“Hannah, now I need to go and kill Jason. I’m serious.”
A pause came.
“I don’t care, Hannah. I can help raise the kid. The rest of us can help raise the kid. I—”
Mason bit his lip so hard, I thought it was going to start bleeding. His fists clenched and unclenched. And then he looked up and saw me.
I didn’t dare break eye contact now, fearing doing so would make him even more suspicious. But I was now as good as fucked, and I didn’t see any way out of the situation.
“Look, if you keep defending this guy, I am going to fucking go kill him myself right now. I am in no fucking mood to talk about this, Hannah. He knocked you up, my sister. He’s going to fucking pay!”
Mason hung up the phone, stuffed it in his pocket, and drove a fist into the nearby wall. Mason barely seemed affected by the fact that his knuckles were bloodied. And he looked back at me.
“How’d you like to help me commit a murder today, Garrett?” he said. “How’d you like to help me murder the guy that knocked up Hannah?”
“Your sister?” I said, fearing I was doing a terrible job of acting the part.
“No, I mean Hannah, the girl that works at Southwest Dine. Yes, I mean my sister, you fucking idiot! We didn’t do the job on Jason. I thought we did, but I should have fucking known that the Bandits would fight dirty like this. I—”
His phone rang. He grabbed it with such force from his pocket, I wondered if he’d crack the damn thing in his hands. He scowled at the name and answered.
“What, Hannah?”
He looked at me with an eye roll, as if saying, “Can you believe this girl?” I just bit my lip, though I came awfully close—too close—to cracking a joke about Hannah having too much to say. Mason turned around and started pacing, giving me a chance to finally break free.
Which, of course, meant that as I walked toward the garage entrance of the shop, both Brock and Steele were waiting for me, concern etched on their faces.
“Guess the secret’s out, huh?” Steele said.
“Or, more like, the secret’s inside but now obvious,” Brock said.
“Way to steal my kind of joke and do so terribly,” I said. “But also, really? Is it that obvious that I’m—”
“Yes,” both of them said at the same time.
I sighed, muttered under my breath, and looked back at Mason, still pacing on the gravel, still talking to Hannah, still figuring out if he would murder or merely assault today.
“Are you going to say anything?” Steele said.
When I turned around, Brock had already gone into the office, his cell phone in hand. I assumed he was about to call Cole, with Butch having returned to California for the time being.
“What, so that Mason can beat my ass like you beat Brock’s?”
Steele looked at me in confusion, his head tilted to the side, before he said, “ah,” the memory coming back.
“The fact that I couldn’t remember at first should be comforting.”
“It’s not. It wasn’t your sister that Brock slept with.”
“Ex is not exactly like petting your friend’s dog.”
I had no response to that. I was too consumed with trying to figure out how to handle the current fucking mess.
“Part of the reason I fucked up Brock when I did, you know, is because I found out by accident,” Steele said. “Went over to see him—had a suspicion, that much is fucking true—and found Tara in his place. Beat the fuck out of him. Had he just admitted it—”
“You two still would have fought, don’t even fucking act like you wouldn’t,” I said. “I’ll bet you a fifth of any alcohol you want that if he’d confessed the truth, you would have punched him.”
“Maybe,” Steele said.
