Savage (4 page)

Jenna looked away. “I refuse to believe the only way to be safe in the world is to stand behind the very people who make it unsafe.”

“Do you still love him?” Kate asked.

“What does that matter?” Jenna asked. “If it’s not good for Lily, it’s irrelevant.”

Kate laughed.

Jenna glared at her. “What?”

“I don’t think that’s how love works.” She slid off the bed, headed for the bureau, and put the joint in the top drawer. “Do you need me to bring you anything when I come tomorrow morning?”

“You’re not staying?” Jenna asked, suddenly sorry for being testy.

Their upbringing had given her a burning desire for security. Kate had embraced the chaos instead. She worked shitty jobs, dated and slept with whomever struck her fancy in the moment, ate junk food and drank soda like a twelve year old. Jenna couldn’t blame Kate for being Kate anymore than she could blame herself for being who she was. They’d both been shaped by their beginning. It was no one’s fault they’d been shaped in different directions.

“Got a bloke coming back to the flat,” Kate said.

“The night before Dad’s funeral?”

Kate rolled her eyes. “I like to think wherever Dad is, he’d want me to have a good shag right now.”

“Good god, Kate.” Jenna shook her head like that would dispel the image that had arisen in her mind. “Please don’t talk about our dead father wanting you to have a shag.”

Kate returned to the bed, bent to kiss Jenna on the cheek. “I’ll be back in the morning. Text me if you need anything.”

Jenna watched her sister disappear into the hall. Then she got up, turned off the light and went back to her own room.

Lily was asleep on her back, arms flung out on both sides, one leg sticking out of the blankets. Jenna covered her up and slid into bed next to her, pushed a strand of hair back from her daughter’s face.

Sometimes she could hardly believe she and Farrell had created this tiny, beautiful, perfect human being. Then she’d think of Farrell, of his raw beauty and the depth she saw lurking in his eyes and the fierceness with which he’d loved her, and she wasn’t surprised at all.

Lily was the best of them both. She would remember Farrell through their daughter. It was as close as she dared get to him.

F
arrell hit
the heavy bag again, oblivious to the sweat streaming down his face, soaking his bare chest. The bag lurched, and he hit it in a quick succession of orchestrated punches.

Hook, jab, uppercut, cross.

He bounced on the balls of his feet before coming at it again, relishing the familiar impact against his fists, the slight give of the bag under his knuckles.

He’d started fighting when he was at Oxford, after his father was killed. He’d started doing a lot of things after that. It hadn’t been pretty. He’d been raised by a virologist, a man whose work required delicate hands, careful precision. The furthest thing from a brute. Farrell didn’t know the first thing about fighting back then, but in the months after his father’s death he’d stopped going to class, stopped completing his school work. Instead he’d gone out every night spoiling for a fight.

He’d started with the pubs around university, but his unspoken rage had given fuel to a surprising talent for beating people to a bloody pulp. It wasn’t long before it was too easy to pummel his peers — other upper class, over-privileged schoolboys — into submission. He’d gone looking for more worthy opponents then. For men who would fight back. Who would do more than land a punch — who would force Farrell to fight better and meaner. He’d found that and more, eventually catching the eye of Jerome Ruskin, the man who’d been head of the London Syndicate at the time.

The rest was history. Farrell had never lost his taste for blood, for the release he felt when he was beating on something with his bare hands. He’d understood why the New York contingent had rebelled when Nico tried to introduce a more modern version of their business. Men who worked outside the law — or above it, as Farrell liked to think of it — didn’t want a cleaner, less dangerous vocation.

They wanted brutality. Pain. Blood.

It was the only way they felt alive. The only way they felt anything.

The one thing that felt better to Farrell than fighting was fucking, and even that pleasure had decreased in the years since Jenna walked out of his life. He’d had his share of women since, but they were nameless, faceless. He hardly remembered them from one day to the next. They were no different than the punching bag in front of him. A vehicle for his release. There was no need to keep his promises to them, because he never made any. He wanted to fuck them and then he wanted to leave (he never let them come to his apartment, or even the club).

