Cease (Bayonet Scars Book 7) (20 page)

"Fuck yes." He slides inside me, hard and fast. And there's not another word between us aside from the occasional I-love-you as we make love in that cold, damp field that's soon to be our home.

CHAPTER 18

January 1999

My eyes are fixed on the red barn that sits in the middle of our property as Jim stomps his way down there, followed by a bunch of dogs. My man's shoulders heave in anger as he trudges through the mud, lifting his feet high in the air to keep from getting stuck in the soggy landscape. One of the puppies, Spartacus, keeps jumping up as they go, desperate for his dad's attention. But Jim ignores him, which is rare. He never fails to give Spartacus attention. I sigh in frustration and mentally kick myself for not dealing with the boys' mess before he got home.

Jim's not been the same since Sylvia passed just a few months ago. I haven't been the same either, though, and that's part of the problem. We've always been such a strong couple, able to withstand anything. Except this is different. Sylvia Stone did more for me and my boy than any other woman in my life. She took me under her wing and forced me to accept her as family. Not that it was all that hard to sway me, in retrospect.

"Dad's pissed." Ryan comes up and stands beside me. It's been just under two years since I met this kid, but he's already changed so much. Verging on eleven now, Ryan's just starting to go through puberty. I thought he was a handful as a nine-year-old, but I was wrong.

"Yeah, I wonder why," I say, nudging him with my shoulder. He just smirks. The little punk.

"Where's your brother?" I ask.

Ryan shrugs his shoulders and folds his arms over his chest, refusing to answer. His mood's suddenly turned sour, as it fucking should. All Jim asked was that the boys stop fucking around in the living room, and they couldn't even do that. If I'd taken the Christmas tree down yesterday, like Jim "suggested," the boys wouldn't have knocked into it, and Sylvia's favorite ornament wouldn't have fallen to the floor and shattered in a hundred different pieces.

"Go find your brother," I say in a hard tone, but he doesn't move. Turning toward him, I do my best to check my temper.

"Ryan James, find your fucking brother and apologize."

Still, he doesn't move. And because I know my kid well enough to know that yelling at him doesn't do any good, I mimic his dad and stomp to the Christmas tree. I locate Sylvia's other favorite ornament and hold it by the string. Being so reckless with it makes me nervous, but Ryan needs to listen. When he turns around, his eyes are wide, and his lip trembles for a moment before he checks his nerves.

"You want me to break this one?" I ask.

Ryan shakes his head. "Stop!"

"You pushed your brother into the tree, and the ornament your grandma left him got broken. Seems to me that either you check your shit and apologize, or I break this one to even the fucking score."

"You wouldn't," Ryan says.

We stay in a standoff, me and this kid that's almost my height, arguing over shit we shouldn't be.

"How many years did you get with your grandma? Huh? How many?" He's silent. We've had this discussion before. My boys--all my boys--are grieving, each in their own ways, and none of them knows how to manage the pain. It's not like I have any better idea how to get out of bed in the morning, but somebody needs to keep this family together.

"Stop crying," Ryan says in something between a plea and a demand. I huff and try to will away the tears.

"Your brother never had a grandma until we came here. Sylvia left him that ornament because it represented this town--her home. She wanted Ian to know that this is his home, too. And now it's broken, and I can't put it back together. The absolute least you can do is say you're sorry to him."

"Okay," he says, and it's the closest thing to an agreement that I'm going to get. Ryan's never been good at expressing sorrow, and Sylvia is the first person he's ever really known who's died. He was too young to remember his mom, and Sylvia's cancer just came back so suddenly. We only had a few weeks before she was gone.

"And apologize to your father while you're at it. You might not get this right now, but he lost his mother, and he might not be crying over her, but mothers are important, and your dad's suffering just as much as you are."

Ryan's eyes are red and glassy now, but he doesn't want me to know that, so he looks away. Carefully, I set the ornament back on the tree and go give my boy a hug. I might be hearing things, but I swear the kid sniffles in my arms. When we're done, I send him off in search of Ian, and then I light a cigarette and take my ass outside.

