Fix It Up - Mary Calmes Page 0,60
said. “I was worried you all were going to be digging graves in the middle of the desert.”
“Are you listening to yourself, for fuck’s sake?” I snarled at him, because yeah, when Jared went all alpha, I’d had the same thought, but I was exhausted, and he was talking out of his ass. “Your husband is a goddamn Fed. How the hell would you explain us getting rid of dead bodies to him?”
“By explaining to him that you felt they deserved it,” he replied flatly, in his unflappable Croy way. Nothing ruffled his feathers, and everything rolled off his back.
“And you think he wouldn’t just throw my ass in jail?” I growled at him.
“No, Loc, he would not,” he assured me. “He knows the kind of man you are.”
The way he was looking at me, calm, steady, like everything he said was making perfect sense…was humbling.
Him, Jared, Ella, Cooper, and Rais—all these people believing in me was a lot of positivity coming my way at once. I was definitely overdue to piss someone off.
I scowled at him, and he laughed and stepped into me like that was totally normal, and hugged me. Tight.
It was a mindfuck. Worse was when I somehow felt compelled to tell him that Ella and I missed him—Jesus—and that I was planning to visit when the job was over, and she was going to come with me.
“I’ll be looking forward to that,” he assured me with a sigh, seeming very pleased.
I shoved him off me, and he was chuckling as he left me, which didn’t help my mood one bit. I was going soft, and that was not helpful in my line of work. I really needed to go to some horrible dive bar and get in a fight. That would take the happy edge off.
Once I was in the SUV driving back, my phone rang, and I saw it was Nick.
“Shit,” I grumbled when I answered.
“Nice,” he muttered on his end.
“No, I mean—shit. Listen, I’m sorry I woke you, just go back to sleep. I hafta talk to you about a lotta things, but it’ll hold until whenever you get up.”
“No, I want to know what you’re doing at…what…five thirty in the morning?” he asked, sounding lazy, languorous, like he’d been up fucking, not like I’d woken him from a sound sleep.
“Had things to do,” I replied, clipping my words. “Go back to bed.” I finished with the order and hung up on him.
He called me right back.
“Seriously, go to sleep,” I grumbled.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” he said fiercely, clearly on his way to getting angry. “I want to know where you are!”
“Why’re you yelling? You’re gonna piss off Jamie.”
“What?”
“Just come by the house tomorrow whenever you wake up, ’cause I need to talk to you.”
He sighed deeply. “Jesus, you’re annoying.”
“I’m sorry, what did you––”
“Where do you think I am right now?”
But I knew where he was, and it wasn’t a surprise. He was beautiful, and so was Jamie. It made all the sense in the world that they would be in bed together. For some reason, I thought it was a shame he never got to meet Croy, because he was missing out on a friend of mine. And why that filtered through my brain didn’t make a lot of sense, but I’d been on an adrenaline high and had crashed hard on the plane, and cried.
I mourned for the boy Nick had been, betrayed by a man who was supposed to love him and protect him. The idea of him looking to his father to save him and instead, the man left him to be beaten, gutted me.
I mourned for the horses who had been fed and nurtured and then had their bones broken by the same people who had shown them affection. The betrayal was monstrous, and imagining their eyes, and recalling the sound of their screams in the video, was heartbreaking.
It became a loop in my head. Nick, the horses, around and around.
I had seen what Nick looked like when he cried, seen how red his eyes became, and of course, my mind conjured him younger and as pale and thin as he’d been when I first arrived, and the hatred and anger swelled in me until I could barely breathe. It was lucky that I’d been alone on the plane, but for the pilot and co-pilot locked in the cockpit, because it would have been hard to explain the tears.
“Loc?” he said, and I could hear the worry