Chapter 15
15
“ W hat were your parents like?” Lina asked Viper as they headed east early the next morning.
He didn’t talk about his parents—or his biological brothers—much, if at all, anymore, and his stomach tightened at her question. She’d opened up to him about hers, but her father’s personality and relationship with her were critical to figuring out the message he’d left her. The story of his parents was better left in the past.
Despite all that, despite the churn of his gut and the little voice in his head telling him not to suck her into all the ugly he’d grown up with, he found himself answering.
“They were the kind of parents who shouldn’t have been parents,” he replied. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her head tip, a curtain of dark hair falling over her shoulder. “They were…” He’d almost said “poor and uneducated,” but a lot of people in the US were and didn’t do the things his parents had done. The stress of no money and not knowing how to help themselves hadn’t helped. But they could have made different choices.
“I grew up poor. Very poor. Seven of us in a three-room shack. And when I say shack, it really was an old shack. No insulation, bare wood floors and walls. We had plumbing, but electricity depended on whether the bill got paid.”
“Where did you grow up?”
“Southern Georgia. At least the winters weren’t long.” The summers had been sweltering, though. No electricity meant no fans, and their six windows had no screens. He’d woken with bug bites all over his body more times than he cared to remember.
“Four brothers?” she asked, recalling what he’d told her a few nights ago.
He nodded. “One is dead, one is in the military, and two are in jail.” The words came out steady and measured even though they felt rushed, like a confession.
“Your parents?”
“My dad’s dead. I haven’t seen or spoken to my mom in ten years.”
“Tell me about your brothers.”
It shouldn’t surprise him that she asked, but it did. Most people thought they wanted the details, thought they could handle them, or knew how to hold them. But when offered the truth, most shied away, unable or unwilling to engage in the painful reality. Not Lina.
“Harrison and Taylor are in prison. Harrison for dealing drugs. Taylor for murder. He killed his girlfriend,” he added, unasked. The only reaction that got was another head tilt. “Lincoln, the youngest, died eight years ago in a drug deal gone bad, and Pierce enlisted at eighteen, like me, but is making a career out of it. He’s the only one I talk to anymore.”
“Your parents were violent,” she said more than asked.
He inclined his head. “That was the only thing freely given in our house.”
“Going from a violent home to the military must have been hard.”
He turned and looked at her. No one, other than his therapist, had ever asked that.
“I’m projecting, of course,” Lina said. “But I’d probably be angry about, well, everything at eighteen if I’d grown up like that. Then, if someone handed me a gun and trained me to fight? It seems like it would be tempting to let all that anger, all that helplessness, out. But you didn’t. I can tell from the man you are now that you didn’t. It couldn’t have been easy, though.”
He jerked his gaze back to the road as memories closed in on him. It had been hard. Torturous at times. More than once, he’d wanted to lash out, to release all the years of pain and abuse and, yes, his helplessness. And shame. The shame of not being able to stop his parents. The shame of not protecting his brothers or keeping them from taking the paths they’d taken. The shame of being helpless.
A vise of guilt, pain, anger, and pride squeezed his chest. The urge to pull over and run gripped him—run from the past, run from the conversation, run from the chaos that swirled inside him when he revisited those days.
He jerked when Lina’s hand touched his. Without a word, she pried one of his hands from the steering wheel, curled her fingers around his, then set them both on his thigh.
Forcing a deep breath, he anchored himself to the soft warmth of her skin. To the feel of her hand enveloping his, strong, gentle, steady, and so sure. She said nothing as the miles ticked by, and slowly, breath by breath, the anxiety eased from his body and mind. When it cleared enough for him to return to the here and now, her words—the important ones—filtered into his thoughts. I can tell from the man you are now that you didn’t.
No doubt, no hesitation, no platitudes, no glossing over. Just a statement. A simple, powerful one. She saw the man he was now and knew that he’d worked his ass off to never be like his parents or siblings. He hadn’t put his past behind him but used it to become a better person. And she believed him to be that person—the person who wouldn’t lash out, who wouldn’t let his past control him, who wouldn’t let his history define his future.
Picking up her hand, he kissed the back before resetting it on his thigh, a feeling of peace winding through his body.
“I looked on the map, and Long Shadow Ranch isn’t on it. Do you think you’ll remember the way when we get close?” he asked.
She accepted his change of subject with a head bob. “I have a pretty good memory, but I was eleven. We may have to wander a little. It’s a huge spread, though. I remember that much. And we passed a lake on our left as we headed north from Spokane.”
“We have a ways to go, but next time we stop, let’s pull up a map of the area and see if anything fits your memory.”
She nodded, and they fell into a comfortable silence. When the landscape changed from the green peaky mountains of the Cascades to the flatter, drier lands of Eastern Washington, they stopped for breakfast. Over coffee, eggs, and pancakes, they identified two possible locations.
They killed the rest of the drive time east talking about their current lives, their friends, playing online trivia games, and listening to music. They even used the karaoke app that came with Roxanne’s car. He had a decent voice, but Lina’s husky chords made him want to listen to her all day. Not technically perfect, but the kind of voice that lured the listener into the story. He imagined the ability to tell a believable tale came in handy as a spy but didn’t ask.
The closer to Spokane they drove, the quieter they fell. When they reached the city limits, Lina plugged the directions to the first location into the onboard system, and their route popped up. Twenty minutes to their destination.
After exiting the highway, she studied the surroundings. He caught her frowning a few times, but didn’t interrupt her focus. Until she told him otherwise, he’d stick to their plan.
“This is it,” she said when they passed a massive old farmhouse. Well-kept and positioned between a circle of trees, the place looked as if it had been standing for well over a hundred years.
“I remember that house,” she said. “It looked like one from a movie my mom and I had recently watched. We talked about whether it was the same one and how lucky the people who lived there were to be in such a beautiful spot.”
“Then it looks like we’ll have at least one answer to your dad’s clues in less than seven minutes,” he said, nodding to the map display on the dash.
“Assuming Clint is still there,” she added.
He recognized the tendency to plan for the worst, so didn’t respond. The final five miles ticked by, and in what felt like no time at all, he slowed and pulled onto a dirt drive. A rusted No Trespassing sign hung from a nail in a nearby tree; otherwise, a long private road stretched before them.
“I remember this,” Lina said, leaning forward and peering out the front window. “He has a big house, the kind you’d see in an architectural magazine featuring homes of the Wild West or whatever they call that style.”
He smiled, then startled as a man rode out of the tree line to their right on a massive bay horse. Two others followed, blocking the road, one on an antsy paint and the other on a gray who eyed them suspiciously. Rifles hung from the saddles of the men on the paint and the gray; the third man carried his. Only Viper knew his weapons, and that was no hunting rifle. He’d used the same one more than once in his days as a sniper.
“This happen to you when you dropped the car off?” he asked, pulling to a stop.
“No,” she said with a small shake of her head. “But I should have known he wouldn’t like unannounced guests.”