Chapter 23

Once upon a time there was a twat. It was you. The end.

-Meme

Ghost

All the Dixie Wardens attended this meeting. And not just the Alabama Chapter, but the Benton Chapter, too.

This was the first time the Benton Chapter had seen me in the light of day.

A few weeks back, I’d come face to face with Sebastian for the first time since Ghost had become the new me.

Silas had been doing a great job of keeping my existence a secret, but that night, Sebastian had learned that I wasn’t dead.

Lucky for me, he’d gotten all the way home, six hours away, before he’d decided that my face needed to meet with his fist.

But as I looked at him across the table from me, I realized that his anger hadn’t lessened in all of that time.

In fact, if I was a guessing man, I’d say it’d gotten worse.

The rest of the men hadn’t realized who I was yet.

That, I could tell.

Otherwise they would all be up in arms, collectively and individually trying to beat the shit out of me.

It was the face.

Not to mention I’d put on about thirty pounds in muscle since they’d last seen me. Oh, and let’s not forget to mention that they all thought that I was dead.

I was no longer that naïve twenty-one-year-old kid. I was now a grown ass man who had the last six years of his life ripped away from him in the most savage way possible. I’d been tortured for a year of it, and the next five were spent living as half a man. I’d survived only on the promise of one day having revenge while I watched everyone else live their lives around me.

“What are we even doing here?” asked Torren. “My wife wasn’t happy about the short notice. We had to bow out of a dentist appointment for the kids because I couldn’t be there to help take them.”

Sterling looked at him like he was crazy. “You had to bow out of a dentist appointment?” he jeered. “Poor baby. I had to bow out of a fucking practice. They fined me eighteen thousand dollars.”

Sterling was a professional baseball player. Ever since he’d made it to the major leagues, he’d been on a hot streak, and I loved to watch him on TV. I’d been so fuckin’ proud of him, too. I’d always wanted to tell him that.

“You can afford it,” Kettle rumbled. “I had to call in sick.”

Sebastian grunted. “Me, too. It worked out because I threw up on our last shift.”

He did look a little green.

“Don’t you fuckin’ give that shit to us, either,” Kettle grumbled. “I do not want to take that shit home. If I catch it, then that means Adeline will catch it. Then the fucking kids will. Then they’ll give it right back to me once it’s all over and done with. I do not want to deal with throw up.”

I chuckled under my breath, drawing the attention of the one man who’d been eyeing me all night, besides Sebastian, who knew exactly who I was.

He was practically quivering in his seat, staring at me surreptitiously every chance he got.

I knew he was dying to talk to me. The only thing that’d kept him in check was Silas, and since he was in the hallway talking to Lynn, I knew that it was only a matter of time before he broke.

I looked away from Cleo’s penetrating gaze.

Though my face was different, the structure of it was not. I had scars now where I didn’t before, and my entire face looked like it’d been pieced back together after the fire.

The only real things that were left unchanged about my face were the color of my eyes and the shape of my mouth.

Everything else was different.

My pieced-back-together face, like Frankenstein’s, was hard to look at sometimes. I was no longer that same handsome man that my wife had fallen for, and it made it hard for me to understand what my wife saw in me. She’d never once commented on the change, she just traced her fingers along my scars as if she was committing each and every one to memory.

“God, I’m fucking starving.”

That was Truth.

I looked over at where he was sitting next to me. “Do you want me to order you a pizza, Truth?”

Truth tapped his lip. “Can we?”

I shrugged. “I don’t see why not.”

“Pizza doesn’t deliver here,” Trance, another member, said. His eyes were shrewd, and now they were on me, too. “We’re too far out of the city limits.”

I swallowed worriedly, turning my gaze away before he could read too much into my expression.

Jesus, this was about to get sticky.

I knew these men were going to be happy that I was alive, but I’d also let them think the unthinkable—that I was dead.

And it was going to go over like a cat turd in a sand box.

I kept my mouth shut after that, but the next ten minutes I could feel the tension rising in the room.

I’d stayed out of the limelight since I’d become a Dixie Warden. When there were club-wide celebrations each year, I’d skipped them. When there was any chance at all that I might see them, I purposefully went the other way.

But my gravesite rendezvous with Silas were being interrupted by my former club members, I’d had to watch them mourn me over and over again.

They were still mourning me, as a matter of fact.

God, this was a fucking mess.

Fuck. My fucking parents.

“Goddammit,” Sebastian got up then hauled ass out of the room.

I winced.

“Fucker’s gonna give us all the shits and pukes by the time we’re done here,” Cleo muttered darkly.

I looked at him, and his eyes were still on me.

His narrowed, and I steeled myself, letting him study me straight on.

He took his time, and it was a few long, uneasy moments for me.

“Son of a fucking bitch!” Cleo exclaimed.

Lynn walked in with Silas behind him.

The minute that Lynn sat down, the entire room quieted. Conversations that the others were having quieted, and I tensed. But not because this was about to go down, but because Cleo was now standing.

