The Lonesome Young (23 page)

His smile faded, but he reached out and twirled a strand of my hair in his fingers.

“What’s my future? I don’t know. When I was little, I wanted to be a cop like my dad. When I got older, I just wanted
not
to be a criminal like my brothers. These days, I actually think I might want to write.”

“Write what? Books, movies, comics, plays, blogs, news?”

He shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “Books, I guess, but that sounds presumptuous, doesn’t it? What could I have to say that anybody would want to read? I’m just some hick kid from a backwater town in Kentucky that nobody’s ever heard of.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t put yourself down. There are enough people around here who want to do it for you. Don’t help them.”

His eyes widened, and then a beautiful smile spread across his incredibly gorgeous face. “You always do that.”

“Do what?”

“Stand up for me. Even when it’s myself you’re defending me from. I don’t know how to take it. It causes a funny feeling in my gut.”

I considered that for a moment, and the butterflies dancing in my own stomach. “That funny feeling might be the potato salad,” I said, teasing. “Mayonnaise can go bad fast.”

He pounced on me and tickled me, and then he was kissing me, long, slow kisses that made the stars overhead swirl crazily around in the night sky. His tongue touched my lips, and when I opened my mouth to his unspoken demand, he angled his head and deepened the kiss until I was trembling beneath him with the sensation of too much, too much,
too much
.

Or maybe not enough.

He pulled away from me, breathing hard, and then sat up, and I realized I wasn’t the only one shaking.

“We need to take it slow,” he said. I nodded, and he groaned.

“Help me out, here, Victoria, because I’m trying to say what I
should
say, not what I actually want to say.”

“We need to take it slow,” I parroted, trying to believe it.

He looked down at me and then closed his eyes. “I need a cold shower.”

The first crack of thunder sounded, and a fat raindrop smacked me on the nose exactly then, in a feat of spectacular timing, and I started to laugh.

“I think you’re going to get your wish.”

We raced to pack everything up and get back to the truck before the rain became a deluge. Mickey carefully backed up the truck, turned it around, and headed back down the hill.

“The last thing we need is to get stuck up here if the road washes out,” he said, shaking his head so that drops of rainwater from his hair sprayed all over. “We’d never be able to explain that one.”

I checked my phone to see if Melinda had texted me that our folks were back yet.

“Crap. My phone must have died.”

Mickey glanced over. “Yeah, I think it died way earlier, unless you were deliberately ignoring my call when I left my house.”

A shiver of unease snaked through me, and I plugged my phone into the car charger and it immediately lit up with a listing of six missed calls. I pressed the speakerphone button, and the first voice mail message shrieked out at me.

It was Buddy, and he was nearly incoherent.

“Victoria where are you? They took Melinda, they came to the house on motorcycles and took her, and I’m all alone and nobody is answering their phones, you have to come home
right now
.”

I dropped the phone out of suddenly numb fingers and stared at Mickey in horror.

“Oh, my God, what happened? What is he talking about?”

I retrieved the phone and called the house, but there was no answer. Then I tried my parents, who also weren’t answering. Gran didn’t own a cell phone, and Pete wasn’t answering his. Finally, I tried Melinda’s phone, knowing she probably hadn’t charged it in weeks.

No answer.

I hit play on the rest of the messages, and they were all increasingly worried and then hysterical messages from my little brother, who had been
all alone in the house
and afraid, while I was stealing kisses with Mickey.

I was going to hell for this.

I was
already
in hell for this.

My hands wouldn’t quit shaking. “Take me home. No, to the school for your bike. No, it’s raining too hard. To your place, and then I’ll go to my house by myself, and—”

Mickey’s phone rang, cutting off my frantic chatter, and his face hardened when he read the display.

“Hello, Anna Mae. I should have known you’d be involved in this.”

He listened for a minute. “And the boy?”

When he shut off the phone and put it back in his pocket, I wanted to strangle him. “Well? What was that? Does she know something? Where is Buddy?”

He finally reached the road and pulled out, headed toward Ethan’s place if I had my directions straight.

