Ahead of us, Jace and Ethan jogged up the porch steps and through the front door, clearly determined to claim a couple of bottles before Parker got near the kitchen island, which doubled as a fully stocked bar. The guys did quite a bit of drinking on their nights off, which wasn’t as bad as it sounded. It’s really hard to get a cat drunk, possibly because of our accelerated metabolism, which also makes it difficult to sustain a buzz.
Out of habit, I paused with my hand on the old iron porch rail, looking up at the second floor. The light was on in Marc’s room; he was still up. I’d never been able to pass the guesthouse without looking up at his window. Not once. It was an addiction. A pointless, self-destructive addiction. But really, is there any other kind?
Parker, true gentleman that he was, opened the front door for me, then followed me into the living room. The guesthouse was small but much warmer and more comfortable than the main house. And though the occupants sometimes changed—as older enforcers moved on, and younger ones came to replace them—the ambience stayed the same. The guys kept the fridge stocked with soda, squirt cheese, and frozen burritos, food my mother never served, and to my knowledge had never tasted. Ever since we were old enough to walk, my brothers and I had been welcome to make ourselves at home anytime we needed a junk-food fix.A couple of years ago, the guys went in together on an obscenely large wide-screen television, which they kept tuned to sitcom reruns, action movies or ESPN. There were always empty glasses on every flat surface and discarded clothing on the floor. It was like going away to summer camp every time I walked through the door—until Marc and I broke up. I hadn’t been in the guesthouse since, in almost five years.
But one glance at the living room told me nothing had changed. The floors were still scarred hardwood, because the guys couldn’t keep carpet in decent shape. The walls were dingy white and almost completely bare, because they didn’t know what to hang up. Cheap miniblinds covered the windows, and the only plates in the cabinet were made of paper. Videogame controllers and DVD boxes littered the living-room floor. And the entire place smelled like sweat and old pizza, scents I associated with some of the best times of my life.
I couldn’t help but smile.
Parker waved a hand at the couch against one wall. “Sit down. I’ll get you a drink.”
“You guys could use some new furniture,” I said, brushing off a crumb-crusted cushion before I sat. The couch was upholstered in 1980s brown-and-yellow plaid, the cushions flattened to half their original thickness. When I sat, I sank deep enough to place my navel several inches lower than my knees.
“Nah,” Jace said from behind the makeshift bar, a bottle of tequila in one hand and a shot glass in the other. “It would take us years to break in anything new.”
I laughed. “That would sure be a shame.”
“What’s your pleasure?” Parker asked, lining up a series of bottles on the faded Formica countertop. If Marc or Jace had asked the same question, I might have raised an eyebrow at the choice of words, but not with Parker. His only vice was alcohol, and even under the influence he was the most polite man I knew. And the gentlest, other than Owen.
Before I could reply, wood groaned behind me, and my words died on my lips. But someone else answered for me. “Margarita on the rocks, heavy on the salt.”
I whirled around and felt my hair swing out in an arc behind me. Marc stood at the bottom of the stairs, wearing only a snug pair of jeans with both knees worn through. Light from the bare bulb in the stairwell played on muscles I’d watched him develop years ago. He had one hand in his pocket and the other wrapped around the neck of an empty beer bottle.
Sensitive parts of me tightened as my eyes lingered on the lines of his chest, drawn to the four long, parallel scars that had brought him into my life. It was all I could do to keep from squirming on the couch. I hated that just seeing him like that could affect me so strongly, and I hated it even worse that he knew it. And he wasn’t the only one. Everyone in the room heard my raspy intake of breath, and they’d have to be blind to miss the flush scalding my cheeks as I took in Marc’s scent from across the room. At the edge of my vision, Jace downed his first shot, following it with a slice of the lime he’d just cut. Then he snatched the shot Ethan had poured for himself and tossed it back too, ignoring my brother’s grumbling protest. I saw it, but it barely registered. I couldn’t drag my focus from Marc.
“How did you know that?” I whispered, knowing he could hear me. I’d been barely eighteen when we broke up, and too young to drink. So there was no way he could know my drink of choice. At least, there was no way he should have known.
