct I possessed had told me I didn’t want to stay around long enough to find out.
Now I stared at the same man lying dead on the cabin floor and wondered what that look had meant.
“He looked at me like that before,” I said quietly.
Jasper turned toward me. “In Rosewood?”
I nodded. “I thought maybe I was imagining it.”
His thumb moved once across the back of my hand. Neither of us tried to turn that odd look into an answer we didn’t have. Whatever Mac had known then, if he had known anything at all, had died with him.
Gator moved farther into the cabin. “We need to get y’all outta here.”
Jasper nodded immediately. “Yeah.”
I looked at him. “Where?”
“Home.”
Just that. No discussion about whether we could go back. No careful warning that we had to wait for King. No maybe.
Home.
My chest tightened. Jasper glanced down at me and caught whatever was on my face. His thumb brushed across my knuckles, but he didn’t ask.
Gator started issuing instructions to the men around him, and the cabin came alive again. Braveheart disappeared outside. Worm stepped around Mac without looking down and began checking the windows. Thore followed Gator toward the porch while Juju headed for the back of the cabin.
Angel stayed where he was. So did I.
For a moment, Jasper seemed caught between following Gator and refusing to move more than three inches away from me. I saved him the trouble. “Go.”
His head turned sharply. “Not happenin’.”
“Jasper—”
“No.”
“I’m standing in a cabin surrounded by Bourbon Kings and”—my gaze slipped toward Angel before I could stop myself—“him.”
Angel’s mouth twitched. Barely.
I looked back at Jasper. “I think I’m safe for two minutes.”
His eyes moved from me to Angel. Whatever passed between them made me wonder how much history two men could fit into one look.
Angel was the one who spoke. “She’s safe.”
Jasper’s expression hardened. “I know.”
The words should have sounded insulting. They didn’t. If anything, Angel seemed to understand exactly what Jasper meant. He wasn’t agreeing that Angel could protect me. Jasper was telling him he already knew I was safe because Jasper was still here.
Gator called something from outside that sounded suspiciously like an insult involving Jasper’s intelligence. Jasper closed his eyes. “I’m gonna kill him.”
“You’d have to get in line.”
That earned me a look. Better.
He bent and kissed my forehead before pointing toward the far side of the room. “Don’t go outside.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Cute.”
“You married me.”
“Best decision I ever made,” he said before kissing my forehead again.
I watched him walk toward the porch, favoring one side just enough that I knew his ribs hurt no matter how many times he told me he was fine.
Then I realized Angel and I were alone. Well, not actually alone. There were people everywhere. I could hear men outside and someone moving behind the cabin. It felt like we were.
Angel had put his gun away. I noticed that first. Maybe because five minutes earlier I hadn’t known how to hold one. Maybe because a gun in his hand had been part of the first real image I ever had of him. He stood with both hands loose at his sides now, leaving several feet between us.
“I wasn’t supposed to meet you like this,” he said.
I almost laughed, although nothing about the situation was funny. “Was there a plan?”
“No.”
That startled a small sound out of me. His mouth moved again. Not quite a smile. Apparently, I had inherited something besides his eyes. Or maybe I was imagining that too.
“I told King he could tell you I knew,” I said.
Angel nodded. “He did.”
“And that I wasn’t ready.”
“He told me that too.”
I waited. He didn’t offer an excuse for being here, which left one question I couldn’t make sense of. “Then how did you know I was Fiona? King promised he wouldn’t tell you.”
“He didn’t.”
I frowned. “Then how did you know?”
Angel hesitated just long enough that I knew I wasn’t going to like the answer before he gave it. “Grace.”
“Grace?”
“King had me on speaker. He wouldn’t give me your name.” Something that might have been reluctant amusement crossed his face. “Grace did.”
I stared at him for a second. “She told you I was Fiona Mitchell-Steiner?”
His mouth shifted slightly. “No. Fiona DuBois.”
“She told you I married Jasper.”
“Yeah,” he answered. “I’ve known Romeo a long time. Knew there was only person he would trust to protect his wife.”
That explained how he had connected the rest. I looked toward the porch where Jasper had disappeared before turning back to Angel. “So you went to Gator.”
That almost-smile returned. “Yeah.”
“He told you where we were?”
“No. Told me you weren’t ready and he wasn’t tellin’ me shit.”
That sounded enough like Gator that I almost smiled. “Then Jasper called.”
Angel’s gaze shifted briefly toward Mac’s body. “Yeah.”
The answer was so simple that it took some of the fight out of the question I hadn’t meant to make sound accusing. He hadn’t come because he decided he was entitled to ignore what I wanted. He had been with Gator when Jasper called because someone had found us.
“You were mad at King.”
Angel looked at me for a long moment. “Yeah.”
At least he didn’t lie.
“But he kept his word to you.”
Something in his voice made me think that mattered to him even while he hated it.
I tucked a piece of hair behind my ear, mostly because I needed something to do with my hands. “You can sit down.”
His eyes flicked toward the remains of the table. “Furniture’s a little limited.”
I looked at it too. A laugh slipped out of me.
Angel glanced toward the porch. “Rome’s always been hard on furniture.”
Something in the way he said Jasper’s road name made me look at him. There was familiarity there, the kind that came from knowing someone before the rest of the world knew the version standing in front of them now. “How long have you known Jasper?”
“Fourteen years.”