End of story.

Jenna had been different.

He moved to the striking bag that hung from the ceiling, hitting it in a series of quick motions, trying to banish her from his mind. He’d been hoping to exorcise the need that had been raging in his blood over the past few days. It was only because of the funeral. Because he knew he would see her later today. He’d been fine in the five years since she’d left. He’d taken control of the London branch of the Syndicate after Ruskin was killed, kept everything together after the Syndicate fell apart. He was creating his own empire, outside the rules and regulations once set by Raneiro Donati, now in prison serving more than one life sentence. Farrell had amassed a small fortune. Bought homes all over the world, sanctuaries where he could retreat when the past felt too close.

He’d been fine, and he would continue to be fine once Jenna went back to New York.

He simply needed to get through today.

He was shaken from his thoughts by the ringing of his cell. He walked over to the table and glanced at the phone he’d left sitting there when he’d started working out. When he saw the name on the display, he pulled at his gloves until he could press the buttons.

“Yes?”

“This is Frances Moore calling from Huntington Hills.” The woman’s voice was crisp and clear in his ear. He recognized the name from the last time he’d gotten a call like this one. “May I speak to Mr. Black, please?”

“This is Farrell Black. Is everything okay?”

“We had another incident today,” the voice said. “You asked us to contact you.”

“Yes, thank you,” he said. “Is he calm now?”

“We have things in hand, yes, but I do think he would like to see you.”

Farrell spent a few seconds debating the merit of skipping the funeral, then decided against it. It wouldn’t change anything, and he needed to pay his respects to the Carver family.

“I’ll be there first thing tomorrow,” Farrell said. “Call me if anything else comes up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Ms. Moore?”

“Yes?”

“Make sure he has anything he needs.”

“Of course.”

He disconnected the call and set down the phone, then headed for the shower. It was one of the rare moments when he felt his isolation, but he wouldn’t allow himself to wallow in it.

Life was shit. Everyone was alone.

They just didn’t know it.

J
enna stood
next to her mother as the pallbearers passed by with her father’s coffin. The service had been short and small, attended by their neighbors and a few people Jenna assumed were from the Stafford Institute where her father had worked.

She spent the entirety of the service avoiding the casket, trying to keep her shoulders squared and her head up through any means necessary, even resorting to outright lies.

Her father’s body was not inside the wooden box.

She would see him again.

She would.

Kate had cried steadily throughout the mass, and Jenna took a calm, steadying breath and took hold of her sister’s hand. Sometimes she envied Kate. If only Jenna could muster such a simple release.

But she came up empty even as she searched her heart for the pain she knew must be there somewhere. Her whole body felt like an empty cavity, a corpse already readied for burial. There was only numbness, and she was alternately grateful and angry for it. She was glad she’d left Lily with Mrs. Hodges'. Funerals and death and dying were already complicated for a four-year-old. Jenna didn’t know how to explain the absence of her grandad, a man she’d never met.

And that was when she felt the stab of pain. Of guilt.

She’d never brought Lily home to meet her father. She’d been too afraid that someone would tell Farrell. That he would find out about the secret she’d been keeping and her carefully constructed house of cards would come tumbling down.

She didn’t know if she could take it. She was barely hanging on as it was, trying to be strong for Lily. She was on the edge, at the precipice of something dark and unnameable that would strip her of the control she’d fought so hard for over the last five years.

She should have brought Lily home to meet her parents. She would have to live with the fact that she hadn’t.

They followed the pallbearers out of the chapel and down the front steps. The cemetery was spread out on all sides, the grounds green under an oppressive spring sky. She slipped a hand in her pocket and touched the rigid cover of her father’s passport as his body was loaded into the waiting hearse. It was silly to carry around the passport, but it gave her a strange kind of comfort. Rubbing the little booklet between her fingers was soothing, and when things got to be overwhelming she distracted herself by thinking about what her father had been doing in Madrid. In Amsterdam.