“Vic told me a couple of years ago.” His face was completely blank, impossible to read. “He watched you at Hudson’s on your twenty-first birthday.”
My blush deepened. If Vic had witnessed my birthday binge, he’d know I hadn’t left the bar alone. And Marc would know, too. I’d been an idiot to think my life at school and my life on the ranch were unconnected. They were hopelessly intertwined around me, like two different vines fighting to strangle the same poor tree, and only my desperation for privacy had kept me from seeing it.
Marc looked away first, and my eyes followed him into the kitchen. He took a juice glass out of the dish drainer and half filled it with whiskey, then finished off the glass with Coke from a can. Without even a glance in my direction, he sat at the island on a bar stool, his back to me.
“Sorry, Faythe,” Parker said, waving a clear plastic carton with less than a single swig of bright green liquid at the bottom. “We’re out of margarita mix. What’s your second choice?”
“I don’t know.” I’d only had a couple of drinks since that night at Hudson’s. I’d never been much of a drinker, in part because I didn’t know how to achieve a buzz without looking like a lush in front of my friends. But the guys did, Parker in particular.
Parker was the oldest of six boys, each no more than eighteen months apart. As teenagers, the Pierce brothers were infamous for putting their mother through hell. On one notorious occasion, Mrs. Pierce came home to find all six of her boys, the youngest of whom was then fourteen, passed out drunk in what remained of her formal living room. Her husband was at the Lazy S at the time, attending a yearly council meeting. He took the call from his wife in my father’s office, surrounded by his fellow Alphas. And me, of course, though at the time I had no idea why Daddy kept including me.
As luck would have it, Mr. Pierce accidentally pushed the speakerphone button at exactly the wrong moment, and the entire room heard his wife turn over responsibility for all six boys to him. In one long, near-hysterical sentence, she said that grooming Caroline, their ten-year-old daughter, was all she could handle at the moment, and he could do what he wanted with his sons, so long as he kept them away from her.
Mr. Pierce’s first act as de facto warden was to get rid of the three boys who had already come of age. He negotiated right then with the leaders of three other territories, making arrangements for his sons to serve as enforcers, to teach them discipline and responsibility. Parker had been at the ranch ever since, for the better part of ten years.
“The trick is to drink it quickly, then start on another one,” Parker said, crossing the room to hand me a tall glass filled with a dubious-looking brown liquid.
I held the glass up to the light, looking for a justifiable reason to hand it back. Maybe spots on the glass, or a hair floating on the surface? No such luck. To be polite, I’d have to try it. “What is this?”
“Long Island Iced Tea.”
Oh. I could handle tea.
But, if I’d watched him mix my drink instead of watching Marc’s tanned shoulders tense and relax, I would have known that the only thing a Long Island Iced Tea had in common with its namesake was color. I took a drink and made a face but managed to swallow it. For a moment, I considered asking Parker for a plain soda instead, but then my eyes settled on Vic’s empty recliner, and I remembered why I was there in the first place instead of asleep in my own bed. Sara. Raped and murdered. And put on display.I took another sip, and then another after that, trying to drown out my thoughts and wipe the gory images from my mind. But no matter where I looked, I saw her body as Michael had described it. Every time I closed my eyes, even just to blink, Sara’s eyes stared back at me, brilliant blue and framed by lashes that had never needed mascara. So I kept drinking, desperate to forget the way she died, to hold back tears I still hadn’t shed. I drank to numb an ache so acute that my heart throbbed painfully with each beat, and my head pulsed with a near-paralyzing pressure, like it might burst and end my misery once and for all.
And finally, after thirty minutes and three Long Island Iced Teas, my liquid anesthesia began to take effect, though the taste failed to grow on me.
Across the room, Marc had settled into a faded and lumpy armchair. In one hand he gripped the bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and in the other he clenched its cap, as if he were afraid of what his hands might do if he left them unoccupied. My bet was that he would ruin more drywall, and maybe break a couple of his own fingers in the process. He didn’t deal well with anger or grief, both of which showed clearly in the lines of his face.