to hold Tucker through the pain.
And then they were both lost in Conklin’s consciousness, their bodies living through agony, their souls being twisted like the pendant that now hung on Josh Greenaway’s neck, heated in the crucible of pain and betrayal and reforged into a different shape.
When the rape was over, Conklin collapsed to the dirty straw, weeping, blood running from his mouth, from his nose, from his backside. He sobbed into the horseshit, confused as to how his belief in human goodness had gone so terribly wrong.
“Get up,” Meeks snarled. “Pull up yer pants. Ye think yer precious dad’ll care what I just did? It’s no more than what he did ter me. Who’s the woman now? Who’s the mewling whore? Now get out of my stable. Next time just let me brush the fuckin’ horse!”
The boy pulled himself up, sniveling. “I don’t need to tell my dad what you did to me,” he said, the sneer that would line his face permanently beginning in that moment. “I can fire servants same as he can.”
“Do it and I’ll tell all yer friends ye put out like any whore,” Meeks said with a cruel laugh.
For a moment, Thomas’s heart shriveled, but then his eyes narrowed. “You could tell them,” Conklin said, bending down and picking a hoof pick up out of the straw. “But no one will listen to a one-eyed fucker like you!”
He turned and swung the hoof pick, and while he hadn’t been strong enough to fight Meeks off when they’d been wrestling in the straw, he was more than strong enough to drive the thing through Meeks’s eye.
Later, when he was describing the incident to his father, he said the groom had gotten impertinent, and they’d scuffled. That he’d defended himself, as was only proper.
His father had looked coldly at Meeks, cowering and holding a towel to the tatters of his eye, and then pulled out a gun and shot him in the head.
Conklin gasped, staring at the twitching corpse of his adversary, and his father put his hand on his son’s shoulder.
“Nobody touches us, son. Nobody.”
But that wasn’t true, was it? Because his father touched him that night.
And again, and again, until Conklin found the first rich woman he could marry and moved far from home.
And had a son.
Angel came back to himself with a thump and squeezed Tucker’s hands in panic, the rough towels wrapped around Tucker’s wrist and fingers rasping under his palms.
Tucker looked back, brown eyes troubled—but sane.
“I’m sorry,” he said, as though speaking to himself. “That was a terrible thing to have happen. That was a terrible way to grow up.”
“Nobody feels pity for me!” The words were coming from Tucker’s mouth, but the voice was Conklin’s. “I take what I need, and I don’t need your pity!”
“Oh, but you do,” Tucker said softly. He looked at Angel and squeezed his hands back. Then he let go and nodded up with his chin.
Angel shook his head.
Tucker nodded again. “Go,” he whispered. Angel lifted up, hovering, about a foot, and Tucker rolled his eyes and backed up just a little. “Thomas Conklin Senior, I can lay you to rest. I can put a name on your coffin and let you find peace.”
“You will do what I tell you to do—”
Angel sank to the ground again and seized Tucker’s hand.
And saw the struggle inside. It was like watching the men, all but naked, in a wrestling match. But Tucker had Conklin—the grown, fiftyish man in his prime—pinned.
“I will not!” Tucker gritted. “You can concede and let me lay you to rest or—”
“Or what?” Conklin sneered.
Tucker’s grin was feral, triumphant, the snarl of the warrior who had won the pitched battle.
“You’re getting weaker, Thomas. Can you feel it? I can feel it. While we’ve been toodling down memory lane, your strength has been sucked into the earth of Daisy Place. You’re feeding the foundation right now, soldering the gold and the silver and the iron into an unbreakable, alloyed mass. This part of the yard won’t be a sponge for souls anymore, you understand? It will be a watershed, where they can escape and fade into dust if they’re peaceful. Only the angry souls need stay. Do you feel it? The freedom here? But not for you.”
Conklin almost broke free. He thrashed, his elbow catching Tucker in the jaw and then in the eye. Tucker’s nose broke—again—with a crunch, and Angel cringed, knowing that if he were to see Tucker from the outside, he’d see