“I was good,” he finally said. Though it should have been something to be proud of, his tone said otherwise. Like it was more of a curse than anything. “The owner noticed and sort of took me under his wing. Years later, he offered me my first job. Why I took it? I don’t know if I have a real answer for that.”
“How old were you?”
“Almost twenty-two.”
“So you’ve been killing people a long time? Like thewholetime?” I couldn’t hide the shock from the question. I could tell that it hadn’t really sunk in yet, even though he’d already told me how many years he’d been in the game.
“Yes, but I don’t want you to think that I’m like some crazy killing machine. I take a handful of jobs a year.”
Um, still, a handful of killings a year is a lot. Add that up by all those years… oh, no, I didn’t want to think about that.
“Does your family know?”
“God, no,” he said with a sharp laugh. “I support my mom and help Irenna out a lot. Do you think they would be okay knowing how I got that money?”
“I suppose not. So what do they think you do? Like how do you have all of this money to help them out?”
“Well,” he said drawing out the word which let me know he was going to tell me that there was a huge lie behind it. One that he probably had to keep going and hated it. “They think I’m some finance guy for some hot-shot firm. I talk in a way that they don’t understand what it is I do. By now, they’ve given up on trying to understand.”
I let out a laugh because I could just see his mom shaking her head and patting him on the head as a way to tell him to stop talking. And that led to more images of her floating in my mind. I thought about her now with a smile on my face. Though I still was sad that I hadn’t seen her in a long time, somehow it felt like I was closer to her now than I’d been in a really long time.
“Oh! Does your mom still make that coffee cake?” I asked with way too much excitement in my tone as I remembered it. For a moment there, I swore I could taste it on my tongue.
His chest rumbled with a low chuckle.
“Yes, every time I go for a visit. Only now she puts bourbon in the crumble.”
I laughed thinking about how his mom, Elaine, would look all relaxed and loving life— and putting booze in her coffee cake. It was a beautiful image. If anyone deserved a break, it was her. She had the biggest heart of anyone I knew. She took me in when she was already struggling to feed her own kids. She made sure I ate and even had money for lunch at school. You know, on those days that I didn’t find enough loose change around my house. Because that was how it was. I’d like to say my parents were scatterbrained, but the truth was that they just didn’t care.
“I bet that is amazing.” I was practically drooling thinking about it. Yeah, I wish I had a slice right now, still warm out of the oven and all. “Do you visit them often?”
“No,” he said with a sad sigh. “Not as much as I should.”
That felt strange to me, the three of them always seemed so close. Even the way he talked now, I imagined that they all still had a big part in each other’s lives.
“You hate lying to them?” It was really more of a statement.
“Yeah.” His sadness was so raw right now. Without thinking, I wrapped my arm tighter around him. “You want to fill me in on how you got to Ray Ramos? I know you were with the Steel Paragons Motorcycle Club for a while.”
“You know about the club? How?” I asked surprised as I tilted my head to look up at his face.
“Yeah, big shock to me, too. I found out after you left. I actually know Nadya really well.”
“Wait.” I shook my head and leaned up on my arm. “You. You were the one that trained her, weren’t you? She never really talked about it but a few times I overheard her mention a mentor, no name. She’s not exactly big on the whole talking thing.”
Thinking of her made me think of the club. Nadya wasn’t really close with anyone, let alone with me. She was one of those people that came off as cold and deadly. Emotionless. But she made Tank, one of the officers of the club, happy and she seemed to really care about his son as well. So that was all that really mattered.
I smiled thinking about them all. I missed them but in a way, I was glad I left. After all, I might not have ended up here. Somehow being here with Silas felt right. Like he was meant to be in my life.
“That would be me,” he told me with a tiny sigh. “Might not be another of my finest choices. I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I think… I think that I was trying too hard to find you that I just needed someone to save. I found her on the streets and before I knew it, I was taking her with me. I didn’t have much to show anyone, especially not back then. I lost myself for a long time there.”
“And now?”
“Now, I’m not sure,” he said as he let out a little huff of a laugh.
“I’m not going to say turning someone into a killer is the best thing, but it kind of feels like she is one of those people made for it. All I know is that she helped save the people I really care about. She had their backs even when they tried to shut her out. They might not follow the line of the law but they are still good people. They took me in and gave me a place to stay. They treated me really well.”
“But you left?” His eyes told me he wanted to know why. That he wanted to know everything that he’d missed all these years.
