Insatiable (Steel Brothers Saga #12) - Helen Hardt Page 0,37

razor blades around in their purse.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Bryce

“My half brother has been obsessed with the Steels for years,” Dominic said. “He was my mother’s son from her first marriage. He appeared when Alex and I were teens. Our mom had just died. Anyway, he had nowhere else to go, so my dad took him in, and he changed his last name to Booker.”

“Where had he been, if he wasn’t with your mom?”

“She never talked about him. She only told us that we had an older brother but he died when he was young.”

A brick hit my gut.

“And he’s obsessed with the Steels?” I said.

“The Steels, yeah, mostly Jonah. And your father. Tom Simpson.”

“My dad’s dead.”

“I know.”

“If he has a beef with a dead man, I don’t know what to tell you.”

“If he has a beef with a dead man, you know why,” Dominic said. “We all know who your father was.”

Chills crawled up my spine. Oh, yeah, I knew all right. But damn it, I was not my father.

“I’m not responsible for what my father did to anyone, and neither are the Steels.”

“I know that,” Dominic said, “but my brother isn’t quite as logical as I am. He tends to think with his emotions, which are out of whack.”

“You called him psycho,” I said.

“Yeah, and I stand by that assessment.”

“I do too. Only a psycho would arm himself with three guns and booby-trap his office with pepper spray.”

“Agreed,” Dominic said.

“Look,” I said. “I don’t know what my father did to your brother, but I know it can’t be pretty. Your brother was far from the only one.”

Dominic nodded. “I know that, man, but that thought never helped my brother and probably not any of the others.”

Talon visibly tensed. His story had gone public when all hell broke loose months ago. Dominic probably knew Talon had been among my father’s victims. That wasn’t for me to say, though.

“You’re saying your brother is a danger to the Steels? And to Colin? That’s why you acted on orders to protect them?”

“That’s right. But thanks to you all, they’re no longer protected.”

“You need to look no further than to us to protect our mother and sister,” Talon said through clenched teeth. “You’d better keep your hands off them and every other Steel from now on.”

I turned to Talon and Ryan. “Did you guys ever find the file of news clippings from the kids who disappeared around the same time as Luke?”

“Not yet. Joe was going to look for them,” Ryan said.

“Any chance a little kid named Cade disappeared?” I asked.

“I was too young to remember,” Ryan said.

“And I just remember Luke,” Talon said. “And…”

And…himself. He didn’t finish the sentence.

“What was Cade’s father’s name?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Dominic said. “My mom never talked about him. Like I said, she told us Cade was dead.”

“And she never mentioned his father?”

“Not once. It was like he never existed. She wouldn’t talk about it. We always figured he’d been really abusive.”

“What happened to him?”

“She never said.”

“And you never asked?”

“We were young,” he said. “We didn’t think about it. Then she died.”

“Of what?” Ryan asked.

“Drive-by shooting in our little Iowa town. The first and only. No one was ever caught.”

“Right before Cade showed up,” Talon said. “Seems a little incriminating.”

I nodded. “And more than a little convenient.”

“You think Cade shot his own mother?” Dominic asked.

“You said yourself he was psycho. Do you mean this never occurred to you?”

“Cade acted all broken up about it,” Dominic said. “So no, I didn’t think about it.”

“Your father took Cade in, let him take his name.”

“Yeah. My dad was a good man.”

“Was?” Talon asked.

Dominic nodded. “He died last year. Cancer.”

“Okay.” At least we knew Cade hadn’t offed his stepdad. Even the biggest psycho in the world couldn’t force cancer on someone.

“Fast-forward,” I said. “How did you start working for Brad Steel?”

“Cade kind of took Alex and me under his wing. He taught us how to handle guns, and he was good, man. Really good. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but right around the time Alex and I finished high school, he got a little weirder than usual. Like I said, he was obsessed with your father and the Steels. He asked Alex and me to go in with him, help us avenge him. We didn’t know what he was talking about, and he wouldn’t elaborate, but I could tell he was thinking about doing something terrible. Alex and I declined, and a few days later, we got a phone