Sloe Ride (18 page)

“Can I be a little bit of a dick? You know, just on principle.” Damien chuckled at Miki’s sneer. “Don’t want him to know we want him. We’re going to have to make him work for it.”

“Dude, he came here on a Sunday and braved the whole gauntlet of horror. Probably figuring out when’s the best time to talk to you. Before the she-demon descends with her flying monkeys, or after they’ve all been fed so everyone’s in a food coma and she’s rattling about the turrets looking for new victims.”

“Sinjun, not everyone’s scared to shit of Brigid. He grew up here. With them.” He grabbed Miki’s cup and handed it to him. “She loves him like a son. Just like she loves you.”

“Yeah, I love her too,” Miki said through a mouthful of coffee. “I’m just not going to tell her. ’Cause I’m thinking that’s how she levels up, and I don’t fucking want to know what bonus power she’d get then.”

Warehouse kitchen

Kane: Your coffee’s kind of sweet today, Mick. Too much sugar?

Miki: I didn’t put any sugar in it. I just poured it into the cup.

K: Must be sweet because I kissed you before I took a sip.

M: Shit like that makes me throw up in my mouth, dude. Really.

K: Isn’t there a
single
romantic bone in your body?

M: Only when you put it in me.

“W
OW
,
SO
they shot you down?” Sionn handed Rafe an ice-cold beer, then settled into pillows strewn about the Morgans’ covered widow’s walk. “Just like that?”

“Yeah, didn’t even entertain the idea.” Shoving his hair away from his face, Rafe sighed. “Sure, kind of out of left field, but it had some merit. Really, is there anything
that
wrong with me? How much more fucking penance am I supposed to do before people don’t think I’m shit?”

“I’m pretty sure they don’t think you’re shite there, Andrade,” his friend countered. “Probably just a bad time for it.”

“Dude, Donal couldn’t say no fast enough.” Rafe saluted Sionn with his bottle. “I was just offering Quinn a place to stay, not knock him up and leave him at a train station with a one-way ticket to a nunnery. It got even uglier after that.”

The widow’s walk was a long-standing male Morgan tradition, a hideaway Brigid and the girls rarely intruded on. Built more for aesthetics than a longing to watch the ocean for a returning sailor, the broad platform provided a safe harbor during the family’s storms.

And from the tempest brewing beneath them, Rafe wasn’t sure the widow’s walk would survive if any of the thundering Morgans took it into their heads to follow him.

The view still took his breath away. Even after all the years he’d climbed up three stories and flung open the door to the walk, seeing San Francisco tumble to his feet in front of him humbled Rafe. The sun began to steal under the foggy horizon, pearling the sea as it sank down beneath the water. Oddly, he could see more from his penthouse on Nob Hill, but he
felt
much more while under the Morgans’ eaves.

“Probably best for you he said no—” Sionn yelped as the door to the walk opened and struck him in the elbow. “Fucking hell! D, you’re supposed to knock first. Walk rules.”

“Yeah, rules. You all need to post them on the wall or something. Who the hell would think about knocking when they leave the house?” Damien ducked his head under the eave overhang and took the bottle out of his lover’s hand. “Get lost, Murphy. Rafe and I have a few things to talk about.”

“Love you too, asshole,” Sionn grumbled as he stood. He caught Damien’s chin in his hand, turning his lover’s face, then sliding in close for a kiss. His mouth was brutal on Damie’s, a fierce, possessive assault that softened into a tender caress when Damien curved into Sionn’s body. They pulled apart, Damien breathing hard while Sionn wore a smug smile. “That’s something to keep for later, D. Oh, and I didn’t tell him I talked to you yet. So I’m leaving that for you to deal with too.”

“Fucker,” Damien muttered at Sionn’s back as his lover went inside. He pinched at the inseam of his jeans, adjusting the wrap of denim around his zipper, then looked over his shoulder, snarling at Rafe’s amused smirk. “Don’t get cocky there, dick. I’m not up here because I want to fuck you.”

