Page 135 of Kings Don't Break
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“Logan?” Mace chokes out. He checks everyone else’s reaction like he needs to make sure he’s not the only person seeing the man standing before him.
The problem is, everybody else is just as shocked. Everybody’s gaping. Everybody’s speechless.
Including me.
I’m daring my eyes to tell me they’ve deceived me. I’m wondering if there was more than Coke in the soda can I’m clutching.
But he’s real. Logan in the flesh.
It’s been over three years since he died. Three long years have passed. That Logan bears the evidence of—he still resembles himself but different.
Older. Worn down. Battle fatigued.
Mason’s older brother’s got scars. Both physically and metaphorically. From the damaged energy he exudes to the slash mark along his cheek and across his throat. He’s been through things in his time away.
The only way to describe his eyes would be to say they’re haunted. In the past, they were a baby blue like their father’s that many women loved. The color’s morphed from being reminiscent of the sky to being closer to glacial ice that makes you uncomfortable when on the receiving end.
A man that’s seen and experienced things no person should.
I know this after one look at him.
His straggly, unwashed sheets of brown hair and overgrown beard confirm this. So do the clothes he’s wearing that are riddled with holes and dusted in dirt and grime.
Logan’s been to hell and back. Whatever his story is, wherever he’s been all this time we’ve presumed he’s dead, he’s got the ghosts to show for it.
Finally, after several seconds of stunned silence go by, Silver makes the first move. Fitting, as the vice prez of the club who’s recently returned from his hiatus. He steps over to Logan as if about to investigate whether we’ve got an impostor in our midst.
“Son,” Silver says. He grips Logan by the shoulder like a father figure. “We should head inside. You can tell us about... you can tell us where you’ve been all this time.”
Logan blinks several times like he’s been in his own trance. His expression’s void of any real human emotion. There’s an emptiness to it that makes you think of the walking dead. A man that’s lived and died and no longer can tell the difference.
But he lets Silver lead him away from the party. Everybody else in attendance watches on, still unable to move or think up anything to say.
I force myself to get up out of my chair. Korine gives me a knowing look, her brows knitted in concern. She gets exactly what I’m about to do.
I go to Mace and collect him in much the same way Silver did Logan. We leave the patio behind and follow Logan and Silver into the club office. Only a few others trickle in, like Tito and Bush.
“What’s going on?” Mace says the moment the door’s closed. He strides up to Logan in a sudden burst of energy, his face twisted in anger. “You’ve been alive all these years and you didn’t tell us? What kind of fucked-up games have you been playing, Logan?”
“Mace,” Silver starts.
“You let us think you were dead?! That you’d been shot and run off a fucking cliff? You know what it was like finding your bike totaled? Learning from the cops what had happened and how you hadn’t survived that big of a fall? That fucking coyotes likely ate your remains?” he rages in a thick rumble. Veins pulse at the sides of his neck and in his forearms as he clenches his hands into ready fists. He takes more steps toward his older brother like he’s tempted to swing on him. “Were you trying to escape the MC and what it meant to take over for Pop? Leave me with all the fucking problems, huh?”
“MACE!” Silver bellows. “Enough.”
“C’mon,” I say, cutting in between. I serve as a buffer, easing Mace back with a hand to his chest, holding eye contact with him in hopes it’ll help him snap out of his temper. “Hear him out first. Hear what he’s got to say.”
Mace inhales a tense breath, his expression no less rabid.
Attention shifts to the other side of the room, where Logan’s with Silver, still looking every bit of a dead man who’s alive. Silver clamps his hand on Logan’s shoulder again to rouse him out of his prolonged stare that’s as haunted as it is vacant.
“Tell us, son,” Silver says. “What the hell’s happened to you all this time?”
Logan’s throat bobs with a hard swallow. He blinks a couple times, then strokes a hand over his unkempt beard. A faraway look glazes over his face the more he seems to think on what to say about his whereabouts.
