Sinful Desire (Sinful Nights, #2)(91)

She pursed her lips together and squeezed her eyes shut. Her face looked pinched, as if she were sucking all her own secrets into her mouth and holding them in with her breath.

Ryan huffed through his nostrils. Enough. This was f*cking enough. He wanted to slam his fist into the wood. To knock the damn table over on its side. To throw things. But he wasn’t that kind of a man. He didn’t do that on the ice, and he didn’t do it in here. Violence begets more violence. Fear spawns more fear. He had to rely on his head and his heart.

“Don’t you dare shut down on me again,” he seethed, the words curling out of his mouth like hot smoke. “Don’t you try that routine with me. I have a right to know what I’ve been carrying around for you. It’s not a secret anymore. The pattern was made. The names are revealed.” He thumped his fingertip against the table. “Jerry. T.J. Kenny. They were in your pattern, Mom. Yours.” He pointed at her for emphasis. “I want to know why the addresses, and therefore the names, of those men were hidden. Because for eighteen years, you tricked me into thinking this was special to you. I kept it safe. Because I f*cking love you, Mom.”

His throat hitched, and wild tears threatened to rain from his eyes. He stopped speaking, pressed his thumb and forefinger over the bridge of his nose, and pinched, keeping them at bay. “I love you, and I love Dad. I came to see you all the time, even when I was in college, even when I had leave from the army. I’m the one. I came here. I saw you. And I have been a messed-up son-of-a-bitch most of my life because of this. Please, I’m begging you. Tell me something.”

She parted her lips and bit nervously on her thumbnail. Her eyes welled up. She dug into her thumb then whispered. “Ry,” she said, like a fearful creature. “They told me not to say a word about anything. That’s why I gave it to you. To get rid of it. To hide it.”

He knit his brow. “Who? Who told you not to say a word?”

“Those men.”

“Why didn’t you just have me throw it out?”

She glanced from side to side then under the table, as if she were sweeping the room for spies. Leaning across, she lowered her volume even more. He practically had to read her lips. “I thought I’d gotten rid of that stuff already. But then the cops came, and I still had it, and I couldn’t have you throwing out something the cops might think was evidence,” she said, her lips quivering. “I didn’t want to put that on you, or make you responsible for that. I had you keep it knowing no one would ever look inside my sewing pattern.”

His chest burned with shame. He’d been played a fool by his own mother. But why? What was she so afraid of? “Why did you have it in the first place? Why did you put their addresses in there?” he asked, pressing on like a cross-examiner.

She twisted a strand of her hair, back and forth, tight against her skull. “They were just my notes. That was all. They were notes about who I was meeting, and I was taking on so much extra sewing work to pay off my debt, so I wrote things down on my patterns.”

“But this wasn’t on a pattern. It was in a pattern.”

“I know,” she said through gritted teeth. “But I didn’t want anyone to know I was meeting them.” She dropped her forehead in her hands and hissed, “About the drugs. And I told you why. I wanted to try to stay clean about the drugs in case I ever got out, and I fought so hard to have my conviction overturned.”

He drew a deep breath. “You put their addresses in a pattern because you were meeting them about drugs, Mom? C’mon. Why would you do that?”

Her jaw was set hard. “I told you. I wanted to keep you all safe from them. I had to protect my babies. I had to.”

“So you put the info on Stefano’s accomplices in a pattern to f*cking protect us? You told me not to say anything about the drugs because you were trying to get out of here, but then you hid their addresses in a pattern. Something doesn’t add up.”

She flinched, but didn’t answer, then brushed something unseen off her shoulder. Fuck. This was spiraling again.

“Or was there something else going on? Did they have something else on you?” he asked, grasping at straws, but hell, he had to try something. Because it made no sense why she would need to shield all those names so badly.

She covered her eyes. “I was scared. That’s why I hid the info. That’s why I didn’t want anyone to know the addresses and who I was meeting.”

“Why? What did they have on you? Why were you so afraid of them? What did you have to hide? What was so important about those names that you asked me to hide this pattern? Because if it was that goddamn important, it sounds like it was more than drugs. It sounds like you gave me your own notes to plan a murder. Is that what it was? Was this your goddamn blueprint that you gave me?”

“No!” She raised her voice—the same tone she’d admonished him with when he was a kid. “That is the truth. I put their addresses in there because I needed to remember them. That’s all.”

But the dots didn’t connect. He pressed on. “Were you meeting them to plan the murder of my father?”

“I told you, I didn’t do it,” she said in a whispered shout. “I told you I didn’t kill him. Are you ever going to believe me?”

“I know you didn’t pull the trigger, Mom. Everyone knows that,” he said, exasperated, as he scrubbed his hand over his chin. “But you’ve told me other things that have turned out not to be true. So I want to know this—were T.J. Nelson and Kenny Nelson working with Stefano? Were they his accomplices?”