Honor Unraveled (6 page)

“You read this?” he asked his daughter.

She nodded. “Why didn’t she tell you about me?” An intense stillness followed her question, as if any but the right answer would shatter her.

“I don’t know.” Kit leaned forward and rested his hands on his daughter’s little knees. “But I do know that everything she did, she did for your welfare. I’m grateful to her for that.” He cupped her cheek. “And I’m proud of how strong you both are.” He kissed her forehead. “Now go put this letter back and quit snooping in her things.”

“Okay. I think I’m going to go back to bed now.”

Kit smiled. “Good call.”

She hugged him, then kissed his cheek. “I love you, Dad.”

Before he could respond, she’d slipped around the coffee table and disappeared into Ivy’s room. A moment later, she left Ivy’s room and moved toward her door, waving at him as she went. “Night.”

“Night, baby. Sleep well.” He watched her step into her room. “Casey?” He stopped her before her door was closed.

“Yeah?”

“I love you, too.”

She grinned at him, then shut the door.

* * *

Kit sat on the sofa outside Casey’s room for a long while after she left. He wasn’t fit for company. His mood worsened as the minutes passed, and he thought of the life Ivy and Casey had lived prior to his reconnecting with them.

He’d been in Afghanistan most of the last eight years, coming back to the States for brief visits only. He’d never made an effort to visit with Ivy on those trips. She never seemed to want him to. His cowardliness had affected his daughter.

Jesus, he was a bastard.

He was still on the couch in the sitting room an hour later when Ivy quit for the night. She paused outside Casey’s room. “Everything okay?” she asked him.

“What do you think?” he bit out, then ground his teeth, locking other words away.

She didn’t answer him, just lowered her gaze, then stepped into Casey’s room. He wanted to go in there with her, yearned to be a part of their circle. Why it mattered so much to him, he couldn’t say—maybe it was that no one he’d loved had let him in.

He crossed the room as Ivy stepped out of Casey’s darkened room a minute later. Waiting for an invite was a problem, because it sure as hell wasn’t coming. Ivy didn’t relinquish her hold on the doorknob.
 

“Let me say goodnight to her,” Kit whispered.

“She’s already asleep.”

“I won’t wake her.”

“Kit, please.”

The muscles bunched in the corners of Kit’s jaw as he stared into Ivy’s midnight-blue eyes. Her scent was sweet. Seductive. Unable to stop himself, he bent close to breathe it in. Her hair tickled his nose. He could feel her stiffening, gathering her resistance around her like a steel coat. He was breaking the rules. And he didn’t fucking care. But he did pull back.
 

“It’s a bad idea to stand between me and my daughter, Ivy. A really, really bad idea. One with consequences.”

“Kit…” she protested with a broken whisper. “Leave her.”

“She’s my daughter, too. You’ve had her for twelve years. I’ve had her for a couple of afternoons. We are not even.”

Ivy lifted her gaze to him, dark and shimmering like a mountain lake in the black of night. “You could have had her from the beginning. You could have been there all along.”

Kit’s jaw pulsed. “Stand aside, Ivy.” She didn’t. He covered her hand on the knob and turned it. They moved together into the darkness of their daughter’s room. Kit stepped away from Ivy as soon as he could. Dim light from the sunroom lit a path to Casey. Her hair spread across the pillow in ropes of blond. Her face was buried in the fur of a big old teddy bear.
 

Kit smoothed the bangs over her forehead. She didn’t stir. He swallowed hard. She was twelve. Twelve. Ivy had been only four years older than his daughter was now when they’d first met. A child still. He wondered if she’d slept with a stuffed animal then as Casey did now.
 

He’d only been a year and a half older than Ivy, but he’d never been a child. Just one more of the many ways they were polar opposites. She was the daughter of a CPA father and a PTA mother. He was the unfortunate outcome of a sex-for-whiskey transaction. He’d met his father once, long enough for the man to make it clear he wanted nothing to do with him or his mom.
 