The hearse pulled away from the curb, and she started walking toward the gravesite with her mother and sister and the other funeral attendees.

“This bloody sucks,” Kate sniffled next to her.

Jenna squeezed her hand. “I know.”

She looked over at their mother. Jenna had been surprised to hear her mother sob quietly through the service. Her parents hadn’t shown affection often when Jenna had been growing up, the house filled with the tension and resentment that was a hallmark of their marriage. But if John Carver had been a steadying presence for his daughters, he was that times a hundred for the woman who probably would be on the streets, drinking rubbing alcohol out of a paper bag, if not for him.

“You okay, Mum?”

Her mother nodded, then fumbled in her bag for her sunglasses. When she had them on, Jenna took her hand so she was walking between her and Kate. She knew how it looked. Like she was propping them up. Like she was the strong one. But the truth is, she thought she might fall over without them. Without the anchor of their need. This she could do. This taking care of people and getting things in hand. Taking control of a bad situation. Without something to keep her mind busy she might have to come face to face with her own grief.

And that might undo her.

It was better this way. They all had their self-assigned roles. It was dysfunctional, but it was all they knew. Jenna didn’t know who she was without it.

They reached the gravesite and watched as the pallbearers situated the coffin amid a spray of flowers. Then the priest began his final blessing. Jenna hadn’t been to church since she was a child, but the words were comforting, the intonation of the priest like a familiar lullaby. She let her eyes scan the crowd.

There was Mr. Osbourne, who had once helped them wrestle their mother up the stairs just in time to vomit on the landing.

Mrs. Ahmadi, who let them run a tab at her small market before the Tesco had taken over.

Mrs. Shelton who had been so grateful to their father for mowing her lawn after her husband died.

There were others, people she recognized from life in the neighborhood, plus the ones in well-cut suits who were probably from the lab. Had they been friendly with her father? Had they been good to him? Her eyes landed on one of the men, standing at the front of the group. He was young, probably in his early thirties, but his bearing made it clear he was used to being in charge. His hair was neatly trimmed, his face clean shaven. He was tall and slender, but she sensed power beneath the wool jacket. His arms were folded in front of his body, and he kept his eyes respectfully downcast as the priest concluded his blessing.

She turned her attention back to the priest.

Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name…

He finished reciting the prayer, and then it was over. She stood with her mother and sister to accept condolences, shaking hands and trying to smile, thanking everyone for coming. She was listening to old Mr. Paddon talk about the recent death of his cat when she caught sight of a shadowed figure standing under one of the trees in the distance.

She knew those shoulders, wide and strong enough to carry the weight of the world. He stood like he always did, feet slightly apart, like he was prepared for anything. His face was in shadow, but she caught sight of the strong line of his jaw, knew without being able to see them that his eyes were gray and cold.

She could almost feel the blood coursing through her veins. Could sense his presence like a tangible thing in the air, the connection she’d always felt to him palpable even after five years and the thousands of miles she’d put between them.

“I’m sorry to be meeting under such sad circumstances.”

The voice got her attention, and she looked up to find that it belonged to the handsome, well-dressed man she’d observed during the funeral. He was looming above her now, looking down at her with concerned blue eyes.

“Yes, thank you for coming, Mr…”

He held out a hand. “Alexander Petrov. I’m the Chief Operating Officer at Stafford.”

So he was from her father’s work. The guy in charge at The Stafford Institute.

“You were my father’s boss,” she said.

He gave her a wan smile. “Guilty as charged.”

“It was very kind of you to come,” she said.

His expression turned serious. “Of course. I’m terribly sorry about what happened.”

She nodded. “Thank you.”

He held her gaze a little longer than necessary, then glanced back at Mrs. Ahmadi, waiting to talk to Jenna.

“We can speak more later,” he said. “Please let me know if there’s anything you need.”

He continued to Kate, and Jenna turned her attention to Mrs. Ahmadi long enough to give her a smile before looking back at the tree where she’d seen Farrell.

But it must have been her imagination. There was no one there.