Rune's Solace (The Devil's House MC : South Carolina #7)

Chapter One

THE BEST HOUR of the day came before anybody else was awake to ruin it.

I was already on my knees in the dirt when the sun started to rise over the trees, early enough that July hadn’t decided to be miserable yet.

The air was cool and wet against the back of my neck, and the ground still held yesterday’s rain, dark under my fingers and smelling like dirt ought to smell.

Rosemary when I brushed against it. Mint farther down.

River if the wind came through the trees right.

I pulled a slow breath into my lungs and went back to work.

My hands knew what they were doing without much help from me.

Ten thousand mornings of the same work will do that to a man, and most days I was glad for it, because if my hands were busy my head usually shut the hell up.

I pinched the spent tops off the basil, thumbed a snail off a comfrey leaf and tossed it into the grass instead of crushing it, then worked my way down the row like I always did, west to east, taking care of the plants that caught the sun first before I got to the ones that could handle being ignored awhile.

There was an order to it I liked. Everything I’d put in this ground was here for a reason, and most of it did what it was supposed to do if I paid attention.

Too much water, you backed off. Not enough sun, you moved it.

Something started dying, you figured out why and fixed it before it was too late.

Plants didn’t lie to you about what was wrong with them, and they didn’t pretend they didn’t need anything when they did.

People could make a hell of a mess out of something that simple.

My mother taught me most of what I knew before I was tall enough to see over the beds.

She would’ve bitched about my garden for an hour if she’d lived long enough to see it, probably told me everything was too neat and then spent the rest of the day rearranging it when my back was turned.

Hers had been half the size and twice as wild, behind the house I grew up in maybe twenty minutes up the road, same dirt and same wet South Carolina heat, but she let things go wherever they wanted while I kept mine where I’d put them.

Didn’t matter. Her hands were still in mine every time I worked out here, and so was her voice, especially when I got near the things she’d drilled into me hardest. Feverfew for a headache.

Yarrow for bleeding. Comfrey for bone, but never on an open wound.

Not on an open wound, Gavin. You listening to me? You’ll seal the dirt right in.

I hadn’t listened worth a damn when I was twelve.

Listened now.

I sat back on my heels and wiped my forehead with my arm as the morning rays filtered through the oaks, catching the ink up both my arms. Green things mostly, leaves and vines and plants laid over older marks that weren’t half as nice to look at.

The rest of the brothers favored skulls, reapers, knives, the usual shit men like us put on ourselves to save everybody else the trouble of wondering what we were capable of.

Mine didn’t look as mean until you knew what you were looking at.

Foxglove could stop a heart as quick as a bullet if you used enough of it.

Nightshade was pretty right up until it killed you.

I knew which things healed and which things hurt, and I knew exactly how little separated the two.

The brothers thought the gardening was funny when I first started it.

Herbalist. Witch doctor. Big bad biker playing in the dirt.

That lasted until about the third time somebody came pounding on my cabin door at two in the morning with a bullet still in him and nowhere legal to take it, and I put him on my table and dug the lead out with the same hands they’d been laughing at the day before.

Nobody laughed much after that.

I could fix damn near anything that came through my door if it got to me breathing, and I could put a man down just as easy when that was what the job called for.

Both things lived in me fine. Always had.

A man who only knew how to mend wasn’t much use in a club like mine, and I’d never had trouble doing the other work when Devil pointed me toward it.

I’d done things that would’ve kept better men awake and slept fine afterward.

Lately, sleeping hadn’t been quite so easy.

I looked down and realized I’d been holding the same piece of chamomile between my fingers long enough to warm it.

I let go.

There was one thing I didn’t do out here, and that was think about Amy Dawson.

That was the rule, anyway.

I’d gotten pretty damn good at keeping it most days, mostly because I’d built my life so there wasn’t much room left for her to get into.

Up before the sun. Garden. Cut whatever Josie needed for the kitchen.

Make whatever was needed for my shelf. Handle club business.

Take whatever Devil put in front of me. Work until I was tired enough to fall into bed and go unconscious before my head had a chance to start running.

