Page 137 of Cinder
“Have you seen where they’re keeping Ella?” I ask.
“They’re not here,” he says in an odd voice, while keeping his gun trained on me.
My eyes narrow. “You said you saw them arrive on CCTV?—”
Fuck.
He lied.
Because he’s the motherfucking rat.
My heart falls to the pit of my stomach.
The rat was a Knight after all.
Quicker than a heartbeat, I aim my gun at him again.
“Why?” My voice shakes because I know what I have to do. Rogue will have to pay, and it will be up to me to enforce it. “Why did you betray the club?”
Rogue’s face falls. He looks destroyed. Like the weight of his guilt has aged him.
“You know my sister’s story. You know she needs the money.”
His younger sister has a sick kid. Medical bills have crippled their family.
“There were other ways.”
“Yeah, how? Take on extra patrol runs? Work my ass to the bone doing hours outside of the club? Do you know what it was like seeing all that money come in from the Knights’ Fantasia trade, knowing if I got a bigger piece of the pie, it’d make all the difference?”
“The profit is distributed fairly.”
“My sister needed more. My niece needed more.”
“The club helped her?—”
“But it wasn’t enough,” he yells helplessly. “I had to do something. I couldn’t stand by and watch my niece suffer. It was killing my sister. Her old man ran out on them. Quit because it was too hard. What was I supposed to do, let them both suffer?”
“You talk to Beast. You don’t betray the club.”
He swallows thickly, ashamed. His eyes are red and glassy. “It wasn’t meant to go down this way. It was only meant to be a one-time deal. I didn’t think they would come after the Knights. But then the Bratva found me, and that’s the thing about these guys, once they’ve got you, they want more and more and more from you, and they push and push until you find yourself doing shit you never thought you would.”
He shakes his head as he recalls what he’s been going through.
“At first, they said they would rat me out to the club. Tell you what I did if I didn’t start giving them something useful. So I fed them little bits of information. Useless shit. But they knew it. So they threatened to hurt my sister and her kid if I didn’t start playing ball. Then they started paying for shit. A specialist appointment. Medication. My niece started doing better. They gave her a chance, and in return, all I had to do was occasionally feed them a little intel. What choice did I have? I was screwed if I did and screwed if I didn’t. I chose my sister and niece over the club. You would’ve done the same.”
“No, I wouldn’t have sold clean routes to the fucking Bratvain the first place. I would’ve spoken to my president. My club brothers. Not betray them.”
“That’s easy to say when you haven’t got anything to lose,” he says. “When you don’t have anyone you care about enough to do anything to save them.”
He’s wrong. I have fucking everything to lose.
And I’m here trying to make sure that doesn’t happen.
I grit my teeth. “You led us into an ambush.”
“They made me do it.”
“They make you kill Cheezy too?”