Kit still remembered the first time Ivy looked at him. They were at school, between lunch shifts. One of the rare times he’d made an appearance in those hallowed halls. He’d been standing with all the other high school reprobates, by the wide bank of windows that lit the back stairs, trying to be cool, or at least seem bad enough to tempt the good girls to look at them and the tough guys to keep away.

And she did. Her gaze met his. For a heartbeat. Long enough for color to bloom across her pale cheeks. She smiled at him, smiled into his eyes, and stole his heart.
 

And now, the cavity where his heart had once been throbbed in the vacuum she left.
 

“Do you recognize the bear?” Ivy asked him.

He looked at the worn stuffy his daughter clutched. “No.”

“It’s the one you sent her when you first contacted us. She calls it Bo, for Bolanger.”

He’d sent that bear to her six years ago. She clung to it now with a death grip, even in her sleep. That, more than anything else, confirmed he wasn’t wrong in trying to rekindle his relationship with Ivy.

He leaned down and kissed Casey’s forehead. “Sleep in peace, baby girl. You’re safe,” he whispered. He straightened and looked across the bed to Ivy. She didn’t speak, but he caught the way she stiffened, the yin to the yang of her first response to him. He turned away from his daughter and left the room.

He needed air. And lots of it.

“Greer,” Kit patched in to his radio as he walked down the hall toward the garage. “I’m heading over to Mandy’s property.”

“Copy that, boss. Want company?”

“Negative.”

Kit grabbed a set of keys from the shelf next to the garage door. Four SUVs were parked inside the garage, though it could hold two more. The small parking lot outside the garage housed another half-dozen vehicles. He waited impatiently for the overhead door to open, then he pulled out into the night.
 

A random memory crept into his mind about how many times he’d hot-wired one of Blade’s dad’s vehicles when the bastard was out of town. How else was he going to teach Blade how to drive? They’d take it to the old ghost town down on BLM land and practiced executing J-turns. Afterward, they drank the beers they’d taken from Blade’s dad’s bar and talked about how they were going to blow out of Wolf Creek Bend. The dream then was to become badass SEALs. Except it wasn’t the Navy that awaited them, but the Army. And the Red Team. At least the badass part had come true. That and they’d gotten the hell out of Wolf Creek Bend.

It was in the back of one of those borrowed SUVs he’d first made love to Ivy, up by a mountain lake, deep in the woods of the Medicine Bow Mountains. Yeah, talk about heaven.

He drove the short distance down the road from Blade’s house to Mandy’s. Her grandparents had left the property to her. Both of them had passed while she was in college—her grandfather in her freshman year, her grandmother her senior year. He remembered the letter she’d written him when she graduated. There’d been no family there to see her commencement. He was all she had in the world, and he was stuck in Afghanistan. He’d arranged leave later that summer and sent her a ticket to fly out to the coast to spend a week with him at Myrtle Beach. They’d had so much fun, it had become an annual event for the next few years. Until this summer. He’d never meant to return to Wolf Creek Bend, but now that he was here, seeing it with adult eyes, it wasn’t all that bad of a place.
 

It was just all the goddamned ghosts that lingered.

He pulled into Mandy’s drive. The exterior lights were on. Max and Greer had the place smart-wired. They could turn any of the lights on or off remotely. Cameras were set up around the property with motion-activated sensors that recorded any activity around the house. Rocco had been determined to make sure nothing else happened to Mandy’s property while it was vacant. Kit wished she could get started rebuilding her riding center, but it wasn’t safe enough yet.

He parked in front of the house and shut off his headlights. Seeing Rocco and Mandy as a couple had taken some getting used to. But now, he was glad they were together. He’d never seen two people so much in love. Except, maybe, for Blade and Eden.
 

He didn’t go into the house. Instead, he walked around the side of it and started up the long path that led to the top of the hill behind her house. From there, he could see both Mandy’s property and Blade’s. He and Blade had spent a lot of time on that hill, looking down on the two properties and the people who lived there, both polar opposites of the other, one a family home, one a dungeon.

