Tequila Mockingbird (19 page)

Brigid Morgan hated surprises. Especially when they were about her children.

“You can take her. She’s short,” Kane whispered into Connor’s ear. “I’ll feint a block if you need it.”

“She’d hand you your ass,” Con muttered back. “Run away now, brother. I’ll hold her back so you can live. Tell your children of my bravery.”

“You brought this down on yourself, Connor. Your bravery’s not going to be what I’ll be telling my children.” Kane slapped his back. “Good luck. I’ve always wanted to be the eldest. Pity I don’t get your room.”

“You’ve already had my room.” But Connor was talking to the air. Kane deserted him in a few quick strides, his powerful long legs taking him over to Forest’s side. Brigid made it over a stack of bricks, her vibrant red curls practically crackling with energy as she reached Con’s side. “Hello, Mum.”

He didn’t know what he’d expected.

Tears certainly wasn’t it.

“Oh, don’t cry, Mum,” Connor murmured, folding his mother into his arms. “God, please. Don’t. Shite.”

She clung to him, a tiny tempest stilled by emotions Connor couldn’t begin to understand. He held her for a minute, maybe longer. Then she sniffed and mumbled into his chest.

“I can’t breathe, you git. Let me go.” He didn’t, and her arms remained tight around his waist as Brigid looked up at him. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I just told Da yesterday,” Con replied softly. She always smelled the same, a brisk lemon verbena he’d come to associate with mothers in general. “I figured he’d have told you.”

“Your da would sooner cut off his own balls than share a secret that’s not his to tell.” Brigid lapsed into Gaelic. “Tell me what’s going on in that thick head of yours, or I’ll crack it open to find out.”

He laughed, despite the tears and the lump in his throat. “I didn’t… know. Well some part of me knew, but I wasn’t willing to look at that. Here, come sit down.”

They found the stairs, a quiet spot on the side of the building. Sitting beside him, Brigid took his hands, rubbing at them as she spoke, “Talk to me, Con. I don’t know where to start.”

“I don’t know what to tell you. Well, I do. Some,” Connor explained. “I went to Da because I felt like I was letting him down—you down. I wanted to be like him—maybe even in some ways, be him. I wanted to be a cop, have a wife and children. Build a good life, but when it came time for the wife bit, I guess it didn’t fit as well as I thought it would. I couldn’t find a woman I liked as much to be around. Then Forest—God, Mum, Forest. He’s a bit like Miki, but gentle, fragile in some ways, but he keeps going. All of the shite that’s rained down on him and he keeps going.”

“He’s stronger than you gave him credit for, then.” His mother laughed, a tender sound he loved. “Your da used to coddle me. Treated me like I was breakable.”

“When did he stop?”

“Who says he has?” Brigid flashed him a smile. “The question I have for you, son, is why did you think you had to be your da? Where did I go wrong in raising you there? That you’d think—even after you’ve seen us love your brothers, that you’d hide this?”

“Ach, you raised me fine. I just took a wrong turn in my own head. Maybe Quinn’s right, and I was too much of a coward to face the truth until I had something—someone—to lose.”

“So Quinn too?” She snorted. “That one’s worse than your da. I’m pretty sure he knows why Stonehenge was built, and someone asked him not to tell.”

“Mad at me?” Con asked softly. “For not… shite, that’s not what I want to say. I know you want me to be happy. I
know
that in my bones, Mum. I guess I should apologize for not listening to what you were telling me all these years. To do the right thing, even if it’s difficult. Because that’s what this is going to be—hard. For me. For people I work with. I’ve been a lie, Mum. Pretty much.”

“Your life’s not been a lie, Connor Donal Morgan,” Brigid scolded tartly. “You’re the same man you always were. You’ve just expanded your horizons, as it were. And if anyone should apologize, it’s me. I failed you. In some way I failed to teach you how to know yourself. I’m sorry for that. I can’t even begin to tell you how sorry.”

“Well, now we’ll both be wearing matching hair shirts,” Con teased his mother, who slapped his knee.