“Then why
are
you here?” He couldn’t look at Damien, not when apprehension and dread hooked into his throat and pulled it closed. The last thing he wanted was Sionn talking to his lover. Coming back to the music had to be on his own terms—not by standing on someone else’s back. Certainly not Sionn’s back. He’d ruined nearly every relationship he had. Rafe
couldn’t
lose Sionn too.

“We’ve got business. And not because Sionn asked me to give you a chance.” Damien’s cold-washed Brit tones were a hard blue compared to the rolling green heat in Sionn’s voice, made harder by an edge of steel pissiness rolling off of Damie’s tongue.

“I told him not to—”

“Yeah, he keeps saying that too. Pisses me off that I believe him.” Damien stalked the length of the walk only to come back to where he started. Looking down at Rafe, he growled, “Stand up. ’Cause I’m not going to talk about this sitting down in a bunch of pillows.”

“Too much like sex?” Rafe grinned, putting his beer down.

“No, not sex but close. Too intimate. Too much like we’re friends or brothers sharing this space—like they all do. Like Miki does. You want this spot, you fucking stand up for it and deal with me eye to eye.”

Rafe’s blood itched, crawling toward a want he’d shoved down time and time again. There were too many things fighting for space in his head: the hurt he’d felt downstairs, Sionn’s heartfelt, skewed support, and now Damien’s anger. He’d hoped, damn it. Fucking hoped the Sinner’s boys would take a chance on him, if only because he was damned good at the one thing he knew he could do—play a bass until it wept with release. And there was that little whisper of a promise to make it all go away, if only he dipped his toe back into the quicksand he’d pulled himself out of.

“Sounds like you’ve already made up your mind.” He stood anyway, jutting his chin out as if daring Damien to pop him one. “So why the fuck should I bother?”

“See, it’s shit like
that
that makes me want to say fuck you,” Damien spat.

“So again, then why the fuck are you here?”

“Because Quinn said something to me when—well it doesn’t matter when—just that he said it.” The guitarist punched his fists into his jeans. “Fucker asked me why I couldn’t give you a chance to come back from the dead when I’d done it too. Can’t argue with that kind of shit. Much as I’d like to. So yeah, here I am. Dealing with you wanting a chance with us.”

“I wish Sionn hadn’t told you that. It would have been better coming from me.” Rafe grabbed his beer bottle, then walked to the railing, leaned his elbows on the thick plank, and looked out onto the Morgans’ backyard. Damien followed him, shoulders stiff with resentment as he took a sip of his purloined bottle. “Seriously, I should have been the one to—”

“Better this way. Because I would have told you fucking hell no to your face and walked away,” Damien admitted. “Instead I got to climb all over Sionn, spit at Sinjun when he walked away, then got my ass handed to me by Quinn when I went up to the roof to pick a fight with Sinjun.”

“Yeah, that’s going to make you love me.” Turning, Rafe faced the guitarist, studying him. The years had layered a polish on Damien Mitchell.

His age shone in the crisp, wintery blue of his eyes, and the self-assured swagger of his walk no longer seemed to need a dash of bravado and challenge in it. Instead, he carried himself more like a man who’d seen it all, done it all, and come back stronger for it. His death, while greatly exaggerated, had been a good one, and the world clamored to find out what Damien had up his sleeve to herald his resurrection.

It surprised Rafe on how badly he wanted to be one of those to help roll back the stone.

“I fucked up. No two ways about it.” Rafe watched Miki’s dog tear around the yard below, chasing a bouncing purple tennis ball. “There’s a lot of shit I can’t take back. I know that. But I can’t let it bury me. Do you know what it’s like to
need
to play, and there’s nothing there but yourself?”

The look Damien shot him was all the response Rafe needed.

“I’m not asking for anything you wouldn’t give anyone else—”

“You’re asking for a fuck ton more than anyone else.” Damie rounded on him. “You’re asking me to
risk
Sinjun, because I’m dragging him back into the studio… back on stage, and I’d be trusting you to not screw it up. You’re putting Sionn on the fucking line, because if you fuck me up, you mess me and him up. You think about that? So yeah, Andrade, you’re asking me to fuck up everything I have with the two people I love more than goddamn music, and you think you’re not asking me to give you anything?”

