“I’m sorry, kid,” King whispered, his words lost in the suffocating silence of impending doom.
I shrugged, my movement brittle, defiant. “I knew he’d come for me the second I shot him.”
“Next time, aim higher,” he murmured, his voice laced with grim amusement.
A bitter smirk touched my lips. “That’s what Danny said.”
Rowen’s grip on my arm was like a vise, his knuckles bone-white. “Let’s go, Dante.”
I took one last, lingering look at everything I had ever cherished, at the men I loved, at the life I was leaving behind—a life that now felt as distant and unreal as a faded photograph. Then I turned and walked out of the clubhouse, into the cold, bitter night, leaving the echoes of Danny’s screams behind.
Chapter Forty-One
Bane
Years. I’d spent years gnawing at the edges of this fucked-up game of cat and mouse. A specter in the shadows, gathering any bit of information like a starving man scavenging for scraps. Each whispered secret, each careless boast, a piece of the puzzle I painstakingly assembled.
My disguise? A masterpiece of deception. The reek of cheap whiskey clung to me, a shroud woven from desperation and despair. My eyes, bloodshot and vacant, mirrored the pathetic soul I projected—a broken man, utterly insignificant. Even Montana, my oldest friend, saw only the wreckage. The fool. He, like the rest, drank the bitter wine of my carefully crafted illusion.
But tonight... tonight, the meticulously built dam of my patience shattered.
Tonight, that motherfucker, that slithering, two-legged piece of shit, took my son as the icy grip of rage seized me, a fist clenching around my heart, squeezing the air from my lungs. The taste of bile rose in my throat, acrid and bitter. I could feel the tremor in my hands, a tremor born not of fear, but of a fury so incandescent it threatened to consume me whole.
I knew. Fucking knew, the moment my eyes landed on the kid. Talk about a gut punch, raw and so visceral it damn near robbed me of my sanity. I didn’t need a goddamn DNA test. He was my sister’s ghost, reborn. That same mop of wavy blond hair, the way the sunlight caught it, the same defiant tilt to his chin... a mirror reflecting a past I’d buried so deep, the stench of it still clung to my memory. The arithmetic was simple, brutally so. But the equation of George Stone’s betrayal and the bitter taste of my cowardice... that was a calculus I couldn’t solve. So, when I finally got my hands on those goddamn ghost files and learned I had a daughter, I fucking left New York to find her. It wasn’t hard. Thanks to the ghost files, they led me straight to her.
The air hung thick with the stench of stale beer and desperation, a miasma clinging to the suffocating chaos of the clubhouse. Each footfall echoed, a drumbeat in the suffocating silence between shouted obscenities.
My heart hammered a frantic tattoo against my ribs.
I needed to be gone, unseen, a ghost slipping through the cracks of this festering den before anyone noticed my absence. The chill of the polished wood under my bare feet was a stark contrast to the burning rage that consumed me.
Inside my room, the air was thinner, but the pressure remained, crushing me under the weight of my decision. My fingers, slick with a cold sweat, fumbled with the straps of my bag, each item a physical manifestation of a life I was leaving behind.
I wasn’t coming back. Not without him.
This sick, twisted charade, this meticulously orchestrated game of Sinclair’s... it was over. He’d played his hand and in doing so, he’d unleashed a fury he could never have anticipated. Taking my son... that bastard, that gilded viper, had crossed a line beyond redemption. He’d learn who held the true power. He’d learn the meaning of pain. He’d learn what it meant to face the Devil himself.
Tonight, the rules changed.
Tonight, a new predator entered the game.
Tonight, the mask slipped from the face of the beast, revealing a cold, calculating fury that chilled me even as it ignited my soul. Sinclair thought he’d won, but all he did was unmask the Devil in disguise.
“Bane?”
My gaze snagged on the doorway. There she stood, a fragile silhouette etched against the dim light. The scent of wood smoke and fear clung to her, a phantom limb of the horrors she’d endured. A raw ache, a physical wound in my chest, clawed at me. I yearned to whisper assurances; to promise I’d bring her brother home, to undo the shattered pieces of her life.
But the lie choked me. I couldn’t. Not this time.
She didn’t know me, of course. Just another ghost in the gallery of men who’d haunted her existence, another face in the blurred tapestry of her pain. Each one a brand seared onto my soul, a stain that would fester and bleed until my dying breath. Learning the depths of her suffering... the chilling details... it was a slow, agonizing crucifixion. Her pain, a lead weight in my gut, became my penance, my cross to bear, heavy and unforgiving.
She was my Everest of failure, the summit I’d climb for the rest of my wretched days. My atonement, my life sentence. All because my fist hadn’t been swift enough, my strength insufficient, to shatter George Stone before he shattered her. The taste of ash and regret was bitter on my tongue, the silence of my inaction deafening.
“Leaving?” Her words hung in the air, thick and acrid, like the scent of burned sugar and betrayal.
“I have to,” I rasped, the leather of my bag biting into my shoulder. The weight of it felt insignificant compared to the crushing burden in my chest.
“You’re going after him, aren’t you?” Her voice, a silken whisper edged with steel, sent a shiver down my spine. The air crackled with unspoken accusations, with years of simmering resentment and desperate hope.
