***
Another six months later
I stared at the man through my scope.
I couldn’t do it. I really couldn’t do it.
There was no way in hell that I could do it. This man had been like a second father to me. He’d been my backbone for three years. He’d taken care of my wife and child for the last year while I’d been recovering.
While I’d been dead.
I dropped my head to the ground, uncaring that there was a large rock denting my forehead.
“No. No, no, no, no, no,” I swallowed the bile threatening to make its way back up my throat.
I lifted my head and stared through the scope one last time.
One last final time, then pulled the trigger.
The man jumped, then fell.
But then he got back up and didn’t stop running until he was out of my range.
“You’re dead.”
The gun at the back of my neck felt cold, but I knew that it would be okay.
The man I’d missed just moments before would continue to watch over my wife and child.
I closed my eyes and made my peace with the man above.
Then waited for the shot.
It didn’t take long.
In fact, it happened so fast that I’d barely finished saying ‘amen’ inside my head when the gunshot sounded.
But no pain was forthcoming.
I opened my eyes and stared at the dirt beneath my face. There was gravel and a small amount of glass mixed there.
“Get up,” a man’s voice ordered, the tone hinting to me that the man at my back was more than willing to blow my head to pieces if I didn’t step very carefully.
I stood up, being certain not to make any sudden movements, and turned to study the man at my back.
It was only when he lifted the light to shine it in my eyes that I got a glimpse of the face, and realized who he was.
Stone. He was the president of the Dixie Wardens MC Alabama chapter. A man I’d met multiple times throughout the years, and a man I’d once called friend.
He didn’t look so friendly now with that gun aimed directly at my face.
“Let me see your hands,” he ordered, his voice low and menacing.
I showed him my hands.
Secretly, I wished he’d kill me. I wanted him to pull that trigger. To take me out and make this constant pain I felt in my heart go away.
But I knew he wouldn’t, not as long as I didn’t react or do anything stupid.
And I wouldn’t. With that little piece of shit, who’d been my babysitter anytime I was out of my room for the last year, now dead, there was no one keeping me in line anymore. No one to tattle to Daddy that I wasn’t following his orders.
That, and I wouldn’t do it to Stone. Once in the brotherhood, I was always going to be in the brotherhood, and that meant I wasn’t going to do a damn thing to hurt any one of them. Not to this man. And especially, not to him. Not to anyone.
“Turn around and lean your hands against that tree. Don’t fuck around, or I’ll be forced to do something I don’t want to do.”
I did as instructed, placing my hands on the tree, pushing harder than was necessary to give me a little bite of pain. A bite of pain that I needed to keep me present in the here and now.
My eyes went down to the ground where my babysitter now lay, a puddle of every-growing blood spreading out underneath his blown apart head. And smiled.
Stone methodically searched me, double checking that I had nothing on my person that could be used to hurt him or myself, and then ordered me to start walking in the direction of where I had aimed the shot just moments before.
The closer I got to the man who I’d nearly killed, the more fear I started to feel.
Would the man I’d nearly shot recognize me? Would he know who I was? What would he say if he did?
I walked stiffly to the tiny cabin where I’d tracked him down, thinking that I should’ve paid more attention to the fact that he was meeting people out here rather than assuming he was alone.
“Who sent you here? I know you could have made that shot and the fact that knocking him to the ground was all you accomplished is the only reason you are still breathing,” the older man hissed.
He sounded pissed.
I couldn’t blame him.
“Someone is holding my family’s life over my head. Said he’d stop hunting them if I followed the rules,” I took a deep breath. “I was kidding myself. I knew that he wasn’t going to honor that. I just had to wait, had to play his game. Otherwise he would’ve sent someone else after h-h-him.”
Fuck the letter H. Goddammit.
My teeth were chattering. Fuck, it was cold.
I hated when I couldn’t control it.
It wasn’t something that happened very often. Not anymore, anyway.
But, it always got worse when I wasn’t in control of myself.
And with Stone’s gun to the back of my head, I definitely did not feel in control.
“Move slower. I don’t want to run to keep up with you,” he growled from behind me. “You even think about escaping, you’ll wind up with a bullet in one of your kidneys.”
I automatically slowed my pace, letting Stone catch up to me.
“Good boy.”
I gritted my teeth, stepped over a log and came to a sudden, bone-rattling halt when I saw the man standing in front of us.
It was him.
Face to face with the man that’d nearly gone down from a bullet from my own gun.
He studied me for so long that I thought for sure that he’d recognized me, but his next words proved that he didn’t.
“Who are you, and what do you want?” he growled.
I looked the man straight in the eye and opened my mouth to speak.
I wasn’t too worried that he would recognize my voice. Not only had my face changed over the last year, but my voice had, too.
Plastic surgery couldn’t fix damaged vocal cords.
“I’m…,” I hesitated. I couldn’t give him my real name. Then he’d surely recognize me. My name wasn’t a common one, and there was likely only a handful of fucking men in the entire world that shared it with me. “I’m T-im.”
I stuttered over the words, not because of my problem, but because I nearly told him my name.
So stupid.
His brows furrowed. “What did I ever do to you to deserve being shot at?”
Nothing at all. You’ve changed my life.
“My father decided that you needed to die.” Once I made the decision to tell him why I was there, I let it all hang out. I told him everything that he would ever need to know about my father, and even some things he didn’t need to know.
“And who exactly is your father?” he challenged me.
Here’s where I fucked up.
I’d never, not once, spoken about my father or the fact that the whole reason I joined the brotherhood was because of him and my shitty family. What I should’ve realized, though, was that this man was a fucking magician. If he wanted to know something, he’d do whatever it took to get it, and there wasn’t anywhere in this world a person could hide from him if he wanted something from them.
And this was one of those times. I shouldn’t have told him the truth. Shouldn’t have told him my father’s name, because the moment that I did, his eyes zeroed in on mine.
And then they widened as realization dawned.
“Son. Of. A. Bitch.”