Mated to My Step-brother and His Best Friend novel · Chapter 10 of 32

Chapter 10: The Fragment

I looked at the black roots under his skin.

Twenty years of silver.

It had worked its way into the muscle and scarred over, and his body had built a wall around it.

"Yes," I said. "But not alone."

"I asked for you alone for a reason."

"I don't care about your reason. Alone, a draw like that would put me in bed for a week. Maybe longer." I looked him in the eye. "Get your son. And Bowie."

Abner's mouth twitched under the grey beard.

"You talk to me like Sherry does," he said.

"Somebody has to."

He sent for them.

Deacon came in first, saw his father's bare shoulder, and stopped dead.

"Dad."

"Shut the door, son."

Bowie slipped in behind him and shut it.

He took one look at the shoulder and whistled low.

"That's the one from the lake?"

"That's the one from the lake."

Deacon was staring.

"You told me they got it all out," he said. "You told me that when I was eleven."

"I told you what an eleven-year-old needed to hear."

Abner sat down heavily in the leather chair by the fire.

I knelt beside it.

"Tell me what happened," I said. "I want to know what I'm pulling."

He looked at the fire for a while.

"She liked to swim at night," he said. "End of summer. The water's warmest then. I was on the dock with a towel. Deacon was asleep in the house."

Deacon's face didn't move.

His hands did. They closed.

"Three men came out of the trees on the far shore," Abner said. "Hunters. Orange caps. One of them yelled, and she looked up, and they fired."

The fire popped.

"I went in after her. Something hit me in the shoulder. I got her to the dock. She was already gone."

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