World’s gone too dark, too dark for me to see
I turn and reach out, but there’s no one there for me
Every time I hear a heart break, I die a bit inside
I cry for every child, I cry for every bride
Atlas carries the world on his shoulders,
Jesus hangs for our sins on a tree
White doves for peace are in the air
But something whispers we’ll never be free
Light a candle for the darkness
Light a candle for our sin
Hug your nearest neighbor
Don’t forget to let love in
—Candles Burning
“TO THE left, Miki. No, my left,” Kane murmured, his hands sliding over Miki’s hips. “Turn over. No, not that way. Come on—”
“I can fucking walk, K,” he growled between his gritted teeth. “It’s a damned soft brace. I didn’t break anything. It’s just swollen a bit. I just want to sit down on the couch.”
“How are the stitches? Pulling?”
“They’re fucking fine. No swelling. Not hot.” Miki slapped Kane’s hands away, irritated at being guided to one of the suite’s couches. “It’s not even that deep. Even Castillo said I probably cut myself on one of the riser brackets.”
“Castillo also said they don’t have a suspect for the knifings.”
“Not her fault. Club stopped checking bags at ten. That’s on them.” His knee was better but still tender. Standing wasn’t the best thing for it, but he was sick of sitting down. “Remember, she’s got a knife they found behind the bar.”
“Getting prints matched up just takes fucking forever,” Kane grumbled. “Place should have had a camera. Hell, I never should have let you—”
“Keep on with that thought, and we’ll see how much I’ll let you near me,” he cautioned. As much as he loved Kane, there were times when the Morgan family motto was less “Honor and virtue” and more “Herd lovers like you’re border collies.”
“I’m fine. Castillo’s doing her job, and you’ve got one night with me before you head back. Couch doesn’t look that comfortable, dude.”
“You were just… it kills me to see you hurt, a ghra. Those days in the hospital about did me in.”
“Yeah, wasn’t a picnic for me either. Done now. We’re good. And finally not fucking stuck in the van. I’d almost take the hospital over that any day.”
The time Miki spent in the hospital were the longest forty-two hours of his life. When he’d been laid up in Los Angeles, Miki thought the emptiness of his life with only Edie to come by once in a while was the worst thing he’d ever have to experience.
He was wrong. The constant in and out of people coupled with frequent pokes and prods by specialists was enough to make him scream.
Or kill.
When the doctor in charge of his recovery announced he could be sprung, Miki still hadn’t ruled out killing as an option quite yet. Kane was certainly getting on his frayed nerves, and he wasn’t going to feel right unless he got in a good hot shower and scrubbed the sick off of his skin.
Because no matter what put a guy into the hospital, he always came out smelling like death.
The next day following his escape from the hospital had been a whirlwind of people and good-byes. Brigid was off on a plane before the sun rose over the Atlantic, and they’d all piled into the band’s van to head to New York. All of them—including Kane and Sionn—because for some stupid reason, they were going to spend a day in the Big Apple. Together. Like some demented vacation flick where a leather-faced guy with a chainsaw would go a long way in making things just that much more interesting.
About half an hour into the trip, Miki was more than ready to be the one with the chainsaw.
Forest at least had the good sense to sprawl over the back row of chairs and spend his time talking to Connor on the phone. From the sultry chuckles and soft oohs coming from the rear of the van, Miki didn’t think Forest heard one damned bit of the arguing going on in front of him.
Miki didn’t have that luxury. He had a front-row seat to the most convoluted, testosterone-fueled discussion on which way to get to Manhattan from Boston. Despite having the disadvantage of not growing up in the Morgan household, Damien held his own. They’d played musical driver’s seats along the way and only once ended up in a state they hadn’t planned on detouring through.
And Manhattan was exactly as he’d remembered.
It was loud and a bit pretentious, packed with people from somewhere else but desperate to call themselves New Yorkers. The real New York clung to the edges of the sidewalk, in the faces and voices of street vendors and city workers who watched the streams of people with bemused expressions. The sky was filled with walls, and lines of cloud-streaked cadet blue striped the cityscape, a rare clear day sparkling through the grime. Subway entrances sucked in and vomited out bodies, sending crowds careening along their way. A few long miles into the noisy city, and they’d arrived at the overpriced hotel Kane and Sionn booked over Damien’s barely there protests. Rafe had been the first one out of the van, proclaiming his love for the Apple in a voice loud enough to draw stares while Forest simply stood in awe of Times Square.
Miki’d just wanted to stretch out someplace and maybe get Kane in bed, but the Irish cop seemed to be more in the coddling mood than cuddling.
“There’s isn’t ice in the freezer. Five-star hotel my ass. You’d think they’d have ice in the damned room.” Kane stood in front of the couch, caught halfway between the sweep of windows overlooking the square and the suite’s kitchenette. “Do you want me to—”
“Kane, just sit the fuck down for a minute.” Miki exhaled hard, sinking into the soft cushions. “You guys turned a four-hour drive into a slog through the Scottish Highlands.”