Jim is on his way back from the barn now, and he's carrying a load of wood for the fireplace. His scowl tells me his mood is still too pissy for me to deal with, so I take a leisurely stroll to the mailbox and try to decompress.

An envelope, just a little bit too large for the box, sticks out. Ignoring the rest of the waiting mail, I grab the bubble mailer and inspect the label. There's no return address, but it was stamped in New York, and it's addressed to Ruby Buckley. My heart stops, my stomach does a flip, and I take one final drag from my cigarette before tossing it to the ground and stomping it out. I haven't received one of these since getting to Fort Bragg. Everything was so hectic after Ian and I left Texas that the packages stopped coming. They had nowhere to go. The last one I received was almost three years ago. The twins were only two then, and it was just a handful of pictures. Gloria, Mike's sister, risks a lot to send me these packages. Last year, when I finally got the word out to her that I was settled and didn't hear back, I just figured that was it. I wouldn't get anything else.

I open the envelope as quickly as possible while being careful not to damage anything inside. There's a video tape labeled "Christmas 1998," so it's really recent. A sob breaks free, and I clutch the tape to my chest. Everything I've gotten of my babies has been still photographs. I've never heard their voices or seen them move. Not since the day Mike took them.

Sucking in a deep breath and blowing it out slowly, I focus on calming myself down. There are also photos in the envelope--some candid and two professional ones from what looks to be their preschool--and a single sheet of white paper. Messy drawings in two different colors grace one side. I can barely breathe as I study the lines of the purple crayon and run my fingers over my baby girl's name in the bottom left corner. She wrote it herself, and her
r
is backward, but she's writing. Holy fuck, she's writing. Michael's side of the paper is more like three quarters of it, with his green crayon going right over his sister's purple. His name is even messier in his corner, but all his letters are facing the right way. My fingers trace his name as well, and I take care to note how hard he presses the crayon compared to his sister's soft lines. My babies are writing, and they're in preschool, and they're living this entire life without me.

"Babe," Jim shouts as he rushes up on me. Concern is clear in his voice, and so is the fact that he sprinted to me. He's out of breath and heaving when he gets to me. "What's wrong?"

I can't talk, so I just hand him their preschool photographs and nuzzle into Jim's flannel shirt in uncontrollable sobs. My eyes are closed as I strain for breath, but I can see their perfect faces so clearly in my head. Michael's all smiles with big brown eyes and little white teeth. He looks happy and confident, and even though he and Ian have very different features, I see his older brother in his eyes. Alexandra's smile is almost nonexistent in her school photo. She looks shy and demure. Like Esmeralda. I sob even harder at the thought. The last thing I want is for my daughter to grow up to be that timid. I want her to be strong and fearless.

Jim whistles as loud as he can and screams for the boys. I fight to pull myself together. By the time they appear from the neighboring woods, we're on the move and almost inside the house.

"This is a good thing, momma," Jim says. "Remember, we celebrate this shit." He smiles, full and genuine. I force myself to channel some of his mood and give the boys a soft smile when we get inside. Jim leads us into the living room where he takes the envelope from me and starts getting the tape ready.

"One of you get your mother some tissues. It's movie time."

CHAPTER 19

June 2005

"Very funny," I say, giving Ian the dirtiest look I can manage, which, admittedly, isn't very dirty right now. I'm laughing too hard to be actually annoyed with the situation. My entire front is covered in cold-ass water that smells like a bad mix of detergent and mold.

"I told you to turn off the water first," he says. My boy's a month shy of turning eighteen, and somehow we managed to get him to graduation. His brother dropped out last year, but that's okay, too. Ryan's not an academic, and once he stopped going to school, I stopped having to drop everything to deal with the Fort Bragg PD for whatever violation my kid got himself slapped with that time. When he turned eighteen back in March, he started prospecting for the club anyway. That's his future. We've known it for years, and that's okay. But Ian, my high school graduate, is book savvy, and he should be the one fixing the washing machine right now.

