I’ve come a long way
Cried in the dark
There’s been times when I’ve screamed
Times when my soul’s barely a spark
You touched me then
Kissed my bleeding heart
Showed me the sunshine
Promised never to part
Wake up in the morning
You are still near
The world’s only beautiful
When you’re right here
—Beautiful Day
CONNOR FELT the air change when Kane spotted the matching rings he and Forest wore and then the ripple when, a second later, his baby brother made the intuitive leap to their meaning.
Mostly because, as they strolled down the Vegas strip behind Miki and Forest, Kane looked up at something Forest was pointing out, glanced back down at Connor’s hand, then said, “Mum’s going to fucking kill you both.”
Connor had about fifteen pounds of muscle on Kane and maybe an inch or two of height, so he figured he could take his brother down and bury his dead body someplace out in the desert before Kane spilled the beans to their mother. The biggest complication in that plan was Miki. As dirty as the Morgan boys fought, Miki was dirtier and meaner. A normal person would take one look at Miki St. John, see a lean, silky beautiful man inclined to sidestep trouble and think he’d be a pushover, especially against Connor’s mass and strength.
Yet Connor knew better. He might have the brawn to do serious damage, but Miki had years of living on the edge, an unnatural ability to turn anything into a weapon, and no fear of death. He’d go all in where a fight over Kane was concerned, and that made him doubly dangerous. So while Con knew he could best Kane, he’d live in terror of Sinjun for the rest of his life. Which would be about five seconds after he popped Kane in the mouth.
Funny thing about Las Vegas—something Connor hadn’t noticed before—there were a lot of things an enraged rock star could use to kill a man lying about on the road. The newsstands were bolted down now, their curved forms randomly dotting the sidewalks, but there were other dangers, like street entertainers with canes or women with impossibly tall stilettos. He wouldn’t put it past Kane’s Miki to upend a woman in a tight gold lamé, rip off her shoe, and bury its knifelike heel into Connor’s eye.
Since Miki and Forest were about ten feet ahead of them, Connor decided he’d take his chances.
“Say one damned thing to her, and I’ll rip your fucking balls off, little brother,” he ground out through a smile he gave Forest when his lover glanced back at them.
It was a good threat. Solid and delivered with enough menace to leave Kane weak in his knees. Nearly two years of living and loving Miki St. John, however, changed a man, and Connor was disgusted when his baby brother laughed at him.
Literally laughed in his face, then kept walking.
“I’m serious, Kane.” Connor snagged his brother’s arm, yanking him to a stop. “You whisper one word in Mum’s ear, and you’ll be giving Sinjun toothless blowjobs.”
“Should have thought about that before you married him.” Kane shrugged him off. “’Sides, she loves Forest. You she’ll kill, but Forest can do no wrong.”
“We’re going to have a family thing. Just need to keep it quiet.” He rubbed at an aching spot between his eyes. “It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, between us, you know? Sometimes—and I love our family—but there are times when I’m sick of them being around for everything. This was just… us. Intimate. Well, crazy, but it was just ours.”
“Yeah, I know how that is.” His brother nodded, his smirk a flash of white teeth and mockery. “But see, out of all of us, you’re the only one who she could count on to be walking down the aisle. And you took that from her. She’s going to kill you so slowly. You’re going to be begging for your death before she’s half-done with you.”
“Did you miss the part where I said we’re going to do a family thing—”
“Then I’d suggest you let her plan it, because there’s no going back on this, Con. This is possibly the stupidest thing you’ve done since you convinced Riley he could make his dick longer by shoving it in the vacuum hose and turning the damned thing on.”
“God in Heaven, he was a stupid kid. We couldn’t get Quinn to fall for anything. I never figured the rest of them would be so stupid.”
“Riley isn’t stupid. He’s just not Q,” Kane pointed out. “Now, what are you going to tell Mum?”
“That I’d want her to help plan the family ceremony.” Connor shrugged at Kane’s disbelieving snort. “It would go a long way in mending fences, and she’s not that bad, really. As you said, she loves Forest. All he has to do is say please, and she’s bending over backwards and giving him the moon. Not like you and your Miki are ever going to be exchanging rings.”
“I don’t know. We’ve never really talked about it,” he replied. “Miki’s not… it’s hard around him. There’s no framework for him. I don’t know if marriage is even something he thinks about. If it’s important to him. I’m guessing not. Once he loves, I don’t think he needs anything else.”
“What about you?” Connor asked, slowing his pace so they could talk without their lovers hearing them. “What do you want, Kane? Have you talked to him about any of that?”
“Con, I don’t know,” Kane said. “I’m not thinking about where we’re going to be in five years. Maybe one day Miki will look at me and say, ‘Hey, I want to get married.’ Maybe I’ll say it to him. I don’t know, but I’m not going to worry about it. We’ll do what we do. But I can tell you this, I sure as hell wouldn’t let Mum plan the wedding. I’d never see Miki again.”