Damien’s hand clenched on the beer bottle, and for a brief moment Rafe feared the glass would crack in his hand.

“I’m good,” he ventured. Rafe heard the thread of begging in his voice. Hell, it was more tapestry than thread, but he didn’t care. If ever there was a time to beg, it was now. “I’m better than any other damned bassist out there. You know that. Or you wouldn’t be up here. Even if Sionn asked you.”

“And what about that other shit?” Damien’s lip curled. “I’m not having you smear me like you smeared Collins. Yeah, so you’re good. Maybe as good as Johnny was, but that’s not enough, Andrade. You’ve got to fit. You’ve got to be willing to haul your own shit, set up your own gear. We’re not going to be doing this in stadiums. It’s been too long… we’ve been gone too long. We’re starting from the bottom again.”

“You don’t need to—”

“Yeah, we do.”

Rafe chuffed out a breath. “You ever going to let me finish a fucking sentence?”

“Maybe.” Damien briefly lifted his shoulders in a half-assed apology. “Probably not. We’re going into this just like we did the last time. We need to. Forest needs to be a part of this band’s beginning. We’re going to book clubs and play the shit out of our crap until our fingers bleed. We might never fucking play stadiums. And we could crash and burn because the world’s sick of our shit. You’ve got to bring your damned best and know it might not be good enough, Andrade.”

“And that’s if I even get in?” Rafe set his bottle down on the walk’s floor.

“Yeah,
if
you get in.” Damien drained his beer, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “We’ve got a practice session down at the Sound tomorrow around nine. Bring your shit, and let’s see what you can do. After that I’ll talk it over with Miki. You’ve got to fit, Andrade. Rub someone the wrong way, and there’s no going forward.”

“St. John’s not the easiest guy to get along with,” Rafe pointed out. “Kind of like a wet, blind cat caught in a burlap bag kind of not easy.”

“Dude, that’s your problem. I get along with Sinjun fine,” the guitarist grunted. “You want in. Make him like you. Fuck, make him love you, because Forest, that’s easy. He likes everyone.”

“And what about you?” Rafe ventured.

“Me? I’m a fucking breeze to get along with. Do what I say. Listen to how I want things, and we’ll be fine.” Damien opened the door leading to the house. “Just so we’re clear. All of this works and you get in, that’s good for you. Fuck me over like you fucked over Collins? I get one damned hint that you’re dosing up, and you’d better be the dead guy on the floor this time around, because by the time I get done with you, you’ll wish you were.”

“T
ALK
TO
me, Kane.” It wasn’t his father who barked at him from across the study. No, not the man who’d cheered him on at baseball games, hugged him tight after pinning Kane’s first badge to his tightly creased dress blues, and held him up when the hospital doctors patched Miki up. No, the steel-eyed, stone-jawed man standing by a wall covered with photos of his family was pure cop, a captain of the force, and a hardass demanding answers from a detective with little to give him. “Talk to me about how all of this is connected to Quinn, and what the fuck are you all doing about it?”

There’d be no asking for a shot of Irish whiskey, not now, but Kane poured one anyway, sighing when his father shook his head as Kane held up the bottle. Sipping at the burning amber, he leaned against his father’s desk and gathered his words carefully.

“Kappelhoff is—”

“The end of it. The recent of it. Ye start at where ye think is the beginning, and then we’ll go from there,” Donal interrupted. “We’ve got two incidents for certain—the truck ramming into the boy and then the thing at his house. You tell me how you think this and Kappelhoff’s death are connected here.”

“Sir, Kappelhoff’s murder just… it sticks something in me, and Sanchez agrees he was killed because of his connection to Quinn.” Kane shifted under his father’s glare. “And yeah, we were looking into Southern’s case without their approval. But shit, the brass down there wasn’t moving on it. They’re calling it road rage, but you and I know something’s up. I want the whole thing wrapped up into one case, and I want that case on
my
desk.”