The room was deadly silent, and one by one every brother looked my way. “Styx—” Tank went to speak, but I shook my head at my best friend. I had to do this. I’d seen the looks I’d gotten from the brothers over these past few weeks. They suspected me. Not so much my own chapter, but the others. Every time there was an attack, I was asked how they would’ve known where we’d be. How many would’ve been there. Everything. Tank never got those looks. He’d paid his dues. Wasn’t coated in Nazi tattoos anymore, unlike me. As involved as Tank was, he hadn’t been born for the sole purpose of being the Ku Klux Klan’s heir. Raised to only champion the white race. In the Ayers household, the air we breathed was Klan and Klan alone.
I wanted to just cut tail and fucking leave all this shit behind, but I wasn’t gonna back down. All this? It was my fault. I’d created this. I had to fucking end it. Least I could do right now was try to save these men.
And I wouldn’t let them see me weak. I’d never fucking do that.
“It’s called the invisible empire,” I said, and could almost smell the lingering smell of smoke from a burning cross beside me. Could feel the air charged with the cause, the need for the race war to start. Like my old brotherhood had once looked to me, dressed in green robes and standing before the fiery cross, these brothers were looking at me too. But none like I was a fucking messiah. More like a suspect.
“Invisible because we exist where no one sees. No one knows who we are. We assimilate into society. We exist among you.”
“Y’all have flags outside your houses and giant swastikas tattooed on your skin.” Some of the brothers smirked. “Hardly invisible,” Smiler said.
“And they’re the ones you need to worry about the least.” I leaned on the table. My knuckles cracked from all the tension on my body. “As I’ve said before to my chapter, the rednecks and the skinheads who fight for fun and protest outside of town halls aren’t the ones you need to fear. They’re the show ponies, the distraction. They’re the waving hand, making you look one way while the real soldiers, the true army of the invisible empire, tear you down with the other.”
“I don’t fear none of you cunts,” Crow, the New Orleans president, said. The fucker was smiling, rolling the dice he always held in his hand.
“You should.”
Crow smirked. In fact, all the others did. It made my blood boil. The Klan—me, my brother, my father, my uncle—had worked all our fucking lives to make people think the way they did about us. To make us look a joke. But in secret we’d built the empire of thinking men. Of men and women who would allow the skinhead jokes to smash down your front door, while we, the true brotherhood, would sneak in through the window.
“We?” I followed the sound of the question to Hush. Cowboy had his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “You keep saying we.”
I did? My heart fucking pounded. I hadn’t meant to say we. I didn’t think of myself as Klan anymore. Not at all.
“Them,” I rasped, feeling my stomach drop. “I meant them.”
Hush never moved his eyes from me. And I knew why. Bastards, shitty assfeeder members of the Klan, took out his folks. And he’d seen them die. Watched them burn. “Them,” I said again, all the fight draining from my body. “They are an organized unit . . .” I trailed off, stopping myself from telling them how they were so well trained. But what was the fucking point? Most of these brothers still thought me a Nazi anyway. Saw me as the White Prince no matter how much I tried to escape it.
“I taught them,” I said and felt Tank tense beside me. He loved this club. But he’d also kept a shit-ton back from them because of me. Never even told them who I was until some of my old brotherhood had taken Ky’s old lady back to the cult we used to work with. I knew he hadn’t wanted me to tell all these Hangmen that it was me who had crafted them into the men they were now. The fighters. And that it was Beau who had taken control where I’d left off and made