“He is her white whale.”
“They get on, you know? But he’s prickly and so’s she.” Kane nodded. “Truth now. Do you really want the two of them on the same side of the fence? I’d get no fucking peace. I’d have nowhere to hide if the two of them get the same idea in their head—”
Something was off about the man crossing the street head of them. Connor couldn’t put his finger on what it was, but something odd grabbed at Connor’s mind and shook him like a terrier with a bone. It wasn’t him cutting through traffic. There were plenty of idiots slicing through the spaces between the parade of slow-moving cars. It could have been his hunched-over shoulders and the hoodie he’d pulled down low over his eyes. The night was cold enough for a jacket for some, although the brisk cold wind on his face felt good. There was the threat of rain in the air and an electrical crackle on Connor’s skin, warning him of an incoming storm.
Still, even with his attention drawn to the dark-clad man jogging up to the sidewalk, Connor almost didn’t see the knife in his hand until its edge was nearly to Miki’s ribs.
Then all hell broke loose.
FOREST WAS a decent guy. Oddly decent despite every shitty thing he’d come up against in life. The way Miki saw it, Forest would end up a lot like Donal, tossing out little pebbles of wisdom and understanding while the rest of them couldn’t get their shit together enough to microwave a bowl of oatmeal.
Whereas he was going to spend the rest of his life wondering why his brain insisted on turning everything he heard into music.
It was a bad thing for the most part. Sometimes the thrum of tires on a road lulled him into crashing, but more often than not, he caught the beat of a baseline, and then his fingers and mind itched to fill in the blanks. There was a reason he loved being home. It was quiet. A stillness where the only voices he had to worry about were the ones he knew and the jangle of metal meant Dude was strolling by or scratching at a phantom itch somewhere in his wiry blond fur.
Except nothing was turning into music now.
Las Vegas was the kind of chaos bright and loud enough to drive Miki insane if he stayed submerged in its flashing cacophony for longer than a few hours. The drummer seemed to thrive in it, bouncing on the balls of his feet when they stopped to watch a man in brass-paint-covered clothes pretend to be a windup toy dancing to the recorded plinking of a badly played toy piano.
He kind of envied Forest’s wholehearted disregard of the world around them. It was as if Connor came into his life and suddenly everything dangerous was outside of a hamster ball and couldn’t touch him. Miki knew better. There were things out there with mouths bigger than a hamster ball and powerful enough to crush his seemingly impenetrable world with one snapping bite.
“Man, that’s some crazy shit,” Forest shouted over the crashing chimes of a passing one-man band’s performance. “Worse than drums, I think. You’d have to keep track of everything you’re—”
“Hey, you’re Miki St. John. I’ve got your CD, man!” A guy in a black hoodie and camo pants appeared in front of Miki, sliding out of the crowd to thrust a plastic case at Miki’s stomach. “Can I get you to sign—”
“Mick!” Connor yelled down the sidewalk. “Get—”
Crowds were a curious thing. In the face of panic, some fled while others stumbled about, unsure of where to go or what to do. A few screamed, drawing the energy on the sidewalk up tight, and people broke off from the foot traffic, crashing into one another when they scattered away from the thundering rush of Morgans coming at them.
“Hey, wait—” Miki held up his hand for Kane to stop, for Connor to take away the crazed look on his face, anything to hold off the wall of rage barreling down on him. The crowd was thick and frantic, shoving at his back. Someone’s hand glanced off of his head, and he turned to tear into whoever hit him.
Then he saw the knife.
The blade was small enough to be hidden behind the CD case being shoved at him. The guy twisted his wrist, and the case fell away, its cheap knockoff album art from an ’80s hair band flying up into the air as it flipped open. The paper flapped across Miki’s left hand, a black-and-red butterfly sporting Aqua-Net coifs and spiked leather jackets on its wings. The knife dug in next, its tip burying into Miki’s skin to pull up a long thread of blood along its matte silver blade.
“Motherfucking son of a bitch,” Miki snapped.
Fear did odd things to him. It haunted his thoughts, shadowy reminders of pain and terrors past, and Miki found himself in the throes of anger when slammed up against a wall of panic. The slice on his arm stung, bleeding out onto the sidewalk and leaving crimson snowflake splashes on the rough concrete slab beneath his feet. He’d grown up with the smell of his own blood in his nose. Miki knew the feel of his skin being torn apart and the ache of swollen flesh and torn muscles before he could even read his own name.
