him. So this club can’t pollute him. At least not yet.” Mae’s voice wavered, and I had to swallow a fucking lump that was building in my throat. “Is it normal to be unable to ever look away from your child like this? To want to shield him from all the bad, and only give him the good? Because I must do that. Whatever it takes, I will protect him and keep him safe. My baby, my River . . . my baby boy who now owns my whole heart, will be safe from this life. From his father. I have to find a way . . .” Mae wiped at her cheeks while I stood in the hallway like a statue. Mae looked at me. “She loved you, Styx. She loved you so much that on some of the pages the ink is smudged from where she’d been crying as she emptied her heart into the journal.”
I couldn’t fucking speak. I knew no words would come out of my mouth right now even if I tried. Mae came to me and took my hand. “She was sixteen when she first met your father. He was thirty-two. He got her pregnant not long afterward. She was a lost soul. Had run away from home.” My jaw clenched. I didn’t want to hear this. I knew shit about my mother, and never wanted to know. She went to the boatman when I was ten, but left me long before that. Of course, that didn’t stop Mae. She just fucking barreled on like she’d barreled into my life. Bitch was the only one who I’d let get away with this shit. Mae’s hand pressed against my face. “She ran away from home when she couldn’t take any more of the abuse.” I froze. Mae’s expression fell to one of sympathy. Because my old lady knew what abuse felt like, had the scars on her thighs to prove it. Of course, there were all kinds of abuse. She must have seen that question in my eyes. “Sexual abuse, Styx. Abuse like I endured.”
My hands fell away from Mae, and I had to step back. My fingers curled into fists and my jaw clenched. “It was her older brother,” Mae said. I closed my eyes and just tried to fucking breathe. I may have been a stone-cold killer, one of the most lethal Hangmen to ever wear the Dark Lord on his cut, but this club didn’t tolerate that shit. In fact, I’d rip the rancid cock off any fucker I knew did.
Happily.
Especially after Mae . . . after seeing what she and her sisters went through. What it did to them, how it fucking destroyed them for most of their lives. Kept a part of them forever fucked up.
But my mother . . . the woman I barely remembered and never tried to. The one who left me to the fists and daily ridicule of my father . . . My mother had a brother. Something else I never knew.
“He was a lot older than her. Her mother and father weren’t around much. Her father was lost to drugs, and her mother killed herself when your mother was only nine.” Mae took a deep breath. “Styx . . . she was only eight when he raped her for the first time. Her older brother. He was sixteen.” I saw that look in Mae’s eyes, the one that showed pain and . . . fuck . . . sympathy, because she knew exactly what that felt like. She’d been eight too when that bastard Brother Jacob had raped her in that joke of a cult.
“M-Mae.” I shook my head and picked up my beer from the table next to me. I downed it and tossed the bottle in the trash. “St-stop.”
Mae’s shoulders sagged. She held that fucking journal against her chest like she was scared I’d toss it in the fire if she let it go. She was right. I would. I didn’t wanna know shit about my mother. A shitty life was no excuse for leaving me behind for the Diablo prez. Fuck, I had to work alongside Chavez most days now. It was his old man my mother had shacked up with.
I didn’t wanna fucking know.
Kissing Mae again, I went into my office and shut the door. I slumped behind my desk and took a long fucking breath. My cell buzzed.