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jackson

J ackson!” My mom’s face lit up when she opened the door to her apartment. When I didn’t return the gesture, her expression fell. Yeah, I wasn’t in the fucking mood.

I was running on coffee and rage alone—not a great fucking combination. West was gone when I woke up. Not dead but not in my house either. No, he was spacing out in a field somewhere with Daisy and her friends not doing his damn job. I left him. Better not touch the horses while drunk anyway.

“We need to talk,” I said. “And I do mean talk because I’m real tired of everyone keeping me out of the loop.”

“Oh, honey—”

“Don’t oh honey me, Ma,” I interrupted. She opened the door wider to let me in. “I know you and Mickey are keeping shit from me. Shit that West seems to think I know. And you know what? I’d like to fucking know.”

“Jackson—”

“ Now . ”

“Jackson—”

“He thinks I know something I don’t know,” I snapped. “Mickey knows shit about the chaos going down on my ranch that I don’t know. And so do you. Start talking, Ma.”

She sighed, her shoulders visibly rising and falling with her defeat. I crossed my arms, and she reached out, slapping them down.

“Stop that grumpy shit, son,” she ordered. “Go sit at the table. I’ll be there in a few minutes. The least you can do is humor an old lady. These knees ain’t what they used to be.”

I did as she asked and crossed my boots over one another as I waited. And waited. When she swore loudly, I tensed. I knew better than to rush in and help. Mom wasn’t one for unsolicited help.

“You have to understand, we Myles don’t get to pick our business partner,” Mom said as she rejoined me with a file in hand. She eased into the chair across from me and put her hand on top of the file. “Your great-great-whatever-grandfather, he picked his partner in the McNamaras. They were good together. But all these generations later, that’s who we’re stuck with. If we’d had a choice, we never would’ve associated with the likes of Harrison McNamara.”

“Don’t blame you,” I replied. “The man was a fucking dick.”

“That’s putting it mildly, yes,” she agreed. She paused, her head tipping slightly as she considered me. “Are you sure you want to know, Jackson? There’s no going back once you know.”

“It’s impacting my business, it’s impacting my employees,” I ticked each one off on my fingers, “and frankly, I’m real fucking tired of it being thrown around that I need to handle West with kiddie gloves but no one will tell me why. I deserve to fucking know.”

“Okay.” She let out a deep breath and stared out her balcony door, her fingers drumming on the file. I just sat there because what the hell else was I going to do? “Do you remember when you came out to us?”

“Vaguely,” I said. Honestly, I hadn’t put much stock in the moment because my parents just let me know that they were already aware I was gay. It made the moment pointless.

“We knew you were gay because we knew what happened between you and West the night he left,” she told me. I carefully held my expression as I waited for something more. They hadn’t said a damn thing about the night West left—and definitely not about knowing what we’d done in that field. “ We got a call from Sheriff Keating that following morning. West had been picked up from the bus station in Merrillville and taken to the hospital. While we were told it wasn’t pretty, we weren’t really sure what to expect when we got there, but we were told not to tell Harrison.”

I frowned. Why the hell not?

She opened the folder showing off what looked like a police report—complete with pictures. Gruesome ones . She only handed one to me, which I was honestly grateful for.

The aged picture was of West in a hospital bed, and fuck, he was in bad shape. One eye was swollen shut and his brow was split while his lip was busted open and his nose had been broken. His entire face was a cascade of purple bruises that matched the deeply bruised band of angry flesh around his neck.

He looked like hell—a kid beaten senseless. It made me sick to my stomach.

“Harrison did this to him?” I whispered. My brows furrowed together tighter as I stared at the picture hard like it’d give me all the answers as to what the hell West had gone through. Mom nodded, and I asked, “Why?”

“Because West told him that he loved you.” He what? My gaze snapped up to meet hers. “We knew that Harrison wasn’t treating that boy right for years, but we never imagined… we never imagined Harrison would try to kill him.”

“What do you mean you knew?” I demanded. “How could you know and not do anything?”

“West wouldn’t talk about it,” Mom told me. I wanted to be mad, but how many times had I teased West about being clumsy? A sprained wrist, a black eye, a busted lip. West had always laughed it off as being clumsy as fuck, and I let him. “There was nothing we could do.”

I didn’t buy that for shit, but I didn’t say a fucking thing otherwise. To be honest, I didn’t know what the hell to think.

“He was afraid to come back with us,” she continued. “He didn’t think we could protect him, but we were determined to try. And he wouldn’t press charges against Harrison—he was too scared for that. Your dad paid for his hospital bill outright to make sure Harrison’s insurance wasn’t charged, and he made sure Keating never told a soul. We have the only police report made. ”

“Why?” I asked. I couldn’t let go of that stupid picture, and I couldn’t look away. “Why would you keep this?”

Why couldn’t I stop staring at it? I ran my thumb over the damaged picture. How could such a simple thing blast through every wall I’d ever built around my memories and feelings for West? My chest was painfully tight at the thought of what he’d gone through. He never deserved this. And not because of me.

“Insurance,” Mom said. “Your dad had had enough of Harrison, but it wasn’t enough to end their business partnership. He wanted to keep it in case he ever figured out how to use it, and I just put it away and tried to forget it.”