He was fucking tired of tangling with the nightmares in his life shoving into his every waking moment until he couldn’t take a breath without it tasting like the regurgitated shit sandwich he’d been left to eat at birth. The asshole with the knife was simply another pebble in the road, a path he’d smoothed out carefully when he’d fallen in love with Kane and reunited with Damien.
And he was really tired of people thinking they could take him down without a fight.
His fist was bloody when Miki planted it in the guy’s thin lips. His knuckles took the brunt of the hit when he scraped them across the man’s teeth, but the shot was enough to make his attacker stumble back and drop the knife.
Miki tried to grab at the man’s zipped-up sweatshirt. He needed something to hold on to, to twist around and drive the guy down so he could hammer at his head. Punching out again, he got a glancing blow off the man’s cheek, pushing the hoodie back from his face.
It was a shock of sorts to find himself staring into the face of an older Asian man, his left incisor flashing gold in the blood smeared across his lips. The sunken hollow of his cheeks was at odds with the pink, fleshy bags beneath his hard, glittering eyes. His messy crop of hair was more wiry silver than black, and as Miki tugged at the sweatshirt’s hood, he pulled apart the top’s zipper, exposing a patchwork quilt of mottled blue tattoos running down his crepe-like wattle and spotted neck.
Including one that looked so much like the one Miki had on his arm it shocked him speechless to see it.
The man jerked free of Miki’s numb fingers, spinning around. Kane’s hand closed over Miki’s shoulder, pulling him back, and the man’s arms flailed about, his foot sliding off the sidewalk. One of his hands smacked Miki’s cheek. Then the world went hot with Irish curses and black-haired cops pushing into Miki’s space. Frightened, the man turned to flee and lost his balance, falling away from the sidewalk.
Everything moved too quickly to make sense out of but too slow to do anything but watch in horror as the man’s arm flung wide. Miki felt a shove from the right, a woman still caught on the edge of the fray. Then he saw the street entertainer make a grab for the man.
Miki’s attacker shoved back, but the performer was stronger, muscles thickened from time spent holding himself in impossible poses. The man in the hoodie bounced off the gold-painted performer and tumbled right into a Las Vegas tour bus.
“AND YOU’VE never seen this man before in your life?”
For the fifth or sixth time since he’d been shoved into the tiny gray room with its uncomfortable chairs and flickering yellow lights, Miki stared down the cop who’d led him into their little slice of Groundhog Day hell and shook his head. They’d been at it for more than two hours, and the questions kept circling back around to the one thing Miki couldn’t answer—who the hell was the guy who stabbed him, then pancaked himself against a bus.
It was funny that cops still made Miki nervous. Especially considering he spent most of his days surrounded by people who lived, ate, and breathed badges and justice. By now Miki felt the snarl in his belly at the scent of a police officer would have gone the way of the dodo. Instead, being a ringside spectator at the Morgan show only seemed to make things worse. Probably because he judged every cop he met by one golden standard—Captain Donal Morgan and his badge-sporting brood.
The asshole spitting on him as he talked was sure as hell no Donal Morgan.
Miki slid the photo of the dead guy back across the table with a flick of his fingers. He’d studied the battered, bloodied face for nearly half an hour, trying to make some sense out of the whole thing. There were tantalizing peeks of ink, but when Miki’d asked for a good shot of the guy’s neck, a thick-necked cop who’d dragged him into the station jumped on him for it, then passed Miki over to a skinny detective for questioning. He’d agreed to it at first, but as his ass grew colder and number from sitting too long on the metal seat, Miki wondered if he’d been stupid to tell Kane he’d go it alone.
“Look, for the last fucking time, I don’t know him,” he repeated slowly. “It’s not like you guys don’t have his fingerprints. Hell, you’ve got his damned fingers. I’d like to know who the hell he is, but I don’t.”
“Yet you think he’s got a tattoo on his neck that matches the one on your arm?” Up close, the cop’s breath smelled oddly of mint and pastrami. “Guy’s got a beef with you, knows your name, and maybe has the same tattoo as you, but you don’t know him?”
Ginger-haired and lean but for a pop of a belly straining two buttons of his sweat-stained blue cotton shirt, Detective Jenkins of the LVPD looked like he could only have ended up as a cop. Or maybe a high school principal. Either way, his fleshy pink lips continued to flap, spittle flying across the table’s slick surface.
“Won’t know for sure unless I can see it again.” Clenching his fists, Miki steadied his voice. “Asshole tried to stab me, and I grabbed his hoodie. That’s when I saw his neck, but I can’t be sure. Look, it’s all I’ve got for you.”
A knock on the door jerked the cop up, his spine snapping straight at the sound. His gray polyester pants squeaked when he walked to the door, a faint whispering slither not unlike the sound of anoles fighting on Miki’s rooftop. Jenkins’s shoulders grew stiff, and he barked over a meek-voiced uniform standing in front of the now open door.