Worked better than it had any right to.

Then I’d get a morning like this, halfway down a row of chamomile with nobody around and nothing loud enough to drown myself out with, and she’d walk straight into my head without so much as knocking.

The kiss always came first.

Her in my cabin. My hand in her hair. That little sound she’d made when I finally put my mouth on hers after months of pretending I didn’t spend half my life thinking about doing exactly that.

I’d kissed her like a man who’d forgotten every reason he wasn’t supposed to, and for a few minutes I’d let myself have something I’d wanted so long I’d damn near convinced myself wanting it was the same as having a right to it.

It wasn’t.

She’d been eighteen when she came to us and nineteen by the time I kissed her.

I was thirty-five, patched into a one-percenter club, with blood on my hands and enough ugly behind me to know exactly what kind of man I was.

Amy had already had enough taken from her by men who figured wanting something gave them the right to take it, and I’d spent months telling myself that if there was one decent thing left in me, I’d use it to make damn sure I never became another one.

Then I kissed her anyway.

And instead of admitting I’d lost the fight, I panicked and made sure she paid for it.

I didn’t lie to her afterward. A lie would’ve been kinder.

I waited until the common room was full—brothers, old ladies, Amy sitting right there—and put my hands on one of the club women where I knew Amy could see me.

Walked that woman toward the hall like I had every intention of fucking her, and I never looked back because I didn’t need to.

I’d set the entire damn thing up for one person in that room, and I knew she was watching.

Still saw her face before I turned away.

That was the part that stuck.

Not the woman. Not the hall. Not even the look the brothers gave me, because some of them knew me well enough to know something didn’t add up. It was Amy’s face and the second she believed me, when something I’d spent months handling careful went out behind her eyes.

Then I kept walking.

I left the woman at the end of the hall, gave her forty dollars to keep her mouth shut, and went outside to stand in the dark by myself like feeling shitty about what I’d done somehow made me less of a bastard for doing it.

It didn’t. I’d kissed Amy, let her think that maybe the thing between us was finally real, then made her watch me choose somebody else in front of damn near everybody she knew, all because I’d decided hurting her bad enough once would keep me from hurting her worse later.

Called it mercy.

Fucking cowardice was closer.

Worst part was, it worked.

Amy believed every second because I’d made damn sure she would, and then she did exactly what I’d wanted.

She got mad. Got hurt. Stopped looking at me like I was anything she wanted and started building something that didn’t have me in it.

College across the river, classes, new friends, a life that belonged to her.

There was even some boy her own age hanging around now, the kind who could walk beside her in broad daylight without anybody wondering what the hell he was doing there, no patch on his back, no club attached to his name, no blood on his hands and no sixteen years between them.

Good.

That was what I told myself whenever I saw the two of them.

Good. That’s what you wanted.

Problem was, knowing I’d gotten exactly what I wanted hadn’t made watching it any easier.

“You’re doing the thing.”

I hadn’t heard Josie cross the yard. He moved quiet for a man his size, which fooled people who didn’t know him, same as the apron did, same as the fact he could spend half a day feeding forty people and remember who hated onions. They saw the cook and figured that was all the man was made of.

Their mistake.

He appeared beside me holding two mugs and shoved one in my direction. I took it without asking. Black and mean, the way I liked it.

“You gonna keep eyeball-fucking that plant,” he asked, “or you planning on doing something with it?”

“Fuck off.”

“He’s still with us.” Josie dropped onto the upended crate by the tomatoes and blew across his coffee. “Was starting to think you’d gone soft on me.”

“I’m working.”

“Bullshit. You haven’t moved in ten minutes.”

“I got shit on my mind.”

“Yeah. I can see it leaking out your fucking ears.”

I looked at him.

“Don’t give me that look.” He took a drink and nodded toward the chamomile. “I’ve been watching you stare at the same patch of dirt like it personally fucked you over. Whatever’s chewing on you, spit it out.”

“Nothing’s chewing on me.”

“Right.” Another drink. “And I’m the fucking tooth fairy.”