It was a lonely place. A home that had been long in ruin, devoid of joy.
And suddenly she knew where they were without needing to ask him. “You spent some time in the area,” she murmured quietly, his words back at the river. “This is the house where you grew up.”
He stared at the old house, the van now paused in the empty road. “Yeah. This is it.”
“The mailbox doesn’t say Jones on it,” Tori pointed out, looking at him in question.
“I dropped the family name after I got into the Phoenix program. Henry Sheppard helped me start fresh, bury my past. I’ve been Ethan Jones ever since.” He turned into the narrow driveway.
Tori could see that he wasn’t happy to be there. His fingers were coiled around the wheel, his jaw clamped tight.
“What are we doing here? Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Staying anywhere else right now is too much risk. We could be spotted at a motel, and I’m not going to make you sleep in this van tonight.”
“But here, Ethan?”
“I’ll keep you safe.” A solemn reassurance, spoken like a vow.
He kept driving, the silence in the vehicle punctuated by the pop and crunch of gravel as they rolled slowly toward the old house.
She didn’t understand until now how deep Ethan’s dread must be that the killer on their tail, or the ones who hired him, might find them.
If he thought seeking shelter at his father’s house was less terrifying than facing his other enemies, then Tori could only hope they survived the night so they could run far and fast again tomorrow.
She sat ramrod straight as the van crawled up the driveway to the side of the house. Inside, a curtain swung back into place in a dingy bay window, as if someone had just peeked out. Before the van had slowed to a stop, the side screen door opened.
An old man stepped out onto the covered wooden porch. Tall and thin, hunched at the shoulders, he poked his thinning, gray-haired head around one of the rails and scowled at his uninvited visitors.
He wore a white, short-sleeved undershirt and dark green work pants. Sagging, faded black tattoos rode his forearms. His glower was piercing, terrifying and forbidding.
He peered at the van’s windshield for a long moment, then the glare faltered. Just a fraction, and only for a moment before he called it back and scowled even more furiously.
Ethan put the van in park, but left the engine running as he opened his door and got out.
Tori didn’t feel quite as brave as him, yet she couldn’t let him face his father on his own. She climbed out too, and stood beside the vehicle as Ethan walked around the front.
“If you come here for the readin’ of the will, you’re too early.” His father’s voice was scratchy, not nearly as deep or smooth as Ethan’s. “I ain’t dead yet, boy.”
Tori stared, unsure what to do or say in the face of this cold reunion. Ethan seemed thoroughly unfazed. He stood his ground as the old man hobbled down from the stoop and made his way onto the dirt drive.
Fog-gray eyes stared out of a skull covered in tissue-thin, sallow skin. His cheeks were sunken, lips dry and cracked.
He wasn’t healthy, but there was still an air of couched aggression in the man. God only knew what he’d been like with a few more pounds on him and thirty fewer years of age.
The old man’s shadow-ringed gaze slid to Tori for no more than a second before he turned his displeasure back on his son. “You gonna tell me what you’re doing here? You didn’t come for my funeral and you sure as shit ain’t here on a social call.”
“We need a place to crash. Just for the night.” Ethan didn’t phrase it as a question, and there was no fear or hesitation in his voice or the steely stare he fixed on his father. He reached into the pocket of his cargo shorts. “If you need money—”
“I don’t want your goddamn money, boy.”
The sharp retort made a rattle crawl up the old man’s throat. He wheezed and coughed, then spat at the dusty ground once he’d composed himself again.
He pursed his pale lips, looking from the van to Tori, then Ethan. “Just for one night?”
Ethan gave a curt nod. “We’ll be gone by sunrise.”
His father studied him for a long while, then his head bobbed absently in consideration. “Okay, then. If that’s what you need, boy. Come on inside.”
Ethan cleared his throat. “I’d like to park the van in the barn.”
The wiry gray eyebrows rose a fraction. He grunted, then motioned for Ethan to follow him as he started heading for the weather-beaten red outbuilding.
Ethan didn’t follow right away. He walked over and brushed his fingers through the hair over her brow. “There’s a bathroom just inside the house. Second door on the left.”