“It wasn’t that long.”
“We left at seven in the morning, dropped your mom off at the airport, then got on the road.” He glanced at the clock. “It’s now five in the afternoon. You guys took… wait, let me count… I’ll even cut some time off for the two-hour good-bye we had with Brigid. Eight! Eight hours to get from there to here.”
“We stopped for lunch.”
“We went through a drive-thru.” He shook his head at Kane. “And we ate while Rafe drove.”
“You took the longest to say good-bye to Mum.” Kane’s Irish thickened. “At least fifteen minutes.”
“She wouldn’t let go of my neck,” Miki shot back. “Woman doesn’t know a good-bye even when it smacks her in the face. Couldn’t wait to get rid of her.”
“You love my mother.” His lover took a step closer to the couch, looming.
“I’m not saying I don’t,” Miki countered quickly. “What I’m saying is that it took the four of you assholes eight-plus hours to get us to New York. And for what? One night? You and Sionn fly out tomorrow from JFK while we head over to New Jersey. What good is that?”
“The good here, Miki love—” Kane knelt down in between Miki’s parted legs. “is that I get to spend a night with you here. In New York. Without anyone else in sight.”
It’d been too long since he’d had Kane’s mouth on his, and Miki suckled at his lover’s lips with a fierce hunger. Their tongues brushed once, then again, teasing and probing into one another. Kane’s body was as familiar to Miki as his own and a hell of a lot more enjoyable to touch. His fingers found Kane’s waistband and then the button he’d been looking for. His thumb dug against the metal disc, and an amused chuckle stopped him dead in his tracks.
“Oh, fuck me,” Kane muttered under his breath.
Miki rested his forehead against his lover’s chest, sighing heavily. “I was trying to.”
“Guess no one told you the living space connects to my room, Sin,” Rafe drawled from an open door across the suite’s main room. “You guys up for Italian? We’re going to meet in the lobby in about forty-five minutes. Damien says it’s a bonding experience. Notice the air quotes.”
“I’ll go get you some ice for that knee, and you get a painkiller in you. No arguing about that.” Kane buttoned his jeans back up, to Miki’s deep disgust. “Maybe you can work on getting Andrade out of the room.”
“Can’t argue about the pills,” Miki replied. “I fucking flushed them. Well, the pain shit. The anti-inflammatory ones I kept, but I’ve got tons of those from before we left home too.”
“Why the fuck would you flush—” Kane bit his lower lip, frustration working over his face. “Miki, they’re for—”
“Rafe doesn’t need that kind of crap around him.” It’d been an easy decision, one Miki made nearly as soon as he’d left the hospital. “Drug-free band. Drug-free backstage. It was one of the conditions for this tour. I’m not going to fuck my friend up because I can’t deal with the shit I’ve already been dealing with.”
For a second, Miki thought Kane was going to argue. It was a moot point. The pills were probably already getting a sewer alligator stoned, but moot points were sometimes what Kane liked to latch on to and grumble about. This time he took a long, hard look at Rafe, then picked up the silver ice bucket he’d left on the coffee table.
“I’m going to get ice for your damned knee. Andrade, we may or may not be down for Italian.” Kane bent back down to give Miki a kiss. “You, love, decide if you feel up to it. I’m good with room service and a movie. And it doesn’t even have to be a dirty movie.”
Rafe waited until Kane left, then sat down on the couch. “You didn’t have to do that, Mick. I’d have been… fuck, I don’t know if I’d have been okay. I’d like to say yeah, but I just don’t fucking know.”
“Why risk it?” Miki shrugged.
The pain in his joints was something he’d learned to live with, a price he’d paid for waking up after the accident that tore his life apart. What happened in Boston strained his knee, but it wasn’t anything he couldn’t endure, and with a steady supply of anti-inflammatories, he’d be fine in a few days. Providing he didn’t engage in hot rock-star sex in the bathtub, although the stubble across Kane’s firm jaw and his lover’s strong hands on him every time he turned around wasn’t helping.
“What’d they give you for the pain?” Rafe asked.
Miki rattled off what he’d read on the bottle before dumping them in the toilet. “Fuckers wouldn’t flush. It was like a zombie hoard, shuffling back up to the surface. I’d have fished the damned things out, but they get all gummy and fall apart in your hand. I’d probably have ODed scooping them out into a bag. How’d that have looked?”
“Shit, you’d have gotten some bucks on the street for that crap. What’d they give you? Ten?”
“Thirty.” He smirked at Rafe’s low whistle. “Yeah, probably could have paid rent on a Chinatown trash can or something with it. But it’s pining for the fjords right now.”
