“Shit.”
“Mary doesn’t know.” Rhage went back to trying to pull his hair out. “Yeah, I should have told her before now, but I just didn’t know how. I told Doc Jane I would. But I’m a fucking coward for both of them. I was hoping … for good news, I guess, but the longer they’re in there, the more I think—”
Across the way, the exam room door swung open, and Doc Jane emerged.
One look at her face and he knew that the worst case had rolled out in there.
“How bad is it?” Rhage gritted as he jumped to his shitkickers. “And is there anything we can do?”
EIGHT
Turtleneck.
Hours later, as Axe sat silently in the back of the “school bus,” he tried to think of where in the hell he could get a turtleneck.
Reaching up to his throat, he massaged the side that he’d had tattooed and wondered if he could find one in his father’s shit. And didn’t that make him want a stiff drink … or maybe even a syringe full of lights-out.
He hadn’t been anywhere near his dad’s room since the death.
“Fuck,” he said to the blackened window.
To get out of his head, he looked away from his reflection—and hey, what do you know. Pey-pey had gotten bored of the don’t-touch-my-cousin routine, and was back in his primary mode of staring at Paradise as she sat beside her male.
No one had had a good time tonight, not that training was ever a party. But yeah, it stung when you were forced to meet your failures head on. What was fun? Seeing Peyton all castrated across the aisle from that female, wishing he could get in her head and help her out, be the savior he felt she needed. You could practically read the thought bubbles floating around.
Sorry, champ. She had all she required.
Novo stood up and walked down to Axe, shoving him over so she could take a load off. “I’m going at two a.m. When is your interview?”
“In a half hour.” He rubbed his tattoos, thinking they were probably going to work against him. “I gotta hustle.”
“Good luck.”
As the female put her palm out, Axe shook it. “You, too.”
“Guess it’s just you and me going for the job.” Her voice took on an edge. “Peyton already has enough money, and far be it from him to let gainful employment get in the way of his smoking up. Boone doesn’t need the cash, either—and Paradise and Craeg are already providing extra security at the Audience House on their nights off.”
Shit, Axe wasn’t crazy about competing with Novo—he would have much rather gone up against another male, and yeah, guess that made him sexist. Then again, the joke was probably on him. She was just as good at the fighting and the shooting as he was, her strength nearly that of his own, her brains a little ahead of his. She also didn’t look like a serial killer.
But hey, he would take his piercings out. Bam. Nearly normal.
He also had zero personal skills. So she could very well beat him in the interview.
“You want to have a friendly wager?” Novo drawled.
“On what?”
“Who gets it? Loser has to pay for dinner.”
He wasn’t in a position to buy her a Kit Kat. “How about winner buys dinner?”
“Deal.”
Twenty minutes later, the bus came to a stop and everyone filed off. The night was bitterly cold, and no one lingered to talk. As Axe dematerialized to his father’s cottage, he thought it was weird that he’d never called the little place his “parents’ ”—but then again, there had been no “parents” involved with the damn thing. It had been built for his mother, and hadn’t done its job to keep her in the family.
So the roof and four walls were nothing but a monument to his father’s weakness for a female.
Going inside, he was glad there was no electricity, no lights to turn on. He couldn’t stand the kitchen, hated looking at it, and he steamed right through the shallow space. The stairs to the second floor were short and steep and he took them two at a time, proceeding to the only open door.
He kept his father’s room closed off.
His room was a mattress on the floor, clothes in piles, and not much else. Hell, he didn’t even sleep up here, because the fireplace was downstairs and he had to stay warm. In the spring and summer, though, he’d move back to the second floor—or maybe he wouldn’t. Who cared.
Axe went through his own “wardrobe” of muscle shirts, black jeans, and the occasional leather jacket or cloak, although not because he expected a turtleneck to have miraculously appeared courtesy of the Look-More-Normal Fairy Godmother dropping by. It was more because he had to brace himself to go through his father’s stuff.
Ten minutes and no turtle-for-his-neck later, he was down the hall and opening the door. With no lights on anywhere in the house, the shallow space was nothing but shadows and shades of gray … kind of like his self-hatred had sucked the color out of everything.
He couldn’t even look at the bed, which was still messy from the last time his father had slept it in two years ago, and he certainly didn’t spare all the pictures of his fucking mother a glance, and no, he didn’t dwell on the layer of dust that covered everything or the fact that one of the windows had sprung from its sash and let in fallen leaves and even some of the snow.
It seemed colder in the room, his breath condensing in puffs of white.
Maybe his father was haunting the place.
As a shiver went down his spine, Axe marched his ass over to the bureau and went through the things in it with rough, agitated hands. He found what he was looking for in the bottom drawer.
It seemed so fucking weird to think the thing had been worn and used by the male. And as he shoved the drawer shut, and beat feet out of the room like he was being stalked, he vowed never to go in there again.
Back in his own space, he stripped off his muscle shirt and pulled on his father’s turtleneck. Heading over to the mirror above his cheap dresser, he leaned in and made sure everything on his throat was covered up.
Just before he turned away, he reached up and removed, one by one, the black piercings that ran from his lobe up to his cartilage on the same side as his tattoos. Also took out the one on his brow.
Next move was to arm himself. Slipping on a shoulder holster, he tucked the pair of forties he’d been given the week before into both sides. The way the Brothers saw it, they were investing time and money into the trainees and the last thing they needed was for anyone in the program to wake up dead because they had shit equipment: Once the class had all been vetted properly at the gun range, the Glocks had been handed out—and although you were not permitted to bring the weapons into the training center, you sure as shit were expected to have ’em with you outside of it.
And use them properly if necessary. Unlike what they’d done the night before.