Pawn (The Pawn Duet #2) - T.M. Frazier Page 0,25

chest is heaving. My questions are rhetorical, but still, I wait for Thorne’s answer, wondering what I missed that she sees so clearly.

Thorne stands straight and gently places her hands on my chest, She looks up into my eyes with both sadness and compassion. More emotion than I’ve ever seen from her in all the years she’s been around. “Mickey thinks she can take them down herself. She wants to so that you won’t have to.” She pauses and searches for something in my gaze. “Is it so hard for you to understand? To see what I see?” She frowns. “Or, do you just not think that you’re worthy?” The way she asks leads me to believe that she’s asking herself more than she’s asking me.

I try to temper my frustration so that my anger doesn’t blanket my words. “What am I not seeing? Tell me, Thorne. Help me to understand because it may be obvious to you, but it’s not to me. I’m fucking lost here.”

More lost than I’ve ever felt. More than when my mother left. More than when Gutter died.

Thorne holds my face in her hands, forcing me to look at her. “Pike, people protect the people they love. And Mickey?” A tear wells up in Thorne’s eye and falls from the corner, trickling down her cheek. “She fucking loves you.”

Her words punch at my chest like a steel fist. I recoil and feel behind me for the desk for support. I shake my head. “No, she can’t. People who love you don’t leave you.”

“You think it’s that cut and dry?” She chuckles. Love is complicated.”

“Not in my experience. It’s pretty easy. You love someone, and they leave. It means they don’t love you back,” I answer honestly.

She drops her hands. “What you mean is that your mother left you, and you think that means she didn’t love you,” Thorne accuses, accurately.

I search my memory for the time I told Thorne about my mother, but I come up blank. “How did you—”

She waves me off. “You were drunk slurring your way through your past one night and let it slip.”

I’m a drunken confessor? Good to know. Maybe, whiskey isn’t the best breakfast choice this morning.

Thorne nudges my shoulder “Did you ever stop and think she left because she loves you?”

“Mickey or my mom?” I ask.

“Both.”

I answer honestly, “No.”

“Well, you were wrong.” She laughs. “So fucking wrong.”

I say nothing because my mind is racing with this new idea. Mickey left, but not because she chose revenge over me, but because she loves me.

This changes everything.

“Someone finally crushed that stony heart of yours,” Thorne says, perching on the desk next to me.

I take a deep, shaky breath and muster a half smile with my hand clenched over my chest. “Sure as fuck feels that way,” I admit, and it’s a surprising relief to admit a weakness I’ve always tried to hide from the rest of the world.

A new plan forms. One that will take every trustworthy person I know and a lot of fucking patience.

It’s a plan that will see this shit through. And I’ll kill every one of those fuckers if I have to, but I’m bringing Mickey back here with me where she belongs.

Home.

6

Mickey

Horror films or zombie movies where people are hacked to bits and guts are strewn about like lawn decorations, are meant to provoke a reaction of disgust and fear within the viewer. But after a subject watches hundreds of those same kinds of violent movies, the same feelings they felt while watching the first are a mere flicker of what they were, becoming muted. The viewer now desensitized to the violent graphic images playing out in detail on the screen before them.

This doesn’t just apply to movies. It applies to real life as well. When one hundred subjects living in high crime neighborhoods were given a survey about their level of fear, surprise, and adrenaline provoking circumstances, seventy percent of those subjects reported not even jumping in surprise or feeling fear-induced adrenaline rushes when hearing gunshots.

I grew up listening to the hate-filled words of The Fourth Reich every summer for two months. While I never ever thought what the Reich was preaching was right, I never remember a specific moment when I stepped outside of my scientific over-analytic mind and thought, “This is wrong.” It was assumed. At least, I thought it was. I thought the fact that they were wrong was the one constant the entire psychological experiment was based on.

Or was I