Speed of Light (Marauders #3.5) Read online

  Speed of Light

  A Marauders Interlude

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  By Lina Andersson

  THE FREAK CIRCLE PRESS

  Speed of Light © Lina Andersson 2015

  All Rights Reserved

  Lina Andersson has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this book under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.

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  Cover art & Design by Kalle Andersson

  ALSO BY LINA ANDERSSON

  THE MARAUDERS SERIES:

  Arrow of Time, Book 1

  Perfect Collision, Book 2

  S-Duality, Book 2,5

  Center of Gravity, Book 3

  Dedication:

  For my dad – Who might not always agree with me, but he always believes in me

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  Acknowledgments:

  A big thank you to Susan Fanetti, Sarah Osborne, C.D. Breadner, and Torrie McLean for all their help with this book.

  And another big thank you to them, and all the other ladies of the FCP for their constant encouragement, support, and just generally for being awesome people.

  Speed of Light: According to Special Relativity, the speed of light, c, is the maximum speed in the universe. It is generally assumed that c has the same value throughout spacetime, meaning that it’s not dependent on location, and do not vary over time.

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  11.

  They scramble and they clamber and violently seize me,

  They pinch me and they squeeze me,

  And tie me to the rack forthwith,

  Where Greta and her band soon put me to the question

  And wring from me my pennies to ruin their digestion

  On sweets bought of candy-man Smith.

  “Marauders” - Gustaf Fröding

  PROLOGUE

  A Cheerful Holiday… Next Year

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  VINCENT ‘MACE’ MULLEN WASN’T sure how the fuck he’d ended up in his current situation. He looked at the little baby with thick black hair sleeping in his arms. She wore a red dress with fluffy white trim, and he was pretty sure he’d seen a similar dress on one of the strippers at The Booty Bank the night before.

  It was Alma, Mitch’s baby, and Mace still wasn’t sure who it was that had handed her to him. Either way, she’d puked, and then taken his beard braid in a firm grip before falling asleep. Every time he’d tried to pull his beard out of her hand, she whined, and Mitch had told him to ‘not fucking wake her up.’ Mace was pretty sure Mitch just liked to see him suffer.

  “How the fuck did that happen?” Sisco chuckled with a nod towards the baby.

  “I don’t know. She puked on me and then fell asleep.”

  “Pretty sure that’s happened before.”

  “Yeah, but they’re usually older and the puke smells of alcohol, not milk.”

  Sisco laughed and waved at Anna, Mitch’s old lady.

  “Swan, have pity on my man here and take your daughter from him.”

  Sisco was the only one who called Anna ‘Swan.’ Mace had asked her why, and she’d explained that it was from some ballet she’d been in. He still wasn’t convinced that she’d been honest, since he had a hard time imagining a grown person pretending to be a swan on stage—even if it was in a ballet.

  Anna grabbed her cane and walked over to him with a smile.

  “Did Mitch put you up to this?”

  “Yeah,” Mace admitted.

  Anna nodded. “Bet he had some great reason for why he wouldn’t take her, too.” She handed her cane to Sisco and leaned over Mace. Gently, she pried Alma’s hand from his beard and lifted her up. “Thank you.”

  She reached for her cane and took off. When Alma was born, Mace had wondered how Anna would carry her around, but he’d soon noticed that it didn’t seem to bother her at all that she just had one free hand. Quite often, Alma was sort of hanging over her arm, legs and arms straight down, and her head resting on the inside of Anna’s elbow. It looked kind of comfy.

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  Three hours later they were leaving.

  “I’ll meet you at the clubhouse in an hour,” Sisco said with a wave as the two of them walked down the driveway towards their bikes.

  “Yeah,” Mace answered, and he was already bracing himself for what was about to come.

