Letting her go completely, I shuffled back, resting my head on the pillow and holding my arm out for her to come lie down. She fell into place, and I kept my eyes trained upwards as I tried to find a way or a place to begin when it came to talking about Pete.
“He was good to me when everyone else kept me at a distance. He was the first man to treat me like an equal, not a project or the guy who would one day be handing them their own asses on a plate.” I laughed weakly, but I didn’t find anything funny. “You already know I was created for all the wrong reasons. My father wanted a son who could make the dreams he never managed to achieve come true. An heir. Pete hated it. He hated that I wasn’t allowed to be the kid I should have been allowed to be, so he took me under his wing. He taught me everything I know: fighting, business stuff, women, even how to be the biggest asshole on the planet.” I smirkedand ran my fingers through her hair.
“He saw the real you—the one that hides away from the rest of the world.”
“I guess so. I didn’t know anything about the real world until he showed me it for what it was. He pushed me to think, to make decisions for myself. He knew when to let me run ahead and when to pull me back in line. I’d have been dead a long time before him if he hadn’t shown me how to survive, which is why him dying because of what I got him into is something I know I will never be able to forgive myself for. I can’t see beyond that. He was in that ring that night because of me—because of deals I made and promises I couldn’t keep. I thought I had it all figured out…” My voice trailed off as my nostrils flared, and I pulled in another long breath. “I got us into so much debt from the boxing shit. It started out as an outlet for bad guys to go against bad guys. Keep the violence off the streets and put it where it belonged. Bring a little extra cash into the club if we could keep it underground. But bets started getting placed. Debt grew for some and others got rich from it. It became addictive. It turns out more men get high off blood than we realized, but things went sour so quickly. Before I knew it, I was fixing fights, forcing my brothers to do shit like drug running for other clubs, asking them to always go that step too far so we could get back in control. I fought most days to try and keep our heads above water. I thought I was a man playing a man’s game.”
The bitter taste of reality on my tongue made my body tense again before I turned my head away.
“Drew,” she said gently, her fingers light on my chin, trying to coax my eyes back to her. “We all make mistakes. We all do things we aren’t proud of, and sometimes we do thingsthat change the courses of our lives forever. The way you talk about Pete tells me that he loved you, but that he was as much of a leader as you were. He was a father figure for you. It wasn’t your fault.”
I held her gaze for what felt like such a long time before I finally let the sadness out. “The Emps wanted revenge for the fact that I tried to double cross them. I cost their clubs money by fixing fights, all to satisfy the likes of the Navs, the Gray Skulls, and the Descended, among others. I’ve hated Cortez since I took my very first breath in this club. I wanted him to lose. I played with fire and I got burned. My whole family did, too. Only the Emps knew where to hit me hardest. They knew I’d try to take the fall I deserved. So they offered our club a fight to the death with one man left standing.”
My hand rose to her hair, my fingers carefully tucking it behind her ear as she waited for me to continue. “Ramirez had this evil, smug smile on his face when he called Pete’s name. He knew. They all knew what they were doing to me. I tried to stop it, I told them it wasn’t going to happen, but Pete… he volunteered without question. He jumped in that ring without a single glance backwards. Jedd could have killed an Emp. Slater, too. Kenny was just a kid. Harry would have died after two rounds, no doubt about it, but Pete, he wanted to pay my debt for me. He wanted to try to win, even though, deep down, we both knew he had no chance against Ramirez. It was a suicide fight, Ayda. Jedd was forced to hold me in place and make me watch the whole fucking thing. They held a gun to Jedd the whole way through.”
“Still not your fault, Drew. You were willing to pay for your mistakes, but that was taken away from you. You obviously tried to stop it from going where it went, and theywouldn’t let you. The only people to blame here are the assholes that put you between a rock and a hard place. Pete wanted to protect you. He got in that ring and there wasn’t a damn thing you could have done to stop him.” She ran her hands along my jaw and kept them there. “He wanted you to live, to go on, probably because he knew that you would never let yourself get in that position again, and you haven’t.”