“Oh, no, that’s okay. I’d rather wait for you—”
He gave a faint shake of his head. “I need to get a few things straight with him. And I need to do it alone.”
“Okay,” she agreed.
He kissed her, tender and sweet.
Then he pivoted to go confront the monster of his youth.
17
Ethan pulled the van inside the open barn, amazed to see the place had hardly changed since he’d last been there. It was time-worn and brittle though, suffering from an obvious, prolonged dereliction and neglect.
Rather like his father.
Ethan glanced at the old man who waited inside the barn with him. He looked worse than unhealthy.
The strong, rangy, combative drunk who used to simmer with explosive rages had become a stooped, jaundiced shadow of the terror he once had been.
And Ethan had been shocked not to detect the sickly sweet, ever-present whiff of whiskey on his father the instant he got close to him.
“You been on the road for long?” the old man asked as Ethan got out and shut the driver’s side door.
“Not long.”
His father grunted. “Where’d you say you were headed again?”
“I didn’t.”
Another grunt, this time with an edge of annoyance to it. “Gotta tell you, boy, figured I’d be dead and dust before I ever saw you around here again.”
Ethan swung an indifferent look toward him. “Yeah, that makes two of us.”
“You in trouble of some sort?”
Jesus, was that a flicker of genuine concern in those cataract-clotted eyes, or was he imagining things?
Ethan wasn’t about to trust that idea at face value.
His father considered him for a long moment. “Yeah, you must be mixed up in something bad. I’m thinking you gotta be in some kinda dire straits, to come running back home to me.”
“This isn’t home,” Ethan said sharply. “You don’t even know the meaning.”
“Yet here you are.”
Ethan wheeled on him. To his shock, the old man shrank back, cowering from him. “Don’t think for a second I’d be here unless I had no other place to go. If it was just me, I’d sleep on the street before I asked you for a fucking thing.”
But he had to think about Tori, about her comfort and safety. He wouldn’t risk them sleeping unsecured in the van. And with a hired killer behind him somewhere, they couldn’t chance staying at a motel or other public place where they might be seen by the assassin or anyone else.
They had to lie low, and hope the danger either passed them by, or gave Ethan the chance to eliminate it permanently.
Right now, he needed to keep his head down and come up with a plan. A roadmap for where they should go, where they might be safe for a while.
He glanced at his father, who had gone quiet, recoiled from Ethan’s fury. “I don’t want to argue with you. I don’t even want to be standing here talking with you right now. I’m just passing through. Like I said, we’ll be gone in the morning. Then you can carry on with your life and I’ll carry on with mine.”
“Carry on, you say.” His thin mouth pressed flatter and he clucked his tongue. “Did you know I stopped drinking?” When Ethan didn’t respond, his father went on. “Naw, you couldn’t know that. You’ve been away for too long. Well, I did. Two and half years now, not a single drop.”
Ethan blew out a sharp sigh. “Better late than never.”
“Late is right.” The old man chuckled, and the wet, scraping sound of it echoed in the quiet barn. “Too fucking late for me. I’m not well, as you might’ve guessed. Cirrhosis. Terminal, so they tell me. I’ve had one foot in the grave for the past eight months.”
“That’s too bad.” Ethan knew it sounded cold, unfeeling. But there wasn’t much emotion in him when he looked at the man who had terrorized him so often and driven his mother away.
“You hold a grudge, just like she always did,” his father remarked tonelessly. “Well, I suppose it’s no use apologizing now. What’s done is done.”
Ethan scoffed. The old man was true to form, he’d give him that. He might be dying. He might even be wrestling with some personal regrets. But damn if he was going to accept any blame for his past sins.
And truly, Ethan had no need to hear it from him either. “Don’t worry. I’m not looking for sorry from you. I’m long past that.”
His father stared at him. “Where you been all this time, anyway?”
Ethan shrugged. “Around. Here and there.”
“Been gone what, almost twenty years?”
“Seventeen,” Ethan replied. “Didn’t expect you to be keeping track.”
“I heard you joined the military,” his father pressed. “That true?”
Jesus. Ethan started to bristle at all of the questions. “What do you care?”
Those filmy gray eyes that used to instill so much dread in him when he was a kid now narrowed with a spark of animosity in them.
