Yes. Yes. He did.
“No, no, no, no, no...”
But instead of seeing it through my father’s perspective, I thought about what he had said on the video that Father Marcellus had sent me. I thought about all of the snide remarks he’d made about Lane—and how he had never badmouthed anyone in the club before that. I thought about how he always seemed to speak to me off of club property instead of on it.
Far from being an innocent man framed for something he didn’t do... far from playing a double-cross game of working with the Saints...
And that alone...
That fucking thing alone, that should have been the biggest sign of all. Really? My father, working for the Saints with the intent to double-cross them? This wasn’t fucking Cold War shit. We were the center of our own lives, but we weren’t bigger than two clubs feuding for the right to live our lives in the middle of a small town in one state in one country of this whole damn world.
“Why...” I said, my eyes starting to well. “Why...”
I wanted to say more, but now, the venom seemed to make it impossible for me to clear my throat. No longer did I have the capability of opening up to say more; I was reduced to just blubbering like a fucking idiot.
Which I was. I was an enormous fucking idiot. I’d missed so many damn signs.
“Why did... why did you do... why?”
I took a deep breath and told myself to stop acting like a fucking whiny brat. I needed to ask the questions, even if I could never get real answers.
“Why... did you... betray... the Black... Reapers?”
I closed my eyes.
But this time, no answer came.
I suspected that no answer ever would come. It was one thing to have proof that my father had betrayed the club. At that point, it didn’t really much matter why, whether he’d been bribed, he hated Lane that much, he had a change of heart, what-fucking-ever.
It only mattered that... that...
To think, it was still fucking hard to think those words, let alone say them out loud.
It was bullshit.
Fucking stupid bullshit.
“Why the fuck would you do that, Dad...”
It wasn’t a question. My tone was getting too heavy, too angry, too violent for me to be asking questions. I was more just lobbing accusations than anything inquisitive.
“Why the fuck would you put yourself in this spot,” I growled.
I shook my head.
“To get yourself killed!”
Seriously, why? Why? Why?
Why would he even have gone to the Fallen Saints in the first place? Even if my father had good intentions, he had to have known how bad that would have looked. He had to know that there were easier ways of upending the Saints; our problem after Roger’s death was leadership, not personnel or resources.“Our” problem...
Even if that wasn’t complex, he’d put me in a terrible spot of trying to make a damn bit of sense of anything. I couldn’t see my ass from my head at this point, I was so fucked. I’d left the Black Reapers on account of the Sergeant-at-Arms killing my dad, and now I’d just become a different shade of Reaper and become the very thing that had murdered my father.
I was sure some fucking psychiatrist could have a field day analyzing that one.Let them, I figured. I was drowning so much under the weight of my emotions and anger right now that I couldn’t even think.
“And now we’re split,” I muttered.
Cole and Lane are apart.
