She shook her head. “Don't do this, Seth.”
“Take a shower, Seth,” he mocked, in a sing-song voice. “It'll loosen up your back. I'll just call out for some dinner. Don't you worry about a thing.”
“I just ordered cheeseburgers, fries and a soda from the diner,” she whispered.
He pondered that. “I should've thought it through,” he said. “You're Victor's long-lost darling, right? They tell me the guy's worth a hundred and fifty million or so. I can almost understand it, even if he did whack your daddy. Let's just let bygones by bygones, shall we? What's a little murder? Happens in the best of families.”
“Stop it!” she protested. “You saw what happened at my house! That was real, Seth!”
“Yeah, that does confuse things,” he admitted. “But a woman like you might have all kinds of enemies. Particularly if you make a habit of treating your lovers the way you treat me.”
She had the tears under control now, assuming they were ever real to begin with. “I never lied to you, Seth,” she said, in a stiff, dignified little voice. “Where are we going?” “Someplace where you can't cause any more damage.”
She flinched. “I would never do anything to hurt you.”
He allowed part of his mind to assess the possibility that she was telling him the truth. He shied away from the thought.
He wanted it to be the truth too badly. It was his weak spot, his Achilles’ heel. He had to overcompensate for it, even if it killed him.
The pattern taking shape, the one in which Raine sold him out and set him up to die, made perfect sense in the world where Jesse had been tortured and killed. It lined up just fine with a world where a mother could deliberately swallow so many pills that she just didn't wake up the next morning. That was the real world, where any horrible thing could happen. There were no rules at all. No limits to how horrible things could get.
He pressed his hand against his side, lightheaded. His sweater was getting soggy, and the slash throbbed and burned.
Raine saw the blood on his hand. “You're hurt!”
“No big deal. We're almost there.”
“Why didn't you tell me? Stop the car, so I can—”
“One more word, and I put you in the trunk.”
She stared with burning eyes at the rain pounding against the windshield. Heat poured from the vent, but it was fake heat, it couldn't touch her. She was lost on a glacier. She would never warm up. Pursued by unknown assassins, and the man she loved was convinced that she had set him up to die. Things couldn't get worse than this.
No, not true. If the man at the motel with the caved-in head had succeeded in killing Seth, that would have been worse. Infinitely worse. That would have been the end of the world.
And he'd come so close. She'd seen the blade flash down but she hadn't seen Seth's response, just a dark blur, a crunch, a thud, and that was that. Not like fight movies, where the eye followed every move as if it were a beautiful dance. There had been nothing beautiful about what she'd seen tonight. Just a brusque, lethal efficiency of movement.
There were a lot of things she didn't know about Seth Mackey.
He slowed and turned onto a steep gravel road. The sedan struggled and spun for a moment, but the tires finally gripped and soon they were bouncing along a narrow, rutted road.
The road dead-ended, the headlights of the car illuminating the porch of what appeared to be a large, ramshackle house. A light burned in the downstairs room off the porch. Seth killed the motor.
The porch door opened. A very large man was silhouetted against the light behind him. Seth got out of the car. “It's me,” he said.
Seth opened the passenger side and pulled Raine out, wrapping his fingers around her upper arm like a manacle.
“This isn't necessary” she hissed.
He ignored her, and dragged her towards the house. A muscular, hawk-nosed man with a short beard stared at her, stupefied as Seth pulled her through the doorway.
She blinked, taking in a swift blur of images. A big, smoky kitchen that seemed almost tropically warm. A kerosene lamp burning on the table. A card game was laid out, a coffeepot. Glasses and cups, a bottle of whisky. A sink full of dirty dishes. Two men sat at the table. The man with the beard closed the door and followed them in, leaning against the wall and folding massive arms over his barrel chest.
One of the men at the table was smoking a cigarette. He had the same hawk nose as the bearded man, and his big feet were propped up on the open door of the woodstove. There was a hole in the big toe of his sock, she noticed, before he pulled his feet down and stubbed out his cigarette. He was long and skinny, shaggy-haired, his lean face glinting with golden beard stubble. Green eyes, sharp and watchful.
The other man was clean-shaven and extremely hand- some, with a mane of tawny hair pulled back in a thick pony-tail. He had similar green eyes, with which he studied her body with undisguised interest.
The skinny guy with the hole in his sock broke the spell. “What's going on?” he demanded.
“I need a room I can lock from the outside, a padlock. A heater. And blankets.”
The three men looked at each other. Looked back at her.
“What the fuck do you think you're looking at?” Seth snarled.
The handsome long-haired guy jumped up. “The attic room ought to work. I'll go scrounge up a futon.”
“I'll get a padlock out of the shed,” the bearded man said.
The skinny one rose to his feet and reached for a cane. “I'll get some blankets.” He gave Seth a hard look as he limped by. “Then you and I are going to have a talk.”
“Whatever. Let me get her squared away first,” Seth said, pressing his hand against his side. He was paler than she had ever seen him.
The skinny guy's eyes widened. “Jesus, man, what did you do to yourself?”
“Later.”
They put her in the attic. There was a bustle of activity, which she could not follow. Someone dragged in a space heater and turned it on right next to her, but she didn't feel the heat. The man with the ponytail draped a blanket over her. The skinny guy was speaking to her, but she didn't hear his voice. He snapped his fingers in front of her face, looking worried, and said something to Seth. Seth shrugged.
The men filed out of the room, Seth last. He cast a hard look at her over his shoulder. She closed her eyes against it.
The door shut Clunk, rattle, and the padlock was engaged.
Connor popped the first aid kit open and pulled out a roll of gauze. “Get that sweater off,” he said. “Let me take a look.”
“It's no big deal, I told you. Give me some more of that whiskey.”
“Shut up and get the shirt off, bonehead. Some antibiotic ointment and some Band-Aids are not going to kill you.”
He dragged the thing over his head with a sigh. Davy pulled a dishcloth out of a drawer, ran hot water over it, and handed it to him.
He sponged the blood streaks off, wincing as Connor smeared antiseptic gel over the long, ugly slice and taped bandages over it. Sean tossed him a red flannel shirt, which he pulled on very slowly and carefully. He was too tired to bother buttoning it.
The three brothers plied him with whiskey and pried the whole tale out of him, bit by bit. By the time they were finished, Seth was so wiped out that even their long, speaking glances to each other didn't bug him anymore. The end of his story was greeted by silence, broken only by the crackle of the woodstove.
“OK “ he said, bracing himself. “Get it over with. This is the part where you guys tell me what an asshole I am. Go for it. I'm ready.”
“Nah,” Connor said. He put an oak log into the wood-stove, prodding it with a poker until it nested in the coals. “You got it wrong. This is the part where we calmly discuss our options.”