One text. No words. Just an address.
I looked at it for three seconds and then looked at Brendon while he drove and felt the war happening inside my chest play out in real time.
I texted back. Give me an hour.
I didn’t know what I was doing anymore. What I knew was that ten days of silence had told me something about myself that I didn’t have a clean answer for. And that man in a suit across a dinner table had just looked at me like I was already his and somehow that felt more true than anything I had been telling myself for the past week and a half.
I was in trouble.
And the most honest part of me had stopped pretending I wanted to get out of it. I needed Griz. Maybe he was right. Maybe I did need to let Brendon go. Hell. I didn’t know what to do.
The safe house was a nondescript spot that we used for situations exactly like this one. A place where things got handled without the outside world having any involvement in it. Usually it was all Deuce’s problems getting taken care of here. Now, it’s my own problems.
I pulled up and sat in the car for a minute before I went in.
Savage had been in there for days now. Fed, comfortable, not harmed. I had made that clear when I had him picked up. I wasn’t running a torture operation. I just needed him contained until I was ready to have the conversation that needed to be had, and I hadn’t been ready until now.
I got out and went inside.
He was sitting at the table in the main room when I walked in. Guarded and triple locked from the outside. He looked up and something moved across his face that wasn’t quite relief and wasn’t quite fear. Something in between. He looked tired. Notphysically, he looked fine physically. But tired in the way a man looked when he had been alone with his own thoughts for too long and the thoughts hadn’t been kind.
I pulled out the chair across from him and sat down.
Neither one of us said anything for a moment.
Then Savage said, “You gonna kill me? Get the shit over with if so.”
“If I was going to kill you,” I said, “you’d already be dead. Nigga look how you’ve been living these past few days. I could have had your bitch ass tied up and beaten every day. You know, the way that you did me. But you’ve been living luxury in this motherfucker.”
He nodded slow. Looked down at the table then back up. “So what then.”
“We’re gonna talk,” I said. “For real this time. Not around each other. It’s shit that’s been needing to be addressed and we about to handle that. For real.”
He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms but didn’t say anything to stop me so I kept going.
“I know why you did what you did,” I said. “You felt like Grim needed somebody to go to bat for him and you took on that responsibility. You’ve been covering for that nigga your whole life the same way I was covering for both of y’all before I left. I understand that. I’m not sitting here pretending I don’t understand it.”
Savage’s jaw moved but he stayed quiet.
“What I need you to understand,” I continued, “is that I never wanted to hurt you. Either one of you. Leaving wasn’t aboutabandoning my brothers. It was about surviving a situation that had gone past the point of no return and I was seventeen years old and I made the only decision I could see clearly enough to make at that moment.”
“You killed Pops,” Savage said. Not accusatory. Just stating it.
“Yeah,” I said. “I did. It was him or my brother, and I’ll kill the bitch ass nigga again if I could.”
“Yeah.” Was all he said.
I laughed shortly. I was trying to have a real conversation, and he was sitting here being stubborn. I was being too kind if you ask me. But again, this was my baby brother.
“My problem with you was that I didn’t know why you left. You ain’t told me shit. He unfolded his arms and put his hands flat on the table. “Griz, I was fifteen years old. I came home and my father was dead and my brother was screaming and my mama was losing her mind and you were just gone. You were just gone and nobody could tell me why or where you went or if you were coming back.” His voice stayed even but I could hear what was underneath it. “You know what that does to a fifteen year old kid who loved and admired his fuckin brothers? You were the one that held everything together. You were the one that made sure we ate when Pops didn’t give a fuck. You were the one that stood between us and him when he got in his moods. And then you were just not there anymore.”
I sat with that. Let it land the way it deserved to.
“I know,” I said.
“Do you?” He looked at me. “Because from where I was standing it felt like you chose yourself over us.”
“I chose staying alive over a situation where I wasn’t sure I was going to get to do that,” I said. “I shot our father to keep him from putting a bullet in Grim’s head. I saved your brother’s life that night Savage. And the response I got in that room in the first thirty seconds told me that nobody was going to see it that way. So I ran because I was seventeen and scared and I thought my life was over if I stayed.”
