Raw Deal (Larson Brothers #1)(50)
“Did you ever imagine us here?” she asked him. “In your wildest dreams?”
“In my wildest ones?” He grinned, showing off perfect laugh lines. “Maybe.”
“Do you believe in omens?”
He considered her for a moment, his eyes gentle. “Not really. Why do you ask?”
Shrugging, she turned her attention back to digging another scrumptious bite from the carton. “It’s silly.”
“Tell me. Maybe you can convert a hardened cynic.”
“Tommy had a thing for eagles. You might have noticed the tattoo on his back.”
“Had my face smashed against it a couple of times. Incredible piece of work he had.”
“I’ve never seen a real one before, you know? Well, maybe at a zoo or something when I was a kid. But I saw one circling above his service that day. All by itself against the blue sky, just . . . strong and beautiful and . . .” Dropping her gaze, she growled in frustration at the sudden heat gathering behind her eyes, pressing her fingertips to her forehead. He put one hand on her shin, rubbing comfortingly, encouragingly. “Then I saw you,” she finished when she had shoved the tears back where they belonged.
“What do you think it meant?” He asked, out of genuine curiosity, she thought. Or at least it sounded that way. Not humoring or patronizing her.
“Rowan asked if I thought it was him saying goodbye. It was my first thought when I saw it, but I’ve never believed in things like that either. Probably a stupid coincidence I’ve given entirely too much thought to, right? But it keeps coming back to me.”
“I think we have to take solace wherever we find it. If it’s therapeutic for you to believe it was him, then believe it. And don’t let anyone take it from you.”
She fell silent for a time, scraping her spoon against the inside of the ice cream carton to get at the soft, melty part and taking a bite. “You don’t seem to like talking about your past,” she ventured, flicking a glance up at him. “I want to ask, but I don’t want to intrude.”
“You couldn’t intrude if you wanted to. I’ll be an open book for you. I don’t offer that to many.”
“Did you . . .” Trailing off, unable to phrase the question, she could only look up at him helplessly. “I don’t want to dig up what the press says. I deliberately avoid it. I don’t want to listen to everyone else, either. And I don’t really want to hear it, but . . . I guess I need to. Whatever it is.”
“When I was seventeen,” he began, abandoning his spoon in the ice cream so that it stood straight up and not looking at her, “I killed a man in our house.”
“Was it an accident?” she asked, her heart thudding hard.
His jaw stiffened, hard as granite. Otherwise he was as still as sculpture. “No. I f*cking meant to do it. Said it was an accident to keep my ass out of jail, told everyone that, but he was beating my mother. He’d beaten her to the ground, unconscious, and was still beating her. He would have killed her. I don’t know why, maybe over money or drugs or sex, but I didn’t care. I returned the favor, and I didn’t stop until that son of a bitch was dead.”
Savannah laced her hands together in front of her mouth, simultaneously heartbroken and horrified, robbed of words.
“Some people think I should have called the police. My mother would have been dead before they got there. Some people think that once I subdued him, I should have stopped. I guess they have a point. But seeing her there . . .” His voice cracked and he drew a deep breath before going on, “Beaten and bloody and so small on the floor in a puddle of her own blood . . . I couldn’t stop. All I could imagine was that we would never be safe, Mom or Zane or Damien or me, even if they picked the guy up and he went to jail, he would be out in no time and we would all be in danger then. I knew how the system worked.”
“And you were let off?”
“Eventually. They determined it was justifiable. Zane was there so he could back me up. I don’t know where Damien was but I’m glad he was gone. Mom was slow recovering—probably because all the drugs had taken their toll. She was never the same, and about seven months later, she was gone.”
“I’m so sorry, Michael. For everything.”
“I never meant to hurt your brother, Savannah. Beat him, yeah, even beat him bad. But never that. Never what happened. It’s the darkest, emptiest, most f*cking catastrophic feeling you can ever imagine and it shredded me. I couldn’t deal. I could have gone the rest of my life without knowing it again. When it happened with Tommy . . . Jesus Christ, I can’t describe it.” He scrubbed his face hard with both hands, as if to wipe away the emotion. She bet there wasn’t enough force in the world to do that. “I kept thinking of your family, and how I didn’t know you but you probably wanted to do to me what I did to that guy fifteen years ago. That it was payback.”
“No, no. I know you didn’t mean for it to happen,” she said, prompting an open stream of tears to flow down her cheeks. She didn’t even care anymore about them. After what he had just shared with her, being embarrassed of a few tears seemed ridiculous. She crawled over to him and collapsed onto his chest, sighing as the strength of his arms came around her, clutching her as fiercely as she did him. Each of them soaking in the other’s strength. He shuddered against her, grappling with his unnamable demons. We have to take solace wherever we can find it, he’d said, and somehow, by some divine intervention or alignment of the stars or whatever the hell else determined their destinies . . . he was her solace.