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My feet move before my brain can instruct them to, and I’m at his side, dropping to my knees.
“What happened, Dad?”
He drags his eyes away from Mom, who’s busy checking him over, and looks at me. A ghostly smile surfaces, but then Mom is twisting his face forward so he’s looking at her.
“They know,” he tells her.
“Who? What do they know?” I demand.
Mom doesn’t question him. Instead, she instructs me to help get him up.
Together, we get him into a chair at the table, causing him to clutch his side, wincing in pain.
“How bad?” Mom asks.
“He got me in the side, and everywhere else you can see. Angelo figured me out, but luckily, it was just me and him, though the club will know by now who I really am.”
Club? I take another look at him, and as my eyes roam down his body, I notice the leather and patches he’s wearing.
Grabbing a bowl of soapy water and a handful of towels, she snaps,
“I thought I told you to go up to your room?”
“You did.”
“Son, you should listen to your mother. This is nothing.”
Nothing? I find nothing funny about any of this, but an incredulous laugh escapes past my lips.
“I’m not leaving. I want to know what happened to you, and why you’re dressed like something out of a movie?”
Mom’s concentrating on cleaning the blood from dad’s face, but his attention is on me.
“Then you should sit and listen very carefully to what I have to say, because after tonight, we’ll be gone from here, and you’ll never be able to contact your friends again.”
Pulling out a chair, I drag it closer to my parents.
“You’ve always wondered what I do for work. The reason I’ve never told you is because I work undercover for the FBI, infiltrating criminal organisations to help bring them down. Most of that work involves motorcycle clubs.”
Okay, now I understand the patched leather vest. Everything is finally making sense.
“And Mom knew?”
She remains quiet as he nods.
“It’s how we met. The first time I met your mother, she had just killed her father, the president of a violent, powerful motorcycle club, and she wanted to die.”
I gasp, and he takes a moment to clear his throat.
“You wanted to know, so listen. I was undercover for a rival club, and things got messy. Her father’s men wanted her dead, and they nearly succeeded by shooting her. Luckily, it was in the leg. She survived, as you can see, because I hid her at my place. I made it my mission to protect her, even though she’ll tell you she didn’t need it.”
Mom smiles at Dad, and he returns it. “In the end, a lot of men were arrested and sent to prison. Most of them are still there.”
I have so many questions, but the one that first comes to mind is, “Why did you kill your dad?”
“Like your father said, he was a very powerful man whose brothers always came first, even before me, his daughter. I grew up around men you couldn’t even begin to understand, but to me, it was normal—something I was used to. My father only understood loyalty. You were either with him or against him. You followed his rules or you paid the price, and I paid the ultimate price. He found out I was planning to run off to college, which was at the same time one of the brothers killed a woman. Instead of having the police find her, and to keep them from sniffing around his club, he told me I would have to take the fall. I refused, of course, When I refused, he had his men hold me down, poured whiskey over my hands, and used a blowtorch to burn them to a crisp. I passed out from the pain, and when I woke up, I was lying beside Maria’s dead body with the police surrounding us. The bastard set me up for her murder, and I spent ten years in prison for a crime I didn’t commit.”
“Not only that, but she endured brutality there you couldn’t begin to imagine. Your mother has suffered terribly—”