He leaned over the table, his hands steepled on top of it, only a few feet separating us.

“I can see you’ve figured it out,” Silas drawled.

The tension didn’t break.

“What out?” Kettle asked, looking at Silas.

“Tunnel, you mother. Fucker.”

Every head in the room swiveled around at that, and I scooted my seat away from the table and stood up.

“Everybody, sit the fuck down.”

Nobody listened.

“I said sit down!” Silas bellowed.

Cleo was halfway around the table now.

I was turned to face him, waiting.

And the others in the room from the Benton Dixie Wardens were now standing as well.

“Fuck me.”

That came from Torren.

Cleo didn’t stop until a clearly just-puked-his-guts-out Sebastian came back in.

The moment he realized what was going on, he stepped in the middle of Cleo and me, all the while hugging a trashcan.

Cleo’s hands were fisted tightly at his sides, and he was staring at me with such betrayal on his face that it was hard to watch.

I held his glare, though.

I deserved the hate.

A gunshot rang out, and I looked over at Silas, who was standing with his gun in his hand.

Above his head was a forty-five caliber hole in the drywall.

We all stared.

“I said sit. The. Fuck. Down,” he repeated, this time his tone clearly allowing no room for argument.

I didn’t sit until everyone else did, but this time, it was with my back to the wall, and nowhere near the goddamn table.

If I was within reaching distance of any of these boys, they were going to fucking stab me, likely with the pen or pencils that were gathered in a cup in the middle of the table.

God, this goddamn room was giving me heartburn.

This was the Benton chapter’s clubhouse.

This was the place where I finally felt at home for the first time.

This was the place of my rebirth.

“Everyone needs to fucking listen to what I have to say before they go off all half-cocked,” Silas growled, his eyes on Cleo.

Cleo didn’t bother to move his gaze off of me.

“Show ‘em the pictures,” I told Silas.

Silas grunted. “Ghost…”

“His name isn’t fucking Ghost,” Cleo said through clenched teeth. “Let’s go ahead and call him Tunnel. I mean, that is his fucking name, right?”

Hearing my name out of anybody’s mouth but Mina’s was enough to make my heart race.

It felt wrong. It felt like that was the only link that my parents needed to have to take the last little bit of my life that I had left to me.

“No,” I said, purposefully coming off as hard and unyielding. “That’s my name now. Nobody calls me Tunnel anymore, and before you get all pissed off, you need to understand why I had to do what I did. If you still want to kick my ass afterward, fine, so be it. Do what you have to do. But until then, save your judgement.”

Cleo’s eyes narrowed. “My wife still has nightmares about having a part in your death, and she still carries that guilt,” he hissed. “She has my loyalty. At one time, you did, too, but you no longer do.”

I looked over to Silas.

“Show them the goddamned pictures.”

Silas didn’t hesitate. He pulled up the pictures, and then set them on slideshow.

I’d seen them, of course, but each time I did, it was enough to make a sickness roll through me that left my belly rolling for hours.

The pictures were not your everyday pictures. Ones you’d share with your family on Facebook.

They were ones that you shouldn’t fucking share, because you shouldn’t even have pictures like this.

The first photo filled the screen, and every eye in the house, including a very pissed off Cleo’s, went to it.

It was a picture of my baby, Sienna. She was lying on her back in the water. The plastic tub that she was lying in was bright green, and it wasn’t one that I’d ever seen before. It had a yellow rubber duck floating up by her head, and the bubbles were floating around her body. Everything was covered with bubbles except for her privates.

The next photo filled the screen. This one, she was on her belly. She was up on her pudgy little elbows and she was looking at the camera that was positioned behind her. Her legs were slightly parted, and you could also see her privates.

It continued like this, over and over again, picture after picture.

At one point, a picture came up with Sienna playing with white frosting. She was sitting up on her butt, legs spread in front of her, and she had a cupcake in her hands. White frosting was smeared all over her, and she had a satisfied grin on her face as she leaned forward, mouth open wide, to get a bite of frosting.

“Awwww,” one of the men said. “She’s a cutie.”

I closed my eyes.

The picture scrolled to the next photo.

“This photo, along with the other thirty-two photos, were found in my daughter’s room,” I said with zero emotion. “Mina and I didn’t take them.”

The room went absolutely silent.

“My father abducted Sienna in the middle of the night, while Mina and I slept. I didn’t even know that it’d happened. When Mina went to work, I went into Sienna’s bedroom to get her ready for daycare when I found those pictures, printed out for me to see, in the crib next to her.”

A low growl came from somewhere down the table from me.

“They don’t look that bad, until you pair the photos together with the fact that my father is a fuckin’ sick mother fucker,” I growled.

“He just wanted you to know that he had her long enough to take all of these photos?” Cleo asked, all anger gone from his voice.

