Page 14 of Love Thy Brother
“Why do you think?” Cam’s voice rose, cracking like a whip across the table. “You’re my brother. If some cunt’s trying to hurt you, they need to fucking die.”
“Because you love me? Or because I’myourbrother?”
“What does that mean?”
“You know what it means.”
Cam opened his mouth.
Alexei cut him off. “Is a fair question. That he does not know the answer is a fight for another day.” To me, he said, “You are asking if Cam will intervene to save face instead of saving you?”
“I don’t need fucking saving.”
“Maybe, but any vulnerability makes the club look weak. And if the Kings are perceived to be fragile, every business and every person connected to it is at risk. In this life, that means death, no?”
A dry laugh escaped me. “I’m not a King.”
“You are an O’Brian, though. Whether you like it or not, that is the same thing.”
I’d heard enough. Whatever I thought I’d come here for, an ancestry assassination from my brother’s extra lover wasn’t it.
I shoved my chair back, surging to my feet, mentally already halfway home, but Rubi blocked the door, his face a fucking stranger’s.
Feeling trapped riled me in ways no fucker needed to see. Wild, I invaded his personal space. “You think I won’t fight you to get out of this hellhole?”
He didn’t move. Barely blinked. “I don’t want to fight, Riv.”
“What do you want then? Oh yeah. I remember. Nothing.” I spun and turned my anger back on Cam. “Get him out of my way.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
Cam leaned back in his seat, morphing more and more into the president I’d never asked for in my life. Swallowing the brother I needed. The brother Iloved. “We need to figure this out. Regardless of our motivations, no one steps to you and gets away with it. We could be fucking pig farmers and I’d feel and act the same.”
“Your hands would be as dirty too.”
“Yourhands ain’t clean, bro. Back in the day, you rode with us, as long as Saint has.”
Denial twisted my windpipe. I wasn’t like Saint. I’d never killed anyone. Or made myself useful enough to clean up after a brother who had.
But...blood stained my skin all the same. I’d fought men. Hurt them. Ridden them down and kicked the shit out of them for no other reason than they wore the wrong colours, or a brother more important than me had told me to.
And it wasn’t morals that had stopped me. It was fear of losing the men I could cheerfully chuck in the sea right now.
Rubi wasn’t gonna move and I was too riled up to risk laying hands on him. Fighting or fucking, some days there wasn’t much difference.
I stomped to the window instead, turning my back on him while I fought the compulsion to toss a chair at the glass and smash my way out of a room my dad had built from the ground up. Foundations, bricks, plaster. It was the first building him and Rubi’s old man had finished on the compound. Probably full of asbestos, and wasn’t that fitting?
God, it hurt being so angry all the time. My stomach ached, my veins burned, and my joints cracked like a fucking glow stick. At home, when my roommate wasn’t sailing the seven seas, I used his innate calm instead of party drugs. Stayed in and watched him parent his three-year-old sprog like it had been his life plan all along, not a random hook-up that had derailed his existence.
But Oscar wasn’t here now. All I had was history and judgement at my back, and the view from this shitty window.
And, of course, all I could see was the pretty chaplain crossing the yard with a child I’d never seen before. She had long, dark hair and olive skin. Couldn’t see the colour of her eyes, but she looked enough like another brother that I jabbed my finger on the glass. “Who the fuck is that?”
Saint joined me at the window. I hadn’t heard him move. “Mateo’s kid.”
“His what?”
