23. Zack
23
ZACK
“ T he rules of the game are simple,” Liam said. “Get from Pole A to Pole Z before anyone else, with more points than anyone else. Each wicket is five points. Hitting another player’s ball is ten points. Reaching Pole Z before anyone else is twenty points. Making someone bleed is fifty points.”
“Hence the name of the game?” I asked, watching Mateo set up the wickets and poles while Liam explained. They told me it was blood ball, but it looked an awful lot like croquet.
Seb snorted. “No. We call it blood ball because Holly said the four of us playing any game involving wooden mallets and balls, someone was going to bleed. She was right. So we figured we might as well award points for something that was going to happen anyway.”
I glanced at Holly, who stared back at me with a little smirk. I had the feeling she was plotting exactly which part of me would be the first to bleed.
“Don’t look her in the eyes, man,” Mateo muttered, shaking his head. “It’s a trap.”
That only served to pull her attention to him instead of me. His shit-eating grin made me wonder if maybe that was the whole point.
We had decided to stay an extra night at Mercy River Ranch and leave first thing tomorrow morning. It was more for Hurricane Red’s sake than ours, but I had to admit I was in no hurry to end this adventure Hannah and I found ourselves on. For the first time in months, I hadn’t thought about that fucking cliff. It was a relief. And even though I knew it was still there, waiting for me, it felt like there was a forest standing between us here. This road trip was a pause on real life. Here, I had a purpose.
And right now, with Hurricane Red finally getting the rest he deserved, my purpose was blood ball. I felt good about it. After Hannah’s attentions to every aching muscle and itchy scar last night, I had slept like a baby. Even better, I had woken up actually feeling good. I couldn’t remember the last time that had happened.
Hannah had opted out of blood ball, preferring to enjoy the spring weather with a mug of hot tea and a book. But I noticed her spot on the porch swing gave her the perfect viewpoint of our shenanigans.
“A few logistics,” Liam continued. “No carrying a weapon of any sort?—”
“Except the mallet,” Mateo broke in.
“No weapons except the mallet,” Liam agreed. “We don’t take turns. You just get your ball through the wickets and try to keep other players from doing the same. The game ends when the first player knocks his?—”
“ Her ,” Holly said.
“His or her ball into Pole Z. We stop the game and look at the video to determine who won. Winner is the player with the most points, even if they never made it to Pole Z.” Liam pointed across the field, to where a camera was set up on a tripod. “There’s the camera. Don’t knock it over. It’s an automatic last place for fucking with the evidence, and you get latrine duty. Got it?”
I nodded. “Got it.”
“I saw the news articles on your injury. It looked brutal.” Jeremiah eyed me. Even odds on whether he was concerned for my health or checking for weaknesses to use to his advantage. “You sure you want to do this?”
“Bronc riding wasn’t my only rodeo event. I also wrestled steers. I think I can hold my own.” Even before the words left my lips, I had the feeling I was going to live to regret them.
Not that I was scared, exactly. It was just that the lack of tattoos that gave me pause, that was all. I had spent time with plenty of people who served in the military, and every last one of them had tattoos. Except for Jack Price, Essie’s twin brother. But Jack Price was a tier one operator with a team that wasn’t allowed to have tattoos.
Maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe it meant nothing at all.
But I suspected it meant exactly what I thought it meant.
Jeremiah, Liam, Seb, Mateo, and Holly exchanged glances and in that glance, something was decided. I hoped it wasn’t my death.
Liam rubbed his hands together. “This should be fun.”
I grinned. “Absolutely, it will be.”
Ten minutes later, I found myself flat on my back, the breath knocked clean out of me. Five blurry faces peered down at me.
“Dude, you killed him,” Seb said in a hushed tone.
“I did not!” Holly protested, shoving his shoulder.
“Didn’t I tell you not to look her in the eyes?” Mateo demanded.
“What’s going on?” Hannah called from the porch swing. I heard it squeak as she pushed to her feet.
In an instant I was scrambling to my feet because fuck the blurry vision and burning lungs, I wasn’t about to let Hannah see me brought low like this. Dizziness nearly knocked me down again, but Jeremiah offered a hand to steady me.
“Easy,” he said quietly.
I would have knocked him off me, but then I’d probably fall injure myself falling back down again, and how would I fuck his sister tonight if I threw out my back?
“Everything is fine!” I hollered. “Stay there. I’m good.” I smirked at Holly. “Not even bleeding, so no points for you.”
She looked almost bored as her gaze drifted over my grass-stained body. “Check your elbow.”
I raised my bent elbow to verify and saw a streak of red. “Dammit.”
“Better luck next time, cowboy.” She swung her mallet over her shoulder and sauntered off.
Liam turned to face me. “Can I give you a few pointers?”
I nodded. “Sure.”
