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When she wrapped herself around him, Rome just flipped his brother off. That actually pulled a laugh from Liam and the bubbling tension in the room dialed down.
“I’ll get some ice,” Dove offered, but Rome shook his head.
“Doesn’t hurt.” Then he looked at Kellan. “Why are we meeting?”
Kellan sighed. The rapid-fire shifts in everyone’s mood were a real testament to how fucked up everything was right now.
“Little Bit,” Doc said, holding out a hand to her. “Maybe we should…”
“Nope,” Kellan said, shaking his head. “She stays.”
He and Doc essentially shared a glare, and it ratcheted the tension up.
“She doesn’t need to discussthis.”
“Man,” Jasper said, swinging right into the fight. I scrubbed a hand over my face. “You don’t just get to decide what she can handle or not. Kel’s right. She’s a Vandal, she stays. This involvesallof us.”
“Maybe it doesn’t—”
A whistle split the air and pulled everyone around. Freddie lowered his fingers from his lips. “How about we stop bitching about what Boo-Boo does or doesn’t get to do? This sucks for all of us. Kel said she needs to be here, and unlessshewants to skip out, she stays.”
“Agreed,” Milo interjected, and even Dove twisted to stare at him. His expression softened for her. “You proved your point over and over. This is your life. We are your family. We do this together, or we’re not doing it at all.”
“That’s not totally true,” she said, giving Rome a squeeze before she moved over to Doc and just like she had with Liam and me, she leaned into him when he wrapped his arms around her.
Taking care of us by letting us take care of her. I admired that.
“It’s as true as it needs to be, Ivy,” Milo told her. “The uncle is dead one way or another. Your father is too. You don’t have to do a thing.”
Woah… “He knew?”
And I was on my feet. I wasn’t the only one. That was the confirmation we’d been waiting for, but my gaze wasn’t on Milo but on Dove. Her eyes dipped before she closed them, and Doc tightened his arms around her as she sighed.
“We have confirmation?” That was from Liam. “Because we’re still trying to track the fuckbucket down, but that dickwad is in Vegas.”
She gave a little jerk at the description, but Kellan’s aggrieved look shut everyone up. “One, we don’t haveabsoluteconfirmation yet.” He glanced at all of us before looking at Dove. “Your mother wants to believe he didn’t know about what was done to her or you.”
“I know,” she said softly, almost too softly. It was Doc’s expression that grew more foreboding.
“I think she’s fooling herself,” Milo said, and like Kellan, he gentled the tone down. “I think it’s easier to lie to herself about it than admit maybe he knew and didn’t care.”
“However we don’t know that for sure,” she said. “And I don’t know how to find out for certain.”
“I do,” I said, even as Liam, Doc, and Jasper echoed the same two words.
Dove glanced at all of us then focused on Kellan. “You want to go get him. You want to talk to him directly.”
He nodded. “It might be simpler to put a bullet in his head.” Gentle didn’t mean he was going to softball the info. “But we need to know what he knows and what he did.”
“He could know where Uncle Fuckbucket is.”
Freddie cracked his knuckles. “He could know more than that, Boo-Boo.”
This was why Kellan wanted her here. We were going to find this out, although she did deserve to have a say in it and if she wanted to face him.
Well, she got to have that call too.
“So, the first question,” Kellan continued. “The most important one… how involved do you want to be in this?”
