Page 55 of Price of Angels

Michael’s face compressed the smallest bit in a frown. “Yeah.”

Mercy turned his back to him. “I’m eating lunch.”

“I want to talk to you,” Michael persisted in his toneless voice. “For a second.” A beat, then, the faintest trace of some emotion: “Please.”

Clearly, the man was suffering a major catastrophe if he was almost having emotions and sayingplease. It would serve him right, Mercy thought for one dark moment, to make him wait some more. But the Lean Dog part of him, that didn’t want to cause even more club drama than he already had, sighed and turned around. “What about?”

Michael motioned with his head toward the parking lot and walked that way. So this was a private talk, then.

With a grimace as his knee pulled, Mercy stood. “Don’t eat my fries.” And followed his least favorite brother.

Michael came to a halt in front of a customer’s waiting bike and turned suddenly, bringing Mercy up short. His hands went back on his hips. He held his head at an angle that projected deference. There was some sort of eagerness in him, a stress Mercy had never noticed before.

Without lifting his shaded eyes to make contact, Michael said, “How did the meeting with Abraham Jessup go this morning?”

Mercy shrugged. “It went. Why?”

“Did Ghost make a deal with him?” His voice was taking on a tight, clipped sound; not his normal, businesslike quality, but one less stable.

Christ. Michael McCall wasfeelingthings.

“Yeah,” Mercy said. “He’s gonna give him that northeast territory that Junior abandoned. He’s got decent coke to sell.”

“Shit,” Michael said to himself. Then his head tipped back, gaze fixed to Mercy’s face, the shapes of his eyes just visible through the lenses of the glasses. “What do you make of him?”

Mercy was shocked. “You want to know if I like him or not?”

“That’s what I asked, isn’t it?” Impatience. Anxiety. Veiled, but there, under the granite surface.

Mercy studied him a moment, the way his knuckles looked white where his fingers were digging into his hipbones. A vein stood out in his throat, a muscle in his jaw throwing a thin, straight shadow where it was raised. The man was riled. Given his normal state, he could have been on a rampage, for all Mercy knew.

“Ghost is letting the guy deal,” he said, carefully, not knowing what Michael’s stake in all this was. “And all our dealers are shitheads; comes with the territory. But–”

Michael inhaled.

“ – this one makes my skin crawl. I don’t know anything about him, but no, I don’t like him. Guy gives me a bad feeling.”

Michael nodded. He swallowed and his throat worked. He glanced away, out across the vast Dartmoor lot that spread off to his right toward the nursery. “You met the son-in-law?”

“Weird as hell.”

Michael nodded again. “Thanks.” He turned to walk away.

“Hey,” Mercy said, staying him a moment. “Why do you care?” he asked, curious, but not unkind.

Michael hesitated. “They’re very bad people.”

“Well…so are we, most of the time.”

He shook his head, brows drawing together in an obvious scowl. “Not like this.” He glanced at Mercy, briefly, before he left. “Not even you.”

Ghost was in the trucking offices, because that was where the most incompetent managers always seemed to be. The newest secretary, a mousy, nervous thing, stood off to the side, hands clasped together in front of her, while Ghost pawed through the paperwork nightmare on the desk.

Michael hesitated in the doorway. It had always been a priority of his to keep anything personal or dramatic away from the club. He never wanted to cause his president any worry.

But he was too full of pulsing energy to let that stop him now. It might have been the hangover, but it felt like an awakening of sorts. Like someone had doused him with cold water. He had something to do. Something personal, even dramatic. And he felt, after all he’d done, that the least his president could do was grant him the time he’d promised.

“Ghost?” he asked, stepping into the office.

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