This
was the man Ethan recalled. Not the bent, apparently sober, dead man walking who’d assumed he could prod for answers and poke around for sympathy just because he’d gone a couple of years without a drink and a couple of decades without punching his kid.
The old man crossed his withered, tattooed arms over his tattered undershirt. “I hope for your sake you did join the service. God knows, you needed the discipline. Needed someone to put you in your place.”
“I thought that was your job,” Ethan muttered.
“Your mother made you soft. She made you arrogant, all those books she put under your nose, letting you sit in front of that computer for hours. You were so smart, always acting like you were better than me, better than the life I provided for you.” He scowled at Ethan. “You and your mother, you never appreciated what I did.”
Ethan met the accusing gaze leveled on him now with one of his own. “Guess you showed us both real good, huh, Dad?”
He expected his father to bellow back in fury, or lash out with flying fists. But he did neither.
He got quiet, contemplative. He stared at Ethan, studying the unswaying glare he’d never seen directed at him before in his life.
He looked down at his scuffed work boots, then glanced vaguely back toward the house where Tori had gone a few minutes ago. “You gonna tell me about the girl?”
“She’s with me,” Ethan said firmly. “She’s mine. That’s all you need to know.”
“Yours,” the old man mused. A slow smile played at the edges of his mouth. “Well, I’ll be goddamned. Did you go off and fall in love, boy?”
He tensed with a spike of fierce protectiveness. “I’m not a boy anymore, and you need to know that woman means everything to me. Anyone touches her, I will kill him. Anyone.”
His father shook his head. “What do you think, I’m gonna hurt either one of you? Look at me, son. I’m not the same person I was back then. I’m sober. I’m also old. And I’m dying.”
“I hope you’re not looking for sympathy from me.”
“No, son…I’m not.” He paused for a long moment, his hard eyes going distant. The lines of his face seemed to deepen with what looked astonishingly like regret. It was there and gone, dismissed by the rattled clearing of his throat. “If you have anything to bring inside, go on and gather it up. We can close up the barn when you’re ready.”
His father didn’t wait for a reply, just shuffled outside and left Ethan standing there behind him. Tori passed him on the way out of the house. He gave her a nod, but kept walking, his gait hitching, humbled by age and disease.
“Fuck.” Ethan raked a hand over his scalp. He didn’t want to feel even a twinge of forgiveness for the son of a bitch. He wanted to hate him.
He still did, in fact. Part of him probably always would.
But as he watched Tori approach, he couldn’t deny the sense of gratitude that overcame him. William Davis might be the sorriest excuse for a father, but for all his faults, he was still willing to shelter Ethan and Tori from the even bigger terror that was still breathing down their necks.
A terror that Ethan felt certain would not relent until one of them was dead.
18
Hours later, after a quiet, awkwardly hospitable dinner with Ethan’s father, Tori found herself in the attic bedroom that was to be their lodging for the night.
She’d gone up alone. Ethan had decided to take a shower after he and Tori cleared the table and washed the dishes.
She had only planned to change out of her shorts into the pair of yoga pants she’d stuffed into her purse when she left Hoshi’s place, but once she was inside the cramped little room, she couldn’t help lingering over the artifacts of Ethan’s childhood.
Opposite the wall with the sole window in the room sat a narrow twin bed with a bookcase headboard, crammed with paperbacks, all sporting aged, barely legible spines.
A wheeled chair and battered particle board desk stood across the small space, its veneer faded and filmed with dust in some areas, scarred and peeling away in others.
Wall-mounted pine shelves served as displays for a collection of model aircraft, rockets, and sports cars.
There was something heartbreaking about the normalcy of Ethan’s room. How it bore no signs of the trauma he’d suffered in this house, under his father’s alcohol-fueled fury and his mother’s eventual abandonment.
Then again, maybe it did.
She drifted over to the bed and sat down, looking at Ethan’s boyhood library. There were easily close to a hundred books on the shelf. So many, they were packed in like sardines, some standing up and others filed on their sides. A veritable hoard, collected by a boy with a sharp, intellectual mind and a hidden gift that made him all the more extraordinary.