“Your Forest—his family? Are they nice to him?”

“He was adopted by a man—the man in the RV. I told you about him.”

“Oh God, then he lost his da.” Her face softened, and Connor briefly sent a prayer to the heavens for Brigid to go easy on Forest once she got her hands on him.

“His mother’s… I get the feeling she’s a shitty piece of work. He’s reclusive a bit, Mum. Quiet, then you get him going and he shines up, like a sun out of the clouds. I live for that smile of his. And when he laughs at something I’ve said, it makes me warm inside,” Connor admitted. “I just was too stupid to see it. Not until it was almost too late.”

She grabbed him into a fierce hug, and Connor choked on his mother’s curls until he could get her red hair out of his mouth. Turning his head, he held her tightly, rocking the woman who’d given birth to him and sent him on his way, always shadowing his footsteps but holding back when he fell. She’d waited for him to stand up, reaching to give him a hand when he’d needed one. He fell less as he got older, and somewhere along the way he’d forgotten she’d always be there, following his path and watching, looking for the times when Connor needed her—even if he wasn’t man enough to admit it.

“I want to fix him, Mum,” Connor admitted. “And I know I can’t, but damned if it’s not what I want to be doing.”

“Aye, I want to fix all of the ones you boys seem to be bringing home,” Brigid replied.

“Well, maybe with this one, you’ll get the chance. He needs love, Mum. Like no one I’ve ever seen. Frank Marshall tried, I can see that, but it wasn’t what Forest needed. Not all of it. He
needs
to know the world’s not going to be yanked out from under him. Because he keeps waiting for it. That feeling of it… it fills him.”

“Then you and I, we’ll have to change that.” Brigid let him go and craned her neck, looking up and past Connor’s shoulder. “Is that door supposed to be open? The one at the top of the stairs?”

Connor turned, nearly twisting in half to look. The door to Forest’s tiny apartment was ajar, enough of a crack for Con to see the bilious green paint someone’d painted the frame. He reached for his gun, dislodging it from its holster, and slowly stood up.

“Go get Kane and Keeks, Mum. Tell them to call it in, and one of them needs to get their ass over here to back me up.” Connor took a step up and motioned his mother back when she opened her mouth. “Go. Please. No arguing. And if you could please keep Forest to the front. If someone’s broken into his place, I want to see how bad they left it.”

He climbed the rest of the way, taking the stairs carefully. Keeping his Glock down, Connor eased into the apartment, using his shoulder to push the door open. It gave him just enough light to see the former storeroom, and Connor didn’t like what he saw inside.

The place was trashed. Anything edible in the fridge was lost. Its contents had been emptied out onto the floor and smeared over the walls and counters. The air was ripe with sour and something else—a metallic taint Connor knew all too well.

No shadows jumped out at him. No one came out of the corner of the room in a rage, holding one of the dull kitchen knives Connor’d used to make them breakfast. If anything, the place was too still—too quiet. The futon littered the carpet, pulled off its frame and ripped to shreds. The drum kit dominating the room didn’t go unscathed, and Connor’s heart twisted at the sight of its stabbed skins and buckled rims.

While the equipment could be replaced, it was a violation of who Forest was—the one thing Connor knew gave him some peace. He’d spoken of it—of the Zen he achieved when finding the beat of a song—and to see Forest’s center twisted apart ached.

Then Connor spotted the slack hand poking out from behind the torn-down drum kit, and his senses went on wide alert. Drawing up his weapon, he stepped in closer, cautiously moving over the debris of Forest’s belongings. The hand didn’t move, and a faint wet sound reached Con’s ears as he drew around the kit and found himself staring down at a long-legged young man, his blond hair sticky with dried blood and his chest jerking up and down as a large rat ate away at the deep, long slice on his throat.

At first glance, Connor’s eyes saw another man—blonder and prettier, with a fuller mouth and melancholy brown eyes. Then he blinked, and the image whispered away, leaving only the rat and a dead man at his feet.