Reaching the top of the hill, he did a 360, looking at his childhood haunts. His mom had brought him to town when he was a junior in high school. He couldn’t understand why she’d moved them from LA’s drug hub to the armpit of Wyoming until the day she’d cornered a man and shoved Kit out in front of her.

Jesus, he hated his mother for that. It was outside the only grocery store in town on a busy Saturday morning. The man wasn’t alone. He was with a woman and a young girl. His wife and Mandy.

Kit had already been nearly six feet tall then, but he felt as small as a first-grader. For the space of half a dozen heartbeats, he looked at this dad, and his dad looked at him. The man was about his height and had blond hair, too. Kit’s mom had brown hair. He’d always wondered where his coloring had come from.

And now he knew.

And the fucking bastard walked right past him, continuing on to the parking lot as if a family IED hadn’t just exploded in front of him.

The woman with him stared in shocked silence. Mandy had smiled though. She’d come over and touched his chest. “You’re my brother? I always wanted an older brother,” she’d said, staring at him in awe. Before he could answer, his father had grabbed her and her mom, yanking them forward toward their car. All the while, his mother had kept up a shrieking cacophony of accusations and noise. She’d followed them to their car, standing behind it so they couldn’t back up, hitting it with her fists. And then the cops had come. He’d gotten arrested for trying to protect his mother from them. Sheriff Tate had been on the force all those years ago. He’d made Kit cool down in jail for a few hours, then let him go with a warning.
 

From then on, his mom crawled through all the bars in town, swapping sex for whatever drugs the men had. It wasn’t LA, but it was still hell.

Yeah, those were the good ol’ fucking days.
 

Was it any wonder he’d rarely shown up for school? His mother had pretty much pinned a sign to his back: “Say my mother’s a whore. I dare ya.” It had taken a few weeks to establish himself as a mean motherfucker before he could go to any classes without being harassed.

And then there was Ivy. The most beautiful goddamned angel he’d ever seen. He went to school just to see her. She’d been the center of his life ever since the day she smiled at him. Even in the years he’d backed away, giving her the privacy and space her father insisted she wanted.
 

And now they were together, but not together, bound to each other by a daughter they both loved and the poisonous results of every decision they’d ever made.
 

Kit sat in the hard dirt at the top of the hill. He bent his knees and dropped his head to hands, wondering how the hell he was going to get them out of the terrible spot they were in.

The supply truck was backed to the garage so they could unload its goods the next day. Dennis Jackson—Blade’s foreman—and a few of the guys unloaded boxes of supplies, dry goods, and fresh and frozen foods. Dennis’ wife, Kathy, directed the delivery to various storage locations with the ease of a logistic maestro.
 

When the truck was empty of food, Greer brought the last item down the ramp. A black 1950 Harley Panhead with ape handlebars. He parked it in front of Max, who grinned at it as if it were a long-lost friend. It wasn’t an entirely human smile, either.

According to his dossier, Max, under his alias as Mad Dog, was a full patch member of the WKB. The upper rocker on his club vest showed “White Kingdom.” The bottom rocker indicated his home chapter was Denver. The logo in the middle was of a grinning skull overtop a red triskelion symbol with the club’s initials W, K, and B woven into it. To one side of the logo was an “MC” patch. On the other was a “1%” patch.

The club thought he was an IT guy for an Alaskan fishing company and didn’t question his long absences. He wore the WKB colors in a red bandanna around his head. A silver ring punctuated the lower third of his right eyebrow. A similar ring protruded from the left side of his lower lip. Thick black plugs in his earlobes broadcast his high threshold for pain. A wide bracelet of grinning skulls encircled his left wrist. Matching skull rings cluttered his right hand, forming de facto brass knuckles. Props, all of it. But as Kit looked from the metal to the man beneath, he saw only a sociopath with the hardened eyes of a stone-cold killer.