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“Where is she now?” I heard myself asking.
“Dead,” Pinkie answered before my father could. “For years now.”
Diesel rubbed a palm over his beard. “Murdered, by her son…when he was twelve.”
“He fucking strangled her to death,” Pinkie added, his face twisting. “In her own bed.”
My Sparrow let out a little gasp, and I remembered her telling us about all the photos she’d found on Drake’s, no,Carson’s,computer. Of women who’d been strangled. How they’d all sort of looked like her. I had to wonder if my Sparrow looked a little like Lilliana Rose Bates. His first kill. And whether that was why he’d been drawn to her.
Sour bile coated my throat, making my mouth fill with warm saliva. I choked it down. “That’s when you saw him last,” I said, not really a question, but I was damn sure expecting an explanation. “That’s what you said.”
“I went to see him in juvie. Offered to pay for him to get help. He didn’t even know who I was.”
“She hadn’t told him?”
“No.”
“I’m guessing he didn’t take your offer?” Ava Jade asked and I could see the gears turning behind her sharp eyes, putting it all together.
Diesel’s rings caught the light as he spun them round and round on his fingers. “No. But he found out soon enough who I was. He wanted in. To be a Saint. As if I could have someone like him anywhere near my Jacqueline. He started writing me letters after that. Pinkie?”
“Yeah, boss,” Pinkie said, leaving the room.
“You kept them?” Grey asked, and it was hard to miss the hurt in his voice. I knew, for him more than the rest of us, our makeshift family was everything. Finding out Diesel had another son, a biological son, wouldn’t sit right with him. Neither would the fact that Diesel left that son, just like his mother had left him.
“I did. They’re in the office. The letters got more and more insistent, borderline psychotic. Before they stopped altogether about five years ago. The last one I got from him was the day he was released from Folsom State after a long lull between letters. In it he said he understood why I couldn’t have him in my crew. That he would work on himself. Becomebetter. Worthy of the Saint title. And then he would come see me. I never heard from him again.”
Pinkie returned with the letters, dropping them on the table in front of me. Each yellowed envelope was stamped with the Folsom State Prison seal. Printed with its address, Carson’s name almost illegibly printed in the blank space provided.
I lifted the one on the top before letting it fall back to the table. “I don’t give a fuck about some letters he sent you years ago. You should’ve told us.”
“I didn’t think he would—”
“He was a threat,” Rook interjected, slamming his now empty glass onto the table. “Not just to you. But to us. And now to Ava Jade, too.”
“All because you abandoned him,” Grey growled.
“He was a fucked up kid who wouldn’t accept my offer to get him help, what was I supposed to do? Hekilledhis mother.”
“Did you ever ask him why?” Ava Jade asked our father with murder in her eyes. The still-beating thing in my chest ached at the pain in her eyes, realizing what made her ask the question. The things her own mother did to her. Except that was before my Sparrow found her wings. While she was still earthbound, trapped in the skin of her weaker self.
Diesel narrowed his steely eyes on Ava Jade. “The kid killed his mother,” he tried to remind her.
“And now that same kid has also had a hand in killing off half your fucking men,” she spat back. “He murdered at least twelve other women. For fuck sake’s, he had Corvuskill himself. He almost…”
She trailed off, her face turning a shade of pale green.
“And you think I could’ve stopped any of that?”
“Maybe,” Grey spoke up. “If you were there.”
Rook tapped his glass on the table, and I shoved the scotch back at him. He poured. “Even if you couldn’t have changed how he turned out, at least you might’ve been there.” He took a sip before reaching over the table to offer the rest to Ava Jade. She shook her head, and he drained it himself instead.
“For what?” Diesel demanded.
“To put a piece of fucking lead between his eyes before he could hurt anyone else.”
Diesel jerked back at Rook’s words, and I knew my father well enough to see that he was coming to realize we were right. But they were all forgetting one thing.
