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My fingers tapped impatiently on the table as I waited for Optimus to go through all the business matters for church. Then it would be my chance to speak, my opportunity to plead my case and hope that my brothers would have my back with what I was about to propose.
“Shake, you’ve got the floor,” Op finally announced, nodding for me to start. It was still strange to hear my brothers use my road name. A lot of them still called me Ham, and honestly, it didn’t worry me that they did.
Pushing my chair back, I stood on two unsteady legs and braced my hands on the table. “I don’t know how many of you have heard my story, but here’s the short version. My parents were killed when I was eighteen. My brother and sister were only twelve and sixteen, and the courts wouldn’t let me take them. They refused to give me custody, and we didn’t have a lot of family, and the ones who were around had priors.”
My breathing became heavy as I recounted the different ways in which I tried to fight for my family. How I’d spent every single cent that my parents had saved. How I was still paying back lawyer’s fees and debts that I’d gathered all those years ago.
“With Wrench’s help, I finally found my brother and sister,” I told my brothers, before taking a deep breath. “Romeo is in High Desert State Prison, Nevada, and Ophelia is in Cali in a new boarding house for homeless teens.”
“Your parents really went all out with the Shakespeare shit, didn’t they?” Dice commented, leaning back in his chair.
I rolled my eyes ignoring the comment that I’d heard more times than I could count. Yes, my parents were a little obsessed with Shakespeare and his work. I still think Romeo lucked out with the most normal name. I couldn’t say I’d met another Hamlet or Ophelia.
Blizzard leaned forward cupping his hands together on the large table. It was an incredibly impressive slab of wood, but it was the club logo which was carved into the center that made the piece completely priceless and meaningful. “I don’t know if I’m sure what you’re looking for here, kid.”
The term kid had once bugged me, especially when I was here trying to prove myself as a man—someone who could handle his shit, someone stronger than I was before. Now, though, it was almost comforting like a reminder that these guys were my family. And while I wasn’t that much younger than a lot them, they treated me like I was a brother or a son.
“I managed to go down and visit with him a few days ago,” I explained. I was still exhausted. “The crap he’s been through since our parents died has been shit, and I wasn’t there to help him through it like I should have been…” I looked up to the ceiling, “… like a real fucking brother should have been. So I’m asking for you guys to help me now be the brother I should have been back then.”
“He in some kind of trouble?” Blizzard asked, leaning back in his seat and listening intently.
I took a deep breath as I tried to recall the details of my visit with Romeo to my brothers.
“So, you really made a name for yourself, huh,” I commented after listening to Romeo explain the way he worked.
He was the middle man I guess you could say. He hooked suppliers up with buyers. You had something you wanted to sell, Romeo knew someone who would buy it. And I wasn’t talking about cars or boats or pieces of land. No, we were talking guns, drugs, and sometimes even people.
It made me cringe to think that my little brother—the same little brother who used to beg me to read to him at night, or who I taught how to hit a baseball—could be capable of doing this kind of thing. I often thought of people who had a hand in the trafficking trade were born without a conscience or had something so horrific happen to them that they just stopped believing in the idea of right and wrong.
I wanted to ask, to know about Romeo’s foster family, to know where he went after he turned eighteen and how the hell he stepped into this kind of work.
The Brothers by Blood, we weren’t exactly angels. We were guilty of putting drugs and guns out there that had no doubt had an effect on different people and families. Maybe even damaged someone’s life, but there was one thing we never stood for—human trafficking.
“I tried to block it out,” he reasoned with a clenched jaw, trying to keep his voice down to a whisper. “Man, you don’t know what it’s like to be in that situation at eighteen, where this guy drags a young girl out of the trunk of a car, demanding you find him a buyer for her. You’re suddenly an accessory. He knows if the police find out, that it was me who told, and if I say no, I’m dead within seconds.”
I heard him, I understood, but it was still like a kick in the gut to know he had to be a part of that. “So, what? You walk out of here, you’re straight back shipping in redheads from Scotland for some rich businessman? Or maybe delivering that ice to the pimp downtown who uses it to keep his girls in line.”
I was trying to be fucking understanding, but it all left a sour taste in my mouth, and I kept wondering why he’d let it get this far if he hated it so much.
Romeo’s eyes narrowed, and he leaned forward, the chains around his hands tinkling against the metal table. “You seriously think this is what I imagined myself doing at sixteen? You think I don’t wonder every damn day whether Mom and Dad would be ashamed of me. Whether if they were still alive if I would still be here?” He looked around, his eyes moving about at a fast pace, checking to make sure no one was listening in or too interested in our conversation. When he turned back to me, suddenly Romeo’s hard shell had a crack, and looking back at me was the sixteen-year-old that had screamed at me to help him as CPS dragged him away. “I know you probably think I’m a waste of air. I’m not fucking proud of the shit I’ve done, Hamlet, but I did what I had to do to survive.”
I wish he’d just punch me in the face.
That’s how fucking shit I felt about the fact I could have possibly done something to protect him from all of this. I could have gone looking for him sooner. I could have just taken him from the foster home and run.
I could have…
Those words didn’t mean shit now.
All that mattered was how far I’d go to do what I should have done back then to keep my little brother from having to go through any more fucking bullshit.
“You don’t have to do this anymore,” I told him, holding his eyes and feeling the pain coursing through them and into me.
He laughed and shook his head like I was some small child who’d just told him Santa wasn’t real. “You don’t get it, big brother. You don’t just walk away from this kind of thing. They don’t let you do that. I know too much about people who are essentially fucking ghosts.”
“You’re just one fucking guy, Rome. But maybe they’ll think twice if you have an entire MC at your back.”
His eyes grew just slightly, and I could see the moment he realized he might just have an out.
