She sat up, moving until her back was against the wall and she’d pulled her knees up and held her legs tightly to her chest. There were tear-tracks on her face. He sank down on the edge of the bed close to her and reached out to brush wet strands of hair from her face.
“It’s what we do, Bree. We’re good at it.”
She blinked at him, her long lashes fanning her cheeks. “I don’t understand.”
“We hunt pedophiles and we get the children back. Your father may not be a pedophile, but he kidnapped a child. We’ve been hunting since we were little kids, so for all of our lives. We’ll find Zane and we’ll bring him home.”
She wiped at her face. “I still don’t understand.”
“The man who was the international president of the Swords ran the largest human trafficking ring in the world. He had what we referred to as ‘snuff’ ships. He took women, men and children onto the ships with his very wealthy and sick clients and gave those chosen to them. They used them, got their kinks satisfied and killed them. The bodies went overboard.”
He’d told her all of it before, but in an offhand way, as if he was making excuses for himself—and he had been. This time he wanted her to know what Torpedo Ink was capable of because he would never stop until he had their son back and neither would any of his brothers and sisters.
“Czar joined the Swords and worked his way up to enforcer. He joined that particular chapter because it had been the chapter of the international president. Czar knew if the man came back, it would be to that chapter.”
Breezy lifted her head and looked at him. Met his eyes. It was the first time since he’d last seen her that she really looked at him without anger or hurt. She studied his face for a long time and then frowned. He’d fallen hard for that little frown. He’d traced it with his fingertips more than once just to memorize it.
“You’re MC,” she said with conviction. There was distaste in her voice.
He was. He was Torpedo Ink and he lived and died for those colors and his brothers. He nodded slowly, sensing he was on very shaky ground. “Yes. Torpedo Ink is my club. I’m VP. We’ve always been Torpedo Ink and we always will.”
“You can’t hide the MC in a man.” The distaste had deepened to revulsion.
He couldn’t blame her for disliking clubs. She’d been born into the Swords club, and they hadn’t treated any of their women with respect. They saw them as assets to be used. Even the old ladies. “Not all clubs are alike, Breezy.”
“It doesn’t matter as long as you get Zane back. I swear to you, Steele, he’s your son. I wouldn’t lie about that.”
“I know that. I wasn’t the one asking.” He hadn’t been. It hadn’t occurred to him that Breezy would lie to him about the child. Apparently, it had occurred to the others and they’d made certain the boy was his by using Absinthe, their own lie detector. “It wouldn’t have mattered though, Bree. We would have gone after him no matter what.”
She rubbed her chin on top of her knees. There was a scant four inches between his fingers and her ankle. He was acutely aware of that short distance. He could touch her, she was that close. Feel her skin. Feel what had always belonged to him.
“As soon as we get him back, I’ll be gone. You won’t have to worry that I’ll ask you for anything. I’m working now, and I’ve been able to support us. I have most of the money you gave me, and I’ve been saving a little bit here and there in order to pay it back. To get started, I needed some of it, but I was careful. I’ll have all of it.”
He heard the pride in her voice, but it didn’t matter. Anger swept through him. “I gave you that money to give you a good start, Bree. That was me taking care of you.”
She drew back. He felt that withdrawal, although she had nowhere to go. Their conversation was so careful, so stilted, when they’d always laughed together and talked so easily about everything. Or had they? He tried to think back to the nights they lay in bed together chatting. They’d been comfortable, but he’d done most of the talking, not Breezy. If she spoke, it was to tell him about her day, about some of the children she supervised. Sometimes it was her worries for the girls. They hadn’t felt distant from each other, not like this.
She laughed easily, that was one of the things he remembered most. Her laughter. The sound of it. The way she turned everything bad into something good. It didn’t matter how he was feeling, and often it wasn’t good. He had nightmares and woke up dripping in sweat. He’d sit on the edge of the bed and she’d wrap her arms around him and the next thing he wasn’t thinking, only feeling. She could drive away every one of his demons so easily.
“It’s important to me to pay you back, Steele,” she said. “I never want to feel like that again, the way I did when you set me straight. It was hard to hear, but I know I had to learn to stand on my own two feet.”
He shook his head. “I was full of shit, baby. I wanted you safe and I said whatever I could to drive you away.”
She sent him a false smile when there had never been anything false about Breezy. “I appreciate you saying that, Steele, but you had plenty of time to look for me. If that’s what you do, find people, you could have found me. You didn’t. And that’s okay,” she added hastily. “I’m fine now. I needed to learn about myself and my own strength. I knew Zane was coming and I figured it out.”
“Baby …”
She winced. Visibly. “Please, don’t call me that. We’re not …” She trailed off, waving her fingers in the air as if that said everything. “It’s best if we keep this as impersonal as possible. Once we find Zane, I’ll leave, but if you want to stay in touch with him, of course that’s all right.”
His temper kicked in. He’d thought he’d mastered that long ago, but his woman had forgotten who she belonged to. If nothing else, she should have remembered who he belonged to. It was written on her skin, right where he’d had Ink tatt it.
“Impersonal?” He nearly roared the word at her. He leapt up and paced across the room to keep from hitting the wall just beside her head. “There’s nothing impersonal about us. You may have forgotten what it was like when I was moving inside you, but I sure as hell haven’t. I’ll call you anything I damn well please and yes we are …” He waved his fingers in the air just as she had done. “You aren’t leaving when we find Zane.”
She regarded him as if he’d grown two heads. He realized she’d never really seen him lose his temper. In all the time he’d been with her, he hadn’t raised his voice. They weren’t that kind of couple. He’d always led, and she’d always followed. Breezy didn’t do things to upset him. Clearly, that had changed.
“You can’t tell me what I can and can’t do anymore, Steele,” she said quietly. “You threw me away and made it very clear what you thought of me—”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it. You had to leave. I told you that you had to leave, and you wouldn’t. You refused. I knew war was coming. It was too damned dangerous for you to stick around. I had to get you out of there.”
“You could have come with me.”
“I had to back Czar up.”
She shook her head. “Czar had everyone else to back him up, Steele. I had no one. You chose to stay with your club, and you threw me out knowing I didn’t have a clue how to take care of myself.”
He wished she yelled back or cried. She did neither. More, there was truth in what she said. It hadn’t occurred to him to leave the others. They were whole together. Safe. Had he tried to point out that logic she would simply counter that she hadn’t been safe or whole without him. Now she was. Now she was complete without him.
“There are eighteen of us, Bree.” He made an effort to drop his voice down to the level of hers. Quiet. Calm. “We were outnumbered and didn’t expect to walk away from that battle.”
Her eyes were on his face, moving over it, focusing completely on him in the way he remembered. He’d always loved that look, yet at the same time he had always found it disconcerting. He’d often turned away from her, afraid she’d see into him. Afraid she’d see what a fuckup he was. How damaged. Still, he had liked that she nearly always gave him her complete attention.