  The Marauders had always been a family-oriented club, and for as long as he’d been a member there had been a few kids—toddlers—with them for Christmas. He liked it, but he fucking loved leaving them behind to get to the clubhouse, with Sisco and whatever other single members they had, and get laid. This year, he assumed that Bull, Tommy, and Wrench would be with them, since none of them had any family to celebrate Christmas with. Tommy had a brother in New York, and he was going up there for New Year’s. Bull had a couple of ex-wives and a kid, but he’d still join them at the clubhouse, since his kid was spending the evening with his stepmom. Mace had never heard anything about Wrench’s family, though, so he assumed there wasn’t any.

  Either way, he liked the family dinner with the club, and the ending of the day at the clubhouse. It was the part in the middle he hated—when he went to see his brother and his family.

  Mace wished he were stoned, or at least drunk, when he rang the doorbell. He was mid deep breath when the door swung open, and there she was—Joyce.

  “Vince, I’m so glad you came,” she said with her big smile. She gave him a tight hug, and he held on for a few seconds too long, inhaling deeply. “How long are you staying?”

  “Just an hour or so, as usual,” he answered as he let her go and turned towards his brother, Victor. “Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas, Vince.”

  His family all called him ‘Vince,’ and he didn’t argue with it. In fact, he preferred it that way. He was ‘Vince’ with his family, and ‘Mace’ with his brothers, no crossing the firm lines he’d drawn between his two different lives.

  He followed Vic and Joyce inside and gave his presents to their two sons before giving his mom a kiss. She was the main reason he bothered to visit his brother every Christmas.

  “Hungry?” Joyce asked.

  “No. I’m good,” he answered. Mel’s Christmas dinner and dessert never left any room for anything else for the next twelve hours. He had no idea why Joyce tried every year anyway, despite knowing what he’d answer. “A coffee would be nice.”

  He watched her as she walked into the kitchen. She was wearing a red shirt with a black skirt that hugged her still-fine ass.

  She’d still been Joyce Cooper the first time he’d met her. For some reason he couldn’t remember, he’d been in the school library, and he’d noticed the brunette with the slightly too-big mouth sitting at a table. When he’d sat down opposite her, she’d looked up, and he’d noticed her thick, big glasses, but he’d known right from the start that she’d be beautiful as hell underneath them. Once he saw her without them, he’d sworn she’d one day be Joyce Mullen. It just hadn’t turned out the way he’d planned; she was a Mullen, but she wasn’t his.

  He turned to his brother. They looked quite alike, except Vic had short hair and no beard, and his face wasn’t as worn and tired as Mace’s was. He assumed that Vic used a lot of shit to maintain his looks. Surface was important to him.

  Vic knew how Mace felt about Joyce, and he’d known it since they were kids. The sibling rivalry had always been tough between them, but Mace hoped that wasn’t the only reason Vic had gone after Joyce. He hoped, but he wasn’t sure.

  T
hey’d become friends, Joyce and him, and that was when he’d learned what ‘The Friend Zone’ meant. His next mistake had been to bring her home and introduce her to his family, including his three-years-older brother, who’d been seventeen at a time. No fourteen-year-old could compete with a seventeen-year-old; it was that fucking simple. It had been okay as long as Joyce was a girl with too big, frizzy hair and thick glasses, but then she grew up, and Vic had noticed what only Mace had been able to see until then: Joyce was beautiful.

  When Joyce had knocked on his window to tell him that Vic had kissed her, Mace had honestly thought he would throw up, but he’d pretended to be happy for her. He’d fucking pretended for years, and then they’d gotten married with Mace as the best man. Not exactly how he’d imagined watching her walk up the aisle. While the happy couple were on their honeymoon, Mace had started hanging out with the Marauders.

  “I really wish you’d spend Christmas with us,” she said when she came with his coffee. “Christmas is for family.”

  “Leave it, honey,” Vic said.

  “I’m just—”

  “Leave it,” he repeated. “You do this every year, and it’s the same every time. Just leave him alone. He’s a grown man, and he does what he wants.”

