Page 15 of Danger Close (Mourningkill #3)

VD

Cobra

The kid walked away, back to his beat-up old truck. The engine rumbled, and he turned on his headlights. I had no doubt that he’d do exactly what he’d said. He’d be right up on my ass the entire way back to the farmhouse.

I should just take her back to the Vasiliev mansion…

Then she’d be away from the prying eyes of some love-struck pup, and all this family drama. Then we could sit. We could talk. We could share a drink, and just look each other in the eye and figure out where the fuck we went wrong.

I sighed, annoyed. I’d decided to bring her to the farmhouse instead of our reclusive mansion because the boy acted like I would ever, ever , harm Teri.

When I looked into her rich, blue eyes, I knew that she had the same fear.

So off to the fucking farmhouse, and it’s many, many occupants, we would go so that I had witnesses.

At least I’d be able to say goodnight to my kid.

I walked around the front to the driver’s side, swiping at a pamphlet that had been left under the windshield wiper along the way. Not being used to having a passenger, I tossed the flyer onto the passenger’s seat before I remembered she was there, and the junk mail landed on her lap.

When Teri shivered, tugging my leather jacket tightly around her, I blasted the heater, before I pulled the car out into the sparse rural traffic.

“I’m sorry I hit you,” she whispered.

I blinked, confused, before I remembered that she had slapped me not once, but twice.

Maybe my warped brain had gotten so used to violence over the past three years that it had slid off me like water on a duck.

I wasn’t ready to let her off the hook, though.

“Do you know how worried I was?” I asked, my fist tightening on the steering wheel. “When I stepped outside and couldn’t find you? Do you know how terrifying that feeling was?”

The sparse streetlights whisked past us, the light and shadow dancing over her features.

The fear that had enraged me was gone, and now… all that was left was the deep-seated longing and worry that made me want to reach out and take her hand.

“I didn’t think you’d care,” she said, so quietly I almost didn’t hear her.

“Of course, I care!” I yelled, restraining the urge to hit my fist on the steering wheel, because I knew that even though she had slapped me, any display of temper and violence would trigger her into recoiling from me.

I reigned myself in, took a deep breath, and tried again.

“Of course, I care, Princess. ” I was still mad. Fucking livid. But I reached one hand over the center console, and put my hand on her thigh, giving it a squeeze. “You’re the mother of my child. I have always cared.”

It was disturbing how easily Missus Guerro had slipped from my lips. Was she technically still a Guerro? Yes. As far as I could tell. But she wasn’t my Missus, and that fact felt wrong.

“Then why did you never try to contact us? Why haven’t you tried to find us in all these years?” Real, and absolute pain bled from her voice. My heart clenched, and my breath hitched.

I fought the urge to swerve the car to pull over to the side of the road because those words out of her mouth didn’t make sense, unless we lived in alternate realities.

“The fuck are you talking about?” I was losing a grip on my temper. “I wrote to you every day for months. Postcards. Letters. When those went unanswered, I went to every week, then every month because I assumed that you were exhausted from being a single mother.”

She turned in her chair, but the night was too dark for me to take my eyes off the road when kamikaze deer were likely to jump out onto the street at any point. If I were in a truck, I’d care less. But I was in an Audi, and deer are notoriously uninsured.

“Imagine my surprise when I received divorce papers. Reason? Abandonment .” There was no worse Dear John letter in the world.

“I never got any letters.” She was as surprised as I was. She wasn’t lying. I could tell.

“I sent them. They got to the post office in Barstow. I checked.” I had hacked into their scans, which was quite a feat thirty years ago, before the internet was truly a thing.

Getting into databases often meant sending a person to physically look at documents—which was exactly what I did.

I wanted to ensure that if I was, indeed, being snubbed, it was because she had fallen out of love with me.

With each letter received, and sent out to be delivered, my heart cracked a million more times.

“Then they delivered it to the wrong person, because I received nothing from you,” she insisted.

“I’d believe that if that were one or two letters, but over a hundred in a year?” I didn’t believe it.

She shivered, and I regretted my tone, if not my actual words as she whimpered, “I’m not lying.”

