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His shoulders hunched. “Then how can you honestly forgive me? No matter how I look at the situation, there is still me and my unforgivable crime.” His jaw clenched. “Your conviction that I didn’t do it—that you can absolve me—is bullshit. It makes me fear for your state of mind even more than when you were amnesiac.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“None of this makes sense anymore.”
My mind charged over the memories that were still so raw. How did we have such different versions of that night? And what would I have to do to make him see the truth? “There’s nothing to forgive. But obviously you need to forgive yourself.”
“Goddammit, I want so badly to believe you.” Arthur squeezed me tighter. His eyes were wild as if he couldn’t stomach the strained silence that followed whenever we stopped talking.
“You don’t have to believe. It’s the truth.”
When he didn’t say anything, I whispered, “Are you going to listen this time?”
Are you going to believe me unlike when you ignored my every proof that I was Cleo?
Arthur nodded slowly. “Yes. I’ll listen.” The entire day had been leading toward this conversation. “I need to know. Why do you think I’m innocent? Why aren’t you threatening to kill me for what I’ve done?”
Looking into his green eyes, I brushed unruly hair off his forehead. “I’ll tell you why.” Taking a deep breath, prickling with the ghosts of my slain parents, I did my best to offer absolution. “You did kill them, but it wasn’t your fault.”
Arthur stiffened—trading flesh and bone for steel and rebar. His large hands clamped around my hips. “What do you mean?”
“I mean exactly that. It’s not a riddle.”
His eyes turned brittle, disbelieving. His face filled with guilt, consumed with self-hatred. He had it all wrong.
For him to understand, I had to take him back further than just that night. I had to prove to him why everything he recalled was wrong. “Do you remember the first time I walked in on you and your father? That night after the Club meeting when Thorn disciplined Rubix in front of the brothers for leading an unauthorized raid on a bank?”
His face scrunched in irritation. “What does that have to do with—”
Pressing my finger against his lips, I shook my head. “Answer the question. I’ll make you understand.”
With his forehead deeply lined, Arthur’s gaze turned inward. Colors and shadows of the past clouded over his face. He nodded as the night solidified. “Yes.” Then his features fell as if plummeting off a high-rise building. “Shit, I hated you seeing that.”
My heart beat faster—just like it had the evening I’d witnessed domestic violence for the first time.
Oh, God. What was going on?
Arthur was curled up and bloody on the carpet in the middle of the lounge. Diane wailed from the kitchen as I dry heaved and clung to the windowsill outside with all my strength. I wanted to call Arthur’s name, to let him know I was there. I wanted to scream for help.
This wasn’t okay. Abuse was never okay.
But I couldn’t move from my secret spot as Rubix and Asus delivered kick after kick into Arthur’s stomach.
“Family doesn’t snitch, boy. I know it was you. You told Thorn about the raid.”
Coughing up blood, Arthur moaned, “It wasn’t me. I swear.”
“As if I’d listen to you.” Another vicious kick as if Arthur were a football and the goal net was miles away. “Do it again and this will seem like a fucking picnic.”
Goose bumps sprang up over my arms. “You were telling the truth. You never told my father. Thorn found out some other way but it made no difference to Rubix.”
Arthur laughed coldly. “Believe me. By that point, he didn’t need a reason.” His gaze was flint and hardness, but his tone slipped into tender. “You made it better, though. You patched me up and made me so fucking embarrassed.”
I shook the memories free of wiping away his blood and listening to his excuses for his father’s wicked temper. “It wasn’t the last time, either.”
Arthur shook his head. “No, not the last.”
“Now you remember how they punished you for doing nothing wrong, do you also remember how good they were at getting you to give in?” This was the part I feared bringing up. Arthur had a heart of pure gold, but like any precious metal it had impurities—imperfections that could be exploited and twisted to condemn its own molecular structure.
He sighed heavily. “Which downfall are you talking about? There were many.”
I traced the ropes of muscles in his forearm, not making eye contact. In a way, by not looking at him, I gave him an element of privacy. “Not that many. And I’m talking about the night they got you so drunk, you almost single-handedly exterminated the smaller MC just out of our boundaries—just because they lied that I’d been hurt by one of the prospects. You didn’t kill anyone, Art … but you were close.”
Do you see what I’m saying?
He froze. “I always wondered why I woke up to being reprimanded in the Club meeting and having dried blood on my fists.”
Shock turned me cold. “You mean … you don’t remember that, either?”
He smiled, but it wasn’t jovial or free. It was a trap, a cage—a self-inflicted sentence he couldn’t unlock. “No. It’s a blur. I know what I did. I felt their noses crack beneath my fists and I remember the taste of wretched bourbon as my father held my head back, making me drink.” He strained for more, but gave up. “That’s about it.”
