by Aiden Bates
So I was determined to play nice. I fought back the laugh and held up my hands in surrender instead.
“I deserve that, I guess.” I still didn’t think so. Hell, I still thought that this whole scorched earth thing that Daniel had enacted on the chance that I’d ever have a relationship with our daughter was bullshit through and through. But sometimes, playing nice meant telling the other guy what he wanted to hear. “Five minutes, okay? That’s all I want. Then, you never have to see me again. Swear on my father’s grave.”
My Omega father’s grave, was the bit that went unspoken. If I’d sworn on my Alpha dad’s grave, he would’ve known that anything I said was a lie.
“Five minutes,” Daniel agreed after a beat. “But after that, if you try anything else, I swear on my father’s grave that you’ll regret it, Rusty King.”
There was a bitterness in his voice that didn’t quite make sense to me. I understood him not wanting to see me again. I’d knocked him up, and I hadn’t had access to the resources to give a pretty rich boy like him the life that he would’ve wanted. I got that. I’d crunched the numbers on all of it long ago. There was a good chance that he really hadn’t wanted to live the rest of his life as the baby daddy of a low-ranking MMA fighter. There was a better chance that his father had threatened to disown him if I stayed in the picture.
But why the hell was he so pissed at me about that? Something wasn’t adding up. Maybe it never really had to begin with.
“I. Um.” My mouth opened and closed again, but my mind wasn’t turning up words.
Shit. Now that I finally had my chance to talk, I was drawing a blank. I knew from the look on Daniel’s face that five minutes had been asking a lot to begin with. But how the hell did I sum up everything that had happened to my brothers and me over the last few months in so little time?
“Rusty…” Daniel warned.
Then, the words jumped out of my mouth like they had a death wish. “My brother died.”
There was a long pause, the kind that I’d only heard before from a crowd when an underdog knocked out a champion in the ring.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Rusty.” Daniel’s eyes softened, but there was still a measured coolness in his voice. Like he knew he had to say the right thing when all he really wanted to say was fuck off. “I, ah. I saw it on the news when it happened, actually. Josh, right? That must have been hard.”
“Yeah. Yeah, it was.” Again, I opened my mouth and words didn’t come out. Instead, a salty burn in my sinuses had taken their place. Double shit.
I hadn’t cried since I’d gotten the call about Josh. I didn’t think I ever would. But the last place— the worst place—to get in touch with my emotions and grief was right here. Right now.
Daniel saved me by speaking again. “That was a while ago, though. And, no offense, but what does that have to do with me? Surely by now you have a boyfriend or someone you can talk to or—”
“I don’t. Ah. Have a boyfriend, I mean. But that’s not what this is about.” I blinked twice then reached into my pocket. Thankfully, the sensation of a full and complete emotional meltdown in Daniel’s entryway subsided as I pulled out a few folded piece of paper, photocopies that detailed the case we had against Daniel’s father. “I know that you don’t want to hear from me. Doubt you want to listen now that I’m here anyway, either. So this is…evidence.” I shoved the notes in Daniel’s direction and held them out in offering. “My brothers and I have been looking into the murder. Your father might be connected. And like you said. You watch the news. S’pose you’ve heard about this screwed up birth control thing as well.”
To his credit, he took the notes from me.
To my dismay, he didn’t give them more than a glance.
“Is this because my father found you out?” He spat the words at me, all venom. His golden brow was marred by the biggest look of fuck you, you bastard that I’d ever seen.
“Found me out?” I blinked. This time, it wasn’t tears. Just confusion. What the hell was he talking about? “I don’t follow, Daniel.”
“Oh, please.” He threw the notes back at me and I had to scramble to catch them. “You’re just trying to get back at him. Incredible—after all these years, I figured you at least had the dignity to take your knocks and move on, Rusty. You might’ve left juvie, but you obviously still can’t stand the feeling of being caught.”
