Smoke and Steel (Wild West MC #2)(88)

I said nothing.

He didn’t either.

And then he did.

“Then came Rosie,” he whispered, the sheer torment on his face hurting even me.

And I knew.

I knew Beck found a way to live with it.

But Core…

With what Core’s father did…

Core had let it kill him.

I remembered his house when I first walked in.

I thought it was a life incomplete.

It wasn’t.

It was a life being lived without the person in it actually living.

“We were shadowboxing,” he said. “I’ll tell you mine, and I gotta say, in hearing the others, it made me feel even weaker than I knew I already was, because mine was nowhere near as bad. Nowhere near as bad as Core’s. But my mom didn’t give a shit about me. I had an older brother. And she gave him everything. All her love. All her hope. All her devotion. I gave it to him too because he was that good of a guy. Golden. I loved him, fuck, only person on this earth who had that from me. He gave that love back. It meant everything to me. And then he was killed in Afghanistan. We both lost him, and she made clear I knew which one of us should have been under dirt.”

He paused, and I had no idea what to say, though I felt for him, and I wanted to know what his dad did. I wanted to know if he had any love at all, outside his brother.

And I was even more grateful than ever that I had Mom and Liane and then came Andy.

“I acted out, looked for something that would work out that emotion in me,” he continued. “Everything I did was such shit, such trash, it dug me in all the deeper, because my brother would have been disappointed in me. For some reason, though, I just couldn’t stop.”

It lay between us right then.

It hung like a spirit holding the Wheel of Fortune.

One turn, and things change.

What hung there were the two words that turned the wheel to bring change.

Until Rosalie.

“All of us got a story,” he went on. “All of us were shadowboxing demons that life planted in us, way down deep. We were called Bounty, but we did not wake the fuck up and look around to see what bounty we actually had. Each of us was in a brotherhood, and we were all totally alone.”

He shook his head.

And kept going.

“Now, this is no excuse, none of it is, but we had two men in our crew who were snakes in the grass. They injected poison, but only in the way they filled the syringe and handed it to us, and we sunk the needle in our own flesh. So what was bad got worse, and we were all in for that ride.” His gaze bore into mine. “I can honest to God stand here, look you in the eye, and tell you that then, when it happened, when the decision was made, I was all for it. I jumped right in. She was mine, and I was the one to take the first swing, and I spat on her when it was over.”

The wet came and spilled right over the edges of my eyes.

“I gotta live with that,” he whispered.

“Beck,” I whispered back.

He cleared his throat.

“If he wants, he can get into it. He can tell you the full story of what we were and what we became if you give him a shot. But you’re sharp, you can put it together. There’s a reason we’re called Resurrection. We burned it to the ground. And so we could live with ourselves, we had to walk away from those ashes, go somewhere good and right, and do the work to build it back up.”

He tossed the binder on my coffee table. It landed with a plop that felt like an explosion.

“That’s our charter. Those are our rules and regs. No one but a brother has read those. But I’m giving them to you.”

Holy shit.

Slowly, I shifted my gaze to the binder.

On the cover it said:

Iustitia Tribus Honoris Fidelitas





And that was all.

Not the name of their club. Not an author of the document. Not the name of their officers.

Just those words.

“When we got our shit tight, we did the work,” Beck said, regaining my attention. “We left our women and we hiked into the woods and we sat on rocks and built a fire and we didn’t hike back out until it was all out there. Until everyone knew everything. It took over two weeks. It was hard as fuck to do it myself. But it was harder, watching my brothers reach into their own souls, pull those fuckers out and expose their demons for the other men to see. But we didn’t know what brotherhood was about. We didn’t know the shadows our brothers were fighting. We didn’t know what brought us there. We didn’t understand family. And not knowing, it took us to a place we didn’t want to be, but in one way or other, we will never leave. Out in those woods, we became a family. And we took that home to our women.”

Another tear slid down my cheek.

“Every man who comes to us and wants a part of who we are, what we do,” he went on, “before we give them a patch, we take them to those woods. And I don’t give a shit, Hellen, if they share they still feel like an asshole because the girl they liked in high school said no to a date, and that fucked them up. It means something to them. It lives in them. It festers in them. And me and Eight, and Muzzle, and Core and all the rest are there for them to help work that poison out.”

After delivering that, he walked to the door.

I wanted to cry out because for some reason I didn’t want him to leave.