I had a hard time meeting her gaze as I nodded. “Then you can start by telling me what he likes. Down to every dirty detail.”
I STARED AT THREE DAYS’ worth of missed calls and messages from Tyra and knew that she’d be pissed. I hadn’t meant to ghost her, but my father had insisted on starting my training, despite me maintaining that I’d never work for him. Unfortunately, there hadn’t been much I could do with a gun pointed at my head, so I sat dutifully by his side, pretending to soak it all in as he slowly opened the door to his world.
My father liked to kid himself, but he was nothing but a low-life thug dressed in a fancy suit. He stood for nothing except the motto under Thirteen’s insignia, and that was only because it benefited him the most.
Honor thy Father.
Its meaning was clear. To obey him, and I wasn’t talking about God, in all things. Essentially, to kill and bleed for my father whenever he commanded it. Thirteen was nearly seven decades old, formed in 1949 by the original thirteen members. From there, a round table began, like King Arthur and his trusted knights, except there was nothing heroic about the men around it, and Thirteen’s table was more like a pit of snakes. Whenever the presiding Father died, because there was no such thing as stepping down, another took his place. The thing was, that person could be anyone—literally anyone willing to fake their death and give up their identity to become a myth.
Franklin Rees was an alias, a person who did not exist. I didn’t even know my own father’s real name and wondered if I even cared.
My mother, realizing she’d given birth to a monster’s child, fled to Paris when I was six years old. I barely remembered her. I couldn’t recall what she sounded like, looked like, or if she ever loved me.
Shaking off the familiar anguish, I ignored the notifications and let “Wrong Side of Heaven” by Five Finger Death Punch burst through the speakers. Without my father’s blessing or knowledge, I’d set up a private gym in one of the unfinished spaces in the basement. He hadn’t bothered tearing it down, but I didn’t kid myself. I knew it was because he had hopes of putting my brute strength to use one day.
Never gonna happen.
Lying down on the bench, I forced myself to focus on benching the two-hundred-pound weight. The players at USC were already lifting three-hundred pounds, maybe more, and if I were lucky, I’d be at two-eighty by the time camp started in August. I’d also be taking hits from much bigger guys and would need to pack on more muscle. The Trojan’s head coach had already emailed me a training plan to prepare. Unfortunately, I’d been too busy sniffing after Tyra and the little scraps she threw my way to start. They tasted ten times better than the smorgasbord I’d grown accustomed to, and maybe it was knowing that no one else had eaten off my plate.
This analogy is getting weird.
I thought about my theory as I lifted the weight before bringing it back down and admitting that virgin or not, I’d still be obsessed. There was something so pure about Tyra that went beyond the physical. Something that made me wonder if I wasn’t without hope, after all. Tyra didn’t know it, but she could have had anyone. She’d chosen me instead.
As if on autopilot, I set down the weight, stood, and grabbed my phone and keys before rushing from the house. My sudden urge to be near her was almost unbearable. I dialed her number as soon as I got behind the wheel of my car, but it rang once before going straight to voicemail.
See? Pissed.
Ignoring Tyra’s hint to steer clear, I sped all the way to the little house on Tigerwood Lane only to find her car gone. I wondered how she’d gotten it back from Wren and Lou’s in the first place and assumed Selena must have given her a ride. Remembering the girl who’d shown up claiming to be her older sister, I understood why Tyra was pissed. I promised her I had her back only to ghost her when she needed me.
Snatching my phone from the dash, I tried calling her again only to get the same result. Ignoring Einstein’s definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, I tried three more times.