“Being caught?” I took a step back and bumped into the door. Bringing up my delinquent past was a low blow, even for him. “Being caught by who?”
“My father. Obviously.” He said it like it was common knowledge, even though I had no damn clue what I’d been caught doing or when.
“He was the reason I left, sure…”
I was doing my best, but my diplomatic side was waning.
What I actually wanted to do was push Daniel up against the wall, hold him there with my hips pressed against his and my hands around his wrists, and make him explain to me what the fuck he was talking about. Maybe steal a kiss while I was at it, too. His lips looked fucking incredible. Kissable as ever. And he obviously thought I was exactly the kind of asshole who would do something like that, too. Wouldn’t hurt to prove him right in that regard, at least.
But damn me, I knew better. I was better. I clenched my jaw and swallowed those urges back down like bitter pills.
“I don’t know what you think I have against your dad,” I said instead. A growl was rising up in my throat that I couldn’t fight off. “Last I knew, you weren’t exactly his biggest fan either. But he told me that I needed to step off so you and our baby could have a better future. Then you told me the same. So I did. Thought it would make you happy. Been killing myself over how much it hurt me to do it ever since, too.”
I nodded at the notes. If he’d read them—properly, this time—they’d explain everything. I was getting too angry to be able to do it myself, and besides. I’d promised him five minutes. That time must’ve nearly been up.
“You read those notes and you tell me this doesn’t reek of Congressman Rasner’s doing,” I told him. “When you’re done, my number is at the bottom of the last page. Give me a call whenever you like. Doesn’t matter how late it is. I don’t want to fuck up your perfect little life here, believe me. Just want justice for my brother. Guarantee you I won’t be sleeping tonight either way.”
This time, it was Daniel’s mouth that gaped open wordlessly. Good. I’d always liked the way he reacted when I let my temper go on him a little bit. Once upon a time, he’d told me it made him hard when I did it. If there was any small pleasure to this fucked-up little exchange, it was knowing there was a good chance Daniel Rasner’s cock had gone rock hard at the sound of my voice again.
When Daniel finally found his words, though, they weren’t kind ones.
“I think it’s time for you to leave.” He folded the papers and pointed toward the door.
“Already gone.” I wrenched the door open, took one step out of it, and paused. “I hope you’ll make up your own mind about this, Daniel. Might be a nice change of pace, not letting Daddy control you for once.” I swallowed. I knew that I’d already overstayed my welcome, but dammit…I didn’t want to leave on such a bitter note. “She really is beautiful, Daniel. I hope whatever your father’s up to, he doesn’t drag her into this too.”
And there it was. As I slammed the door behind me, I knew it in my goddamn bones.
Whatever happened now, at least I’d seen my child. Only for a minute, sure, but I’d seen her smile. Seen the swirls of green in her eyes, same as mine.
My only regret as I drove away was that I hadn’t been able to keep it together enough to ask her name.
On my way out of town, I couldn’t help it. Couldn’t stop thinking about him. About her. I had to pull off the road just to get my head straight.. In front of the Spartanburg city limits sign, I nearly broke down altogether.
I should have fought harder for Lissa, dammit. I should have fought harder for both of them. It was the
same thought that had haunted me for all these years—the sense that I’d done something wrong just by existing in Daniel Rasner’s life and the feeling that I should have thrown fists and broken bodies and raged against whatever his father and the establishment had tossed at me anyway.
But after talking to Daniel, I couldn’t help but feel like maybe I really had done something wrong. What that was, I didn’t know. If I’d ever even done anything to begin with. If it wasn’t just another one of the congressman’s lies.
A sense of dread sank behind my eyes as pulled back onto the road and headed home to Fort Greene. It was barely a two hour drive, but that just meant I had two whole hours to wait and worry about what Daniel would do next.
If Daniel didn’t believe me—if he couldn’t find some little sliver of truth in Josh’s notes…
Then I might never know what had really forced us apart.