“Blood ball is a combination of chess, rugby, and croquet. From how you’ve played so far, you get the rugby and croquet parts. You’re not bad with a mallet. Your aim is pretty good. You’ve even managed to get in a few tackles, although I’m gonna be honest here, I think it was because they didn’t see you as a real threat. Still, you’re doing pretty good.”
“Thanks,” I said cautiously.
“But you’re missing the strategy aspect. It’s not enough to make someone fall, you have to make them fall on a rock. Aim for something sharp. You know what I mean? You want to make them bleed and get those fifty points.”
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered.
“Strategy.” Liam clapped me on the shoulder. “That’s the part you’re missing.”
And despite my best efforts, I kept right on missing it for the rest of the game. I managed to get in a few decent tackles, but when the points were tallied, I was dead last.
“You held on to the end, and that was more than any of us expected of you,” Mateo said as he headed for the house. “Good game.”
Holly shook her head. “You almost had me. You just didn’t want to hurt a woman.”
I snorted. “I wasn’t even close.”
“Because you weren’t trying.” She paused, looking up at the porch. “Hannah’s waiting for you.”
“Yeah.” I moved faster and broke into a jog.
“Hey,” Hannah greeted me. She cupped my sweaty, filthy face in her palms and looked me over. “You survived.”
Holly, Mateo, Seb, and Liam smirked at us as they filed into the house. I ignored them and wrapped my arms around Hannah’s waist with a smug grin. “Of course I did. No chance in hell I wasn’t coming back to you, duchess.”
Jeremiah was not smirking when he passed us, but he definitely felt some kind of way about seeing his sister’s hands on me. Hannah didn’t seem to notice. She was too busy checking me for damage. “Is your back okay? It looked like Holly took you down hard.”
Yeah, I was going to feel that tomorrow. Hell, I was already feeling it now. “I’m fine. Really.”
I was about to suggest she take me to our room so she could see my bruises without my clothes getting in the way, but Jeremiah returned with two beers.
He nudged his sister’s arm, and she pulled free from me. “I picked up a box of books last week at the used book store in town. Why don’t you get them settled into the library?”
Her eyes lit up. Damn. No wonder Jeremiah had won blood ball. Strategy sure as fuck wasn’t the part he was missing.
“Is that okay?” she asked me hesitantly. “Do you mind?”
Like I was going to stand between her and anything that made her happy. I’d face a whole pack of demented, possessive brothers before I did that.
“I don’t mind.” I pecked her cheek and squeezed her arm. “I’ll come find you in a minute, okay?”
Hannah’s smile was like the sun coming up. It brightened everything in its path.
Totally worth it.
The beer hissed like a sigh of relief as I popped the top open. I eased into one of the cedar Adirondack chairs that faced the fields and mountains and tried not to moan.
Jeremiah had taken a few hard hits himself, but he didn’t slouch or relax into the chair. Like Hannah, he seemed to believe the straighter the spine, the closer to heaven.
“You did better than we thought you would.” There was grudging respect in his tone as he tipped his beer back for a swallow.
“I lost,” I pointed out.
“Yeah. But we thought you would quit.”
I grunted. Tapping out of the game with Hannah’s eyes on me? Not an option. She didn’t care about shit like that, but I did. It didn’t matter that I knew down to my bones that I did not have a snowball’s chance in hell against an elite special forces team, I would go down fighting.
“So,” Jeremiah said, real casual like.
“So,” I said cautiously.
“What’s going on with you and my sister?”
My eyebrows went up. “That’s none of your business.”
“The fuck it’s not.” His tone remained pleasant despite his words. He reminded me of a rattlesnake giving a friendly warning with a shake of his tail before the strike.
The last thing I wanted to do was get into it with Hannah’s big brother, but this man was sorely in need of some boundaries, and I was going to lay them out for him.
I leaned forward. “You track her phone. She allows it, so it’s not my place to put a stop to it. But the relationship between her and me, that’s no one’s business but our own. She’s your sister, and I’ll grant you that her past earns you the right to enquire after her health and well-being. But you need to be asking Hannah those questions, not me. I don’t speak for her.”
He considered me with a tilt of his head. “You ever cross a line I don’t like, that makes it my business.”
“If I ever cross a line Hannah doesn’t like, she’ll decide whether to make it your business,” I corrected.
He wanted to fight me on it. I could see his annoyance in the tick of his jaw. But then he shook his head. “Yeah. I can live with that.”
“Good.” I meant it. Hannah thought the world of her big brother, and trying to come between them was a losing proposition.
He studied me, tapping his finger against his beer can. “Holly thinks you’re good for her. She likes you.”
I shifted, wincing as a bruise on my hip made contact with the hard wood of the chair. Fully half the hits I had taken out there came courtesy of Holly. “What makes you think that?”