“What?” Jenkins moved, blocking Miki’s view of the hall outside. “I’m in the middle of questioning a witness.”
“Fucking lizard,” Miki muttered to himself. The cop didn’t spare him a glance, but Miki was pretty sure the guy heard him—just like he heard a familiar cock-arousing Irish baritone rolling through the crack of the open door.
“Either he’s coming out, or I’m going in to get him, Jenkins.” Kane’s threat was a low roll of sharpness softened with a velvety burr. “Your captain’s rolling through that door in about ten, and she’s going to want to know from you why he’s still in that room when he’s told you everything he knows.”
“I could use a Band-Aid.” Miki raised his voice. “Back of my hand’s bleeding again. Opened it up.”
Another deep rumble, indistinct but definitely Connor. Then Kane said, “Con’s going to find something. Just for God’s sake, don’t suck on it.”
“I’m not.” He lowered his hand before he could lick the daub of blood seeping out of the cut. The back of his hand hurt, and Miki had a tiny bit of regret at refusing the gauze and paper tape he’d been offered by an EMT. “It’s like two drops. Sheesh.”
“Worse than your dog, I swear to all the saints,” he muttered. “What’s it going to be, Jenkins? In or out?”
“He’s all yours, Inspector.” Jenkins flung the door open and waved an elaborate flourish with his arm. “Don’t go anywhere just yet. I’m not done with any of you.”
As welcome a sight as Kane’s massive shoulders and worried, rugged face were, Miki was rounding past disgruntled and heading into pissy. He was hungry, tired, and an asshole trying to kill him ruined what he’d hoped would be a late-night walk down the Las Vegas strip with nothing to do but watch people and sneak a few kisses off of Kane. They were on the rattles-end of a snaking tour, and everyone’s nerves were stretched tight. He’d wanted to grab a steak, blow off some steam, and have the kind of sex where the people in the hotel room beneath their bed would call security on them. Instead he was sitting in a cold gray room with his hand dotted with blood and wondering about the only inheritance he was ever going to have—a shitty, blown-out tattoo he didn’t know the meaning of.
He took Kane’s kiss anyway, because it was a hell of a lot sweeter than the bile churning around in his empty stomach.
“How are you doing, Mick?” Kane pulled one of the other chairs in close, then cupped the back of Miki’s head. “Do I need to kill that asshole? He kept you in here long enough.”
“I don’t need you to defend me against some cop, K,” Miki reminded him. “I’ve been telling your kind to fuck off since before I could play a guitar. And I’m fine. Quit worrying. You look like your mother.”
“Oh, that’s a punch to the balls there, love,” Kane grumbled, but his smile lightened the storm in his eyes.
“Did you really call his captain?” He didn’t think Kane would pull shit on another cop, but after more than an hour with Jenkins, Miki didn’t really care what Kane did—short of shooting the man—but even that was on the table. Slyly, he said, “Or did you have your dad do it?”
“You’re mean when you’re hungry.” Kane pulled a granola bar out of his jacket pocket and put it on the table in front of Miki. “Here.”
“I’m hungry, and you bring me oatmeal-flavored cardboard?” It was a green wrapper, familiar but still low on the list of things Miki considered edible. “The vending machine didn’t have chocolate? Chips?”
“You know that saying about beggars not getting to be choosers?”
“Bullshit, best money I made before we got to headline a stage was from begging.” The granola bar was stiff in his hands as he unwrapped it. It reeked of honey and gruel, and Miki resigned his stomach to its fate. “Don’t know why I’m still here. Not like I was the one who pushed the guy into the bus.”
“That’s what I love about you, Miki, besides that ass and mouth of yours. You’re practical down to the bone.” Kane shook his head. “We’re going to be stuck here for a little bit longer yet. I told Con to let the other guys sleep, because there’s nothing to be done, and they’d just be walking the halls with us. Told Con to go back to the hotel and try to crash for a while, but—”
“He told you to fuck off,” Miki said around a mouthful of mealy granola.
“Pretty much. But Damie and the others? If we’re still here in a few hours when the sun comes up, then there’s room in the hall for them. Hopefully we won’t be here that long, but you never know.”
“So how come they won’t shake me loose? Did anyone say? Jenkins kept pushing me about the guy with the knife, but shit, I stared at that damned photo until my eyes were about to bleed, but he doesn’t ring a bell.” The granola bar was turning to mush, and belatedly, Miki realized he had nothing to wash the mash down with. “Why not just look up his fingerprints? Not like he’s going anywhere.”
“See, that’s the problem, Mick.” Kane grimaced. “He did go somewhere. Coroner’s van got jacked on the way to the morgue. Driver’s in surgery with a shot to the head. The guy’s body never made it to the morgue, love, and they have no idea who took it.”