I might never learn who’d really killed Josh, or why, or how to stop them before whatever it was they were planning next.
And I might never see my daughter again.
6
Daniel
He slammed the door behind him. The sound of tires squealing in my driveway told me he was gone.
At this point, I’d just be lucky if he didn’t take out the mailbox on his way out, too.
Rusty fucking King. How many years had passed since that name had been on my mind? Save for, shamefully, the handful of times when I’d found myself particularly lonely after Lissa’s birth…or particularly in heat, for that matter…
When my father had told me what Rusty had done, I hadn’t believed it.
When he’d shown me the proof—hard, cold evidence, shoved right beneath my very eyes—my heart had broken apart. Cracked and split cleanly in two.
And from that moment on—except for, obviously, a few choice moments from my spank bank that even Rusty’s betrayal couldn’t tarnish—I’d elected to put him out of my mind completely.
I hadn’t been very good at it at first, of course. I’d been in love with him. I’d been carrying his child. During the last call I made to him, telling him to stay away and move on with his life without me, I hadn’t even been able to tell him how truly hurt I was.
But slowly, in days and weeks and months and years, the reality had set in.
I might have loved Rusty, but he’d never loved me. Not really. Not in the way I’d wanted.
Not in the way our child or I deserved.
When Lissa was two, right after she’d come down with that bad fever that had made me so certain I was going to lose her as well, I’d looked up the address to his Alpha Dad’s house and sent along a picture of her. A picture and her name: Melissa Q. Rasner. Our golden-haired, hazel-eyed baby girl. It had only felt right to let him know he had a daughter. To give him her name and let him see her face. The pain of what he’d done to me had finally set in properly by then. I’d been able to let it become real, then I’d been able to start letting it go.
And then, after all these years, he’d had the nerve to show up on my doorstep. Just like that, all of the hurt came crashing back into me like an eighteen wheeler skidding on ice into a smart car.
I’d finally gotten the chance to look him in the eyes and let him know what he’d done to me. How completely he’d destroyed any future we ever could have had together.
Somehow, I’d ended up half-hard, arguing with him about my father instead.
That alone told me that kicking him out of my life had been the right choice. Christ, I couldn’t even be close to him without wanting him.
Now, in his absence, I only wished that he would have stayed away. Stayed away for good.
“Did you talk to the man?” Lissa’s tiny voice was chipper as ever as she poked her head into the hallway. Thankfully, for the whole of Rusty’s visit, she’d stayed in her room. It meant she was still oblivious to who he was.
Good. I aimed to keep it that way.
“I did,” I told her. “But he’s gone now. Did you finish your picture?”
Lissa nodded and skipped down the hall to present me with her finished work. She still hadn’t gotten his nose right—but in her defense, it had been broken several times during Rusty’s MMA career, and she was only five. The rest of it, though, was surprisingly accurate. His well-muscled shoulders beneath his jacket, lopsided but accurately broad. His eyes, that same dark green color that hers were, though she’d omitted the brown that swirled in both of their irises.
She’d even managed to capture his stupid cowlick, swirling his dark hair into a perpetual mess no matter how hard either of us had ever tried to smooth it down.
“It’s a very good picture, Lissa.” I didn’t mention how strange it was to see Rusty again—in person or captured on the page through the eyes of the daughter he’d never known. “I like the way you’ve colored it all in.”
“He’s handsome.” Lissa grinned, sticking her tongue out between the gap her missing front tooth left. “I liked drawing him.”
“Yes,” I couldn’t help but agree. I might have hated Rusty King to his core, but there was no denying that he had more than his fair share of good looks. He’d passed them on to Lissa herself, after all, though she was too young to have realized it yet. “But handsome isn’t a good metric to judge people on. You should remember that.”
“Mm. Okay.” Lissa set her brow for a moment, concentrating, then nodded. “Who was he, then?” Her face lit up with a burst of hopefulness. “Daddy, do you have a boyfriend?”
