Page 15 of Dangerous Command
He cheated on my mother multiple times. Lied to her. I couldn’t stand that.
“I miss him so much,” she said, her voice cracking.
I grit my teeth, but I couldn’t let it go. Why honor him when he didn’t deserve her love?
Our family always deserved respect. But love was different.
“He lied to you,” I said. “Put himself before the family.”
“Your father wasn’t always like this.”
It was hard for me to remember the days when I still looked up to him. “He cheated on you with Ethan’s mother,” I said. “That was before me. You two were still newly-weds when he did that.”
She shrugged. “We barely knew each other then.”
“That doesn’t make it okay. Nor what he did with Muro’s wife.”
She looked down at her palms. “Something changed in him when Muro came into the picture.”
I had never heard her speak Muro’s name before. “You knew about Muro?”
She forced a smile. “I pretended to be clueless, but I wasn’t. Your father told me things.” That shocked me. I had always assumed she didn’t know anything. That sherefusedto acknowledge our business. “I don’t know when he started sleeping with Margot, but I remember the moment I knew he had fallen in love with her.”
“You knew he was screwing Margot too?”
“You can’t help who you fall in love with.”
Her eyes were bleary, soaked in tears, and yet I couldn’t tell if she was speaking of herself or my father or Margot. Which was worse?
“It was long before that,” I argued. “He was always on drugs. Screwing around while the three of us worked.”
“Your father never wanted this life.”
Saying that implied thatwedid. It was the only life I had known, and yeah, if I was going to do it, I was going to be the best, but our lifestyle was the reason Maddie stayed away from me. To her, I was a criminal and would be until the day I died. I would live, breathe, and die an Adler. The same as Gerard.
But I would be better than him.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “You still raise him on a pedestal like he’s some sort of god.”
“He gave me you three,” she said, rubbing my arm. “Even Ethan is a blessing.”
“You barely know Ethan.”
“We watched him grow up from afar.” She glanced around the room as if she might see the ghost of her husband there. “Parenting is an unbreakable bond. When you make a child with someone, it means something. And it will never stop being something. I understand that.”
Again, I wasn’t sure if she was talking about herself or Ethan’s mother. I guess it didn’t matter. I understood the concept of parental bonding theoretically, but it still didn’t excuse his behavior.
“It would have been smarter to leave him.”
“You don’t leave the Adler family; you know that,” she said quietly. “And besides, I would never choose to leave you boys anyway.”
Wil knocked on the door frame. “You ready?”
Our mother nodded and I helped her up. We walked down the stairs, then to the patio in the backyard. The woods stretched far beyond the house, and though this wasn’t the only funeral we had hosted in the last year, it was by far the most attended. Twice as many people showed up to the event, and every single man that we had on staff was circulating the perimeter or mingling. Even if the funeral was for my piece of shit father, we weren’t going to let Muro mess with our day of mourning.
Uncle Ray stood near the woods. I stood beside him, both of us facing the folding chairs set up in the backyard.
“How’s the crowd?” I asked.