  And that was the other side of why he hated seeing Joyce with Vic. It would have been one thing if she was happy with a good guy, but Vic wasn’t a good guy. He was an ass, and he had been from the very beginning. Mace had tried to talk to her about Vic both before and after they’d gotten married. Each time she’d been so pissed, and the last time she’d yelled about how she wasn’t a quitter and that he should just butt out of her marriage. He’d left it alone since then.

  To be fair, he assumed Vic had been in love with her once. He just didn’t much believe in staying faithful or sticking to one woman. Mace didn’t know how much Joyce knew, but she’d never been stupid, so, sadly, he assumed she knew most of it. How someone with a woman as beautiful, stunning, and smart as Joyce could ever feel the need for more was beyond him. He also didn’t fail to see the irony in the fact that Vic was considered a ‘good guy’ with a good reputation and just generally looked like the pillar of society, while Mace was the outlaw bad boy.

  He stayed for an hour, and when he left, Joyce followed him to the door.

  “I wish you’d come more often,” she said in a low voice. “I just… I wish you were around more.”

  “That’s what happens when people grow up,” he smiled. “You know, stuff to do, places to be.”

  “I worry about you.”

  “Don’t. I’m fine. No need to worry at all.” He leaned down and gave her forehead a kiss. “Take care of yourself, J-girl.”

  “I hate it when you call me that!”

  “I know,” he laughed. “Merry Christmas.”

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  When he arrived at the clubhouse, Sisco and Tommy were already getting busy. Tommy with a girl on the pool table, and Sisco on the couch with another one.

  “Hey,” someone said behind him, and he turned around.

  “Hey, Sandra.” Sandra was the spitting image of the young Joyce, and he was glad she was there. “Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas,” she said with a smile and grabbed ahold of the collar of his shirt. “Sisco said you’d be here, and that I’d should be really, really good to you.”

  “Did he now?”

  “I’m your Christmas present from him.”

  There wasn’t anything about him that Sisco didn’t know, and he was the only one in the Marauders who’d actually met Joyce, so he knew what she looked like. When he looked over to Sisco to give him an appreciative nod, he realized that he could’ve given him a happy dance and Sisco still wouldn’t have noticed—he was very busy with the blonde on his lap.

  “Come here, girl,” he said to Sandra instead. He knew Sandra’s family lived somewhere upstate New York, and that she rarely went to see them. It was the third or fourth Christmas she’d spent at the clubhouse, but he didn’t comment on it. That would be personal, and he never got personal with sweetbutts. “Whatta you got under that dress?”

  “Skin,” she smiled. “Been waitin’ for ya.”

  “Good girl,” he mused and sat down in an armchair. “Wanna show me some of that skin?”

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  When someone knocked on his door, Mace turned to the side and tried to focus enough to see the alarm clock. He finally grabbed it and held it an inch from his face. Four a.m. With a sigh, he sat up and walked over to the door. With his hands in front of him, he realized that his vision was slowly coming back, so he’d obviously fallen asleep with his contacts in. It wasn’t the first time, and he knew he’d pay for it the next day.

  He opened the door.

  “You alone, bro?” Sisco asked.

  “Yeah.” He’d gone to bed when the rest of them had passed out in the bar. “Why?”

  “Someone here to see you.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Joyce. Want me to keep her occupied for a few minutes?”

  Mace was trying to kickstart his brain to make sure he’d heard that right. Once it hit home, he cleared his throat.

  “Yeah. Keep her busy for five minutes.”

  Sisco smiled and nodded.

  Five minutes later he waked out to the bar and found Joyce having coffee with Sisco. The remnants of the party were still all around, and it was strange to see her sitting in the middle of it wearing the same neat outfit she’d worn during his visit the night before.

  “Hi,” she smiled when she saw him.

  “Hi.” He had absolutely no idea what else to say, and he realized that he was staring at her stupidly. “Um… Any particular reason you’re showing up here at four a.m.?”

