Total pages in book: 168
Estimated words: 169013 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 845(@200wpm)___ 676(@250wpm)___ 563(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 169013 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 845(@200wpm)___ 676(@250wpm)___ 563(@300wpm)
Not that she hadn’t had her suspicions. But there was no way she knew how grim it went.
I knew she wanted to ask exactly what I meant by that, so I brushed the back of my hand over her cheek and started to speak. “But this? It’s the most dangerous thing we’ve ever done. But it has to happen.”
Tears blurred. “I can’t stand the thought of something happening to you.”
“It won’t.” The oath was out before I could think better of it. I had no right to make it. Not when I knew some of us wouldn’t be coming home.
Brinley blinked, horror thinning her voice. “And Dereck?”
I hesitated, at war with the truth that this thing could still go south. “My intention is he’s getting out with us.”
Her eyes flicked all over my face, searching before she pushed me the way she always did. “And what is this, Silas? What is it you’re involved in? This doesn’t seem like some beef with another motorcycle club.”
I couldn’t give that to her.
Not yet.
Not until after all this went down and I met with the club. In Church, I’d tell them the line I’d crossed and let them know I didn’t intend on ever turning back.
They were going to have no say in that.
My devotion to Brinley.
But giving her the inside on what Crimson Crows really did?
We’d vote if Brinley could fully be let in, going through the same channels that the rest were approved.
So I gave her what I could.
The bare, blatant truth.
The crux. The beginning. The mission I’d set out on long ago before it landed me here.
“With the help of your brother, I’m finally going to get revenge for my mother’s death.”
FIFTY-TWO
SILAS
SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD
“Where are you going?”
His grandmother’s voice echoing down the short hall stalled him in his tracks, and his hand trembled on the doorknob.
Dimness suffused the dense air, and he struggled to breathe through it.
“Out,” he grumbled.
“I see that filth you’re wearing.”
He’d pulled on his Iron Owls cut right before he’d been ready to slink out.
He wasn’t necessarily sneaking. But this was an unending fight with Meems that he wasn’t in the mood for.
He slowly swiveled around on his motorcycle boots.
“You’re just seeing the filth, Meems. It doesn’t have a thing to do with the cut.” He basically sneered it.
He watched the pain slash across her face, and he shifted on his feet, the regret that tried to flutter up squashed by the anger that had become his constant partner.
“You know better than that, Silas Mercer. We all choose our paths, and the one you’re traveling down right now is the wrong one.”
He scoffed. “I started down this path two years ago, and there’s no getting off it.”
Because the path he’d chosen had killed his mother.
“You made a mistake, Silas, but it’s in your power to stop making it. This isn’t what your mother would want from you.”
“I’m thinking what my mother would actually want is to be alive.”
Grief speared through her being, her features aged by at least a decade over the last year.
He hated it.
That he caused it.
That he was the one who’d destroyed their lives.
His brother and sister without a mother.
Living in this shithole of a house in LA since it was close to Meems’s sister and she was going to help out.
Their financial situation far worse than it’d ever been.
But that was the one thing he could do something about. That and avenging his mother.
He’d run into this guy named Deke who introduced him to the club’s vice president, Trent.
They stood for everything he needed.
Power and brutality.
He was going to need it when he finally hunted these motherfuckers down. It wouldn’t be wise to take them all on himself, though he would if he had to.
It wasn’t like he could get any information from his father.
That piece of shit had disappeared that night.
Fucking coward.
Silas guessed the guy was lucky because if that bastard showed his face, Silas would end him himself.
He had no names, but he did know some of the shipments had been coming out of California. He figured if he got in deep enough, he might be able to uncover who they were.
Even if it took fucking years.
Because he wasn’t leaving this life until he buried them.
“What your mother would want is her children flourishing. Thriving even after she’s gone because she already instilled her belief and hope in them.”
Silas’s heart throbbed, mangled and torn, every beat distorted. He rubbed the spot over it like he could stop the bleeding.
“You know she wouldn’t want this for you,” Meems continued, “and I don’t, either. She loved you more than life, Silas, and as her mother, as your grandmother, I’m begging you not to do this.”
He closed his eyes against the onslaught of his grandmother’s words, bolstering himself through the trauma.
Gripping onto the hate.
And he gritted as he turned the doorknob and pulled open the door, “Go back to sleep. You don’t need to worry about me.”