could I have her in my bed and not touch her. I lived for that woman.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Czar asked.
Steele knew why. Every man at the table knew why. Without Czar none of them would be alive—at least none of the original eighteen. He had to make certain Czar lived through the coming war with the Swords.
“You would have sent me away with her,” he admitted, making the truth more about Breezy and less about Czar.
Czar sighed and pressed his fingers to his eyes, looking weary. “What tipped you off to her age?”
“There was a younger girl there, she was about fourteen or fifteen. She had a mop of red hair, freckles and bright green eyes. I think they called her Candy. Do you remember her? Bree was worried about her, worried the club would start using her the way they used Breezy. She said it had started for her around the same age. That made me wonder how old she was. I didn’t think she was a kid. She never acted like a kid. Not how she talked. Not the way she thought. Not the way she took care of everyone. Not the work she did. Not in or out of bed. I didn’t have one inkling, so when she told me how old she was, I nearly fell through the fucking floor.”
He would never forget that moment of complete shock. He was guilty of statutory rape. Worse, he was everything he hated most. He was in a relationship with a teenager and it was a very sexual one. He was demanding of all sorts of things and she gave him whatever he wanted. He pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead.
He’d felt sick, bile rising. “I couldn’t look at her and I knew I had to send her away immediately. I’d planned to, to keep her safe from the Swords when war broke out, but now, I needed to keep her safe from me. I was also extremely angry. Angry at everyone for not knowing. Mostly at myself for not even asking, but her as well, for not telling me. A part of me knew she wasn’t to blame, she probably didn’t think anything of it since her own father had turned her over to his friends at fourteen, but I couldn’t get past the rage.”
Steele wanted to hit something. Hard. Smash Bridges’s face in. He detested the man. He should have been looking out for his daughter, but instead, he’d used her ruthlessly. “I didn’t even ask her when her birthday was. I was fucking glad to have her, I just didn’t take care the way I should have. I was so angry that I was losing her—that the fucking universe had tricked me again, robbed me of the one decent thing I had in this world.”
There was a small silence and Steele realized that fury was in his voice. No matter how much he breathed it away, it came back to choke him whenever he thought about the injustice of that. He’d never had one single thing for himself. Never asked for anything. He’d had her and then she was gone—and he’d done that.
“Why didn’t she contact you when she realized she was pregnant?” Lana asked. “Breezy doesn’t seem the kind of woman to keep that information from a man, even if she was hurt.”
Steele didn’t want to answer her. Shame didn’t sit well on his shoulders. He deserved to feel it. He knew they were blaming Breezy, not him. Like Lana, everyone thought Bree should have contacted him. He couldn’t let them think that about her. He’d told them the worst, admitted that he’d slept with a girl, not a woman and that he would have done so no matter what.
He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair repeatedly. “I told her I didn’t want her, that she’d been nothing more than a warm body to use. I made it very clear I didn’t love her and that she was absolutely nothing to me. I had her banned from the club so she couldn’t even go to another chapter. I told her she was nothing and I never wanted to look at her face again.”
“Steele,” Alena whispered. “You didn’t. She was so young. That must have annihilated her. You had her for a year and you just scraped her off?”
He winced at the pain in Alena’s voice. She was putting herself in Bree’s shoes and she felt that pain—the twisted