“She doesn’t know anything about Buddy. Maybe he wore himself out and fell asleep, Victoria,” he said, taking my icy hand in his. “Isn’t there anybody in the barn you can call? I know you must have staff who work the night shift with the horses, right?”

I hadn’t even thought about that. I dialed the barn number but got the answering machine. I left a message and then looked at Mickey.

“What about the police? Can I call your dad’s office to have somebody go out to the house to check? I know it sounds extreme, but he’s only nine—”

My phone rang again. Pete’s number, but when I answered, it was Gran.

“Your parents are on the way to the Rhodale compound, Victoria, and I’m on the way home. They took Melinda, or maybe she went with them on her own, we don’t quite know yet. Either way, you need to get home right now, do you hear me?” Her voice was shrill and quavering, and I had the desperate thought that if my family didn’t drive her to a heart attack or a stroke soon, it would be a miracle.

“Gran, I’m on the way,” I said. I could hear Pete trying to get her to calm down and then she hung up. So he must be driving her home, and my parents were on the way to Anna Mae’s.

I related to Mickey the part of the phone conversation that he hadn’t heard, but he shook his head. “We’re heading to Anna Mae’s. She said if we don’t show up, she won’t let anybody in the gate to get Melinda.”

“Mickey, we’ve got to find a way to end this,” I said, throwing it out as a challenge—or maybe a prayer.

Or a death wish.

He held out his hand, and I took it, holding tight in the darkness as we sped toward the most terrifying encounter I could imagine.

After several long minutes of silence, he squeezed my hand. “I agree. Let’s end this. We’ll make it our goal. They can’t keep acting this way, and they can’t keep us apart. Pact?”

I took a deep breath and slowly let it out, centering myself, trying not to panic—either at the situation or the thought of trying to accomplish something so enormous in the future.

“Pact.”

And then we raced through the night to the compound, hoping the entire world wasn’t about to explode in flames.

Chapter 32

Mickey

T
he gun. I had the gun.

The words ran through my head continuously, like a mantra or a curse, as we drove through pounding rain toward my brother, his mother, and whatever the hell they had in store for us.

I have the gun, I have the gun, I have the gun.

I’d changed my mind back at the house. Staring at it, I knew I couldn’t take the chance that Jeb would wake up and somehow find it. I hadn’t known what to do with it, so I’d carried it with me and slid it under Victoria’s seat when I took my jacket off.

Problem: Ethan knew I had the gun.

I’d worry about that later.

Would I be able to use it? Would I be able to take such a dark and final step toward a wasted future like Ethan’s, even if Melinda was in danger? I didn’t know.

If
Victoria
was in danger?

No question.

So what did that make
me
?

I didn’t know that, either.

“I’m scared,” Victoria whispered.

She tightened her grip on my hand, and I squeezed back, but then let go to put both hands on the wheel. If we were going to get hurt tonight, it damn sure wasn’t going to be because of reckless driving.

“Would it make you feel better or worse to know that I’m scared, too?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Worse.”

“Nothing scares me,” I shot back with a straight face, and she rewarded me with a ghost of a smile.

She put her phone on speaker and kept compulsively calling her parents, but both of their phones were going straight to voice mail. I gritted my teeth against pointing out that her dad sounded like an asshole even on his voice mail greeting, ordering people to leave a message in a tone that implied he didn’t particularly give a shit if they did or not.

“Why would he take her? Is it revenge for last time? Do you think she went voluntarily?”

Her teeth were chattering, and I pushed my jacket across the seat toward her. She wrapped it around herself, and I turned on the heat in the truck and pushed it up a notch. Taylor Swift started to sing something cheerful and up-tempo, and Victoria viciously stabbed the off button with her finger.

“This is my fault, you know. I had to be so clever and stage a showdown at my house to try to get my parents to pay attention to Melinda. She said we all treated her like she was invisible, and I researched the rehab but didn’t push hard enough. She probably thought I was abandoning her, too, and when I left her tonight . . . It’s my fault.”

