Right out the door…
Gone.
My skin started prickling.
“Knox—”
“Then, I’m in Denver, training to be on the team, and she walks into the office asking for me.”
Holy shit.
“How did she find out where you were?”
“She still sent birthday and Christmas gifts down there. So she asked, and Gypsy told her.”
Gypsy.
A pain in the ass on multiple fronts.
“Okay,” I whispered.
“I sat down with her. I was curious. What made a woman walk out on her kids? Leave them to a man who consorted with criminals, because he was one. A man who was grooming his children to follow in his footsteps. And she knew this man was doing that to her children. She still left. And what made her stay away? But when we were sitting down, mostly I wanted to know what gave her big enough fuckin’ balls to think she could come back?”
“What did she say?” I asked carefully.
“She said she didn’t have any money. She said she was scared of Dad. I said I was thirty-one years old, I got out when I was eighteen, she found me when she felt it was time to find me, but she’d had thirteen years to reconnect, so what the fuck? She said she didn’t think I’d want to hear from her.”
When he didn’t go on, I asked, “What’d you say to that?”
“I said she was right. I didn’t when I got out of that mess in Tucson, only seven years after she left us to all of that, and I didn’t right then, when I was sitting at Fortnum’s, sharing a coffee with the bitch.”
At him referring to his mother as “the bitch,” I went back to pressing my lips together.
“My brothers were assholes, committing felonies in their teens. I had four ‘stepmothers’ between Mom leaving and me leaving, none of them official, all of them skanks, users, and every one of them was the same age when he started it with them, so the last one that I knew was only a few years older than me. Obviously, Dad always had cash, and he liked to be the big man, he liked to swing his dick. He threw huge parties. We were exposed to shit no kid should be exposed to. Drunks. Drugs. Fights. Porn. Firearms. He might have evaded the law, but he didn’t put on any pretense. Everyone knew the kind of man he was. Everyone knew he was garbage.”
He took in a breath, and he was looking at me so intently, I felt the burn of his gaze.
“And everyone thought we were like him.”
Oh God.
“Knox—” I tried again.
“And Crew and Poe confirmed it for them.”
Damn.
He kept going.
“I had a girlfriend all through high school. And her parents were so against her spending any time with me, we had to hide it. So we did. For four years.”
Hide it.
For four years.
I couldn’t hack it.
I shifted back and wilted to my ass on the arm of one of my living room chairs.