I knew she wasn’t. Teri was a lot of things, but she wasn’t a liar. But I wasn’t equipped to figure out what the hell happened. Was it even worth figuring out?

“It doesn’t matter.” It wouldn’t get us back the last thirty years. “What’s done is done.”

We turned at the crossroads, the blue barn on the side of the road as the final landmark before the road that sent us up the drive to the McClanahan farm.

The blue paint almost looked purple in the night light.

I snorted, lightly, because the barn’s coloring reacted to the light the same way Teri’s eyes did.

We continued the drive in silence, Vedder’s headlights tailing us the entire way.

“Please, don’t hurt him,” she said when we turned into the long driveway of the McCalanahan farm.

“Please, don't hurt who?” I asked even though I knew the answer.

“Don’t hurt Greg,” was all she said. “He was trying to be kind.”

I snorted. Was this really what she thought of me?

“I’m not gonna hurt Greg Vedder.” I squeezed her thigh, trying to settle the tension in the air between us. “Not unless he asks for it.”

I might have a temper, and even if the boy and I got into a scuffle, I’d never actually hurt the kid. Pin him down and make him tap out? Sure. But real damage? No. I wasn’t anywhere near angry enough for that.

“He’s just a punk kid who wanted to get lucky, with an easy target.” I shook my head, annoyed.

Then I winced, because I probably shouldn’t have said that out loud.

She scoffed and turned away, tilting her knees toward the door to get out of reach. I retracted the hand that was on her lap, and put it back on the steering wheel.

“Of course, you would think that.” Her tone wasn’t even mad. It was defeated.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” We were going to play this game a lot. The WTF do you mean by that? Game as we peppered each other with underhanded insults.

“You would never be able to understand that a man can be kind to a woman.” She shook her head, her nose lifting in that snobby way that I had once considered refined and elegant. Dignified. “To men like you, women are objects to use. Property.”

“Men like me, huh?” I said, staring out into the winding road, back to the farm. “What the hell do you know about men like me?”

She had no fucking idea. Men like me weren't a dime a dozen. She had no fucking clue what men like me were like.

“More than you will ever know!” She spat the words at me.

I’d killed a man in Reno using scorpions.

I stuck a spork into the eye socket of a British human trafficker in Istanbul, and drowned a rapist in his own, recently used, toilet bowl.

I sanitized my hands afterwards, because that was disgusting.

I choked a man to death on a live squid in Monaco.

I’ll never forget the tentacles still moving from his open, dead mouth.

The post-mortem pictures circulated through the Underground. That was the kill I was most known for.

But Trinity and Teresa had nothing to fear from me. Not now, not ever.

So no, Teri knew nothing about what kind of man I was. How could she?

“Where did you get this?” Teri’s sharp tone cut through my thoughts like a knife.

“Get what?” I said looking over at her for a second, before turning back to the drive, the farmhouse coming into view.

She had the pamphlet in her hand and was staring at it with wide eyes. Her nostrils flared as she took in a deep, frightened breath. Her hand was shaking.

“It was left on the windshield.” She knew that. She’d seen me take it.

I parked near the farmhouse, and cut the engine.

“Did you write this?” Her voice was panicked.

I undid my seatbelt, and twirled the key around my index finger.

“Did you write this?!” Her question was an accusation.

“Write what ?” I asked. The pamphlet looked like a takeout menu for a pizza place. What the hell was so terrible about that? Even in her heroin chic days, she wasn’t the kind of woman who got mad at carbs.

“This!” She waved the paper in front of me.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I snatched the paper from her hand.

What the hell was so scary about this thing? I was about to read it when her door opened. Greg fucking Vedder took one look at her face and reached over to unbuckle her seatbelt. In a single movement, he pulled her out of the car, pushing her behind him.

I tossed the pamphlet on the car floor, and got out of the driver’s seat.

“What the hell did I say about getting near her?” I roared, coming around to confront him. “Get your hands off of her, boy.”

He was protecting her from me? Was he fucking kidding?

I grabbed him by the collar and shook him. He put his hands on mine, his eyes fiery and angry as he wrestled to keep me from lifting him by the fucking scruff like a dog.

“Fuck off, Cobra!” he said through clenched teeth.

“Get away from her before I snap you like a twig!”