“You don’t talk about it much,” I say softly. It’s part of our family history that doesn’t fit into the society pages. That doesn’t fit into my mother’s story about our lives.
“We kept cattle, you know. That was the primary source of income, but my dad, he had a thing for horses. Not the regular kind, for riding or for work. He liked the wild ones. The ones who weren’t quite broken. The ones who hadn’t been trained right.”
“Where is this going?” Grayson demands.
I hold up my hand. “Let him finish.”
And somehow they listen to me.
“But there was this one horse. Domino. That was his name. It was more than bad training. He’d been abused. He had marks all over his hide. He was beyond saving, you know?”
“I hope this isn’t going where I think it is,” Knox mutters.
Abby is the one who steps forward. “Stone asked him a question. He’s answering it.”
“No one could go in the stall,” Daddy said, shaking his head. “I still have this scar on my shoulder from the last time I tried to go in and muck it out. And my father wouldn’t put him down. We ended up just throwing feed over the gate. It was terrible. The smell. I’ll never forget the smell. When you even got close, you could smell what happens when an animal is left to rot. That’s what the basement smelled like. Even over the ashes and cinder, I could smell it. And I knew something horrible had happened there.”
A growl from Stone. “And then you turned yourself in to the police, I’m sure.”
“No,” Daddy says, sounding half repentant, half defiant. “What good would it have done? There wasn’t anyone left in that basement. Everyone dead. Evidence burned. You can’t arrest somebody because of a smell. And Brooke was a baby, her mother still in the hospital from complications. I had to do what was right for the family.”
“And fuck everyone else,” Grayson says, sounding more resigned than angry now.
“I talked to Dorman,” Daddy says with an uneven laugh. Then he winces, those injuries they gave him running deep. “I told him I wouldn’t be part of anything like that again. He told me I was imagining things, that it was a massage business with a little extra. I think he knew I didn’t buy it.”
I shake my head, more heartbroken than I want to admit. Even though I’d suspected Daddy, there was still a part of me that wanted him to be absolved completely. “Then why did he come to my sweet sixteen?”
“Because he was the governor by then,” Daddy says, sounding tired. He closes his eyes, pale.
And because my mother wanted a new wing on the house. “Did Mom know?”
He meets my gaze, mournful. “It would kill her.”
It’s at least some relief to realize one of my parents has their hands clean. “Stone thinks there are boys being held right now. Today. Do you know where they could be?”
“I never did a deal with the governor after that.”
Stone swears behind me. In a perverse way, my father’s attempt to do the right thing has made this harder.
“Any kind of clue can help, Daddy. This is important.”
He looks up at the ceiling with its spider web of cracks, its missing pieces.
Does he feel the angry eyes on him? Does he feel the pent-up rage in the room? I do.
“I never did that, where I kept a house empty for him. But I did construction work for him. Legit work. I made sure to check out every property he dealt with me on, and he knew that I did. Mostly commercial stuff.”
Dad clears his throat. Impatience wells up in the room.
“There was this one project he really wanted me in on,” he continues, “but something didn’t feel right. He had these contracts with businesses who were going to rent storefronts in this old strip mall, but I knew the area was suffering. I’m thinking, who’s paying this much for class C property? So I run some inquiries about the businesses.”
“They’re fronts?” Stone grits out. He’s keeping himself locked tight—for me. It’s costing him—I can tell. He has a lot of rage that needs to blast out of him.
All the guys do.
“Yes, they exist on paper, but there’s no people. Only this umbrella corporation. An LLC with another LLC on top of them. Layers on layers. I told the governor we were too booked to take the job, even though we were struggling.”
Part of me is proud that Daddy made the right choice, refusing work when it seemed shady. Then again, the right thing to do would have been to turn in the governor years ago, to alert the police to that basement. In Stone’s book that would make him guilty. Just as guilty as the men who hurt him.
Daddy looks at me, his eyes haunted. “The last umbrella I found? Good Shepherd, Inc.”
I suck in a breath, because I know who that is. “Uncle Bill?” I say.
My father nods grimly.
“An uncle?” Stone barks.
“Family friend,” Dad says. “That pregnant woman story was bullshit, but your mother overheard us using those names, and Bill thought it up.”
No wonder he hated Mom repeating it. A perverse and twisted version of the original one.
Stone grunts. “Bottom line, you didn’t cut off contact with all the bad guys.”
A few of the men exchange looks. The air seems to quiver with barely restrained violence. That beating was just the start. But they’re willing to follow Stone.
For now.
“I was pretty sure Bill didn’t know,” my father continues. “I couldn’t imagine he did. And at the time, he was going for the judgeship. I warned him off Dorman, but I didn’t tell him what I suspected. Knowing about the crime, whatever it was, would’ve made him an accomplice after the fact. I didn’t want to do that to him.”
Grayson growls, a dog, ready to attack. “Judge William Fossey?”
Dad nods, his expression grave.
“Uncle Bill,” Stone spits, angry. “He fucking ran that whole operation. Didn’t you know?”
“No,” Dad says.
“God!” Stone’s enraged. He has every right to be. They suffered down there thanks to powerful men giving each other the benefit of the doubt. “He was the puppet master. We never saw him, but he destroyed our fucking lives.”
“I’m sorry,” Dad says, and it sounds like he means it. I also know how little that helps these men who suffered in the basement. This is what they’re fighting. Not only the evil that kidnaps them, that uses them, but the silent danger of men who look the other way.
“Too little, too late,” Cruz snarls, fists balled. He’s a hurricane, trapped in a bottle, his tattoos like a warning sign. “Let’s have that address.”
“Wait,” my father says. “I didn’t help you then, but let me help you now. If I give you that address and you storm that place, these guys who did this to you will go free. I could even see them finding a way to implicate you. But if I go to Bill Fossey and his cronies wearing a wire, warn them about you guys or something, get them to talk, that’s the one thing that can’t be explained away.”
I watch Stone’s eyes, the hard line of his lips. He gave up his bloodbath. He gave up instant vengeance for him and his guys. Instant freedom for the boys. But this is something, right? A way to get proof.