He came after my mother. “He let her go for years. My mother. Let her go. He let us both go. Acted like we didn’t matter. That we weren’t good enough for him to be bothered with us. I was two years old when she took me away. Ran away in the night. She started a new life. Just me and her at first.” He had flashes of that life, every now and then. The little Christmas tree in the studio apartment. The train he’d found waiting on Christmas morning. The birthday cake she’d baked and the dinosaurs she’d painted on white poster boards for him. “Eventually, Gray and his mom joined us. They had their own…issues.” He wasn’t gonna tell her about Gray’s father. Not an MC member. A monster who’d worn the skin of a hero instead. Pretending to be the perfect guy in society, but he’d been just as twisted as Cass’s own father and uncle. Gray’s story wasn’t his to tell, though, and, shit, it was hard enough to share his own past.
Cass swallowed. “My mom lost her hearing in an accident when she was a kid. She taught me sign language, taught me how to read lips—she was a pro at that.” He could remember when they’d gone to restaurants and she’d been able to tell him what people far across the room had been saying, just by watching their mouths move. “I used to think she had superpowers.” He’d loved his mother so damn much. “No one else could pick up a conversation from the other side of a room. No one else could watch strangers in a mall and tell you exactly why they were arguing without ever hearing a sound from them. No one else could…” Cass stopped.
Agnes sent him a soft smile. “She sounds incredible.”
Her hand still held his. No, correction, his hand held hers. But he made himself let her go. “She would have liked you.”
Worry came and went on her face. “You sure about that? Sometimes, I’m not overly likable.”
“What the hell? Damn straight, you are likable.” Why would she think anything different? Who had she been hanging with? Who had told the woman she was not likable?
She shook her head. “I’m pretty sure I can be a pain in the ass.”
“You’re my pain in the ass,” he groused. “And I like you plenty.”
She smiled at him.
Javion was heading for the main entrance. Cass couldn’t keep walking down memory lane. He needed to cut to the damn chase. “He let my mother go for years, and then one day…he sent a killer after her. I came home, and she was gone.” Cass hated this memory. They’d been happy for so long. His mom, him, Gray, Gray’s mother—hell, she’d escaped her own pain. They’d all been together. A family. Things had been good, dammit.
Until they’d been a nightmare. “I knew it was a professional hit when I came in. One shot to the head.”
“Oh, God, Cass.” She threw her arms around him. Held tight.
Had that part not been in the files she’d read on him? His profile? Huh. Maybe Gray had covered that up.
“Everything changed then.” Fast. Because he had to get the words out. “My world went to shit. Gray and I—well, I guess you could say our paths diverged. I turned to the streets. Gangs. Fighting. I knew I had to go into the darkness in order to find the bastards who hurt her.” A pause. “My father. My uncle. I had to get into their world and hunt them down. As for Gray, my cousin was meant to protect the world. He became a Marine. I became a killer.”
“Your father drove into oncoming traffic. How many times do I have to remind you of that fact?”
He drove into traffic to get away from me. “I cornered my uncle on a long, desolate stretch of road in Arizona. He was between me and my gun and a cliff that would send him to hell. There was no way out. He spun away after telling me that he’d ordered the hit on my mother because he’d learned that my dad was watching my mom again, that he was still clinging to the same old weakness.” His mother had never been a weakness. Nothing about her had been weak. My mom had superpowers. He swallowed. And maybe his hands closed around Agnes and he hugged her. “My uncle…Winston drove that motorcycle of his right off the cliff even as I fired my weapon. I hit him, I know I did, and his bike crashed. I stood at the edge of the cliff, and I looked below, and I saw the wreckage. I know my shot found its mark. I shot him in the back…”
Wait. Fuck.
“Cass?”
He pulled away from her. “I shot him in the back,” he repeated. “And all of these sonsofbitches are coming at my back. Fitting, huh? Or maybe they’re just following orders. I’m not the only one in the family who was—is—an eye-for-an-eye type.”
“Orders?” Her brow crinkled as she peered up at him.
“His orders. Because if Levi Addams is to be believed…I didn’t kill the bastard. Somehow, despite getting shot and flying off a freaking cliff, Winston Striker is still alive—and he’s after me.” He rolled one shoulder. “Guess that means that, this time, I will just have to carve out his heart in order to make sure he’s dead.”
Javion was pounding on the double entrance doors. No more waiting. No more time.
Cass swung away from her so that he could go meet the guy.
But her hand flew out to curl around his left arm. “Why didn’t you tell me that Levi had the tattoo? You must have known about it.”
“Yeah, I knew.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? And do any other members of your crew also carry it? If so, I want to see their arms. I have to see the tats. That tat is the only way I can truly identify the man who tried to kill me.”
“What if more than one person has the exact tat? You think of that?”
“Of course, I thought of that.” Her eyes narrowed. “I remember his height. I remember his walk. I remember the sound of his voice. I remember the exact way the tat looked against his skin. If I see the SOB, I will know him.”
He believed she would. He also believed that Javion was pounding harder out there.
“It was a very specific tat, Cass. The scales were the most detailed I’ve ever seen. A real Rembrandt of a tattoo artist made the design.”
