And as soon as the door shut, all those heavy feelings, all the weight from what had happened that fateful night, all the anger came out in full force.
“God fucking damnit!” I roared as I punched through the mirror in front of me.
I screamed in frustration and in pain. My knuckles were bloodied, but that was nothing. That would heal, maybe even create a good story at some point.
But the scars of my father’s loss?
I can see it now.
I’m right outside Lane’s house.
Dad’s going up to tell him the news about the Saints.
Suddenly, Butch and Axle intercept him, and Patriot comes over to tell me that they just want to make sure everything is fine. He’s using his fucking fake-ass charm.
And then...
Butch kills him.
One bullet. No remorse. No regret.
Some people preferred to black out a memory like that, for fear that it would cripple them forever.
Me? I replayed that exact moment when Butch raised his gun, pointed it, fired, and blood spurted off my father’s forehead. I remembered the sickening way my father just fell to the ground in a thud, dead before his head collided with the concrete. I remembered how it wasn’t a dramatic fall like a tree; it was more like a pitiful crumpling to the ground.
Even if my father was the fucking rat... even if he had somehow, someway betrayed the club... did he really fucking deserve a death like that?
He was not Red Raven, Secretary of the Black Reapers to me. He was not Red Raven, wise sage and trusted adviser of Roger Carter.
He was just Dad.
In more formal settings, he was Austin Smith Sr. He had passed down his name to me, wanting me to pick up in areas that he felt he had failed. He was a man that gave everything of himself to me under circumstances that would have broken anyone else.
And how did the Black Reapers handle such a serious accusation?
With an impromptu bullet to the fucking skull.
I collapsed to the floor and began to sob. Punching the mirror wasn’t going to bring my father back. Murdering Butch and the rest of the Black Reaper officers, save for Father Marcellus, the one man I had a genuinely good relationship with, wouldn’t bring my father back.
But I wanted desperately to believe that it would give me some measure of peace. Some said eye for an eye didn’t work, but that was only for those who believed forgiveness and compassion were possible. For the average man, sure.
I was no average man.
I was raised in a household without a mother. I was kicked out of multiple schools. I went to jail at fifteen. I had learned to trust no one, save for my father, a lesson I had forgotten terribly in the last weeks of my father’s life.Or perhaps he forgot it. Perhaps he trusted them too much.
And look what it cost him.
Forgiveness? Compassion? I could recognize them when I got them, and I would always appreciate them.
But I could never give them to my enemies. The most I could give was a cold shoulder instead of a fired bullet. That was the extent of my “forgiveness.”
Be strong. Get your ass off the floor, get to it, and be the man your father needs you to be.
I let out my last sniffle and rose. I looked at myself in the broken mirror, the shards in the glass cutting through the image of my limbs and my heart. I told myself that it was time to stop crying. I’d had a private moment. I could not have a public moment.
I turned and grabbed the door handle.
“Let’s go honor a hero.”