Victoria told me the long, painful story of the “dinner from hell.” It wasn’t her fault—not even a little—but I could see why she thought so. Her asshole parents had really done a number on her over the years.

“I would have paid money to see your dad watching those peas roll down the table,” I told her, but she didn’t even blink; she just started speed-dialing her house again to see if her brother would pick up.

“Drive faster, Mickey. Please, just drive faster.”

• • •

The lights at the compound were all blazing. We were the last ones to the stage, and the other players were shouting at each other in front of the gate, standing in the rain. I pulled up behind Mom’s car and the Whitfields’ fancy car. Victoria and I stared at the nightmare in front of us. Her eyes were dry, though. She wasn’t going to break down. She blew me away with her courage.

“Full of sound and fury,” she murmured, and I glanced over at her. We’d read
Macbeth
at Clark High, too.

“So which idiot’s going to be telling this tale that signifies nothing?”

“I am,” she said grimly.

She unfastened her seat belt and shrugged my jacket off, and then she stepped out of the truck. The shouting stopped, and everybody turned around and stared at her. I reached under the seat and retrieved Jeb’s pistol and then put my jacket back on to hide it, so when I climbed out of the truck, I wasn’t Mickey anymore.

I was just another dumbass Rhodale carrying a gun.

Guess I’d have something to write about, now.

Chapter 33

Victoria

I
t was complete and utter chaos. The rain had died down some, but it was still more than a drizzle. My parents were both standing out in it, dressed up from the dance, bedraggled in their soggy finery. Dad was right up in the sheriff’s face, shouting at him and being shouted at in return.

Mom and the woman who must be Mickey’s mom both stood silently, looking bewildered and very unhappy.

Ethan stood behind the gate with more of his thugs, who were all armed, and in the distance a large, squat figure dressed all in black stood on the porch of the house. My sister was nowhere to be seen.

When Ethan saw me get out of the truck, he started laughing and opened the gate.

“Nice job, baby brother,” he yelled at Mickey, who’d come around to join me. “Banging the Whitfield princess. Is she as cold as she looks or did she warm up when she got up close and personal with a Rhodale man?”

I flinched at such crude language coming out of a face that was so like Mickey’s, but I didn’t answer him. I had more important things to worry about than defending my honor to a criminal.

My father, though, apparently didn’t have the same sense of priorities. He went after Ethan, screaming obscenities I hadn’t even known he knew, and one of the guards blocked his way. My mother stumbled and almost fell down in the muddy road, but Mickey’s mom caught her arm and helped her up.

Mickey ignored all of this and took my hand, staring steadily across the muddy road at his brother. The rain turned Mickey’s hair to a deeper, glistening shade of black, and rivulets of water ran down his face and shirt.

“Where’s Melinda, Ethan?”

“She’s warm and safe and happy. More than I can say for the rest of you fools. Why don’t we all go inside and have a little chat?”

The sheriff shouted at Ethan to bring the girl out right now, but Ethan flipped a middle finger in the air and kept walking, leaving the rest of us with no choice but to follow. He surprised me and turned right, into a large outbuilding, instead of heading up to the house. The large wooden doors opened into a huge space that looked like a hollowed-out barn, but in addition to bales of hay, this place had crates and boxes stacked along all of the walls.

I so did not want to know what was in those boxes.

Melinda sat curled up in the middle of the place on an old cloth-upholstered recliner that was pulled up next to a space heater. The guard was still blocking my father, so Mom ran to Melinda and even tried to pull her into an awkward hug, but Melinda pushed her away.

“You’re getting me wet,” Melinda complained.

When I got close enough to see her eyes, I could tell she was stoned out of her stupid little mind.

“You did this on purpose?” I asked her. “You left Buddy alone so you could get
high
?”

Mickey tightened his grip on my hand, like he was afraid I’d go after my sister. It was true that I wanted to shake some sense into her, but I also wanted to rescue her from this situation.

My dad pointed at me. “You shut up right now, Victoria. What the hell are you doing with
him
? You’re supposed to be at Denise’s house studying. You’re as much of a worthless liar as your sister.”