Page 174 of Romeo

“Everyone?”

“Everyone,” Zombie confirmed. “We figured you knew who you could trust.”

Chasm surveyed the room before his attention settled on Ace and me.

“You two staying or going?”

“We’ll stay for a few days; help you get set up. But our place is in Nebraska now.” The answer came without hesitation. I’d help him rebuild. I’d stand beside these men while they figured out what Steele had left behind.

Then I was turning my fucking bike toward Virginia.

“Okay, I guess we better have church and figure out what the fuck we’re doing.”

The room came alive as everyone headed down the hallway.

Ace and I followed them into church and stayed along the wall with the other Nebraska brothers. Chasm stopped just inside the room and looked around.

“Where’s Steele’s desk?”

“After you... died,” Ambush began, “Steele moved into an office. That was when things really started getting shady.”

“Guess I’ll have to check that out later. Anyone opposed to me moving the desk back into church?”

A chorus of nos answered him.

The men took their seats, leaving the chair at the head of the table empty. Chasm walked toward it slowly and gripped the back, but he didn’t sit.

“Not sure I can sit in this chair, brothers. Not sure I deserve it.”

“You deserve it, brother. King told us everything.”

Chasm stiffened. “What are you talking about?”

Venom looked toward Krypto, who passed the attention to Ambush.

“He told us what happened that day. How Steele held him back. He said he didn’t have the proof, but he believed Steele set you up. He told us you’d been suspicious for a while about Steele and Stone having something to do with Titan’s death.”

“And he told us how it was his fault you were in that warehouse alone,” Omen added. “He’s never forgiven himself.”

Chasm looked at me.

I raised an eyebrow.

That sounded like King.

He could carry guilt until it became part of his fucking skeleton but ask him to admit it hurt and you’d be waiting until the end of time. Instead, he tried to fix everything around it.

Chasm wasn’t much different.

He’d spent years believing King betrayed him. Maybe anger had been easier to live with than wondering whether he’d condemned the wrong man.

Now he had a room full of brothers waiting to see which version of the truth he planned to build their future on.

“I wasn’t completely honest with King that day.” Chasm tightened his hands around the chair. “I was meeting someone. Someone who had the information I needed to prove Steele had Titan killed. But somehow Steele found out and turned it around on me. When King stalled, I assumed he was in on it.”

Then he stopped, and I knew exactly why.

Names carried weight in our world, and some of them had the power to change the balance of an entire room. Hemlock’s name wasn’t only connected to what happened in that warehouse. It opened another door into King’s family.