“Come on, baby girl, you gonna shut me out forever?”
“Maybe.” She looks at me with so much hatred that my heart hurts. Then she drops her voice to a whisper, “It depends how long it takes me to get rid of the image of you slaughtering a man inches from my face.”
I glance around. No one was close enough to hear that, they’re all focused on the game, but I’m not taking any more chances out here in the open. I grab her elbow and cart her off to the brick building housing the public toilets. Even from the outside they smell like shit, and there’s graffiti everywhere and a couple of condom wrappers littering the ground. I press her against the wall. “What the fuck is going on with you, Ana?”
“What’s going on with me? I had a gun held to my head last week. I had a guy trying to rape me because I was caught in the wrong place with the wrong person, and you wanna know what the fuck is wrong with
I feel myself frown at the mention of the name. I hate the sound of it on her tongue, like it belongs to another man. In a very real way, it does.
“Oh, you didn’t think I heard that part, did you?”
“Ethan Carr is my birth name, I changed it when I got out to help me disappear. It’s awfully fucking hard to pretend you don’t exist when you’re still carting around ID with your family name on it.”
“I don’t understand why you’d have to disappear in the first place? Why were you sent to prison? And why did those men think you were a rat?”
“You wanna know what got me sent away?”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t mind knowing the reason why I was almost killed last week.”
“Before Kick and I could patch in we had to make it through our initiation. Some DA had information that the club needed. We had to go and rough her up for the info—”
She narrows her eyes. “Rough her up?”
“Assault, Ana.”
“You beat a woman because your
“We were supposed to. None of it sat right with me, or Kick, but we had people waiting outside to make sure we’d go through with it. Once we entered the house we were supposed to tie her up and make her talk, then the boys would come in and take care of the rest. But we tripped some kind of alarm. She was sleeping with a cop who drew on us. I bought Kick some time to get away.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what the brothers do for one another. He had three priors, I had one. He was my best friend. Stupidly, at the time, I thought it made more sense to protect him than to protect myself. So I got three years in a cell for breaking and entering and battering a police officer and Kick walked free.
“While I was on the inside, the club came to see me. They said once I got out, I’d be patched in. They asked me to do things to some of the other prisoners, small acts of retaliation. I never got caught, was never even suspected, then one day a riot broke out because I made the wrong hit.”
“The wrong hit?”
“I attacked the wrong guy. During the riot I was trying to save my own arse and managed to save a prison guard in the process. My time inside was almost up and I would have headed straight back into the waiting arms of the club, but the judge who’d sentenced me somehow caught wind of my heroic feat—” I make air quotes with my hands to let her know how ridiculous that is, because the truth of what happened with that prison guard was so much uglier than that. “—and he set my release six months early for good behaviour, no affiliation with the club and I had to disappear off the grid, change my name and remain in regular scheduled contact with my parole officer.
“The club had several deals go south. Their other contact on the inside had to be the rat, but with the timing of my release and my disappearance, the weight of the club’s deals blowing up in their face fell on me. I knew better than to rat on the club. You rat, you die. My dad had instilled that in me from birth.”
“So we were almost killed because of a misunderstanding?” A line forms between her brows. She’s so fucking cute when she’s mad, and I laugh a little at the stupidity of that thought because Ana brings new meaning to the words hell hath no fury. “Oh, you find this funny, do you?”
She shoves at my chest with her arms and I gently catch her cast in my hand before it can do me serious damage.
“No. I don’t find any of this shit funny. Nothing about being away from you is funny.” I trace my fingers over the plaster cast and then down over her hand. “How’s the arm?”
“It’s in a cast, Elijah, how do you think it is?” We hear the whistle sounding the end of the game, and Ana yanks her arm free and begins the walk back to the oval.
“I’m sorry, baby girl. I fucked up.”
“Yeah, you did.”
“So that’s it? No second chances? You’re just gonna walk away from this clean?”
She backtracks and doesn’t stop until she’s right up in my face, or as in my face as she can be, given how short she is. “You think I’m walking away clean? I’m a fucking mess, Elijah! I can’t close my eyes without seeing that arsehole’s face, without feeling his hands on my body, inside me. He held a gun to my head and you watched—”
“And I killed the motherfucker, didn’t I? I blew his face apart until he was no longer recognisable, Ana! Jesus. Fucking. H. Christ! What more do you want from me?”
She’s crying again when she says, “Nothing. I don’t want a goddamn thing from you, Elijah.”
Ana disappears around the corner of the brick building and I have to fight the urge to follow her. She’s been through enough shit with the people in this town and doesn’t need me making a spectacle of her at her kid brother’s footy match so instead, in the privacy provided by the toilet block, I pound my fist into the brick until my knuckles are bloody and the pain settles in, bone deep. I’m not letting her walk away from this. I can’t.
Chapter Eighteen
Ana
In the three weeks since my run in with Elijah at Little League Rugby, Holly has been glued to my side. Not that I’m not grateful. I am. I’m also indebted. If it weren’t for her helping me out on a Sunday with the baking, the pie shop would have sunk with this stupid cast on my arm.
She’s done more than that, though. Elijah still insists on coming in every day for lunch and, every day at the same time, I take my lunch over to the house to avoid him.
If Holly’s beside me he won’t even try speaking to me, he knows it’s a lost cause. But it’s when she’s not around, when I’m at my lowest, that he chooses to spark up a conversation with me. Every time I see him it’s like a blow to the gut and I don’t know whether it’s the same for him but the more he attacks at my defences, the more I feel them coming down. And I hate us both for it.
That’s why I agreed to come out with Holly tonight. She’s been so good to me for so long that I thought it was time to be a good friend back. Only, as we enter the pub and the noise of the band and the crowd assaults us, and the realisation sinks in that I’m wearing a red dress that’s way too short and way too tight across my boobs and I probably look like a complete arsehole with too much make-up on and my hand still in this god dammed cast, I want to turn and run straight back out that door. And when my eyes slide across the room and fix on the pair of chocolate ones staring intently back at me and then onto Nicole White practically straddling the pool cue beside Elijah, I feel it like I’ve been punched in the face. Which is why, when Scott and his idiotic friends come strutting over to us like they own the place, I decide to do something I promised I never would again. I talk to him and make out like every word that comes from his mouth doesn’t make me want to throw up.
Nicole chooses this moment to play up the fact that she’s yet again sinking her claws into my sloppy seconds by laughing like a complete whore and running her fingers down the side of Elijah’s face.
“Looks like our exes are getting friendly,” Scott mumbles, sounding about as happy as I am about it.
