#TeaserTuesday: Rising Sun

This book has been a bear to write for several reasons, chief among them the intricacy and overlap of its plot, or plots, as it were. And also because, rather than the peaks and troughs of my other books, the tension has been on a steady uphill climb the entire way through. The majority of the characters are having the absolute worst time of their lives, and that's a lot of tension to keep cranking up for a lot of people, and it's quite the mental and emotional effort. Ava's head, especially, is an effortful place to be at the moment. 

The following teaser contains MAJOR SPOILERS for parts one and two of Lord Have Mercy, so either turn back now, or run go grab copies before you continue.

Lord Have Mercy Part One: The Good Son

Lord Have Mercy Part Two: Fortunate Son

Part Three is titled "Rising Sun," and no, that's not a typo on "Son." We're going back to NOLA, so, "There is a house, in New Orleans..." etc. There's going to be four parts total. Part Four will be titled "Big Son." 

Ava was not so deep in her practical, life-preserving numbness that she’d thought Mercy appearing would fix things. But before his arrival, she’d felt as if there was no way to make progress; it wasn’t possible to find Remy without Mercy, therefore every hour that Mercy was away from them was an hour wasted.

Sitting beside him, his familiar heat radiating through her skin in all the places they touched, something ugly, all-encompassing, and obliterating rose up in Ava like a tide. She recognized the basic shape of it, and knew that it was a choking wave of emotion. Despair. Grief. Hopelessness. It would be so, so easy to close her eyes and slip beneath its black surface; to let it strangle her, freeze her, batter her against the rocks of all the ways she couldn’t handle this.

If she allowed herself to fall into that tide at all, she’d be lost. She focused instead on the strong bones of Mercy’s wrist, the warmth of his skin as she wrapped her hand around it. “He grew up in New Orleans,” she said, because focusing on Boyle, on getting him, was the key to keeping her head above water. If she kept Boyle at the forefront of her mind, she could hold onto her anger, and her anger was a life preserver. “That’s how he knows you.” She turned her head to look up at him, and his expression made her hesitate. “What?”

He gazed at her with a heartbroken gentleness that she neither wanted nor expected. “Have you slept, baby?” he asked, in the same tone he used with Millie when she was feeling sick or unusually fussy. “You look tired.”

Ava stared at him, waiting for a more reasonable question. When none came, she said, incredulous, “Did you not hear what I just said?”

“I did,” Mercy said, tone careful. “But I don’t wanna talk about him right now.” Impossibly, infuriatingly, he said, “Have you had anything to eat? How are Cal and Millie? Did you tell them?”

Ava stared at him, and willed what he’d just said to make some sort of sense. She didn’t realize she’d tightened her grip on him until she felt his wrist shift within the circle of her fingers, and looked down to see that she’d dug in with her nails, his skin white and dented in sharp little crescents. Another fraction of pressure, and she thought she’d draw blood.

The notion sent a shock through her – but not of revulsion. She was digging into him, her nails like talons, their baby was missing, and he didn’t want to talk about Boyle right now. He wanted to know if she’d eaten.

Ava turned loose of him, and scrambled down off the table so she stood in front of him, hands on her hips, chest hitching on her next breath. Her pulse had kicked into high gear, and then kept accelerating; she thought she might be having a heart attack. Is this what it had felt like for her dad? This shuddering jerk of her heart that kept ramping up and up? Until it was like thunder inside her? Until her head felt as wobbly and airy as a balloon on an unraveling string?

“Are you seriously,” she panted, “asking me if I’ve had lunch?”

“Ava,” he said, like he was talking to a spooked animal. Or to someone who was being irrational.

For one awful, choking moment, she was seventeen again. Was standing in the sunlit kitchen of his old apartment, the one above the bakery that had, for a little while, been their apartment, when they were first married, when she was pregnant with Remy. When she’d found him packing all of his things, found him leaving, and he’d told her that he was going, with the sad-for-her gentleness of a parent breaking the news that a beloved dog had died. That day, he’d treated her like a child, or like an idiot, and he hadn’t done it before, or since.

Until right now.