Just thinking of my brother felt like taking a crowbar to my skull. I knew he was fucked up right now. I knew he wasn’t handling Maddie and the baby real well. And I’d fucking crushed him. I knew it. He wouldn’t say that, of course. Fuck, his face had barely moved since I’d struck a nerve by calling him Poppa. I’d seen his cheek twitch and his muscles tense. And, in the fucking moment, it hadn’t been enough. I’d wanted him to hit me, to fucking hurt me, to show me that he at least fucking saw me. I knew he couldn’t express shit like that. But in that moment, I hated him. I fucking hated that he was different, that something inside him made him different from the other brothers. I wanted to be able to talk to him, wanted him to talk to me normally.
I was a bastard. I fucking hated myself for what I’d said to him. Telling him he’d be a shit papa. So I’d chased after him as he ran from the cabin, riding by his side. Showing him, I never meant any of what I said, that I fucking loved him as he was. He is my brother. I didn’t need him to be like everyone else. He’d saved me. He’d given me a home and a family. It didn’t matter that he was different, that we didn’t talk much or grabbed a beer at the bar while shooting the shit.
I’d smiled as I’d ridden toward the fuckers we were tracking. The Cade brothers riding together, killing the cunts that hurt Maddie. That is, until one of the assholes waved a snake at him. A motherfucking snake brought Flame to his knees. My brother, my brother who wasn’t scared of anything, the most brutal and ruthless killer there ever was, fell apart in front of my eyes.
Isaiah. He’d called me Isaiah. The brother he lost. He’d called the dicks who tortured us poppa and Pastor Hughes. And he’d fucking broke. He dropped to his knees and broke.
“Ash?” He looked into my eyes and called me fucking Isaiah. Not Ash, the brother he already had. But Isaiah, the brother he had lost. “ASH?” I snapped the fuck out of the memory.
“You okay?” Rider asked and shone a light into my eyes. I pushed the light aside and shuffled off the bed. “Ash, you need to rest.”
“I ain’t resting,” I growled and tried to pull a shirt over my head. I fucking hissed when the pain from the stitches pulled at my skin.
“Ash, forget the shirt and lie on the damn bed,” Rider ordered.
I pulled on a leather jacket and grabbed a pack of smokes from my pocket, putting one in my mouth. “I’m out,” I said and tried to leave the room.
“Ash, you need to rest. Don’t go out drinking. Your body has to heal. Alcohol will fuck with the drugs I’ve given you.” Rider tried to lecture me as I pushed past him, heading toward the door. I didn’t fucking care about healing. I didn’t care about resting. I wanted to get off my face on whiskey and eliminate the sound of Flame’s voice from my skull. The voice that came from his mouth when he’d been talking to Poppa and the pastor. The kid-like voice accompanied by the scared shitless look on his face.
I sniffed, feeling my throat start to burn at the fucking memory of Flame like that. But I couldn’t remove his face from my mind. I couldn’t get the fucking tears, which had tracked through the blood on his cheeks, out of my mind.
Flame fucking cried.
I smashed through the door and strode into the night. AK had gone to get Phebe and Saffie from Mae’s. I wasn’t staying to see them. My chest burned just thinking of Saffie, so I quickly lit up the smoke and took a long inhale. The nicotine helped some, but not fucking enough. The night was fucking silent. I couldn’t even hear Viking’s voice, which was a constant around these cabins.
I didn’t want silence. I didn’t want to think of being tied to the tree then cut by knives and bitten by fucking snakes. And I sure as fuck didn’t want to think of Flame. Flame, my brother, who I’d fucking betrayed with my words. Flame, who might never come the fuck back, from wherever his mind had taken him.
I glanced to our cabin and looked for any signs of movement. There wasn’t any. I didn’t even realize I was walking forward until I stopped near Flame and Maddie’s bedroom window. I took a deep breath, trying hard to fucking convince myself he’d be okay. He’s good. Isaiah is good… The way Flame looked at me thinking I was his other brother… he hadn’t ever looked at me that way. He never kept eye contact, period. But he had when he thought I’d been Isaiah. Not Ash, not the brother he’d had pushed on him when he’d found me in the cellar. Not the brother who looked just like him. Who just wanted to be just like him.
Isaiah. He didn’t want me. He wanted the brother who had died.
I breathed out smoke into the night air, and fucking hated myself when I looked through the window. I wished I hadn’t. I wished I’d turned toward the bar, like I’d intended. My chest was already fucking cracked in two, aching so fucking hard that I could barely breathe. But seeing Maddie on the bed, holding my brother’s hand to her stomach… and she was crying. Maddie, the strongest woman I knew, she was also breaking apart.
I moved my feet, managing to make it about a foot before my head pressed against the wood of the cabin. All the fucking energy in my body drained away. My feet gave way and I collapsed to my knees. I ignored my skin’s screams from my patchwork of stitches and snakebites. I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t get to my feet and make my way to the fucking the bar. I had nothing left. I was being fucking drowned by all the shit in my head—Flame falling apart, Flame slipping into a darkness I doubted he could come back from, my words to him that ruined any love he might have felt for me, Maddie crying on the bed, his kid in her belly, and the chance he would never again be the Flame we all knew and loved.
I couldn’t hold them back. Nothing could have stopped the tears streaming down my face. Not even God himself could stop the sobs that came ripping like demons from my throat. My hands slammed to the ground. My lit smoke was crushed under my palm. And then like a dam bursting, every fucked up thing in my shit life barreled forward, shit no one knew. Shit I hadn’t confessed to a single person alive—my poppa lashing me with his belt, forcing me onto my knees, pushing his limp dick into my mouth, smacking my skull when he failed to get hard. I shook my head, but the memories became a tidal wave, nothing was gonna stop them—the cellar, Poppa trying to push inside me and when he couldn’t, assaulting me in other degrading ways.
My throat was raw with the tears and heavy breaths. “No!” I hissed, when I saw a rope hanging from a tree. I hit my head. “No!” I begged into the night. “Don’t show me her.” Maybe Flame was right, maybe I did have demons in my blood, maybe I shared his flames. Because despite my begging to God or anyone listening, I saw her. I felt myself walking to the tree, my mama swinging from the noose around her neck. Gone. Motherfucking gone. Unable to take my poppa’s shit anymore. Finding death by her own hand preferable to spending one more day with him. That’s what the fucker did. He destroyed his wives in every way until they couldn’t deal with life anymore, couldn’t even fucking stay behind for the sake of their kids. I clenched my teeth, trying to stop the uncontrollable tears and sobs pouring from my mouth. But it was all too much. All of this shit was too fucking much!