Page 9 of Gonzo's Grudge
Before I could even reply, she stormed off.
I deserved that shit too. Every ounce of her pain, her anger, I earned it. I did her wrong for far too many years. She stood by me through every duty station move, every deployment, and held strong as retirement scared the life out of me. Knowing I put my dick in any hole available without a second thought to her, she still remained faithful. In the end, I had to let her go.
Not for me.
The selfish sonofabitch I was absolutely would have kept our marriage like it was. Why not? She didn’t care about the lies, the cheating, as long as I found my way back to her eventually. I probably shouldn’t say that. Deep inside she did care. It ate her up to know I was never satisfied. Alas, she wouldn’t ever stand up to me and that was why I had to be the one to call it off.
It wasn’t fair to her for us to continue.
She was a good woman and the life I was giving her had no future where the scales would ever tip in her favor. She needed a good man that would come home to have dinner with her every night and wake up in his arms every morning. I was not that man.
Got married way too young. I was home visiting on a planned leave. Had a good time with a girl I had a solid history with. When I joined the Marines, we didn’t discuss staying together or breaking up. I left and she waited. I came home on leave and left her again. This continued a few times. All the while I did what I wanted and she remained at home waiting.
I was at my first duty station when she called. The pregnancy test was clear, two lines meant it was time to settle down. At least that was my promise to her. I thought I could do it. We were fucking twenty years old. I thought I could do anything.
Life was about to teach me a hard lesson though. I couldn’t save that baby or the next two she lost after. All Catalina wanted was to be a wife and mother. Did I give her that shit? No, not in the way she deserved. All I did was live the life I wanted. Took her along for one fucked up ride.
Twenty-three years I served my county, and she served me for most of them. Twenty years, she never thought of another man, another life, all while I did what the fuck I wanted, who the fuck I wanted, when the fuck I wanted. When I retired, she thought it would finally be her time to have life with me. Well, when fantasy wasn’t reality, she finally had enough. Half my retirement would be hers, along with the house, the car, and the damn dog. Fuck, even now, she needed anything, I would move mountains for her to have it. I owed her in ways I could never repay.
Loyalty.
Catalina had that shit in spades. No one could ever love me like she did. A love I didn’t deserve. A loyalty I never earned. The respect I would always carry for her meant she could scream, slap, and do anything she needed to, and I would stand up to take her wrath.
She was right.
I knew Gabriel wanted to be a mini me. I encouraged it even knowing the risks. I put him in this situation by allowing him into my world. She begged me not to let him prospect. She cried for me not to take him to the clubhouse. If I wanted to be an Outlaw, she wouldn’t stop me, but she made it clear she didn’t support it for our son.
Our only child.
Her whole world.
After losing child after child, she finally made it full term with a baby boy. We might have been in thirty years old, but she was ready for it all. She was the responsible adult. I was still fucking around and acting like a boy not the man she needed to be. Not the man he needed me to be.
And my world got him put in a fucking box behind bars with very little hope to see the light of day and enjoy the freedoms I fought an entire career to protect.
All of it for a crime he damn sure didn’t commit.
Chapter 4
Gonzo
“This shit can’t be real, Dad,” GJ muttered, disappointment laced in every word.
The words bled out of him, slow and heavy, like a wound that was bleeding out. He sat across from me, swallowed whole by the county’s ugly orange jumpsuit. The Plexiglass barrier between us felt thicker than steel. I could reach out, flatten my palm against the cold surface, but it didn’t matter—I couldn’t touch him, no matter how hard I tried. I couldn’t grip his shoulder, couldn’t give him the kind of reassurance a father should.
The only thing I had was my voice, and right now, even that sounded like nothing more than words that couldn’t be backed up. I knew I would do everything to get him out of this mess, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t feeling the weight of being stuck behind bars. And I couldn’t be sure I would be successful given the way things were going.
Men like us weren’t meant to be caged.
His eyes were bruised by exhaustion, sunken, with dark bags underneath that no young man should carry.
“We’re workin’ on it, GJ,” I said, knowing damn well the words meant nothing to him. Didn’t matter if they were true. Didn’t matter if I had half the club pulling strings and burning favors. What my boy needed was freedom, his life back. And right now, freedom looked like a fantasy, so far out of reach it might as well have been a fairy tale.
Tarte had tried—Christ, she had tried like hell. Our attorney was a shark on the hunt, the type who’d shredded every man who dared sit across from her in law school. She was at the top of her game. But even she couldn’t move the mountain that was this new judge. Weeks of arguing, digging, throwing everything she had into fighting the bail refusal—wasted.
How the fuck could they claim he was a flight risk? My son. My boy who hadn’t been further than Okinawa when I was stationed there. And hell, he was so little then, he didn’t even remember Japan. For the last eleven years, he’d been rooted to the same damn house in Dreadnought. Didn’t even have a passport. Never taken a trip out of state. Never even been on a plane since he was a toddler. The boy was twenty-two and half his life had been in this small town.
But according to this fresh-faced prick of a judge, my boy was a risk to vanish into thin air. By what fucking standards could someone explain that?