“That,” I nodded my head and turned to him. “And the fact that he’s the head of a criminal organization known for abducting kids and then selling them to sick people, just like him, who have a secret fetish for young children.”

The room went absolutely wired.

“I, of course, didn’t know how deep my father’s sickness went. I just knew that right before I ‘died,’” I said, making air quotes in the air. “My father wanted me to work for him. Wanted me to use my job at BPD to help smooth a few things over for him while he continued to run his business.” I cleared my throat. “I refused. Multiple times. The day I died, though? Yeah, that was the day that I got a picture of my wife taken through the scope of a rifle. That was the day that I knew my father was going to kill my wife if I didn’t finally cooperate with him. So I agreed.”

Cleo’s eyes went sharp and ruthless.

I tugged my shirt off and stood.

“These weren’t a lie,” I said to him. “These scars? They were the burns that you saw when I was carried out of that building.”

All eyes went to my chest.

It was even more fucked up than my face.

Scars from my many burns, skin grafts, and lung transplant littered the hard expanse of my chest.

“They killed some guy whose only crime was to be an organ match with me—and I still haven’t figured out how they could’ve found that out—to give me his lungs. They nursed me back to health in a state of the art facility in the basement of my childhood home.”

“You were dead.” That was from Torren.

I looked to him.

“I was. Clinically. Twice,” I said. “But I was brought back in the ambulance. All the CPR y’all did…it saved my life.”

My eyes, all the thanks that I could fit into them, were aimed at the man who’d pulled me out of that burning building.

“Your parents aren’t God. How the hell did they get away with all of this?”

That came from Kettle, who’d been silent up until now.

I reached for my shirt and slipped it back on over my head.

“I can answer that one,” Lynn finally chimed in. “The Morrisons are trust fund babies. They had millions to do whatever they fucking pleased with, and they used it to commit some petty crimes when they were younger. Van Morrison, Tunnel’s father, is the scum of the Earth who grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth. He got what he wanted and he was never told no.”

I snorted. That was the damn truth.

“Candace, well she would do anything for her husband; lie, cheat, steal. It was all of no consequence to her when it came to anything that Van wanted,” Lynn continued. “Bribe a police officer? No problem. Hold a doctor’s family hostage? No biggie. She’d do it for him. Kill a judge just so they could get who they wanted, who had the same ideals as them, on the bench? Done. Multiple times.”

My parents were sick fucks.

“If Van named it, Candace made it happen,” Lynn said finally. “Right now, we believe that there are four judges, just as many police officers, and hundreds of other people in their operation that make what they do run smoothly. They are the heads of the largest organized crime syndicate in the south right now.”

“What do you need us to do?”

That came from Sebastian, who was still hugging the trashcan.

His face looked even more green.

“And what the fuck do we have to do to get those pictures back?” Cleo growled.

I dropped my head as relief poured through me.

“We have all of the pictures back except for the ones directly on Van Morrison’s personal jump drive,” Silas answered. “We’ve tried for over six years now to bring this operation down. Each time we get a leg up, something else comes down on it and shatters it before we can make our next move.”

“You have a mole.”

That came from Big Papa.

I didn’t disagree.

I’d been thinking the same thing for a very long time now.

Lynn had someone in his operation who was hindering it, and one of these days, very soon, I would figure out who it was. When I figured out who it was, I was going to tear them a fucking new one and make them taste it.

This operation should’ve been over and done with a very long time ago. We’ve had ample opportunity to bring them down, but each time something solidified that we could pursue, it would be gone in a matter of hours.

The only thing we kept doing right was interrupting the shipments of children. We’d broken up each and every one over the last few years and had saved a total of forty-two children from being brokered and sold. Forty-two children had been reunited with their parents.

Forty-two times, I’d had a major role in making sure that my parents’ livelihood didn’t thrive.

When those tips came in, we acted on them fast, not giving whomever was in the operation time to contact their bosses or thwart our plans.

The bad thing was that we could never tie any of those child kidnappings to my parents. If anything, their men were loyal to them. Either my parents had something so huge over their heads that they kept silent, or they’d somehow won their loyalty and kept their silence.

Whatever the reason, I knew my parents were involved, and I couldn’t pin a damn thing on them.

On the outside, they appeared clean. On the inside, though? Yeah, they were dirty as dirt could be.

“So, what the hell are we going to do?” That was Cleo again.

“We’ve tried it the right way,” Lynn finally said. “Now we do it the final way.”

The final way meant killing them.

Even across the room from him, I could read the intent in Lynn’s eyes.

The funny thing was that I felt the exact same way.

And I’d been thinking it for a very long time now.

Something released in my chest, allowing me to breathe for the first time in what felt like forever.

Before I couldn’t react to the desire to wipe them out from this Earth, but now? With the power of sixteen Dixie Wardens and Lynn, who I was pretty sure had the authority to close this case by whatever means were necessary, I felt confident that I would make it home to my wife after taking their organization down—and without spending the rest of my days in an orange jumpsuit.