"I told Ryan to do it," I say. It's a shit defense, and we both know it.

"Ry!" Ian shouts. To my surprise, Ryan actually appears from his bedroom after only being called once. This is a rarity. His jet-black hair is messed up, and he's got sleep in his eyes. It's two in the afternoon, but I choose to keep any comments about his life to myself. He's an adult, I remind myself, and as long as he takes care of what he's supposed to, I'm not going to interfere.

Well, I'm going to try not to interfere.

"Did you forget to do something?" I ask, trying to be kind about my tone. He's a pain in the ass fully awake and even worse when he's half-asleep. Ian's not buying it, though. He turns his light brown head of hair toward me, narrows his brown eyes, and gives me a look that speaks of a boy who's been putting up with his mom's excuses for his brother for far too long.

"Really?" he says in a monotone voice. I just shrug my shoulders and ignore him. I baby my boys, and if their dad were here, I'd baby him, too. I won't apologize for doting on the three of them. Ian's jaw ticks as he turns his attention back to his brother. "You forgot to turn off the water like Ma asked you to, you fucktard!"

"Hey! Not that you'd fucking understand, but I was out late on a run."

"Low blow, asshole," Ian snaps back. This has been a point of contention between my boys. Ryan is four months older, and since he dropped out of school, he was able to start prospecting right away. Ian doesn't turn eighteen for another month, so he's had to wait.

"Okay, stop it." A chill runs down my spine from the wet clothes sticking to my skin. "We have three more days before your dad comes home. It'd be a damn shame if one of you were missing when he gets released."

Jim's been serving the state at San Quentin for the last ten months. I can't wait for him to come home. I miss his touch and the sound of his voice when he first wakes up. I miss the sounds he makes when he's moving inside me and even the way he screams when he's mad. The boys miss him, too, even if they won't say it aloud. Ian especially. He refused to have any kind of graduation party until Jim could be here to celebrate with us. I actually cried tears of joys over that, knowing how much his dad's presence means to him. While Ian's been sullen, Ryan's been acting out. He's nearly ruined his friendship with Josh over his stupid antics.

The doorbell buzzes, surprising me. We don't often get people coming out here who think to ring a bell. I direct Ryan to get the door since it's his fucking fault that I'm half-drenched. He moves slowly and yawns upon opening the damn thing. What I see on the other side makes me freeze in place. A man, a little over six feet tall and with grayish-blond hair, stands in the doorway. He's got tattoos up and down his bare arms and up his neck. He even has a vine tattoo going up the side of his face to his temple. Over a black wife beater is a leather cut that declares him the vice president of the Mississippi Forsaken. I didn't need the cut to know who he is, though. I'd never be able to forget that vine tattoo or those piercing blue eyes that remind me so much of a young man I think of as my own.

"Can I help you?" Ryan asks in a tone that suggests he'd rather do anything but.

"No, but she can," he says, pointing an unsteady finger at me.

"You need to leave, Ghost. Now." I can't do this. Shit. Three fucking days until Jim's released, and Ghost shows up now. I knew he'd been released, but this situation is entirely too fucked for words. Not only do my boys not know anything about Ghost, but the fucking man shows up at my house half out of his mind. His eyes are bloodshot and unfocused. He snarls as he speaks and isn't entirely steady on his feet.

"Not without what I came for," he says and steps into the house.

Ryan lifts a hand to the man's chest and gives him a push outside. Despite Ghost's inebriated state, he barely budges and rebounds quickly. He's in Ryan's face and pushing him backward. Ryan stumbles, barefoot, and catches himself but only just before hitting the floor with his ass. Ian lunges forward, shoving Ghost toward the door. The boys restrain him long enough for me to breathe. Memories that have never ceased to haunt me rise to the surface.