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She turned and stared around the basement, willing her heart not to shatter into the pieces she knew it had already shattered into. She could feel the jagged wound in her soul and the ache that seemed never ending.
Pressing her hand into her stomach she pushed back the sob locked in her throat and took a deep, hard breath. Her knees were shaking, her hands trembling, and damn Zeke Mayes to hell, there were tears on her face.
Her breathing hitched as she wrapped her arms across her breasts and turned away from the pictures, the story he had told her. There were gaps, there was something missing. Something he hadn’t told her.
Rogue turned back and stalked to the table, scrambling for the pictures, searching for answers. There had to be answers here. There was more to this than he had told her.
There was something in his eyes that assured her of that before he left. There were demons that haunted him, dark places that festered in his soul. Parts of him that she had sensed and yet had never known.
There were secrets.
She pushed aside the first piles of pictures, went through the others. She stacked them in neat, orderly rows as she moved through them.
There were Zeke’s baby pictures. Pictures of him with his mother and father as a toddler, pictures as he grew and became a teenager.
The majority of the pictures after his teen years were those with his father. In each progression there was a hardness to Thad Mayes’s once-handsome face. A cold reptilian chill began showing in his eyes.
There were pictures that raised the hair on the back of her neck. Pictures of Thad Mayes, James Maynard, and Dayle Mackay participating in sex acts that would have brought shame to the most hedonistic of men. But there were no more pictures of Zeke.
“He burned them all, you know. ”
Rogue jerked around, fear strangling her as she saw a panel slide open to reveal a gap in the cement wall of the basement, and watched as Jonesy stepped through it.
Eyes round, terror surging through her, she watched as he moved into the basement and looked around slowly, his expression heavy and filled with regret as his gaze came back to hers.
“Jonesy,” she whispered, a sob finally tearing from her throat.
“We were always the best of friends,” he said softly. “Me, Thad, and James. Your daddy didn’t change that. There were just some things that I was too young to understand then. ”
He stepped fully into the room and then she saw the handgun he held at his side. The one he lifted slowly and aimed toward her.
“John’s dead,” he said. “I took care of him and that Mackay bastard before I came here for you and the sheriff. ”
She shook her head; her hands clenched desperately around the rim of the table beside her as she lowered her head and shuddered from the pain. Not Jonesy. Oh God, she couldn’t bear it. She loved him like an uncle. He’d saved her when she needed him.
He’d been her friend.
“Why?” she sobbed, her head lifting as fury began to pour inside her. “Why, Jonesy?”
He shook his head. “The bastard burned the pictures of his boy while he obviously saved all the others. Thad was a fool. I warned him that little son of a bitch would end up turning up and taking a bite out of our asses. He always was a foolish little prick. ”
“Why?” she demanded again. “Why are you here? Why are you involved in this?”
He tilted his head and watched her almost curiously.
“Because, despite your sheriff’s beliefs, the head of the serpent was never cut off, sweetheart. Mackay didn’t have the temperament to be the head of anything. He took orders. He was a soldier that became a liability. He was a disease. The head is alive and breathing. ” He smiled, a cold, hard curve to his lips. “And Zeke might run, but he can’t hide from the truth. He’s a part of it. He’ll always be a part of it. ”
TWENTY-TWO
She was hurting. Zeke swore he could feel her hurtas he left the house and forced himself into the Tahoe he had hidden in the back drive. The vehicle was hidden there, beneath a dense covering of trees where it wouldn’t be detected, along an old dirt farm road his father had used when his parents had lived in this house.
His father had moved into another house closer to town after Zeke and his mother had left. The farm had been pretty much abandoned for years, until Zeke returned.
It was the hardest thing Zeke had ever done, forcing himself into the vehicle before starting the engine and pulling out of the drive. He headed back toward the Bar when everything inside him was urging him to return to the house, to explain, to tell her why this had to be done and the ghosts he had to exorcise from his own past.
His mother hadn’t left his father simply because of his adulterous activities. Nothing was ever that simple with his mother. She had divorced Thad Mayes because he had finally crossed a line that was unacceptable to her. He had tricked his son into committing a crime that she knew would haunt him for the rest of his life.
At the age of fourteen, Zeke had shot and killed a man. It didn’t matter that he had killed another of the League’s members, one that his father wanted rid of. It didn’t matter that the man was a deviant with the sexual tastes of the criminally insane. The fact was, Zeke had killed him. He had lifted his father’s handgun from the table, turned, and shot the bastard in the heart, just as his father had taught him during target practice.
