Page 41 of Antonio Miles

“Darby’s mother’s name was Jennifer,” I said. “She was an artist. I met her when she was painting a sunrise at a nearby park in Nashville. She was brash and smart and absolutely relentless when she wanted something.”

Tessa stilled, listening.

“I was twenty-four. I thought I knew everything. She thought the opposite about me and she was right. We were together just shy of two years when she left.”

“I take it things didn’t work out?”

“I honestly couldn’t tell you, honey. Jen was the most independent person I’ve ever met. Man or woman. She chafed at my need to know where she was. Not to control her, and she didn’t really see it as me trying to control her. She just rebelled against authority.” I sighed, shaking my head slightly. “It wasn’t anything unusual for her to leave for days or weeks at a time. She would usually call or even leave a note telling me she’d be back in a little while.

“One day, she was gone.” I gave a little wave of my hand before dropping it back to my chest. “I didn’t think much about it at first. Like I said, she did that on occasion. But this time she was just… gone.”

“Did you ever find out what happened?”

“Only that she spiraled into heavy drug use and OD’d, leaving Darby on her own. After searching for her for several weeks, Seth finally told me to let her go. I don’t know what happened to make her run, but Darby paid the price for it.

“Before she left me, I got her pregnant with Darby, though I didn’t know,” I said. “Not until a couple of years ago. Darby was only seven when Jennifer died. The foster system and Darby… well, they didn’t mix.”

Tessa stroked my jaw in a gentle caress. Then she kissed my shoulder and settled her body close to me, snuggling contentedly. “That painting in the sunroom,” she said, “is hers.”

“Yeah. She painted it the week we met.”

“It belongs with you,” Tessa said, simple as a fact. “You loved her.”

I thought about that statement for a long moment, needing to think about my answer. “Yes. I think I did. Just not in the way I first thought.”

She raised up slightly, looking at me. “I don’t follow.”

“I loved the idea of Jen. She was every man’s dream woman. Well, most men’s. She couldn’t care less what I did or who I was with. I told her I’d never be with more than one woman at a time, but she waved me off. And no. I don’t think she had other lovers. I mean, I thought that maybe at first, but that wasn’t Jen. She’d have come out and said something. She definitely wouldn’t have moved in with me. Took me long enough as it was to get her to agree. It took me a really long time to figure that out about myself. That I was with Jen because I got the freedom I wanted with the commitment from her to be my woman. She never worried about where I was or what I did. My father said she wasn’t the woman for me, but I didn’t believe him.” I studied Tessa’s face, then reached up to stroke her cheek, brushing my thumb over her lower lip. She took it into her mouth and sucked, closing her eyes like she was in bliss. When she opened them again, I held her gaze. “But Seth was right. Jen wasn’t the woman for me. You are, Tessa. So, you be as badass as you want. Or you be as docile as a kitten. I don’t care. Just as long as you’re with me.”

If I lived to be a hundred, I’d never know if I said the wrong thing or not. But Tessa dissolved into tears. And she clung to me as she cried. For a very, very long time.

I tried to comfort her as much as I could, but she just buried her face in my chest and cried all the harder, hanging on to me like she’d never let me go. So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I wrapped my arms around her as tightly as I dared and let her cry it out.

It took a long time for her to wear herself out. But when she did, despite the red cheeks and nose or the puffy eyes, she looked more relaxed than I’d seen her since we met. She was completely passed out. Exhausted.

I watched her as she slept. Her hair spread over my arm and upper belly, twining us together. I made myself a promise, right then. I’d lost Jen for reasons I couldn’t imagine. But I would not lose Tessa. I’d hold her until she told me to stop.

And then I’d hold her anyway.

Chapter Thirteen

Tessa

Ten weeks later

It had been ten weeks since Denton and Rainman disappeared. I’d learned exactly where all my soft spots were by the third week and spent the other seven trying to ignore them.

Denton and Rainman had gone to ground the night of the raid and stayed there, as far as anyone could tell. Knight chased every wire transfer, every burner number, every shell company registered to a name that led to another name that led nowhere at all, and every single trail died clean and quiet, like somebody with real money and real patience had scrubbed the world behind them. Éclipse sat dark. The place had closed up shop with no commotion. It was like the whole of their clientele had gotten some group text telling them business was closed for a while.

Life at the mountain, in the meantime, had turned into something I hadn’t let myself believe I still got to have. Mornings where Antonio slept past dawn, his arm heavy and warm across my waist, were some of the most treasured memories of my life thus far. Coffee on the porch, Carrie teaching me how to braid a fishtail because she said I did it wrong and it drove her insane to watch, Darby swearing up a blue streak at a video game controller like the console had personally wronged her family, and all the smiles and laughs I’d collected from every person holed up in this luxury hide-away would forever live in my heart. Small, stupid, perfect things made me happier than I could ever remember being.

Underneath all of it, though, ran the one thread I couldn’t cut loose no matter how hard I yanked. Mercy Raines. She was still somewhere in the dark I’d only escaped by luck and with a small army. I knew that fixating on her wasn’t really about Mercy. It was about me. About surviving when other people hadn’t and needing somewhere to put that guilt so it didn’t sit on my own chest and crush me instead.

I also knew that the tired, sick feeling dogging me for weeks wasn’t really about her either, though I told myself it was. Some mornings I couldn’t look at eggs without my stomach lurching. Some afternoons I fell asleep sitting up, book still open in my lap, and woke an hour later disoriented and cotton-mouthed. I chalked it up to a low simmering depression I hadn’t had time to examine yet, plus a body that hadn’t kept anything resembling a reliable calendar since the night they’d taken me. Éclipse had knocked my whole life sideways on multiple fronts. Made sense my period would be part of the collateral damage.

It was Veda who finally said out loud what the rest of us had been circling for a week. We sat around the big kitchen table, the four of us, Carrie curled sideways in her chair with her knees drawn up, Darby flipping a butter knife end over end like she might play with a fidget spinner.

“We’re going back to the compound,” Veda said, and there wasn’t a question mark anywhere in her voice. “All of us. Together.”