Page 166 of Seizing Control: Part One

The crazy blonde promised me that my duchess was okay.

Agreed—after I threatened to tell Sander her decade and a half year old secret—to inform me if that changed.

“You gonna speak to her?” Toker asks.

“Nah,” I drawl. “Figure there’s nothin’ left to say.”

After my behaviour at home, where I brought up raping her in front of my mother and Gabriel, it’s unlikely that my wife will want anything to do with me that doesn’t involve her knee meeting my balls again. I shouldn’t have spilled the truth about the ritual, but I was too far gone to stop myself. Weeks of constant drinking and little sleep have stripped me of a filter. The abrupt ice bath that got me moving this morning has done nothing to sober me up.

The sad truth is the words were out of my mouth before I knew I was thinking them.

As the guilt that’s been a constant companion rises up again, I snatch my beer from the table. I lean back in my seat and drain the bottle in one long pull. The bitter liquid creates a burn in my throat the matches the anger I feel every time I think about the hand Gabriel had in that night. If he’d given us a heads-up, I could’ve prepared better. Made it easier on Cherub. Found a way to avoid hurting her.

If I’d known… I’d have backed out of the plan.

Which is the outcome Gabriel wanted to avoid.

“Looks like my lil cuz doesn’t agree,” Toker muses. As I watch my wife gracefully make her way through the crowd of bikers toward me, stopping every few steps to say hello to another Shamrock, her cousin motions for Cub to follow him. “Try not to fuck it up?—”

“I’m not the one who wants a divorce.”

My terse confession stops them both in their tracks. Cub pins me with a sympathetic look while Toker makes a scoffing sound. The lanky redhead frowns and cocks his head to one side. He weighs his next words carefully, the intention behind them growing stronger in the moments before he blows up my entire life with ten words.

“Tell her the truth about Jenna… let her see the real you.” My Tech officer shrugs. “Maybe she’ll change her mind?”

By saying the name of my son’s murderer out loud, Cub unleashes my demons. I haven’t heard that name since Bebe threw it in my face, and I can’t stand the sound of it in my current state. The tiny skerrick of sanity I’ve retained in Cherub’s absence is incinerated to ash. Something cracks in my head, a sonic boom that reverberates like a mushroom bomb as a decade of secrecy and shame surges to the fore without my permission.

My reaction is as instantaneous as it is feral.

I’m on my feet.

Arm pinned to his throat.

Cub’s back to the wall.

His laptop smashed on the floor.

Communal silence dawns.

“What the fuck do you know about that?”

To his credit, Cub doesn’t flinch under the heat of my fury. He swallows hard, then he tells me, “Venom had me delete the security footage from the garage and the perimeter. He made it so you were never there.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s true.”

The sincerity in Cub’s tone leeches away some of the disbelief swirling around in my head.

Could he be telling the truth?

Has Venom known for years what I did?

Did my best friend cover up my darkness without telling me?

It’s possible if I really think about that night. Not once, in the eleven years since I killed the mother of my son, has it crossed my mind to question how I got away with it. I was mindless with grief for a week. My first time outside the compound after that saw me arrested at my son’s funeral after I pitched a fit to try to stop him being buried next to his killer. Two weeks after that, I patched-in, and the Shamrocks found themselves elbow deep in a war a few days after that because I fucked around and found out on Maddison turf. I buried myself in the club, tried to make up for the damage I inflicted with my carelessness.

I only permitted myself to wallow on the anniversary.

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