Rafe stretched his long legs out, resting his feet on the coffee table. He looked as rumpled as Miki felt, stained with the slight rank of hours spent in a car and eating junk food. It was the smell of being on the road, an intimate, familiar scent coupled with the oddness of it being on unfamiliar skin. A long silence yawned between them, the puzzle piece of quiet turning as it tried to fit into the space between them. Something must have clicked in on Rafe’s side because he cleared his throat, then spoke.
“You didn’t have to toss that shit, you know. Not for me.” Rafe’s raspy, deep voice was threaded tight with emotion. “I should be strong enough to deal with you having stuff around. I can’t be crippled by this crap I’ve got going on.”
“You pissed off about it?” That was something Miki hadn’t thought of. He’d taken away Rafe’s choice to stay clean with one flush of a Boston toilet. Well, several flushes, but it didn’t matter. The pills were gone, and he’d pretty much cut Rafe’s balls off with a dull knife when he pressed the handle. “Figured it was better to just get rid of them.”
“Truth?”
“Always a good thing,” Miki replied.
“I’m fucking terrified of having any kind of shit around me,” Rafe muttered, dropping his head back to rest on the couch cushions. “I’d like to be all big man about it and say I wouldn’t come breaking into your bathroom if you’re not around, but thing is, I fucking can’t promise that. So while I’m kind of pissed off you thought you had to dump your shit because you can’t trust me, the truth is I can’t fucking trust myself.”
“Okay.” He pursed his mouth. “Just so I’ve got this. Dumping pills is good but shitty because you don’t know if you can handle being around them.”
“Not shitty. You’re watching out for me. Because you don’t know what kind of crap I’ve got going on inside of me.” He glanced over at Miki, then bit his lower lip. “I said I can’t do this tour unless we’re drug free—not like any of you do shit—but you stuck to that.
“I spent a lot of time hitting up that hospital’s damned meetings because getting shit-faced was all I could think about. Like how fucking easy it would be to take something when no one was watching,” Rafe continued. “It’s going to be fucking hell for you, because a dead raccoon can see you’re in a lot of fucking pain, Sinjun, but I’m going to be an asshole and say, sorry, but I don’t want to end up in rehab again.”
“They suck? Those meetings?” He’d been around enough drunks and druggies before. Being on tour pretty much guaranteed that, and he probably would be cock deep in them again. Drugs and booze were as much a part of the business as music, and Miki wasn’t going to lie to Rafe about spending his whole life on stage and behind it as sober as a nun. He’d woken up more than once in a strange place with even stranger people. “We went through a couple of drummers before Dave, you know? One guy—Pedro—he was really cool. Intense, but I liked him a lot. We’d left him at the apartment ’cause he said he was sick. Came back from helping Damie lay tile on a job, and Pedro’d cleaned our apartment out. Guitars, amps… the goddamned forks we’d stolen from that Denny’s in Japantown… fucking everything. And you know why our shit was gone.”
“Yeah, I’ve had that happen too. Fucking sucks, huh?” Rafe chuckled. “It’s stupid what your brain decides is okay to do because your bones are itching.”
“So fast forward… like two years later. We weren’t huge yet, but we had crowds, you know?” Miki explained. “And we’re at a gig down in San Diego, and in walks Pedro, right up to me and Damie backstage.”
“Fucking balls.”
“See, he’d come by to ask for absolution. Said it was one of his steps, and of all the people he’d hurt, he felt the shittiest about fucking me and Damie over.” It’d been hard to listen to Pedro go through his reasons for putting Damie and Miki into the hole for over two grand, even harder to hear him beg them for their forgiveness. “Sorry doesn’t cut it, right? I mean, no matter what goes on afterwards, it never goes back to what it was before. He was so fucking good, Rafe. Like a dream to fucking work with, but he cut us pretty deep. Sorry doesn’t kiss better a boo-boo that’s gone black, you know?”
“Yeah, I know,” Rafe murmured. “There’s a couple of people I haven’t said I’m sorry to. Don’t know if I’ve got the balls to do it.”
“Dude, Pedro was scraping the bottom of life when he ripped us off, and I don’t think he was much better when he came round backstage. You want to know why I flushed those fucking pills down?” Miki grinned over at his friend. “I don’t want us to ever get that deep—that far down the hole—where you feel like you’ve got to crawl through glass for something you’ve done. Not you. Not if I can help it, you know? The pills? My knee? It’s fucking nothing compared to your life. I’ve lost enough friends, Rafe. I don’t intend to lose you too.”
“WHERE THE fuck are we going, babe?” Kane kept his strides short, surreptitiously watching Miki’s gait. The sidewalks were wet, the afternoon’s clear skies a distant memory, much like the lunch they’d eaten in the van. “We’re about a block and a half from where the cab dropped us off.”
