“Like that pool table.” Rylan shook his head, obviously remembering the new felt Sloan had recently installed on the rec room billiards table.
She laughed. “Yep. He went on a supply raid just to find that damn felt. Jake and Sloan changed things for me. Foxworth grew. Other capable fighters came. And my plans finally had real meat to them.”
“No one here talks about Jake,” Rylan remarked.
“No. He’s a bad memory.” She fell silent, trying not to think about that terrible night, and all the other terrible nights she’d turned away from. “Sloan held onto Jake’s leash for as long as he could, but Jake was a rabid, sick dog and he eventually had to be put down.”
“So . . . what is it, then? You avoid sleeping with Sloan because he reminds you too much of Jake?”
“Sloan is nothing like Jake,” she said harshly. “He’s the man Jake wished he could be.”
Rylan threw up his hands. “Then I can’t figure it out. Wanna help me out?”
She exhaled in annoyance, but some strange compulsion had her trying to explain it. “Look, you and I . . . we’re a lot alike. I don’t think either of us believes in love. We can care about someone. We can owe our loyalty to them, but we can’t give them more than that.”
“Ah, now I get it. You’re afraid that if you ever act on the need to bang each other’s brains out, he’ll want something you can’t give and eventually leave you.”
Reese sucked hard on her cigarette. Rylan’s summary wasn’t exactly right, but it was close enough.
Truth was, she’d always wondered if she was somehow responsible for pushing Jake over the edge. She’d done that to her own mother, after all. Been the instrument of her mother’s death. Begging her to stop breeding, begging her to run away, begging her to live for her daughter instead of the council. In her selfishness, she’d driven her mom to take her own life.
And Jake . . . she’d driven him into madness. Because she’d wanted too much. Because she always wanted more.
She’d never told Sloan what she’d said to Jake to trigger his downward spiral. She wasn’t even sure Sloan suspected she was at fault. All she knew was that her selfish wants had resulted in Cassie’s assault and Jake’s death.
Sometimes, when it was just her and the moon, she acknowledged that her need to crush the council arose from that same selfish desire. To others, she colored it in language of revolution and cloaked her anger with the ideals of freedom. But none of it would exist without that driving need to exact her own vengeance.
Rylan drank the last of his whiskey and rose to his feet. “I’m happy to take point on one of the teams.” He leaned down and pressed a light kiss against her forehead. “But I think you’re wrong that you don’t have enough to give. Worse, you’re wrong if you think that a man is gonna be content with the scraps off your table.”
As he quietly walked out of the apartment, Reese wondered if he was talking about Sloan . . . or himself.
15
The morning that Reese rolled out, Sloan wasn’t there to see her leave. He’d taken himself to the outer edges of Foxworth so he wouldn’t be tempted to stand on the street looking like a lovesick calf. He’d walked about three miles, traversing the once carefully plotted community.
Away from the town center, the houses were larger but eerie in their sameness. With the Sheetrock peeling away, the stick-built construction highlighted the similarities—living space attached to a giant kitchen overlooking a backyard that abutted another backyard. Sometimes there were fences. Sloan wondered if those were to keep people in or out.
The Foxworth outlaws had stripped each and every one of these houses of value long ago, leaving skeletons made of wood, moldy carpet, and cement. Someday, he didn’t know when, the elements would eventually overtake these structures until they were nothing more than hints of the past—mounds covered by straggly western ground growth.
He wondered if it was a metaphor for his life, if he wasn’t much more than an abandoned lot filled with the decayed skeletons of his past. Since Jake’s death, Sloan had been in a holding pattern.
From the moment he’d laid eyes on Reese, he’d wanted her. There hadn’t been much in the way of women in his life, not since the earthquake that killed all but a few of his people. He’d lost his virginity at the age of twelve to a camp follower, a woman who traded her body for food, shelter, and protection. As he and Jake got older, sometimes they’d turn to each other for comfort. At seventeen, Sloan had formed a crush on a girl in a camp to the south, but she’d died from a fever. Life in the free land was often harsh and short-lived.