He ducked his head behind his beer can, but I still caught a fleeting glimpse of his smirk. “You’re alive, aren’t you?”
I supposed he had a point. Blood ball was the perfect opportunity to make a death look like an accident, and there was no doubt in my mind that Holly could accomplish it.
“Seems Hannah told you about Nevada?” Jeremiah asked slowly, like he was feeling me out before showing his hand. “About our family and her…husband?”
Husband. My jaw clenched so hard my teeth clacked. “You mean the middle-aged asshole who thought it was fine and dandy to marry a child?”
Jeremiah snorted. “Yeah, she told you.”
She had hit the highlights, but there was a lot she had left unsaid. Not like she was purposefully keeping things from me. Judging from the conversations we had had on the subject, I suspected she simply hated talking about it. That was fair. I wasn’t going to make her relive it just to satisfy my curiosity.
Except it wasn’t just curiosity. I cared about her, dammit. I wanted to understand. She had asked for my help, and the more facts I had, the better I could do that. Right now, I didn’t have all the facts.
And I had a lot of questions.
“She told me,” I said. “But I still don’t understand. How did they get away with it? Fourteen years old. It was fucking illegal what they did to her.”
Jeremiah looked to the mountains and blew out a harsh breath. “Yeah, it was illegal, but she didn’t know that. She didn’t know there was a town an hour from there that had police and teachers and social workers who could help her. We were born and raised completely outside the system. No birth certificates, no social security numbers, nothing. Someone has to report it for the authorities to do anything. There were rumors, sure. But they can’t just walk into your home and check for child brides based on a rumor.”
I shook my head incredulously. “And your parents fucking allowed it? They just let some old ass dude take their little girl as his fucking wife ?”
“He was a high-ranking elder of the community.” Jeremiah followed the rim of his beer can with his middle finger in slow, methodical circles. “He was a predator, in the kind of community that allows predators to flourish. Child-rearing was the responsibility of the older kids and the lower-ranked wives. It was rare for adults and children to interact, but he was connected to her family, so he was just always around. Hannah was probably only eight or nine when she started minding his children in addition to her own younger siblings. His status in the community…his connection to her family…They allowed it. I allowed it.” He rolled his shoulders like he still carried the weight of that choice. The guilt.
Logically, I knew that Jeremiah had been only a kid himself at the time and didn’t deserve that weight. But a small, mean part of me was glad he suffered from it. Because Hannah suffered, too, and I fucking hated that.
“Through his connection to her family, he had always been around since she was a baby. He was like a father figure to her. Looking back, of course it was odd that he gave her so much attention. Maybe our parents thought it was a good thing for her, that he’d find her a good husband when the time came. I guess I thought that, too. When I was sent away, he promised to protect her.” Jeremiah’s voice went tight with fury. “Instead he fucking married her.”
“But fourteen…” I still couldn’t wrap my mind around it. “She was still a kid. Why didn’t your parents tell him to wait?”
He snorted. “Oh, he fed them some lines about keeping her soul pure. She was too pretty, he said. Her beauty tempted boys off the path of righteousness and straight into damnation.”
Ice slid down my spine. “That’s what her uncle said, too.”
For a moment Jeremiah stared at me, his eyebrows knit together in a frown. “Yeah, he was her uncle.”
I stared back, refusing to comprehend his meaning. Because what he was saying was that?—
“The fuck?” I shot to my feet. “They married her off to her fucking uncle ?”
“Uncle by marriage,” Jeremiah clarified, like that made it better.
Which, okay, it did, actually because at least we weren’t talking about literal incest. But that was like saying oh, my arm is on fire, but at least my legs are okay. Yeah, sure, it was better, but you were still on fucking fire .
“Our aunt—our mother’s sister—was his second wife. He took Hannah as his fourth.”
Fury still pounding in my veins, I looked down at him. “You keep saying was like this is all in the past. He was her uncle. Your aunt was his second wife. But he can still go to prison for it.”
“Well, no. He can’t go to prison. I keep saying was because he’s dead.”
“How did that happen?” Not that I cared about his life being cut short, but damn. What was I supposed to do with all this helpless rage if I couldn’t drag him into a jail cell with my own two hands?
Jeremiah’s gaze flicked away. “He made a choice.”
Suicide? My eyes narrowed. Had Jeremiah helped him make that choice? I wasn’t going to ask. It wouldn’t matter if I did; Jeremiah wouldn’t tell me if he had.
“Does Hannah know?” I asked.
“Hannah knows.”
I nodded.
Fuck. Fuck .
Because now I understood.
She had grown up thinking her uncle was a family member. She loved him. She trusted him. And he had done that . Betrayed her childhood devotion to him. The person who was supposed to protect her and keep her safe had stolen her innocence.
How the hell was she ever supposed to feel safe again?