They were in Greenwich Village, a chopped salad of flashing lights, loud voices, and garish personalities. The buildings were vivid, strong faces poking up into the wet night, brashly seducing passersby to waltz through their open doors and sample the delights within.
A woman on thin, white stilt heels eyed him when they strolled by a sushi place. Her eyes clung to his chest, then flicked over to Miki. As usual, his lover was oblivious, his full mouth in a slight pout as he studied the streets. His loose-hipped stroll was graceful despite the slight hitch in his knee, a prowling feline of a man with more than a little bit of street grit clinging to his every move. There was something coiled and dangerous in Miki’s presence, a fierceness Kane loved… and dreaded.
Miki St. John depended on no one, counted on no one to bail him out, and if there was one thing Kane could change about his lover, it would be his unwillingness to lean on Kane when times got rough.
It couldn’t get any rougher than being stabbed while performing for the first time in years.
The woman in heels was gone in a blink, faded off into the chatter around them. It seemed like every other place they passed was a restaurant or a few parking spaces turned into a battle ground for competing food trucks selling everything from octopus balls in teriyaki sauce to tofu tacos with kale chips.
His stomach pointedly reminded him it hadn’t seen a speck of food since a handful of cold fries somewhere in Connecticut. His dick wasn’t helping either. Sex over the past two weeks had been over the phone and his own hand, so his emotions ran high and hard every time he so much as glanced at Miki.
Kane’d dropped back to let Miki take the lead and soon regretted it. Miki’s ass looked great, delectable and firm in his worn jeans. He’d filled out a bit since Kane’d moved in, gaining muscle and weight where he’d gone thin after the accident. Kane’s brain hummed with the satisfaction of seeing Miki healthy. His dick, however, had purely nefarious thoughts Kane didn’t need to hear as he was walking down a busy New York street.
“We’re almost there,” Miki promised for what had to be the tenth time. “It’s down this street.”
“You keep saying that, and then there’s another street.” Kane nearly lost his lover in the shadowy clot hanging over the corner Miki turned down. “Miki love, where the hell do you think you’re heading?”
The road was narrow, larger than an alley, and at least warranted a name. It also looked more like a spot garbage trucks ambled down to pick up Dumpsters, a supposition soon proved once Miki jogged them past an alley opening just as a junk truck passed by. A garage did a brisk business to the right of the alley, the attendant sliding vehicles into stacked bays, rolling them up and out of the way. Easing a minivan out to the car park’s entrance, a thick-necked woman in a neon safety vest nodded once at Kane, her hand already flicking the keys to another attendant as she headed toward the back.
The alley wasn’t as long as Kane thought it would be, maybe a few hundred feet or so from the street, widening out at the far end. The building in front was angled and hosted an Italian restaurant behind its black-and-gold-painted storefront. Despite someone’s best efforts, the structure was unable to shake off its birth as a bar during Truman’s days and still reeked of cheap booze and unfiltered cigarettes. The line out the door promised either a good meal or a five-star bowl of bacon foam and gold leaf. And it didn’t seem like they were going to find out which, because Miki shouted at him to get his ass into the alley.
“Here we go.” Miki slid past the Dumpsters, wading through the puddles making soup of the back alley’s debris.
“Go where?” Kane wondered if the softness he stepped in was rotten food or a rat. Deciding he didn’t really need to know, he stomped through a few puddles to get his shoes cleaned off. “Where are you—?”
Once clear of the Dumpsters, Kane got a good view of the alley’s end. Formerly, a small courtyard, it’d been walled off by years of construction until all that remained was a garden space scalloped with deep divots filled with fragrant herbs. A sturdy wooden table stood firm on the brick pavement, its four retro vinyl-and-metal chairs sitting at each of its sides. A pair of novena candles was pushed nearly to the far edge, flickering red and green behind an old glass salt and pepper shaker set with battered steel tops.
They were behind the restaurant, but the aromas coming out of the kitchen were nothing like any Italian food Kane’d ever smelled before. Ribbons of coconut and curries trickled out, splashing a colorful palette of perfume on the slightly chilly evening. A small elderly Vietnamese man stood with his hands out to shake Miki’s, fingers trembling with age, and he cackled with undisguised glee when Miki gave him a quick hug.
“Kane, this is Lanh. He makes the best damned pho bo kho in the world, and I asked him if he’d cook for us… for you.” Miki’s smile was nearly as wide as the tiny old man he had in the crook of his arm. “Lanh, this is….”
Miki’s eloquence was normally reserved for paper and song, and he always struggled to find the words to express what Kane meant to him… who Kane was in his life. It was something Kane was used to, but standing in a rain-soaked New York alleyway, Miki suddenly seemed to find the something he’d been struggling to say ever since Kane moved in.
“Lanh, this is Kane,” Miki said softly, his eyes never leaving Kane’s face. “He’s the love of my goddamned life.”