Page 44 of Dangerous Command
A part of Mack’s life.Those words stayed with me. She had said them, and now she was biting her nails, knowing what that meant.
Mack’s life.
Maddie had actually considered letting me in.
“I won’t let you come around if you’re going to set a bad example,” she warned.
I had done nothing wrong. Even if Mack was sheltered, that didn’t change the cold facts about the world. Violence had been a constant for me since I was Mack’s age. It was a part of life. He needed to learn, one way or another.
“Mack needs to learn to stick up for himself,” I said. I had learned how to fight the hard way, and so had my brothers. If this was Mack’s first impression of violence, then so be it. Two men going hand to hand was a fair fight. “You want me to be in his life? Let me be his role modelmyway. You’re not going to find anyone better than me.”
Maddie raised her hands in the air, then crashed into the couch next to me. She held her face and sunk into the couch full of utter disbelief. And defeat.
My shoulders sagged with weight too.Damn it.
“Look,” she said, “I can’t have that kind of violence around Mack. It’ll make me—”
She stopped, not letting the words come out. It struck me as odd. She was both aware of violence and numb to it, especially when it came to our family and what she had been exposed to. And yet there was something about it that simultaneously made her uneasy.
Did it have to do with the past that she was hiding? Why she hid behind a false name? Did it have to do with her history with Muro?
Did she even have any history with him?
“Where is Mack’s father?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” Maddie muttered.
“It does fucking matter,” I said. And that came from me, a person who had grown up with a piece of shit father who had been killed for sleeping with the enemy’s wife, a stupid mistake. “You know it does.”
She looked at me, fatigue creasing lines into her face.
“I’m not going to talk about his father right now, okay?” she said. “It’s too much.”
And we were back to more secrets.
But then I realized thatthiswas what Maddie had been hiding; it wasn’t about some strange past she had in Brackston, but about the son she was keeping safe. A son she was trying to keep from me. She thought I was a danger to him.
A jolt of electricity traveled through me. Maddie had the same kind of loyalty towards her family as I did. She would do anything for her son.
And maybe my mother was right; parenting must have been an unbreakable bond.
“Are you afraid I’ll kill his father?” I asked, my voice quiet. She forced a smile, then shook her head.
“I hope you do,” she said.
What had he done to make her want him dead? Was Maddie still loyal to her family, if she stopped when it came to Mack’s father?
“What about the rest of your family?” I asked. She shifted, giving me her full attention. “If you grew up in Brackston, where are they? I don’t take it Lucy is your blood.”
She sat up, content with the change in topic. “Lucy is a neighbor. The best neighbor I ever had,” she said. She was thoughtful then, staring off into space. “It’s hard, you know?”
“What is?”
“Family,” she said quietly. “Sometimes, I don’t really understand it. My stepdad used to beat my mother. And when he started hurting me, she had nothing left to protect me.”
It was clear, then. Maddie would never let anyone hurt her son, like her mother had let her stepdad hurt her. And that was part of why she had kept me out for so long.
I ran a hand through my hair. How could I expect to be in her life if she was afraid of what I could do?
