“He must have.” Her tone was devoid of any emotional inflection, flat and robotic. “Because even now it’s hard for me to believe the man I knew chased a car down the freeway, reaching speeds over a hundred miles per hour, before he lost control and hit a minivan carrying a young family of four—Wisconsin tourists on a road trip to Chicago. The youngest was only eleven months old. There were no survivors.”
“Fuck.” Again he reached over to put a hand over both of hers, which were again gripping themselves tightly together. “You were a goddamn baby. No one should’ve told you all those details. Why the fuck would anybody tell a twelve-year-old all that shit?”
“The Fieldings wanted to prepare me for when I went back to school. In a weird way, I suppose it was a kindness.”
“A kindness? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“They were doing their best to prepare me, Loki, because when I went back to school, it was even worse than they’d thought it would be. All the kids there knew everything. Every last gory detail. Most of the kids backed away from me like I was radioactive. School friends that I used to talk to and play with every day ignored me like I wasn’t even there. Entire tables would clear if I sat there during lunch. If I hadn’t had Joelle and Felix to be there for me, I don’t know what I would have done.”
Then and there, Loki decided not to kill Felix when he finally ran him to ground. “I’m glad you had them, baby.”
“Unfortunately, not everyone ignored the daughter of a crazy dead man. There were a few kids who went out of their way to make my life miserable.”
He swallowed another curse. “Bullies.”
Again she offered that weirdly stiff nod. “Bullies. There were only a handful, but they were persistent. Not a day went by without at least one of them taunting me about being the daughter of a murderer, until one day I’d finally had enough. I got into a schoolyard scrap with one of the worst bullies around—a girl a couple grades above me. I knocked her down and managed to bloody her nose.”
“Good for you.”
“Not good for me. That’s when even the teachers wondered, out loud and in front of me, if I was just like my father—a hot-headed killer in the making. That’s when I realized that being a Halliday was a horrific and shameful thing. When you’re a Halliday and you get angry, only the Hulk is worse when it comes to being out of control.”
“Alice, no. Jesus, no.” He’d never been happier to see his place come into view, because he wanted to give her his full attention. Without fanfare, he pulled up to a fenced corner lot, a decent-sized property in a neighborhood that was otherwise crammed with rowhouses. Beyond the black wrought iron fence was a building that had once been a ‘60s-era gas station, complete with the kitschy, upwardly slanting roof, and plate glass windows everywhere. He hit a button on the steering wheel, waited for the automatic gate to swing open, and had the Hummer parked in what had once been a garage service bay in less than a minute. Another punch of a button had lights blooming on inside his house, and all the while he kept his eyes on Alice, who was staring at his place with unvarnished shock.
“You live in a gas station?”
“It hasn’t been a gas station for thirty years.” As he spoke, he turned off the engine and let the silence settle around them. “Some architect dude liked the look of it so much, he bought it just so he could convert it into a private residence. When he tried to sell it so he could retire to Boca, no one wanted it. Which was great for me—I got it for a song, and it’s a totally kick-ass kind of house. What isn’t totally kick-ass is how you think that getting angry is a bad thing. It’s not.”
“I don’t think you realize how ironic that is, coming from you. I’ve never lost control the way I did that first day when I met you. I actually attacked you, Loki.”
He waved a negligent hand. “No, you didn’t. I attacked. You countered with an ankle sweep.”
“Okay, but I provoked you into it.”
“For fuck’s sake, your life was falling apart, and all that shit was blamed on me. It’s no wonder you went off. If I’d been in your shoes, I would’ve beaten the dogshit out of someone if I thought they’d blown up my life like that.”
“You’re a man. Women aren’t supposed to punch out their issues. We’re supposed to be more reasonable than you testosterone-y people with penises.”
“Okay, first, that’s sexist. Secondly, I don’t think anyone’s ever taught you the difference between what your dad did, and a surge of anger that’s good and clean and totally fuckin’ righteous.”
“Righteous?”
“Anger can be righteous, Stems. The day we met, you had every damn right to be angry with the guy you thought blew up your life. It wasn’t me, but that’s not the point. You’re not a loose cannon just because you feel anger, and you’re sure as hell not a killer in the making if you uncork that anger every now and again. All you are is human, and you need to believe that you can be human around me. I can take it. I want to take it, so give me everything you’ve got. Maybe then you’ll see that you can trust me with everything you are.”
She searched his face for a long moment before shifting carefully in her seat. “I do trust you, Loki. But I’m not about to let you get a peek at the glass in my ass.”
He shot her a grin and opened the car door. “We’ll see about that.”
Chapter Thirteen
Of all the scenarios Alice could have imagined when it came to getting Loki’s hands on her naked butt, hanging her torso over a bathroom counter while he sat on the lip of a tub with a pair of tweezers in hand wasn’t one of them. Her jeans and panties were down around her knees, and to make her humiliation complete, she had no choice but to look at herself in the mirror only a handful of inches away from her. She had a welt on her forehead where she’d taken a glancing blow from a beer mug, and the cheek where she’d been punched now sported an angry reddish-purple bruise.
What an enticing vision she made.
Not.
“Not too much blood’s coming out of this last one, which means there’s something in there. And I can feel it, so there’s that.”
She flinched when his poking around made the glass shard go deeper. “Shit.”
“Be brave and drink your medicine. I’m almost done.”
“I vote we just let it fester its way out.”
“No. Drink.”
Grudgingly she reached for the glass of Black Bull whiskey and forced a few more swallows down. It burned only slightly less than last time, though the heat of the alcohol made her ears feel so hot she feared they’d pop right off her head. “Ugh, gross. Why do people drink this stuff?”
“That stuff is some of the finest forty-year-old whiskey you can get your hands on, so quit your bitching and get it down the hatch. I gave you a triple, so any minute now you’re going to start feeling better. Or, more accurately, not feeling anything. Considering how your skin’s been shredded, feeling nothing is a definite goal right now.”
“I never thought this would be the first look you’d have of my ass.” She winced as he pinched the delicate skin just above the line where buttock met leg. Of all her scrapes and bumps, he was working on the sorest spot she had, and she doubted even a quart of Black Bull would be enough to dull the pain. “You really should have jumped at the chance when I first tried to get you into bed. You would’ve had a lovely, non-shredded ass—and various other parts—as your first memory of naked me. Instead, you get this. Owwww.”