Avenged(7)

Grunting and pulling my thoughts away from the kinds of women I was going to be fucking in the future, I answered her question about my name. “None of the above. My mom had high hopes for me; she wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer. She wanted me to do something that would get us both out of the shithole city where we lived, so she named me Benton. She said it sounded sophisticated and classy.” Unfortunately for her, I was always much more a Benny than a Benton. I’d barely made it through high school and by the time I graduated, I was already breaking knees and collecting debts for the monster who called all the shots on my streets. I was making enough money to get my mom out of the Point, but she refused to take it, saying it was dirty and she wouldn’t make a deal with the devil. I sold my soul the first chance I got and never looked back. At least, I hadn’t until I almost died. That was enough to make a man question every move he made that got him to that point…and landed him in the Point.

The Point was kind of like Surrender in the fact you couldn’t pinpoint it on a map. It was the nickname for the bad part of the big city I grew up in. It was a place no one wanted to talk about, and very few made it out of in once piece.

The fed that was in charge of my case would lose his mind if he knew I had given this woman my real name, but I figured she had a concussion and was barely conscious so it wouldn’t hurt anything. Plus, I wanted her to know me…well, the me that I’d just decided to be. I wanted to see if I could actually pull off being a guy who deserved a shot at getting it right.

“You don’t look like a Benton.” Her voice was weak and I could see she was struggling to keep her eyes open.

“Oh yeah? What do I look like then?” I was curious and also leery of what her answer would be. I was supposed to be doing my best to fit in here, to make a new life, so if this banged up and barely awake girl could pinpoint that I didn’t belong, I was in deep shit.

Her eyelids fluttered and drifted back over those intense sapphire eyes. Her lips moved slightly and on a whispered breath she exhaled, “You look like trouble.”

She had no idea how right she was. I snickered at her words and it bled into a sigh of relief when the clearing where my cabin sat came into view. I hugged the woman closer to my chest and to see if she was still coherent asked, “What are you doing out in the middle of nowhere Montana in the middle of winter and after midnight anyways?”

She didn’t respond for a long minute so I assumed she was blacked back out. I almost dropped her when she whispered, “I’m looking for someone. I drove up here to find him.”

I looked down at her curiously and her eyes were back open. They were so pretty I found myself staring into them and not moving, even though shelter was a mere hundred yards away. “Who are you looking for?”

She blinked up at me and cocked her head to the side like she was trying to decide if I was friend or foe. Foe. I was always foe, but she didn’t need to know that.

“MacKenzie. I’m looking for a MacKenzie.”

I couldn’t stop the laugh that shook out of my chest. I tilted my head back and hooted up at the night sky as I regained my footing and hauled ass toward the door to my cabin.

“Pop-Tart, you’re going to have to narrow those search parameters down.”

She squinted her eyes at me and wiggled in my grasp, which made us both moan, her in pain, me at the way everything behind my zipper started to tighten and harden. She didn’t ask me about the nickname and I was glad. They had been my favorite things to eat when I was a kid. I used to watch and wait for the sweet treat to pop up out of the toaster like it was my reward for making it through the previous day.

“What do you mean? This town is microscopic. How hard can it be to find one man named MacKenzie?”

I laughed again and jiggled the doorknob, sighing as the warmth from the roaring fire immediately hit my icy skin. “This town is tiny but more than half the year-round residents are MacKenzies. Men, women, children…they’re all part of the MacKenzie brood. The sheriff is a MacKenzie, the town doctor is a MacKenzie. You can’t throw a rock in Surrender without hitting one of them.” I tended to avoid them. Most of the men had ties to the military and different clandestine government agencies. They worked to put the kind of people I spent a lifetime doing business with down. I didn’t want to be on the wrong side of MacKenzie-style vengeance, which was another reason I knew the Marshals dropped me here. It was easier to keep my nose clean when I was living smack dab in the center of a lion’s den.

Those blue eyes widened and then squeezed shut like my words had hit her right in the heart. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”