Page 69 of Angel

Soon after Aaron stepped into the hall, they heard the bathroom door close. Cage whirled on Carlos. “What the fuck!” he shouted.

“I know this isn’t what you want to hear,” Carlos held up the camera, “but this is good, Cage. This will grant you the petition.”

“You think I wanted my son beaten for his sexuality so I could win custody?” Cage roared. “All I have ever wanted is just to know my son!”

Carlos did not take the bait. “You know damn well that that wasn’t what I meant.”

Cage started pacing by the couch. “I need to get those pictures to my lawyer.”

“I’ll send you over a copy of everything as soon as I’ve processed it at the station,” Carlos promised. “Do you need a minute too?”

Cage shook his head. “No. I want to get this over with. Did you call Bear?”

Carlos nodded. “He’s got Maggie, but he’s on his way.”

“Thank you,” he said, though his gratitude came out sounding like a growl. “I want to continue as soon as Aaron is ready. We haven’t even gotten to the part where Veronica tried to send him to a conversion camp.”

“What do you remember about Veronica?”

Cage shrugged. “Honestly, not much. She was willing and I,” he cleared his throat, feeling a bit abashed by the admission, “I was a horny teenager.”

“None of this is your fault,” Carlos told him.

“People keep telling me that, but I’m having a hard time believing it,” Cage said as the bathroom door opened down the hall.

Carlos and Cage turned as Aaron reentered the room.

“Are you ready to continue?” Carlos asked him gently.

Aaron nodded. “Let’s get this over with.”

The next week flew by in a blur. Not wanting Bree to feel pushed aside by Aaron’s entrance into their lives, Angel made sure to drop her off and pick her up each day from school. The town offered her the use of a handicap bus, but Angel told the school that she would be taking Bree for the first few weeks.

Both Harper and Pirate had given Angel private opinions on how Bree was doing in school. At lunch, she sat with Scotty and the other students from Harper’s class. While no one seemed to be giving Bree a hard time, it also didn’t seem like she was making any friends. Some of the kids were nice to her, but no one stood out as ‘a new friend’ to Harper or Pirate.

Bree spoke of her classes and she liked her history teacher, Mr. Bennett. She said he was ‘cool’, which was probably the highest praise a teenager could give an adult. Yet, Angel had also picked up on the fact that Bree had not mentioned making any friends.

Cage told Angel to give it time and to not force the situation. High school was hard enough without the pressure of having friends or being popular.

Angel knew he was right but…still… She wanted Bree to have friends. Aside from Cassie, who didn’t go to school with her, she had none. Angel wanted Bree to have experiences that weren’t linked to the club.

The fallout from their night in Pittsburgh was minimal. As far as Keys could tell, no one suspected the VDMC had any part in the Pythons massacre. Neither King nor Fang had shown their faces and Keys was pondering whether they had split with what resources they’d had on hand before the VDMC had acted.

Steel ordered Keys to stay on their trail.

The AC Pythons were calling for blood but, so far, the blood they were after belonged to the 3Ts. Neither Ivy nor Scar had been seen recently. Bulldog was starting to get pissed off by Scar’s appearing and disappearing act.

“The next time I see him, I’m tranq’ing him and then I’m going to get some damn answers!” Bulldog had proclaimed.

However, now that Keys knew that Scar had been working with Ivy and going after the 3Ts as well as the human trafficking ring connected to both the Heaven Haven Community and Mateo Castillo, he was starting to come up with a pattern. Since Scar’s departure in February, Keys was able to pinpoint based on police reports roughly where Scar had been. The amount of carnage he left in his wake was daunting but, since it was all criminal blood, no one shed a tear.

Until King and/or Fang were discovered, Steel considered the matter of the Pythons’ threat to be closed.

The battle for Aaron’s custody had begun and the first lines in the sand had been drawn. Aaron’s mom, Veronica, was claiming that Cage had kidnapped her son. Cage was nearly arrested by federal agents and probably would have been if not for Carlos. Agent McAlester, who knew the club from their involvement in Ohiopyle two Aprils ago, had tagged along when he’d heard that one of the VDMC had kidnapped a child and brought that child across state lines.

It had taken some doing, along with a rushed paternity test, but a judge finally signed off on the emergency custody after seeing the video of Carlos’s interview with Cage and Aaron. What had been the deciding factor was not Aaron’s claim that he was being forced against his will to attend a conversion camp, but the fact that he had permanent marks on his butt from when his mother’s pastor had beaten Aaron with his mother present.

The entire club had been outraged at the news. Cage himself had to be held back because Veronica, whom he hadn’t seen in seventeen years, had dared to bring her pastor with her to court. The man who had beat his son was in the same room as him and Cage had been forced to let the man walk out of the courtroom alive.

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