Ben all but collapsed beneath him and Mack rolled them so they were on their sides, spooning.
Mack yanked the sheet over them. Nothing made him sleep better than coming hard. He was almost asleep when he heard Ben’s voice.
“I’d die in here without you.”
Mack stiffened. “Don’t fucking say that.”
“It’s true,” Ben said. And then quieter. “I love you. More than I’ve ever loved anyone. I’ll love you to my dying day.”
Mack’s stomach clenched. “Stop talking about dying.”
Ben went quiet after that.
Mack felt the words left unsaid. He knew Ben did too, though he never complained that Mack never told him he loved him back.
Mack snaked his arm around Ben’s stomach and pulled him close.
Not knowing how much he’d come to regret not telling Ben he loved him that night.
Because the very next day, Ben was shanked in the yard.
By Bone’s newest cellmate. Mack had been inside on assigned kitchen duty. He had to hear secondhand about how Ben had bled out right where he fell in the dirt. All alone in his last moments. He was dead before the medic even got on the scene.
The day following, Bone grinned at Mack from across the room. It was then Mack decided that if it was the last thing he ever did on earth, he’d put that motherfucker in the ground.
17
LIAM
“Come here, horsey horse.” Liam held out his hand and approached his mare for what felt like the hundredth time in the past few hours. “Come on. You can do it.”
Just like every other time, the horse watched him sideways as he came toward her. Then, right before he got within touching distance, she bolted to the opposite side of the circle pen.
“Fecking Christ!” Liam took off his hat and hurled it at the fence.
And immediately his da’s voice was ringing through his head.
“How is a son of mine so goddamned worthless?” his da shouted, storming into his bedroom with some shite gossip magazine in his hand.
Liam had been nursing a hangover and grabbed his pounding head. “Can you keep it down, da? I’m still langered somethin’ awful.”
Well that just seemed to set his da off. “I will not keep it down. You’re a twenty-four-year-old man still living with his father. You barely graduated and only because I donated an extremely generous endowment to the university your senior year. You have no skills, no ambitions, and are an embarrassment to the O’Neill name! Look at this.” His father pointed at the headline on the front page above the picture of Liam being hauled away in cuffs by the Garda. “Playboy Billionaire Arrested for Brawling…Again.” Then he opened the magazine and began reading. “Liam O’Neill, son of Prism Media Group mogul Ciarán O’Neill was yet again caught brawling in the streets of Dublin, this time outside a pub in the—”
Liam flopped back on his bed and pulled his pillow over his head to muffle the sound of his father’s voice.
The next second his da had ripped the pillow away. “You listen to me when I’m speaking to ya, ya useless, poxy little shite. I pulled meself up from nothin’ to give you everythin’ you could ever want—
“Don’t give me that shite,” Liam said, launching off the bed and getting in his da’s face. “Everything you’ve ever done in your life has been for yourself. Not for me or ma. Christ knows you scraped her off quick enough so you could go scuttle women half your age. Not that I imagine havin’ a ring on your finger stopped ya from gettin’ your knob polished by skanks all around the world on those business trips you took all the time even when ya were married.”
That was when his da punched him so hard he was knocked to the floor.
“Hey there.”
Liam spun around and put his hand to the back of his neck as he saw Calla standing just outside the fence behind him. Shite. The only thing worse than failing so bad at this was having a witness. Especially Calla.
“Xavier mentioned you were having a little trouble with her.” She gestured behind him in the direction of his mare.
“It’s been two days and she won’t even let me touch her.” Liam shook his head, squinting in the setting sun at the mustang. “She’s banjaxed, I’m telling ya. The organizers have to recognize that some horses are just too far gone. If I had meself a nice foal from a reputable breeder, well, I know I’d really be getting somewhere. But this one—” He shook his head again. And realized that, shite, he was rambling. Like an insecure idiot. He was never insecure around women.
They’d barely had time to spend more than ten minutes together alone since driving home from Denver. The last two days, Calla had spent almost all her time not doing morning chores with her mustang. Yesterday he’d hoped to have some time with her after dinner, but when he got downstairs after cleaning up, Mel told him she’d borrowed their truck to go visit her dad in a nursing home.