  “Can we do this in private?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he shrugged. “I got a room. You can bring the coffee.”

  She didn’t, but in her usual polite manner, she thanked Sisco for the coffee, grabbed her handbag, and followed Mace through the corridor and to his room. He let her in first, and then closed the door behind him. When he turned around, she was unbuttoning her shirt, and he froze. It was possibly the first time since he’d popped his cherry that a woman in her underwear made him freeze up instead of take action.

  “Joyce?”

  “Please don’t talk,” she mumbled and took a few hesitant steps towards him. “Please?”

  She was his brother’s wife, and that should have stopped him. If it had been the wife of one of his actual brothers, one of the Marauders, it would have. But this was different, he told himself. This was Joyce, and she’d been his long before she’d become Vic’s.

  So, he shut his mouth and pulled her into his arms.

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  By the time he’d woken up, Joyce was gone. Even if it hadn’t been a surprise, it had been a disappointment. They hadn’t talked much, and he had no idea why she’d done what she had. It had been just as good as he’d always imagined it would be, though. Possibly even better.

  He’d just sat down for the morning coffee when Vic stormed in. That was when Mace started to get some clue to what Joyce had done, and his suspicions were confirmed when Vic, without uttering a single word, just planted his fist on Mace’s nose.

  She’d done it to get back at Vic. Why the fuck she’d put Mace in the middle of the mess known as her marriage, he had no idea, but she had.

  “You motherfucker!” Vic yelled and tried for another punch, but Bull and Sisco stepped between them. The only reason Vic wasn’t already on the floor with a broken nose was that they knew he was Mace’s brother. “Do you two know what he did? He fucked my wife. My own fucking brother fucked my wife!”

  “I really don’t give a shit what he did, but if you try again I’ll break your fucking arm,” Bull growled, and when he sounded like that, people tended to pay attention.

  Mace reached for something to stop the blood flow from his nose. He suspected that it was broken—again. With a filthy kitchen towel under his nose,
he looked at Vic. “Are you here just to punch me, or did you actually want to talk?”

  Vic glared at Bull and Sisco, and then he sighed. “Talk.”

  The others let him go and moved to the other end of the room. They weren’t gonna let Vic out their sight, though.

  “Why?” Vic asked, and Mace couldn’t help laughing.

  “Are you telling me you give a shit? I doubt you’ve been able to keep it in your pants for a month straight since you two went on your first date.”

  “How’s that a fucking reason? She’s my wife, and you’re my brother.”

  Mace shook his head. He had no idea what to say to that.

  “I think we both know why she did what she did. And I’m pretty fucking sure we both know why I took the chance when I got it, too.”

  Vic didn’t answer, but it was clear to Mace that he understood. No matter what he was saying to Vic, he felt bad. He shouldn’t have. He should’ve used his brain, and he definitely should’ve known something was wrong with what she was doing.

  More than anything, he was pissed at her. It might not be right, but he was. She’d known, and while he wondered how long she had known, he also wondered why she’d talked about missing him just twelve hours before permanently fucking up what little they still had.

  “What did she tell you?” he asked.

  “That she’d been here, you’d fucked, and that she wanted a divorce.”

  Actually, when Mace thought about it, he was mostly pissed at Vic. He’d turned a great girl into a miserable woman.

  The more he thought about it, the more he thought all three of them had acted like complete fucking assholes. Yes, he included himself in that.

  “What did she say to you?” Vic asked. “Are you two—”

  “No,” Mace interrupted him. “We’re not anything, and we won’t be.”

  “So you fuck her, but you won’t make an honorable woman out of her?”

  “We’re not seventeen, and marrying her won’t make an honorable woman out of her. You’ve proven that. She doesn’t want me. If she did, she wouldn’t have told you what happened.”

  Vic sighed and sat down on the bar stool next to Mace, and after a few seconds, Mace sat down, too.

  “Any cognac here?” Vic asked, and Mace huffed.