“Yeah.” I wind my hands in the blanket he gave me to retain the warmth from his touch. “But it gets worse.”
“How?” He chokes the question.
“Mom borrowed fourteen grand to clear her debt with the hospital. When she died, she still owed Dad eleven. But since he’d left the club by then, they’d been hiking up the interest on what he owed them. I didn’t find out until last year when I overheard him on a phone call with Smoke.”
“What does he owe them now?”
“A bit more than seventeen.”
“The fuck?”
Exactly what I said.“He can’t pay them, Fang. They’ll keep increasing what he owes out of spite, no matter what he gives toward it, and then one day they’ll get bored with the game and put a bullet in him.” My chest twists. “I can’t let that happen. He might be a shit father, but he’s the only one I have.”
“You don’t owe him fuck all, Jenna.” Fang’s eyes blaze with barely-checked rage. “This is his problem, not yours.”
“But I can help him with it, just like he helped Mom.”
“By fucking selling yourself in the trade?”
I blanch at his leered statement. I never thought that’s how it might seem to somebody on the outside: that I sold myself to clear the debt. “Fuck no.”
“Then how?” Fang lifts both hands to lace them behind his neck, clearly agitated.
I fist the blanket tighter. “By narcing on their operation so that they get torn apart by the cops. If the Devil’s Breed don’t exist anymore, neither does his debt.”
“So you traded one target for a fucking bigger one?” He laughs, bitter and disbelieving. “They have multiple chapters,Jenna. Whatever void you create, they’ll fill with their own kind. It’d be less than a month, and some patched fucker would be back at your door asking about the debt they found in Smoke’s ledger. Asking why the cops know your name.”
I stare at the ground. Every word from his mouth is the truth, and deep down I always knew that. I simply denied the raw facts to myself over and over, blissfully ignoring the alternate—that Smoke would take down my father and then shift the responsibility to me for no other reason than he could once he found out that I existed.
And how.
No matter which way I look at the situation, I was fucked. Of all the roads I could pick to go down, this one seemed to hurt the least.
“You know what’s the most messed up?” I say.
Fang shrugs, arms now folded over his chest.
“The year after Mom died, they introduced the bill to clear people’s medical debt. All she had to do was hang on another few months, and it would have all gone anyway.” The familiar ache of regret needles into my breastbone at the admission.
“You can only deal with the now, not the what if.”
“I know.” I lift my gaze hesitantly to his before asking. “What will you do with him after you’ve got everything you need?”
“I can’t answer that.” A muscle feathers in his jaw.
“Because you don’t know? Or because you don’t want to?”
“Both.” Fang eyes the used napkin in my hands and then the half-used one on the table. “Are you ready to go back to the house?”
Does he honestly want the truth? Because, “No.” I like it here away from the pressure to hold it all together when I’m around everyone else. I like that he listens and he doesn’t just absorb my words—he processes them. Gives me options. Answers. Another perspective.
He helps whether he means to or not.
“What do you want to do then?”
I look him straight in the eye. “Stay here a while longer.”
“You’re cold, Jenna.”
