Page 66 of Lethal Salvation

“Yes we could, but she never wanted that. Marsha always wanted that divide and no matter how hard we would have tried, she would’ve driven the wedge deeper.”

“I know.” He let the deep flavour of the booze warm his chest as he thought back on his life. “I hated him at first, but when he began to follow us around demanding we play with him or getting in on our games, I grew to love him.”

“Same. I was jealous of him, hated that he took dad away from us but then he was a tenacious little fucker, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah, he was. Can you remember the time he climbed out the bedroom window after us and was dangling, calling our names?”

Damon chuckled. “Hell yeah. He was only five and we had snuck out to smoke weed behind the greenhouse.”

“I thought Dad was going to ground us for the rest of our lives.”

“I wish he had. At least then we would’ve known he gave a shit.”

Gideon swirled the liquid in the crystal glass before throwing it back. “She broke him like she broke her son and we let her.”

“Is it wrong that I feel so much regret for a man who did so much damage to so many innocents?”

Gideon had been feeling the same way. He shook his head. “I don’t know, but I get it. I feel it too.”

“I guess it’s regret for what could have been.”

“Don’t live your life thinking like that. It will crush the life out of you, believe me.”

Gideon cocked his body toward Hurricane who’d made the statement. “You have regrets?”

The big man laughed without any humour. “More than I can count.”

“How do you deal?”

He pulled out a chair and straddled it, his arms laid across the back. “I didn’t for a long time but then I realised, with a little help from someone with way more sense than me, that regret does nothing but poison our soul. The only thing we can do is learn and let it shape how we handle our future.”

“Wise words, but not simple.”

“No, nothing worth doing is ever easy.”

He sensed her before he saw her, the air in the room seemed to settle in the same way his heart did. Angling his head back, he saw her walk in beside Bás. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Damon looking for Lotus, but she was nowhere in sight.

“We have news.”

“Should we wait for Lotus, Titan, and Reaper to join us?”

Gideon shook his head. His brother wasn’t being as subtle as he thought he was.

“Reaper and Titan will be here shortly, but Lotus won’t be joining us for the rest of this mission.”

Damon thrust back his chair and glared at Nadia, making Gideon’s hackles rise.

“Is this about what you saw?”

Nadia crossed her arms and planted her feet and, despite her being a good eight inches shorter than Damon, she held her own. “No.”

“I don’t believe you, Duchess.”

Gideon rose and stepped toward his brother. “Watch the way you fucking speak to her.”

Damon glared between them. “Oh, so it’s okay for you two to fuck like rabbits but not anyone else?”

Gideon swung first, his fist hitting his brother in the cheek. Damon dove at him and they crashed to the ground in a tumble of arms and legs, each trying to get a punch in without getting a fist or knee to the face or, worse, the nuts. Gideon rolled and ploughed his fist into his brother’s jaw, the next second Damon flipped him and landed a blow to his ribs, knocking the air from him.