“Mmm, I know what you mean, Z and I did it under the bleachers at a basketball game.”
“No,” Cress covered her laughing mouth and propped her pretty face in her hands. “In your cheerleading outfit? King would love something like that…Do you think I could borrow that?”
“Okay, hold up,” H.R. demanded on a shout. “If we’re all going to be one big modern fuckin’ family we need to make a rule about sex talk. I don’t think my brain can handle knowing what my dad and brother do in bed.”
“Fair.” I nodded slowly. “My brain can barely handle it either and I’m the one doing it.”
“Okay, see, that’s what I’m talking about, waaay gross.”
Cressida and I laughed, or at least, I tried to, but my cheek was too swollen to allow much movement and the frozen peas had made my face numb.
A key rattled in the front door and a second later, Mute appeared in the front hall. He didn’t look over at us startled women. Instead, he calmly relocked the door and put his keys on the catch-all table beside the stairs. He watched his booted feet move across the wood floorboards as he crossed into the kitchen and came to a stop unerringly at my side.
Only then did he look up at me and when he did a strange garbled groan emerged from his chest.
“Foxy,” he said, dropping to his knees and taking the peas from my hand so he could look at the split flesh. “No.”
“I’m okay, Mute,” I said softly.
“Wasn’t there,” he grunted.
There was heartbreak in his dark eyes as he stared up at me. It echoed in my chest.
“Not your fault, Mute. My dad’s an asshole.”
“Shoulda been there,” he said again.
“Can’t be there all the time,” I pointed out reasonably.
His heavy brow fell into a glower. “Me or Zeus.”
“Mute…”
He held out his hand with his pinky extended like he’d seen me do with Zeus.
The gesture warmed my heart but more, I knew this behavior from the Autism Centre. If I didn’t agree with Mute on something he felt this strongly about, I knew he would throw a tantrum like Sammy would have. My silent hero was still smarting from not knowing about the cancer and I knew this was the final straw.
Mute would stalk me if he had to, in order to keep me safe.
So, I linked my pinky finger with his and we shook thumbs.
“We’re going to watch a movie,” I told him. “A Western.”
“John Wayne,” he said instantly, getting to his feet.
He went to a long cupboard beside the fridge, reached in and came out with a huge bag full of salted nuts and another with HealthWise popcorn. Even his snack food was always healthy. The three of us watched him as he walked out of the kitchen and the sound of the TV floated in from the other room.
“Come on,” he called.
I turned to Cress and H.R. and grinned. “I think John Wayne awaits.”
Zeus.
The night was mine.
It always had been.
I’d never been scared of monsters in the dark or things that went bump in the night. I was part of that world, been born into it and grown up with intrinsic knowledge of how to tame those beasts and corral those demons toward my ends.
The shadows embraced me as I stalked across the Lafayette yard ’round to the back door where I’d broken in before, using the same lock picks and the same alarm code Curtains and Lou had confirmed for me beforehand.
The house was quiet.
But I could smell the fear and shame waftin’ through the house like the scent of some baked thing, this one cookin’ deep in the gut of the man I’d come to scare.
It was just me.
King had wanted a part, Mute too, and Bat, Nova and Buck had been so fuckin’ enraged I was sure there’d be a drive-by shootin’ on tomorrow’s front page of the paper.
But I was Prez and what I said fuckin’ went.
So, it was just me. Wearin’ all black beneath my cut, leather gloves on my hands and steel toes in my boots.
I had a message to send like the angel fuckin’ Gabriel.
Warm yellow light spilled out the door of Benjamin Lafayette’s study and the quiet rustle of papers sounded within.
Alone and workin’.
A normal night.
Not one where he’d beaten and verbally abused a seventeen-year-old girl with cancer.
Just a normal fuckin’ night in the Lafayette Mansion on Entrance Hill.
Fuckin’ dickbag.
I debated stormin’ into the room like an avengin’ angel but decided that my wrath couldn’t be settled with bluster. It sat cold and vibrant, complex like a multifaceted diamond. That hatred had sat like a lump in my gut through the years of writin’ Lou, hearin’ about the neglect her father shoveled out and the pressure to be perfect he shoveled in. But now it’d been condensed by the monumental weight of his latest fuckin’ transgression.
He’d beaten his fuckin’ daughter.
Hit her right in the face.
It burned in me that I’d been at the root’a that action, but I knew with clarity that this was not my fuckin’ fault.
I wasn’t the man bringin’ her a lifetime of pain.
I was the man healin’ her, from the inside out.
So, instead of dramatics, I slipped around the door and took advantage of his fuckin’ self-absorption and walked through the shadows clingin’ to the wall until I was just behind him.
He was older than me, not by a lot, but there was grey in his hair and thinnin’ at the back of his head that had to have made him self-conscious. He reached back to rub at the spot like he unconsciously felt something behind him puttin’ pressure there.
I grinned as I stepped forward, my 9mm in one hand.
Quick as I flash, I took his thin neck in a headlock and pressed the cold butt of the gun to his temple. He let out a shrill kinda garble, the sound a man makes just before he pisses himself.
Loved knowing he was such a pussy that the first sign of a threat put the fear of God into him.
“Shh,” I hushed him and tightened my grip so he’d stop his struggle. “Just here to have a chat, Benny Boy. Father to father. Man to man. See, I got my girl at home with a black fuckin’ eye and she tells me it was you who did it.”
I laughed in his ear and felt him shudder.
“Hard to believe though, ain’t it? A man throwin’ a punch at the face of his own daughter, a young woman with half of his fuckin’ DNA and all of his fuckin’ love inside ’er? Honest to Christ, Benny, it’s hard to wrap my fuckin’ mind around. So, I thought I’d come here and ask you straight up, you hit Lou tonight?”
His Adam’s apple scraped against my forearm as he swallowed hard.
“I’m her father. This is between me and my daughter.” He tried to say it strong, like the mayor he was, only he didn’t have shit to stand on and he knew it.
“See, that’s where you’re just fuckin’ wrong. That girl you hit tonight, she mighta been your daughter once and she might still have your fuckin’ genes, but she’s not your daughter now. And to be honest with you, Benny Boy, she started bein’ my fuckin’ girl the first time you left her down in a colossal fuckin’ way, when there were bullets flyin’ everywhere and you ducked down to save yourself ’fore your kid. She became my girl the second she saw me ‘cross the lot and knew in her soul she’d found someone to take care of ’er true.