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“What?” I asked when he didn’t go on.
“Was just weighing how much my business it is,” Ray said, smirking, revealing one silver incisor that I’d always found oddly charming.
“Go ahead. Butt in,” I invited.
“Just thinking. Whatever your feelings on the guy, that is a good man right there,” he said, shrugging, then shooing me away so he could help the next customer.
That was part of the problem, wasn’t it?
I’d always known how good Seeley was.
Which was why I was so pissed at him for making the choices he’d made.
Walking out, I found him standing near the bike that represented the path he’d chosen in life.
Beside him was Cato, the same tall, muscular frame, same medium-brown hair and green-eyed guy I’d known from the apartment building.
The same guy I’d fished a bullet out of a while back.
Another guy who could have had a different life if he hadn’t gotten so wrapped up in the criminal culture.
I was being a snob, I know.
Especially because I didn’t judge everyone else in the neighborhood like I did the three or four guys I’d practically grown up with, the ones I saw every day, the ones I really wanted a straight life for.
I needed to stop caring.
They’d made their choices.
They would have to live with them.
And, I imagined, on more than one or two occasions, I would have to fish bullets out of them or stitch them up.
I just… I guess I never expected that the next time, it would be Seeley.
CHAPTER FOUR
Seeley
“I mean, not to sound like a nagging wife,” Eddie said, coming out of the back door at the clubhouse in an absolutely ridiculous apron covered in all different types of foods that I think one of the girls had given him for Christmas. He cherished the fucking thing. “But I have been slaving over this meal for four fucking hours now. And I called all of you in half an hour ago. And the food is getting cold. That’s all I’m saying,” he said, throwing up his hands before turning and going back into the house.
“We pissed off Mom,” Levee said, pulling himself out of the pool, barely pausing to grab a towel before making his way into the house.
The thing with Levee, with Cato, with me when Eddie first came around, was that none of us were used to home-cooked meals. That wasn’t the kind of life we came from, the kind of families we had.
We were raised on ramen and chips and whatever shit was cheap at the convenience store or supermarket.
I’d never even had fresh fucking broccoli until Eddie made some as a side dish once.
So when Eddie was cooking, we were eating. It didn’t matter if we just came back from getting food on the road somewhere.
Home-cooked was too much of a novelty for us to pass up on.
Donovan followed Cato into the house.
It was just Alaric who was hanging back.
“Hey, food. Let’s go,” I called. Because lately it seemed like Alaric was losing too much weight, getting a little too cut.