Kane came through the door, his weapon drawn, and he glanced first at the kitchen before joining his brother. He must have seen the body as well, because Connor heard him give a slight gasp of shock. Then the room steadied again when Kane’s hand clamped down on his shoulder.

“It looks like your boy down there, Con,” Kane murmured. “He must have surprised them while they were ripping the place off—”

“Someone came to kill him—Forest, K. I don’t know who this is, but I’m guessing whoever slit his throat thought he was Forest. No such thing as coincidence, Kane. Not like this.” Connor cut his brother off. “He’s not coming back here. Not ever if I have my say in it. We’re going to catch the bastard who’s doing this. Even if I’ve got to call in every damned favor owed to me. I’m going to find who did this—who wanted to do this to him—and I’m going to make them pay. With every damned drop of blood in their bodies.”

Don’t care what you look like

Don’t care who you know

Don’t want to see you ’round

Don’t come down to my show

You’re always bringing Trouble

Trouble knocking at my door

Don’t fuck with the guys I play with

I don’t want you here no more.

—
Trouble in Spades

“S
OMETHING
HAPPENED
up there, didn’t it?” Forest asked when Brigid came back from her talk with Connor. She’d sent Kane upstairs, a worried frown ushering her son on his way. A brief whisper to Kiki, and then she’d approached Forest. The woman grabbed him, giving him a deep hug, hard enough to rattle his spine.

“I don’t know about that, love,” Brigid said as she let him go. She sounded even more Irish than her eldest son, a gentle burr roughening her words when she spoke. “But they’ll keep you safe. My boy’s good at that. In the meantime, we’ll find you someplace to rest up. Connor’s said you’ve cracked that head of yours open.”

She was teeny, and her face was haloed with long red curls. There was a faint scatter of freckles over her pale skin, and her enormous green eyes tilted up, giving her an elfin look. If she’d actually given birth to eight children, no one told her body or her face. If anything, she looked more ready to take on a hoard of Saxons or Vikings, just as soon as she found her sword.

And oh, she could hug.

He was going to cry. Forest knew it. Her hug shook more than his body. It was as if she reached down into the darkest, dankest bits of his soul and touched them with light. He recoiled at first, then sank into her warmth when her arms came at him again, swaddling him tight. Another hug, then a kiss on his cheek when he buried his face in her fragrant hair, and Forest knew he had to pull away, or he’d lose any sense of control he had over his tears.

“I can get a hotel room to stay in,” he protested softly, wiping his face with the back of his hand. He refused to cry. Hell, he refused to even look at the older woman because he knew he’d cry. “Fuck.”

“
No
.” The remaining Morgans spoke as one, a hallelujah chorus mixed with Irish and stubborn. Forest noted the older Hispanic man kept his mouth shut and ducked under the crime-scene tape to take a look at the dining area.

“You can stay with the family. Con’s house is barely habitable for a roach,” Brigid pronounced. “Have you met the others? Or has Connor kept you squirreled away like a cookie?”

“Brae’s the one that squirrels, Mum.” The remaining Morgan male held out his hand. When he leaned forward over a pile of debris to shake Forest’s hand, his police badge flashed from its spot on his belt. “I’m Riley. Fifth in the Morgan dynasty—too many to kill to take over the kingdom—”

“Too fucking lazy too,” Kiki said before continuing her call.

“The virago talking on the phone’s my twin, Kiki. Pretty sure we had an older triplet, but he got in her way, and she ate him in the womb. Me, she finds beneath her notice.” Riley scoffed at her uplifted middle finger, then dropped his voice to a loud whisper that was practically impossible to ignore. “I think you’ve met her already. I can see you wincing when she comes near you.”

“Yeah. Kind of met her. A little bit,” Forest replied, taking a deep breath. Riley was handsome, a clean-cut pirate of sorts compared to his larger, craggier brother. He had the same freckle spray as his mother, but the rest of his face was a more-defined echo of Connor’s. He’d spoken to Kane for a moment before going to poke around the remains of his shop, trying to avoid the whole meeting-the-family thing until Connor was around to run interference.