“Yes.” Noting that he and Ryker are still conflicted, I add to my simple response, “I’ve wanted to be with him for a long time, but I was afraid to strain the relationships between our families. Please don’t make that fear a reality. Ty will be good to me.”
Ryker shocks the hell out of me when he piggybacks on that with a sigh. “He will be.”
With that, he swills every drop of his scotch. I’m guessing that has something to do with Mercy. He’ll never forget how quickly Ty got her to safety.
“If this is what you want …” Axel trails off, searching but resigned. “Well, like you said, it’s done. I can’t believe I didn’t get to walk you down the aisle. But as long as you know there’s nothing more important to us than you—”
“I know,” I whisper, bile coating my throat for what we both missed. “This doesn’t change anything. Nothing could.” Those words have me eager to embark on the inquiries I’ve been dismissing but desperately need to know. “So, I need you to tell me the truth. Were you involved somehow with the fire that killed Mom and Dad?”
He doesn’t meet my eyes. “Yes,” he says, hedging with a hoarse bleat, “I set it.”
“You set it,” I parrot because that is unfathomable and knocks the wind right out of my lungs. My hand presses into my sternum, like it can somehow enable me to ingest this absurd reality, while my other arm coils around my queasy stomach.
But Ryker immediately interjects his own tidbit. “He didn’t know Mom was there.”
That makes a little more sense. Axel adored our mother. But there’s still something missing.
“You intended to kill Dad though?” I probe, unsure how I evenfeel about that. Axel was a far bigger influence in my world, even when my father was alive, even before he knew I wasn’t his. But it’s still … a line. Right?
Axel scrubs his hand over his face with a groan. “He was making threats about you, Jax, and Mom. He … it was the only way. Believe me when I tell you that I tried … The threats were substantiated by plans.”
“What did he threaten?” I ask, my heart breaking with the inquiry. It’s already evident that the despicable verdict my father spewed at me over kettle corn was just the prelude to the real horrors.
Axel can’t even utter the words, his sapphire eyes brimming with so much sorrow that it wrecks me.
So, Ryker spits it out. “He said he’d kill the three of you if Mom didn’t disappear with you both.”
“Okay.” I choke back the immense devastation that slams into my chest, but my eyes sting, and my nose burns. “And Mom … if you didn’t think she was home, how did she end up …”
“Balzano,” Ryker hisses. “You know that name? Who that is?” he verifies, and when I nod my confirmation, he continues, “She went to him and pleaded for him to take her back. We knew she was going to do that. Their affair had been on and off for years. But she must’ve also told him that we had a plan to get rid of Dad. Axel had wanted to calm her fears and ensure she wouldn’t be home at that time, so he filled her in on the plan. She hoped with Dad gone, Balzano would choose her, you guys, all of us.”
My hand crawls up to my throat at the visual of my mother chasing her blueberries and rain, only to be among the crops lost to the burn. “But he didn’t agree to that, obviously.”
“No.” Axel tucks me into his side, kissing my hair and sounding so hollow. “He knocked her out and planted her in the house. I’m so sorry. I didn’t …”
“Motherfucker,” I utter as the anguish drips down my face, and I do my best to swipe it away.
“Yeah,” Ryker mumbles, staring at me with apprehension, likely worried about my mental state.
“And”—I lick a salty tear from my lips—“he just went back to living his life?”
The real questions skulk in the space between us.Why didn’t you kill him? Why didn’t he suffer?
Axel clears his throat, centering himself. “I didn’t know at the time. I thought I’d fucked up somehow or that she’d given up and … not that it would’ve mattered. I was the one who’d set the fire. When I confronted Balzano about his last conversation with Mom, trying to figure out what the hell had gone wrong, he was livid and claimed he had evidence about what I’d done. That if I reported their relationship or if anything happened to him, it would be released, and you’d all be taken away from me. I wasn’t willing to risk it. Plus, he threatened to kill you and Jax if anyone found out the two of you were his, so I swore I’d never mention a word about him to anyone. And I …”
“He did what was necessary to keep us safe.” Ryker’s loyalty laces through that.
He’s always stood by Axel. I’m guessing it’s in large part due to the two of them enduring this tragedy and having their lives upended as a result.
It takes a hot minute for me to digest that, but I’m still confused. “How did you find out that Balzano hid Mom in there?”
“There was a judge,” Axel begins. “A few months before all hell broke loose about the paternity results for you and Jax, I’d heard through the grapevine at La Lune Noire that this judge liked owning people—something I understood since that’s how Dad operated. Turned out, he hated Dad. So, when Dad started threatening Mom, I got myself a meeting with the guy. I granted him a lifetime of liberties at our resort, which also gained him a ton of corruption intel—his favorite commodity—in return for him to use his resources to cover up my involvement in the fire when the time came. Before I figured out Mom was in the house, it looked like everything went asplanned. Dad took his sleeping pills, passed out, the fire was made to look like an accident, and the judge and I had a deal.”
He stalls there and his vexation over the matter is written all over his features. “But,” he sighs, “what I didn’t know was that the crooked judge also had strong ties to Balzano. The details aren’t spelled out, but it appears that the judge discovered Balzano’s involvement, and he covered up his part too.”
As the harrowing picture comes into focus, I yearn for more details. “So, you just learned that Balzano killed Mom?”
Ryker takes that, filling in the holes. “The judge kept records of all his deals—armed himself with enough dirt to throw the country into mayhem. It’s been several years since he died, but the documents were just recovered. Wells alerted us.”
