at him, I saw fucking death in his black eyes. The kid was hitting the weights every day. Growing all the damn time. He was turning into a fucking unit. And with the new flame tattoos that crawled around his neck, and the piercings that had started taking over his face, he was looking more and more like his brother. It seemed the kid had more of Flame’s brand of psycho in him than we’d thought. From the minute I’d met that kid I sensed something dark inside him. Like it would only take one more fucked-up thing happening in his life before the real Ash came crawling out. The kid seemed quiet. But I’d heard of his past. The fucked-up things that were done to him by his and Flame’s old man. ’Course, that didn’t mean he was automatically fucked up; people had survived worse and had come out of it okay. But whenever anything happened to Flame or Maddie, or even AK—people Ash was close to—something fucking shifted in his dark eyes. Something that was a million miles away from the sweet kid he was known to be.
Tank slapped AK on the back. “Leave him. It’s his brother. He wants to stay with Flame and Madds. You know how he is.”
AK squeezed Ash’s shoulder before walking away. Beau’s face flashed in my mind for a second. But before my chest could fucking crack further and leave me paralyzed, I let the image go. Tank must have sensed something was wrong, because he hooked his arm around my neck and said, “Whiskey, Tann. Now.”
I followed him to the bar, from where I could hear raised voices. When we walked in, I instantly felt the tension in the room. Arizona and Gull’s prez had gone, off to get the bodies of his brothers. We made our way to our chapter. Zane, a prospect and AK’s nephew, was behind the bar. I saw him take a deep breath of relief when he saw AK walking toward him. AK leaned over the bar and kissed the kid’s head, telling him without words that he was okay.
I couldn’t fucking take it. All the fucking family shit, the old-lady shit. Seeing it every day was like a cancer eating away at me. Fucking showing me what I didn’t have.
“Zane. Bottle of Beam.” Tank’s voice sounded next to me. I sat on a bar stool, away from Bull, Hush, and Cowboy. I wasn’t fucking welcome on that table. Could see Bull and Hush always watching me. The fucking Nazi they’d been forced to let into their lives. “Ignore it,” Tank said. I closed my eyes, then opened them again when Tank put a shot of whiskey in front of me. I knocked it back.
The noise of the bar disappeared around me as Tank asked, “You see any of them?” I nodded. Tank handed me another shot. “You know them?”
“Yeah.”
“You train them?”
I paused, letting the guilt seep in. The guilt I deserved. “Yeah.” Tank placed his hand on my back. I took another shot, waiting for the whiskey to numb me. I dropped the empty glass to the bar top. “But they got new tricks.”
Tank didn’t speak for a few seconds. I knew he was judging if I could fucking handle it. Then he said, “Beau.” It wasn’t a question.
I rubbed at my eyes. I felt tired, but my body never let me sleep. Instead, in the dark hours, my brain decided to showcase every fucking thing I’d ever done that I regretted. Screaming at me that, outside of Tank and Beauty, I had no one. And worse . . . that my brother, my once best friend, was now running the soldiers I’d been raised to lead. Beau, who had idolized me so much he’d followed me into the army, only to come out to find me gone and standing shoulder to shoulder with his enemies.
Beau, who was now using all his army knowhow to fight a war against me. Fuck, I hadn’t even had the chance to say goodbye to him before I got the fuck out of the Klan for good. Just upped and left him. He never tried to find me. I’d never heard from him at all since he’d come home.
It was clear he was gonna always be Klan. Believed the ideology still. And no doubt no longer saw me as his brother, but as a traitor to his race.