My Maddie (Hades Hangmen #8) - Tillie Cole Page 0,71

that he at least fucking saw me. I knew he couldn’t express shit like that. But in that moment, I hated him. I fucking hated that he was different, that something inside him made him different from the other brothers. I wanted to be able to talk to him, wanted him to talk to me normally.

I was a bastard. I fucking hated myself for what I’d said to him. Telling him he’d be a shit papa. So I’d chased after him as he ran from the cabin, riding by his side. Showing him, I never meant any of what I said, that I fucking loved him as he was. He is my brother. I didn’t need him to be like everyone else. He’d saved me. He’d given me a home and a family. It didn’t matter that he was different, that we didn’t talk much or grabbed a beer at the bar while shooting the shit.

I’d smiled as I’d ridden toward the fuckers we were tracking. The Cade brothers riding together, killing the cunts that hurt Maddie. That is, until one of the assholes waved a snake at him. A motherfucking snake brought Flame to his knees. My brother, my brother who wasn’t scared of anything, the most brutal and ruthless killer there ever was, fell apart in front of my eyes.

Isaiah. He’d called me Isaiah. The brother he lost. He’d called the dicks who tortured us poppa and Pastor Hughes. And he’d fucking broke. He dropped to his knees and broke.

“Ash?” He looked into my eyes and called me fucking Isaiah. Not Ash, the brother he already had. But Isaiah, the brother he had lost. “ASH?” I snapped the fuck out of the memory.

“You okay?” Rider asked and shone a light into my eyes. I pushed the light aside and shuffled off the bed. “Ash, you need to rest.”

“I ain’t resting,” I growled and tried to pull a shirt over my head. I fucking hissed when the pain from the stitches pulled at my skin.

“Ash, forget the shirt and lie on the damn bed,” Rider ordered.

I pulled on a leather jacket and grabbed a pack of smokes from my pocket, putting one in my mouth. “I’m out,” I said and tried to leave the room.

“Ash, you need to rest. Don’t go out drinking. Your body has to heal. Alcohol will fuck with the drugs I’ve given you.” Rider tried to lecture me as I pushed past him, heading toward the door. I didn’t fucking care about healing. I didn’t care about resting. I wanted to get off my face on whiskey and eliminate the sound of Flame’s voice from my skull. The voice that came from his mouth when he’d been talking to Poppa and the pastor. The kid-like voice accompanied by the scared shitless look on his face.

I sniffed, feeling my throat start to burn at the fucking memory of Flame like that. But I couldn’t remove his face from my mind. I couldn’t get the fucking tears, which had tracked through the blood on his cheeks, out of my mind.

Flame fucking cried.

I smashed through the door and strode into the night. AK had gone to get Phebe and Saffie from Mae’s. I wasn’t staying to see them. My chest burned just thinking of Saffie, so I quickly lit up the smoke and took a long inhale. The nicotine helped some, but not fucking enough. The night was fucking silent. I couldn’t even hear Viking’s voice, which was a constant around these cabins.

I didn’t want silence. I didn’t want to think of being tied to the tree then cut by knives and bitten by fucking snakes. And I sure as fuck didn’t want to think of Flame. Flame, my brother, who I’d fucking betrayed with my words. Flame, who might never come the fuck back, from wherever his mind had taken him.

I glanced to our cabin and looked for any signs of movement. There wasn’t any. I didn’t even realize I was walking forward until I stopped near Flame and Maddie’s bedroom window. I took a deep breath, trying hard to fucking convince myself he’d be okay. He’s good. Isaiah is good… The way Flame looked at me thinking I was his other brother… he hadn’t ever looked at me that way. He never kept eye contact, period. But he had when he thought I’d been Isaiah. Not Ash, not the brother he’d had pushed on him when he’d found me in the cellar. Not the brother