Ball & Chain(107)

Ty had to stop and shake the memory a little before he could continue. It still made him angry. Zane was silent, letting him gather his thoughts.

“Through all that shit they were talking, Nick never said a word. He just sat there and watched them. He didn’t look angry. He didn’t look amused. He was just . . . sitting there, blank. And for some reason I was fascinated by it, so I watched him. I mean, one look at him and you could tell Nick was a hardass. I remember thinking, this is someone with restraint. This is someone who’ll take a punch to the face and walk away instead of brawling. This is someone I need to know, because I knew I’d never be that kind of person. And the more shit he took, the angrier I got for him. So when we loaded onto the bus, I made sure I sat beside him.” He began to laugh with the memory. “I had to shove a kid and tell him to keep moving to get to the seat, and I just plopped my happy ass next to him.”

Zane smirked. “I can imagine what that looked like.”

“I remember the look he gave me when I sat, like, ‘Oh my God, who is this idiot and why is he smiling?’ I introduced myself, shook his hand. And I realized, the way he reached for my hand, that the reason he’d been sitting like he had was because his ribs were hurt.”

“Jesus Christ.” Zane sounded as angry as Ty had been back then. “His dad?”

Ty nodded. “A parting gift for abandoning the family to go play hero when he should have been going to work and earning money.”

“I hope Nick lets him rot,” Zane said under his breath.

Ty nodded his agreement. He knew it probably wouldn’t happen, though, because Nick wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he didn’t do what he could to save someone, even someone as evil as his own father.

“Anyway. One of the guys sitting in front of us turned around to say something and I told him to shut the fuck up and turn back around before he got a handful of something he wasn’t ready for. Nick told me later it was the first time someone had stood up for him just because they could. Ever. First time in his life.”

“And that’s why he says you earned his loyalty when you sat down.”

“That’s right. When I asked him who’d broken his rib, he said his father. When I pointed at his knuckles and asked why he hadn’t hit back, he told me he had. But he’d used a baseball bat.” Ty smiled when he remembered the silence that had come over the kids sitting around them, eavesdropping. There had been no mistaking Nick’s tone for a joke, but Ty had laughed his ass off at the time. “I just told him I liked his style, and we were inseparable after that. When I got news that Deuce had been in his wreck, I was . . . Nick was the one who kept me from going AWOL. We looked out for each other, had each other’s six.”

“You two going to be okay now?”

“Yeah,” Ty said without giving it even a second of thought. “I need to do better by him.”

When they reached the patio of the mansion, they found a lot of activity going on, much more than could be justified by the tail end of dinner or the fact that someone had partially repaired the generators. As they stepped into the circle of light cast by the landscape lighting, Nick came jogging out to them, Kelly on his heels.

“What’s going on?” Zane asked.

Nick grimaced, trying to catch his breath. “Richard Burns is dead.”





They tried to keep Ty out of the room, but he bulled his way past all three of them, so they just followed him in, hanging back. Earl was there, refusing to leave. Richard Burns was sprawled on the floor. There was no blood, no obvious injuries or signs of violence on his body. The room, however, hadn’t come through unscathed. Tables were overturned, pictures and lamps had been knocked to the floor, even a small chaise lounge had been tumbled over and crashed into a wall.

The stone walls were so thick throughout the mansion that no one had heard what seemed to have been a pretty epic battle.

The electricity was working again in parts of the mansion, including this room. Ty didn’t know how, and he didn’t ask.

“His neck’s been broke,” Earl told Ty. His voice was gruff. He knelt beside Burns’s body, holding the man’s hand.

“Dad . . .” Ty took a few halting steps and stopped again. His knees went weak, and he would have sunk to the floor if a strong arm hadn’t wrapped around him.

He gripped Zane’s shirt, clinging to him.

“I’m sorry,” Zane whispered.

Earl’s eyes traveled over all four men. “Look around this room,” he said, his voice full of gravel and anger. “Tell me what happened. And then find out who did this.”