“I can’t tell you!” My words were choked with desperation.
“Liar!” he seethed, closing the distance between us. “You fucking know. All of you know and you won’t say a goddamn thing. Why? What the fuck is really going on here?!”
His roar ripped through the room, sending shivers down my spine.
Digger appeared out of nowhere, his face etched with worry, his usually jovial eyes wide with apprehension, and he stepped between us. “Danny, you need to calm down,” he pleaded, his voice tight with warning. “We’re your family. We’re trying to help.”
“Help me? That’s fucking cute.” Danny’s laughter was devoid of humor, a cruel, broken sound. “By keeping secrets? By lying to my face? How is that helping me, Dig? I thought you were my brother, but it seems like you’re all playing some sick game with my life!” Danny’s voice cracked with rage, and his fists clenched so tight his knuckles shone white against his tanned skin. “I want answers. And I want them right fucking now!”
I took a step forward, my heart a trapped bird beating against my ribs. “Danny, please—try to understand. We’re not hiding things to be malicious. It’s complicated. We’re trying to protect you. About your accident—I swear, I had nothing to do with it. I would never hurt you.”
My words were a plea, lost in the storm of Danny’s fury.
“FUCK ALL OF YOU!” Danny’s roar ripped through the air, a guttural scream that vibrated in my chest. “And fuck you, Dante!” He was a hurricane of fury, a storm of muscle and rage, slamming the door behind him with a thunderous clap that rattled the very foundations of the building. The scent of his sweat, lingered in the air even as he vanished into the night.
I lunged, the raw fear a physical weight, but Digger’s grip clamped down on my arm. His fingers dug into my flesh, a searing pain that momentarily eclipsed the icy dread clawing at my insides. “Let him burn,” Digger growled, his voice low and gravelly. His words were like stones in my gut. “Let the rage consume him.”
“Burn? He’ll be killed out there, Digger! There are people who want him dead!” The city’s harsh neon glow reflected in the manic gleam of my eyes as the city throbbed with a deadly pulse around us.
Digger’s gaze was unwavering, cold and calculating. “The club’s got eyes everywhere, Dante. They’ll shadow him and intervene if needed. Right now, all that matters is buying him time.”
“Time? He thinks I did it! That I orchestrated this bloody mess!”
Each word felt like a shard of glass in my mouth, a testament to the despair that choked me.
Digger’s jaw tightened. “He’s drowning in it, Dante. Blind rage. He ain’t hearing a damn thing right now. Not from you, not from anyone.”
Stella’s hand, cool and soft against the fire of my panic, was a surprising comfort. Her voice, though laced with sorrow, was a balm to my tormented soul. “He’s a Franks man, hun,” she whispered, her hug tight, a desperate anchor against the rising tide of my despair. “And when a Franks man’s fury erupts—it’s a goddamn inferno. You don’t want to be anywhere near it until it burns itself out.”
Her words were laced with a weary wisdom born from years spent navigating the treacherous currents of her world as my heart hammered against my ribs.
“So what do I do? Just stand here while he believes I’m the one who betrayed him? The one who caused all this?”
My question hung in the air between us, heavy and suffocating, a testament to my utter powerlessness.
Chapter Seventeen
Danny
They were all fucking liars.
Every fucking one of them.
Storming out onto the city’s streets, I didn’t know where I was going, but I sure as hell wasn’t staying another minute with them.
Fuck them!
Fuck all of them!
A bitter taste curdled in my throat, leaving a rancid film on my tongue.
Every. Single. Fucking. One.
The air hung thick with the stench of their deceit, a miasma clinging to my skin, making me itch with a rage that burned hotter than any sun.
I ripped the door from its hinges, the splintering wood a pathetic echo of the shattering trust within me. The city roared its welcome, a cacophony of honking horns and screeching brakes assaulting my ears. The greasy smell of exhaust fumes and cheap street food clawed at my nostrils, a stark contrast to the suffocating perfume of their hypocrisy I’d just escaped. The cold, bitter air pressed against my face, each icy touch a fresh stab of betrayal. I didn’t know where I was going, only that the concrete jungle was less suffocating than their gilded cage.
Fuck every last one of their saccharine smiles, their carefully crafted façades, their insidious whispers that had poisoned my soul. They’d built their world on sand and now I would watch it crumble into a twisted, satisfying spectacle.
