Ball & Chain (Page 53)

Kelly placed a hand at the small of his back in silent support before he made his way over to the freezer where all three bodies were being stored. There was no guard down here, but why would there be? Milton’s body had already been picked clean of everything the perpetrators wanted, the cook had merely been collateral damage, and Nikki had just been placed in there. Who would have thought to guard the dead bodies in the first place?

For that matter, who would have expected dead bodies at a wedding? Ty and Zane, that’s f**king who.

Nick wandered into the pantry, scanning the shelves. He grabbed a glass canister of white rice and stuffed it under one arm, then went off in search of a mixing bowl.

“I wonder why they didn’t take his phone, too,” Kelly called from the freezer. “I mean, they take a broken watch and slice him up on a guess that he’d swallowed whatever it is, but they don’t take his phone just ’cause it’s waterlogged?”

“We’re obviously looking for someone who’s never dropped his phone in a toilet,” Nick said. He poured the rice out into a stainless steel mixing bowl.

“Ha. Ha ha.” Kelly came up to stand beside Nick at the counter and placed the phone beside the bowl. “Considering you’re the one who told me to put it in the rice, you shouldn’t make jokes.”

“I live on a boat; I can get water out of anything.” Nick absently reached across the counter for a small glass jar of toothpicks and plucked one out to put in his mouth. He began taking the cell phone apart and shoving each piece into the rice separately.

Kelly leaned over the counter to rest his chin on his hand. Nick glanced at Kelly as he shoved the SIM card and battery deep into the rice.

Kelly was watching his face instead of his hands. “Are you okay?” he asked, voice gone soft and intimate.

Nick swallowed hard. “I don’t know. If Garrett hadn’t been up there with me, I would have taken Richard Burns’s head off.”

“Whether he deserves it or not, that’s not like you.”

“I know.”

Kelly straightened, then pushed himself up to sit on the edge of the counter. “It’ll take a while for that rice to do its thing. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on with you, Lucky? Maybe I can help.”

Nick stared at the counter, at Kelly’s hand resting against the white tile, his eyes tracing the lines of Kelly’s long fingers. Kelly tapped them against the tile, and Nick met his eyes.

“My dad,” he started, but he lost his voice before he could go further. He shook his head in frustration.

“Because he’s sick?” Kelly guessed.

Nick nodded.

“What did he say to you when he called for you to come see him? You haven’t been right since.”

Nick didn’t answer, chewing on the toothpick as he stared at the rice.

Kelly was silent for a few moments, then took in a deep breath. “When I was going through the foster system, I saw a lot of kids who were there because they’d been abused. This one kid, he was a few years older than me. Close to aging out of the system. He got word his mom had died of an overdose. He was all torn up about it, and I just couldn’t understand why. His scars were still healing. So I asked him. And he told me he was glad she was dead. He was mourning the mother he could have had. Should have had.”

Nick was silent, his eyes on Kelly the entire time.

Kelly patted his cheek and smiled sadly. “It’s okay to mourn. You do it for you, not him.”

Nick nodded and forced himself to swallow past the knot in his throat. “We’re not at the mourning stage just yet. He needs a new liver. He wants me to get tested to see if I’m a match.”

Kelly’s expression changed from one of gentle sympathy to something else entirely. His eyes sparked, and the lines around his mouth grew hard as he squared his shoulders. “He wants you to donate a piece of your liver?”

Nick nodded, unable to speak.

“Are you going to do it?”

“I don’t know,” Nick whispered. “I don’t want to. I want to let him die.”

Kelly nodded, frowning in sympathy. But then he shook his head. “You’d never forgive yourself. Even if everyone knows he deserves it.”

Nick lowered his head. “I know.”

Kelly grabbed at his shirt front and pulled him sideways until Nick was standing right in front of him, between his legs. Kelly hugged him fiercely, and Nick buried his face in Kelly’s neck.

“The decision you make, you make it for you. Not him,” Kelly whispered into his ear. “You make it for you. And I’ll be there.”

Nick gripped him hard, hugging him for dear life.

Kelly sniffed and smiled against his neck. “You do you, boo boo,” he said, his voice shaking with laughter.

Nick pushed away from him, fighting back tears with a surprised snort. “There’s something so wrong with you.”

“That’s why you love me.”

Ty couldn’t sit still. He bounced his knees, he tapped his toes, he cracked his knuckles. He finally picked up a pen and began twirling it around his fingers just to give his hands something else to do as he watched Zane fiddle with the laptop.

“Okay, I got around the basic password protection, but there’s a little extra encryption on this thing,” Zane finally told him. “I would call him paranoid if he hadn’t ended up dead.”

“I can’t believe he was one of Burns’s guys,” Ty said, shaking his head. “Was he recruited before or after Deuce and Livi started dating?”

“I don’t know, Ty,” Zane said without taking his eyes off the laptop screen.

“Would Dick really put a spy into Deacon’s future in-laws?”

Zane glanced at him. “I don’t know, Ty.”

“I mean, that seems like a stretch even for Dick. I wonder if Deuce dating her was what brought Dick’s attention to the Stanton company, or if Milton really did plant that seed?”

“I don’t know, Ty,” Zane repeated obediently. “Why don’t you go ask him? Maybe he’ll tell you more than he told me.”

Ty sighed heavily, shaking his head. “He won’t tell me anything, he’ll just glare at me like he used to when I was little and make me feel like I’m ten. You know who should talk to him? Dad. It’d be just as uncomfortable as it was when Irish was interrogating me; I bet he’d tell Dad anything. Are you listening to me?”

“No, Ty.”