I sat on the roof of the clubhouse and watched over the cookout below. The place was packed with Serpents—over forty with our guests—and the mood was somewhat light considering the circumstances under which we’d gathered. The out-of-towners had been nothing but cordial and respectful, but I was the only female to be seen. Sometimes a girl needed a breather when drowning in endless waves of pure testosterone.
Hearing boots clanking up the ladder, I looked over my shoulder and saw Torch’s head pop up over the roof line.
“Hey, what are you doing up here?” he asked.
“I just had to get away from the crowd for a minute.”
He scowled. “Did one of these assholes make a pass or something? Tell me who, I’ll fuck him up.”
I laughed and shook my head. “No, relax. They’ve all been on their best behavior around me.”
“Good.” He sauntered over and took a seat next to me, wrapping an arm around my shoulder. “You thinking about him?”
I let myself relax into his chest. “Who?”
“Your old man.”
“I don’t think about things I can’t change, babe,” I sighed. “What’s the point?”
“You never wonder how life would’ve turned out if he hadn’t done what he did?”
I stroked his muscular thigh and sighed. “No. I have you, don’t I? My life couldn’t have turned out any better, there’s nothing in the past worth looking back on… Is that something you think about? How different things would be if you hadn’t had to run away from home?”
He shrugged and took a drink of the beer he’d brought up. “Only to think about what my sister could’ve become if I’d gotten her out too. Emily had a good heart, I wish she’d had more time to leave a mark on the world and that I could’ve at least seen her one last time. I was working on trying to make things right after our old man spent years poisoning her brain to turn on me. Turned out, I didn’t have as much time as I thought I did.”
“Your father didn’t abuse her though, right?” I asked, suddenly realizing he’d never told me more than random bits of the story here and there.
“No, but she saw him beating on both me and my mom. George instilled the idea that laying hands on people you’re supposed to love and protect is normal. He didn’t kill her, but he might as well have. She never would’ve stayed in the fucked-up relationship that ended with her being raped murdered if she’d had a better role model. I have no sympathy for my mother either, she had plenty of family with money and ways to get out, but she was cool with being the trophy wife of a lawyer and spending her days soaking away the bruises in champagne. She didn’t give a shit about her own kids until they were both gone, that’s why she slit her wrists a couple days after Em’s funeral. Or so she said in the note, I think she was just a selfish bitch to the end. She knew how to find me, all she had to do was pick up the fucking phone and let me know what my sister was dealing with and I would’ve killed the son of a bitch before he hurt her. Hell, Emily could’ve told me herself, she was already away at college, but George warped her brain so bad she thought I was nothing but a criminal who didn’t give a shit about her. I managed to get her on the phone a couple times the month before she died, and was gonna go up to Fort Collins to make her hear me out in person, but then I had to make a run for the club and she was dead by the time I got back.”
Wow.
Fuck.
What could I even say to that? My mom had died of a heroin overdose, but she was just young and stupid and I had very few memories of her aside from finding the body in our bathroom. And my father, well, he’d pretty much lost his mind to booze and done the unthinkable by handing me over to a pair of drug dealers; but at least I didn’t have to live with any kind of guilt over my part in any of it.
I didn’t think Torch had anything to feel guilty about either. There was no way he could have taken his sister when he left at sixteen and he’d tried his hardest to