Clay couldn’t say a word for the first few seconds, but he kept moving closer, this face-off feeling inevitable.
“Wow, bro,” Tyler said, nervously stepping back and filling the tense silence. “I forgot how fucked up you look with that shit on your face.”
“My tats?” Clay growled. “You’re just standing out here in my woman’s yard while she’s being held by those murderers, and you want to have a conversation about my tats?” Oh, the rage was coming back now, cleaning out the shock and the hurt in a way that felt righteous and strong. “Why don’t you tell me more about these tats, you fucking asshole? Maybe tell me how you could possibly have stopped some of this from happening?”
“Christ, man. What are you talkin’ about?”
“That’s how you’re gonna play it, then?” He indicated the house, glowing with an ironic warmth beyond them. “Just stand here and pretend like you didn’t sell me to the highest bidder? I don’t have time for you.” Clay looked away and swallowed before letting the rage take wing and hauling back to send his fist flying, right at the fucker’s face. It connected with a satisfying crunch.
He didn’t feel a thing, though. Nothing except rage and the need to destroy, but all the while the clock was ticking. He had to go. Fuck Tyler.
“What the hell, man? Clay, Clay…” Tyler staggered and wiped his mouth, coming away with blood.
“She inside, you motherfucker? You set her up?”
“She’s in there.”
“You gave her to ’em?”
“Nah, man, I—”
There was no time for more of his lies. “Shut the fuck up.”
Tyler’s expression changed before he shifted and started to reach for his gun, but he was no match for Clay. Tyler, who sat behind a desk and pretended to be a good man, versus Clay, who’d spent so many years out there, working hard to pass as filth. He put a hand around the man’s neck and pinned him to the side of the shed, disarming him easily. So fucking easily. “What the hell do you get out of this, huh?”
Tyler opened his mouth, as if to defend himself, then closed it.
“You not even gonna give me that?” Every one of Clay’s words was a whispered arrow, flying at his target, wanting, needing to hurt him. “When’d you start working with them?”
“When?” Tyler asked. “When they showed up at my goddamned door is when.”
“I was under?”
“Yeah. Just toward the end.”
“Before I got shot?”
A pause. “Yeah.”
“So, the night you were supposed to send the team in to get me out? The delay? That was—”
“You don’t fucking get it, do you, Clay? One Saturday, those fucking bastards just show up at my house, with Jayda and the kids in the backyard, and…fuck, man. I didn’t have a choice.”
There was always a choice.
“You set me up to get shot in the back.” Something about his voice must have gotten through to Tyler, because he went still.
“’Course not, man. ’Course not,” Tyler whined, sounding defeated, and Clay backed away. He couldn’t let this go. Would never let this go.
“You the one who killed Bread, Ty? Was that you?” He moved his hand away from Tyler’s neck, blinking at the pain of all this deception.
“What? Fuck no, man.”
“They get his location from you?”
Tyler didn’t answer, but the truth was visible in the slope of his shoulders, the way his lips turned down at the edges, and even under cover of darkness, he couldn’t look Clay in the eye.
“And here?” Through the barrage of pain, a slice of anger came back. Clay was furious. “You sicced them on George? You—”
