#TeaserTuesday: LDL 6

 

So hot off the press it doesn't even have a title yet. I started planning this before I broke ground on Lord Have Mercy, and, unfortunately, it won't leave me alone. This one scales back to a more intimate, personal conflict, a little more romance-focused, less club-takes-on-the-world. We're back in New York with the youngest of Devin's brood, set three years after Nothing More. 

 

Shep expected an interrogation, and wasn’t disappointed. The second they heard a door click shut down the hall, Toly turned to him, eyes nothing but dark slits, jaw set at a tense angle. The whole effect was ruined by the squirming baby on his shoulder and the disaster of his hair, but Shep was going to enjoy that rather than point it out.

“Where was she?”

“Sounding awful fatherly there, Moscow,” Shep drawled.

Toly exhaled forcefully and didn’t deign to repeat himself. He was serious, Shep saw, and he could respect that; in this case, he was serious, too.

He dropped the asshole act. “Big white townhouse on the UWS. She was sitting on the sidewalk when I got there, halfway to hypothermic, and some little punkass was trying to give her something in a Solo cup.” His hand clenched on empty air at the memory of seeing her like that, clearly incapacitated, weaving where she sat in an inelegant heap on the cold concrete, some chinless little shit looming in her face and waving around more drugs in a cup. “When she called, she was slurring and out of it. She said she only had three sips and shouldn’t have been drunk.”

Toly’s expression darkened. “And you believed her?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“She just lied straight to my face.”

“Yeah, well, she doesn’t lie to me.”

Toly opened his mouth…and then closed it. A groove appeared between his black brows.

Shep found that he didn’t want to backtrack or otherwise diffuse the statement. It was true, and he liked that it was. In fact, it felt satisfying to define it out loud that way. Maybe she was a little shit, but she didn’t feed him fibs the way she did other people. He got the truth; it almost felt, strangely, satisfyingly, like he’d earned that truth.