“Your truth.” I laughed, draining the rest of my beer. I threw the empty bottle and made it into the garbage can. I stood, looked directly at him. Lion to fucking mouse. “I might look like my old man, but I’m not my old man yet. Those are powerfulfucking shoes to fill. Shoes I’m fucking proud to wear. You know how I know he’s more powerful than me?
“I would have killed you if you ever spoke those same words to me. He has the restraint to control his urges. I fucking don’t. Unless my wife asks it of me. Maybe the only reason you’re living today is because my mamma asked it of him.Hiswife.Mywife is my life, and anyone tries to come between us, take her from me, we’re going to have a fucking problem. History or not. Blood or fucking not.”
I turned to leave when he called my name.
I turned to face him.
He was standing, his beer bottle in hand, the label entirely gone. “For what it’s worth, I fucking regret those words every day of my life. Would take ’em back if I could. Your old man is my brother, and when he fucking cut me out, it felt like I lost both of my brothers. One by force, another by choice.”
I said nothing to him as I turned my back, prepared to race back to my wife.
That was Mitch Lewis’s issue to iron out, and I was not a man of the cloth for him to confide in, or a therapist who could tell him what to do. That was for him to figure out as a man. He spoke the words as one.
The only reason I had stopped to see him was to see the situation from a different perspective. My old man’s. I realized after meeting my wife, making vows to her, that I was understanding my old man’s position in life like I never had before. I was walking across the country in his fucking shoes, even if they felt too big at that moment.
I felt like my wife and her rubber boots slapping against the ground when she came after me—no longer fucking afraid to make a claim on what she wanted.
Me.
The thought made me grin.
“Fausti!”
My eyes snapped to a man who was waving at me from across the street. Benji. A Fausti solider was behind him, running for me.
Benji had a grin on his face, while the soldier was all fucking business.
“Barroom brawl,” Benji said, shaking his head. “Reminds me of the stories my old man would tell me about Maggie Beautiful when she would fight like a hissing cat.”
Leave it to a town of this size to spread news faster than a Fausti soldier could report it.
Mitch stepped outside of the garage, narrowing his eyes.
My truck came barreling down the street. Rio was driving.
“Get the fuck in,” he said. “Our women have lost their minds, and one of our soldiers, possibly, an eye. Maggie Beautiful hit him in the eye with a beam of sunlight from her makeup mirror, or whatever they’re fucking called, telling him someone had hit him with voodoo, before they all took off for the bar. He thought he had been cursed. He said Maggie Beautiful mentioned something about a guy named Puddin’ before she got him in the eye and stole his sight.”
I jumped inside the truck. Mitch jumped in the truck bed, Benji right behind him.
Mitch hooted. “This feels like old times!” He knocked on the back window twice.
Rio pushed the trembling truck to its limits. My arm was outside the window, my fingers tapping on the metal.
My wife.
My wife was pregnant and in the middle of a fucking barroom brawl.
The truck bounced, and dirt spit from the ground as Rio slid to a stop outside the packed bar. It was bright outside, but inside the bar, my eyes had to adjust to the dimness.
It was fucking chaos.
I threw an elbow into the face of a man who came at me. I had just walked through the door.
“Fuck,” Rio said, his eyes searching for my sister.
My eyes found my wife.
She was sitting on the bar, in her prim and proper outfit, a smile on her face, a beer bottle in her hand—it seemed like she had it poised and ready to go if someone got too close. I didn’t see how that was fucking possible. Marciano was keeping guard in front of her, our mamma, our sister, our grandmother, and a slew of other women, his arms crossed, as if he was nothing but a bored bouncer.
