“Levi, I see you’re putting on a few pounds. Did you have to trade your ride in for a trike so you can cart your ass around with the rest of you?”
“I’m gonna like beating your ass, boy.”
“Carmen told me you preferred dicks. That’s why she came looking for me,” I tell him, talking about the bitch he claimed a year or so ago.
His face goes red, and he throws the first punch. I manage to dodge it, since he broadcast it for five minutes. I deliver one to his stomach, then his ribs, as he uppercuts me. The blow rattles me, but I shake it off and come back at him, finally scoring a good hit to his nose. Blood splatters everywhere and Levi goes back, falling on the blacktop parking lot. He’s shaking his head, trying to get his bearings. When I hear footsteps running, I look up to see Levi’s buddies head toward us. I’m preparing for a fight when Katie’s Jeep suddenly slides to a stop in front of me. It moved so fast it comes close to tipping on two tires.
“Hop in!” she orders.
I don’t have to be told twice. I jump in the Jeep, and we tear out of the parking lot, the trailer and my bike hooked on the back. I grab my phone and hit redial.
“Skull, we’ve got problems,” I tell him the second he picks up the phone.
Damn it.
“Someone needs to kill Colin, slowly and painfully,” I growl, driving down the road.
“I’m pretty sure Skull’s already making plans,” Torch says and from the corner of my eye, I can see him staring at where he tossed the phone after hearing Skull go on for ten minutes.
“If he manages to do that, I might grow to like the asshole.”
My mind churning, I don’t know what to do. If Colin’s flunkies find me, could they possibly be closing in on Bethie and the baby, too? Shit.
“He’ll do it. It just might get real bloody. Step on the gas, sweetness. Levi and his assholes won’t be far behind and I’d rather not have a shootout with you here between us.”
Torch’s voice is stressed and I can hear his worry… for me. That feeling hits my stomach again. Damn him!
“They won’t come after us,” I say.
“Trust me, they will.”
“Not without stealing a car,” I point out. “Even then, they’d have to change some tires.”
“What are you talking about?”
I flip open the console between us and show him my Bowie Knife I keep there. “That’s why it took me so long to pick you up. I slashed the front tires on their bikes and then slashed the four cars in the parking lot. Even managed to get the two on the side that I assume belong to the waitress and cook.”
“Fuck me like a whore in church on Sunday!” he exclaims, then observes me. “I think I underestimated you, Katydid.”
“Most people do,” I admit without bitterness. It’s just a fact of life. Torch shakes his head and looks out the window, growing silent. “What are you thinking about?”
“That if Skull hadn’t killed your father,” he answers, “I’d like to be the one to gut the asshole.”
My hands freeze on the steering wheel. “Skull killed my father?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I didn’t want to find something to like him for,” I grumble.
“Where’d you learn all this shit, Katie?”
I tense up at his question. I keep my vision on the road in front of us and tighten up my hands. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t play dumb, sweetness. We both know you’re smart as a tack.”
His words do a little more towards making my stomach feel weird and releasing that tight rein I have on letting Torch all the way in. It should scare me, but it’s starting to feel normal. I’m starting to wish my walls were down. I want to let Torch in. No one has ever thought of me as smart before, except maybe Bethie, but she loves me.
“My father… was like two different men,” I finally reveal. “When he and my mother were first together, he wanted to live a normal life. He tried to leave the family. Who knows? It might have worked out well.”
“Why didn’t it?”
“My mother was a money-grubbing whore, maybe? Can’t say for sure. I’m judging from the many sermons my father gave while making sure his daughter didn’t walk in her footsteps.”
“What do you mean?”
“When my father left the ‘family’ for her, things were fine until my mother discovered that without the family, she wouldn’t have summer homes in France, credit cards with no limits, no Mercedes, no maids or chauffeurs. In short, my mother hated everything about life in suburbia.”
Torch processes this. “She made your father go back in?”
“If only it were that simple,” I say with a sigh, wondering why some twisted part of me actually feels sorry for Redmond. I shouldn’t; he beat whatever fucks I gave out of me long ago. “She decided, since Redmond wouldn’t keep her in diamonds, furs, and private planes, she’d find someone who would.”
“His twin,” Torch says right on cue.
“Yep. Old Uncle Edmond was knee-deep and climbing the ranks in the family that Redmond had turned his back on. Isabel latched onto him and never looked back, even when my father told her he was taking the oldest daughter with him.”