“Sometimes I think I could tell you I shot ten men just for fun, and you’d still tell me it wasn’t my fault,” I whispered to her.
“I emphatically deny that,” she said with a small smile, dropping her hands to my shoulders. “This world you live in doesn’t have the same rules as the one out there. I just know you’re a good man in a fucked-up situation, doing the best that you can to survive.”
Exhaling slowly, my hands found the small of her back and began to trace their way up and down her spine. I wasn’t sure how to explain the shit that went on in my head to anyone, but I loved that she was so hell-bent on making me try to figure stuff out.
“I learned one lesson from it, though—one lesson that lets me know exactly what I need to do from this point on,” I said softly.
“And what’s that?” she asked, searching my eyes.
“I need to protect what’s mine, no matter what it takes. And you are mine, Ayda Hanagan. All mine. I won’t lose you to anyone.”
Chapter Five
Ayda
Black Friday.
It was the one day I willingly hid away from the rest of the world. The thought of having to be out in the crowds was enough to make me want to screw my feet to the floor. I’d heard some of the Hound Whores moving around the place not long after Drew had drifted back to sleep, and I didn’t pity them their fool's errand. They were heading to Corsicana to hit the sales and the crazy people that went with them. I stayed right where I was, my fingers brushing over the warm skin of Drew’s back as he finally fell into a deep sleep.
He’d been through so much in his life, and I didn’t even know the half of it. There were small pieces that he would feed me when he thought I needed to hear it, but other than that, he was shut up like Fort Knox most of the time. I wasn’t the type of person who needed to know everything, just as he didn’t seem to have the inclination to know about every bad decision and hairstyle I’d ever had in my lifetime. We drip fed one another, and for the most part, it worked.
That was the most Drew had spoken about Pete since I’d met him. I knew he blamed himself for his death. I knew he wore it like a funeral wreath around his heart until therewere times it almost suffocated him. The life that Drew and the others led wouldn’t be something I ever fully understood, but the more time passed, the more I realized I didn’t need to. As I’d said to him only hours earlier, they lived by a different set of rules. They were born from honor and a code of brotherhood that ran deeper than most bloodlines I’d seen. Yes, they were an MC, a ruthless, relentless entity that was unreasonable at times, but even so, above all of that, they were a family first and foremost. They did what they had to do to protect themselves and one another, which was exactly why Drew had ended up in prison, although he spoke even less of that part of his life than he did about Pete.
Those thoughts were the ones that plagued me as I lay there in the bed next to Drew, running my hand over his warm skin in calming circles. Every subtle ridge in his flesh that my fingers danced over was a scar, another story from his past I wasn’t privy to. They were all a part of him, though, so I accepted them with love and moved onto the next. Unfortunately, there were still some thoughts that hounded me as I crawled from the bed at the first sign of the sun kissing the horizon. It was those very thoughts that sent me out of the room and down the hall to Tate’s room, where I stood in the doorway watching him sleep before I finally pushed off the frame and headed toward his bed.
It had been a while since he and I had hung out, and even longer since we went to visit our parents in the cemetery. In fact, I hadn’t been to my parents’ grave since Drew Tucker walked into my life, and I didn’t deem that as a bad thing. It meant I wasn’t dwelling on their death or what I’d lost. It meant I was living, and I knew that they would understand.
Not on Black Friday, though.
That was a tradition, and that’s what had been nagging at the back of my mind as Drew’s words smashed around in my head.
Crawling onto the edge of Tate’s bed, I leaned over his hulking form and prodded at his dimples. He was smiling in his sleep, and that meant one of two things. I was pretty sure they would both scar me for a month.
“Hey, kid.”
“Not now,” he whimpered, pushing my hand away and tugging the blankets back up and over his shoulder. He rolled toward me, his face pushing into his pillow.
“Tate, wake up.”
“Ayda?”
