Lexie turns and gazes out the back door, profile lit up and elegant as ever. I can picture every morning like this, I realize.Not gonna happen.
“No,” she finally says, softly.
I don’t push, even though I want to. It’s clear the guy’s not in her life, and that’s all I really need to know. An address would be good too, so I could kick his ass for leaving her high and dry like this.
We sit in silence a minute, a pleasant kind of silence, but one that’s gradually nearing a steep precipice neither of us seems to want to address. Finally, Lexie says, with a sad sigh, “This isn’t going to last. Is it?”
I sit back, and she faces me, expression suddenly closed and unreadable.
“No,” I say.
“You’re going to go after Jockey.”
I nod, hating that I’ve now had this same, miserable conversation with the only two people in my life who matter.
“Why?” she asks, cocking her head. There’s no judgement in her tone or her face, only a numb, distant curiosity.She’s already writing me off,I realize.To protect herself.
“Word is he’s pumping some bad shit into the streets,” I say. “My dad’s gotta be turning in his grave.”
“And it’s your job to stop him?” Again, only a cool distance to her voice.
“No one else is going to.”
She nods, touches her bottom lip in a way that makes me want to trace it with my tongue. After a long time, it seems, she says, gently, “This will have to end.”
I take a sharp breath, unsurprised by the words, but struck by how painful they are. “Yeah,” I say.
“If you’re getting mixed up in this again,” Lexie says measuredly, “I can’t see you. I have to protect my daughters. They’re all that matters.”
“I know,” I say. She sounds like my dad when she talks like that.
“This is about Milo,” she says after a moment. “Isn’t it?”
I hesitate, holding her eyes. Then nod.
“You fired that day,” she says. “When he was shot. That’s how they got you.”
I never remember the day fully. I remember it in fits and bursts, sporadic and perplexing: gunfire lighting upBen’s. Milo laughing one minute, on his side the next. Me, pulling my pistol, firing out the door like the other guys. My knees sticky with Milo’s blood. I remember my guys, my friends, people I’d known my whole life, shouting at me to leave Milo.
Then the cops are there, lights flaring through the windows against my closed eyelids, and Milo’s hand is already cold, and my gun is unlicensed, and they’re telling me to put my hands on my head, and I can’t, because I’m not there, not really, and then they’re shoving their guns in my face, and they’re slamming me to the ground.
The one thing I can’t forget, ever, is this: me, pinned to the floor, my cheek in Milo’s blood; and his eyes, gazing into mine, empty and unseeing.
“You could let it go,” Lexie says, and I raise my eyes to hers. “We could be together.”
An ultimatum?“Milo deserves justice,” I say quietly.
“What you’re talking about,” she says, more sharply, “what you’re planning, that’s not justice, Liam. It’s revenge.”
“He’s dead, and I’m alive,” I say, ice creeping into my voice. “Me and him paid for Jockey’s big mouth. We paid for that day. Even if Jockey’s guys weren’t fucking over this town—mytown—that’d be enough for me to go after them.”
Lexie’s eyes gleam. She says nothing.
“I have nothing to lose,” I say, closing my hands into fists on the table. “Justice, revenge. Truly, Lexie. What’s the fucking difference now?”
“Nothing to lose?” She stands suddenly, eyes flashing. “Nothing? You can’t think of anything you have that you stand to lose? Christ’ssake, Liam. You know what? Yeah. I guess you’re right about that.”
My stomach twists. “Lexie—”