“What happened?”

“Your dad and I set him up in a hotel in Merrillville—one of those pay-cash kind of places. Cash only, no names, no questions asked. We figured he’d be safe there. Mickey was supposed to find an apartment or a small house for him—something we could buy for him in our name so Harrison would never find him.”

“But?” I prompted. I could feel it coming. It was right there

“But he ran away in the middle of the night without either of us knowing,” she whispered. “I don’t think he thought we could protect him.”

“Do you blame him?” I asked. “It wasn’t like you ever had.”

“Jackson,” she began, but I shook my head.

“He needed your help long before it ever got to this point.” I dropped the picture on the table. “It never should’ve gotten to this point.”

“He wasn’t our son—”

“It doesn’t fucking matter,” I snapped. Bullshit. He wasn’t their son. West had practically been theirs. “He was a hurt kid in need, and you did nothing.”

“We did our best to keep him away from Harrison as much as we could without it turning into a legal battle that could’ve cost us the ranch,” Mom said. The words made my temper spike, but I bit back my angry response.

“What happened next?” I demanded instead. “That ain’t the whole story, is it?”

“No.”

“Keep talking, Ma.” Maybe I was being a little too mean, but I didn’t give a fuck.

“We got a call almost a year later. West was in prison in Texas—had been for a while. He’d been arrested for armed robbery. There was a riot, and the guards lost control for almost a day. West…” Mom choked up. I ran a hand over my beard and just fucking waited with my stomach in knots. There was no way in hell this story ended well. “I didn’t go, but your Dad and Mickey did. And your Dad… your Dad only cried three times in his life. The first was on our wedding day, the second was the day you were born, and the third… I sat with him on the phone as he cried outside the hospital. What those men did to him… oh, Jackson… it was so awful…”

She let out a small cry, her hand covering her mouth as she looked away. My heart lodged in my throat. I was torn between wanting to know and wanting to stay oblivious.

“No one should have done to them what those men did to West. He was just a baby. He was just trying to make it through, and they… they took him… and they… they…”

“It’s okay, Ma,” I cut her off as she struggled with words. I didn’t need her to say a damn thing to have a real strong inkling of what they’d done to him. And truthfully, I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the words. The tears rolling down her cheeks killed me, and I covered her hand with mine. “I get it. I do. You don’t need to say anymore.”

We sat in silence as her shoulders shook. I gave her the time she needed to regain her composure before nodding, needing her to continue.

“Mickey stayed with West for a while,” she said quietly. “Your dad came back, and he confronted Harrison. You probably remember that fight. I had to call Keating because I thought your dad was going to kill him.”

“Yeah, I remember that.” It was the one and only time I’d ever seen my dad lose his temper. “What did Harrison say to set Dad off?”

“Your dad had hoped that maybe… some part of Harrison would care about what had happened to his son. The only thing that man could say was that maybe it’d cure the—it’s so horrible, baby boy,” she told me, interrupting herself. “He said… maybe it’d cure the faggot in him, and that was when your dad lost it.”

“That sounds about right,” I muttered. Nothing about that surprised me. Harrison had always had a special way of talking about people he didn’t approve of, which was pretty much everyone. I frowned as a thought occurred to me. “That was right around the time Dad taught me how to shoot and had me carrying a gun around the ranch. He said we had wolves.”

“The only wolf on our ranch was Harrison McNamara,” Mom replied. “Your Dad was real afraid of what he’d do to you if he ever got you alone. He didn’t think Mickey needed to teach you a damn thing. You were always so attentive to what running the ranch took. He just knew that Harrison wouldn’t start shit if Mickey was there with you.”

And that would explain why Mickey was my assigned shadow for fucking years.

“And West?” I asked. “What happened to him?”

“We decided it was better to let the memory of West McNamara fade,” she admitted. “For his sake and yours.”

“Mine?” I repeated, my voice rising. “Harrison had me thinking West left because he didn’t want to be around me anymore. Like I suddenly wasn’t fucking good enough to be in his life. And you never said a fucking word otherwise. I spent seventeen fucking years hating him for it. And you let me. Harrison wasn’t going to fucking leave the ranch. Who the fuck do you think you’re kidding? You just wanted to bury the fucking secret. Harrison may have been a fucking monster, but you aren’t much better.”

“Jackson—”

“He needed you. West needed you, and the ranch came first. Didn’t want to upset the fucking balance at the ranch.”

“That ranch is our entire family history!” she exclaimed. “There was no good way to separate the two! Being an abusive asshole wasn’t enough to break a generational contract. We would’ve had to sell the ranch—sell everything we had.”

“Or you could’ve just told me,” I said as I pushed to my feet “I could’ve walked off the ranch at any point and found him. He could’ve had the chance at a real life instead of the one he got. He didn’t deserve any of what the three of you put him through. If you’d done a single fucking thing to protect him, he wouldn’t have gone through any of that.”

I left, stalking straight out her door while she called after me. There were a lot of things I wanted to say to my mother and not a single one was appropriate. Not with the anger surging through my blood.

Not with the thought of what they’d let happen to him stuck in my head. Her words haunted me. And I didn’t know what the fuck to do about them.