My eyes went wide. Oh, hell no. I couldn’t let that idea set it.
“He’s, ah. An old friend. He just wanted to come check up on us.”
“Oh.” Lissa’s face fell, but only for a second. Luckily, she wasn’t a moody child. She passed from one emotion to the next without lingering on any one of them for too long, something I hoped she’d be able to maintain through her teenage years. Would make my life a hell of a lot easier, anyway.
“Well, next time, you should tell him to stay for snacks,” Lissa instructed me. “He can have half of my apples.” Her grin turned wicked. “But I’m not sharing the peanut butter.”
“We’ll see, silly girl.” Another thing I didn’t want to mention—that Rusty wouldn’t be back again. Not if I had any say in it. But saying it out loud would only lead to more questions. Ideally, this visit would be the first and only. The kind of thing that would slowly fade from her sweet, tiny head as the years went by, only to disappear with all the other memories of bruised knees and playground scrapes. “Why don’t you go finish your homework now? And your snack.”
Lissa hummed softly to herself as she slipped back into her chair at the table. She turned the paper over, banishing her drawing of Rusty beneath it once more.
It was hard not to say something. Part of me felt like maybe I should. After all, Rusty might have been an asshole, but he was still her father. Maybe she’d find out someday who the handsome man in the bomber jacket really was. Maybe she’d hate me for it.
But I didn’t let those feelings linger. If I ever told her, it’d have to be on some other day. A day when she was old enough to understand why I’d hidden Rusty’s identity from her. A day when she could appreciate the weight of what he’d done.
Instead, I found myself staring at the notes he’d handed me. A quick scan of them while he’d been in the doorway had told me it was a smear campaign against my father. That much had been clear as soon as I saw his name on the page. But a closer look at the photocopies and prints of the papers Rusty had brought over told a slightly more compelling story.
The birth control scandal that had been sweeping the nation had been intentional. The company behind it, Bicroft Pharmaceuticals, was financially connected to an anti-Omega rights organization whose name was already familiar to me, American Families First. AFF had lobbied my father with Bicroft’s money, which I’d already known in part.
AFF was in deep with my father and a lot of his political allies, as well. It’d been a point of contention be
tween us for years now. Part of our great falling out, in fact. If they’d gotten that money from a shady big pharma company, it wouldn’t have surprised me in the least.
But then, there was the real kicker. The King brothers had turned up an old news story that had mentioned my father’s involvement in an assassination conspiracy. Now, they seemed to think that he was tied to Joshua King’s murder as well.
But the assassination story was old news. My father had told me himself that he never would have stooped that low. “Son, we might have differences in politics, but I raised you with my own damn morals, didn’t I? You really think your old man is capable of murder?”
At the time, I’d told him that of course I didn’t. No son wants to believe their father would actually kill someone in cold blood—or arrange for someone else to do it, either.
This wild hare of Rusty’s that my father had been responsible for the assassination, and many more besides, was ridiculous. There was plenty of evidence on Rusty’s pages that the rest of his story was true, but none that my father was a killer.
As I folded the pages back over themselves again, the question on my mind wasn’t whether or not my father had ordered Josh’s murder. No, what I wanted to know was if Rusty really believed it in his bitterness and grief…
Or if he’d become the kind of person who would risk accusing my father of something so sinister just to try and win me back.
In a way, it was almost flattering. Maybe it shouldn’t have been, but it left a flutter in my chest anyway. Having a man like Rusty King so desperate to win me back that he’d make up such a crackpot story about my dad was good for my ego. Bad for Rusty’s plan, though. And telling of his mental state, to boot.
Grief. It had to be grief. Rusty wanted someone to be responsible, and as soon as Brent Rasner’s name had come up, he’d jumped on it.
I felt sorry for him in that, even though I forced myself to let the feeling pass.
Grieving his brother didn’t excuse Rusty for what he’d done to me. It didn’t excuse him for showing up in my life again after all these years of moving on, either.
