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“Hand me my prize,” I grinned as I took the shot.
“Did he ever give you the ‘be a man’ speech? Or was that just a Neal special?” Neal asked.
Declan groaned, leaning back in a seat. “That speech, I didn’t even get in half as much trouble as you two did—”
“Bullshit!” I yelled at him. “You just never got caught, you sneaky bastard. Compared to some of the shit you did, Neal and I were saints. He almost killed you when you had Coraline sit with us at church only after a week.”
Neal snorted. “At least he married her. Did you ever sneak two girls into your room only to be caught mid-go by Dad?”
“No,” Declan and I said at the same time, but he just nodded.
“What did he do?” Declan asked.
“How old were you?” That’s what I wanted to know.
“I was seventeen, and it was the night after mom had the Christmas Ball. There were these two hot girls all over me. Logically, I was super excited, and everything was going great till dad walked in. His face dropped; he gave me that emotionless stare and then just left. I, being the idiot that I was, finished up and had them leave. The moment he came in, I forgot what I was trying to say, but to sum it up, I was telling him that I had needs. He told me I was fool, that I was spilling my seed in women who only wanted our family’s money. That being a man wasn’t about fulfilling my needs but making sure the needs of everyone else around me were satisfied, and that if I didn’t understand that by now, I was a fool that would end up paying child support for the rest of my life. He ended it by saying ‘take a shower, you reek of desperation.’”
“Yep, that was the speech I got,” Declan said with a laugh.
“Nope, I never had that problem,” I lied as I leaned back in my chair.
“Yeah, sure. You do know we knew you before Melody, right? You slept with anything that had legs. I’m surprised dad didn’t cut—”
“Urgh! Shut up,” I cringed, but then nodded. “I don’t want to think about the women before Melody, mostly because I think she has ears all over this room and will kick my ass later. It was like Dad knew how it was going to be between us. I’m grateful he kept pushing even when I fought him on it.”
“You fought him on marrying Melody?” Neal asked me shocked. “I always thought you were the good little solider and did whatever he asked.”
“No, I was actually pissed that you got to marry a woman you cared about, while I was stuck with some Italian chick I didn’t even know. Then Declan here had to fall in love with Coraline in like ten minutes, making me feel worse. We fought about it often, and I finally accepted it, which led to me sleeping around. I think he only tolerated it because I wasn’t bitching at him anymore.”
“It wasn’t ten minutes,” Declan muttered drinking. Neal and I gave him a look. He was a goner from the get-go with her. I had no idea why he was even trying to pretend otherwise.
Neal shook his head and frowned as he knocked back another drink. “He told me not to marry Olivia. He said that she wasn’t the woman I needed. And I got so pissed off, I told him to back the fuck out of it, that I was happy.
“We had this major fight, and I demanded that he tell me if he really gave a shit about me or if he wanted me to be alone and bitter all of my life…he shook his head and turned around. Here I am years later, wishing that I’d just shut my damned mouth and listened to him. Now his death hangs around my neck.”
“Your neck?” He was blaming himself for this?
“You did kill Olivia,” Declan whispered as he poured us all another drink.
“True, but I was also the one who brought her into this family. What’s worse was the fact that I was blindsided by her. I never thought that it would get this fucked up. If I hadn’t married her, she wouldn’t have helped that motherfucking bastard, and dad might have still been here.”
“I wish I could put it on your shoulders brother,” I whispered as I took a deep breath and shook my head. “And as true as your statement on Olivia is, it was not your fault. It was mine. I take responsibility for it. It hangs around my neck, and my neck alone. Avian called me not even an hour before father was killed. I was the one who’d set a match under his ass, and it was my fault that he erupted.”
I paused as I took a final drink before standing. “If he thinks this is over, or that I’m down and out of this fight, he is fucking mistaken. I’m coming back with a vengeance, and I won’t stop until he dies in the worst type of way.”
There was silence before I took the one glass that hadn’t been emptied and poured it over the floor, spilling the drink in his honor.
Placing my hands on both of their shoulders, I leaned in. “Get some rest, brothers, because we start again tomorrow.”
Before I headed back to my room I stopped at my mother’s. I expected her to be in bed, but instead, she was sitting on the ground surrounded by photos, baby clothes, hats, and toys. They were everywhere as she slowly looked them all over.
Hearing me, she looked up, smiled, and reached out for me. Tip-toeing over everything, I made my way to the end of her bed and took a seat on the floor beside her. The very first thing she gave me was a picture of myself as a very tiny infant.
“He was so afraid that he would crush you.” She giggled. “But after you looked up at him, he never wanted to let you go.”
Swallowing, I looked to another picture of Neal and me. I was in Dad’s arms and he carried me with this look of wonder that was spread all over his face.
“You don’t know this, but I’m sort of a hoarder…a neat hoarder, but a hoarder nonetheless.” She lifted up the outfit I was wearing in the photo before looking around her room. “I kept a lot of these things because your father told me to. Every New Year’s he said he’d cheated death and one day he knew it would catch up to him.”
“He told me he didn’t believe in death. That he had a plan.” I logically knew that that couldn’t be true, but I didn’t realize how much the mere idea of his argument had comforted me up until now.
She snorted and rolled her eyes. “Horseshit. He thought about it often and he worried you all wouldn’t be old enough, should he die. He’d had a lot of close calls, but he said he just had to make it long enough for you to take over. Not because he’d die, but because you were ready to step up. He was thrown into this, but he wanted you to choose it.”
“It didn’t feel like a choice.” I’d never known anything but this life. He had sculpted me and trained me for this life.
“If you truly didn’t want to do this, he would have taken over again. He would have focused on Neal or Declan. All you had to do was let him know, but he knew you were different. He had a lot of faith in you. He came in sometimes saying that he’d felt like he was holding you over a giant cliff and watching as men bowed at your feet.”
That certainly explained why we watched the Lion King as much as we did when I was a child. She pulled a small music box from under her bed. Opening it, I saw that it contained a small pile of letters. She selected a single one and handed it to me.
“Every year your father wrote you all a new letter just in case. I asked him to keep the old ones but he would burn those. His feelings and thoughts changed each year, and he wanted you to have the last, and best, version. He wrote this one a few weeks ago when Mel asked for him to create the new lives for us all,” she said, as I took the letter from her hands.
