Page 143 of Caution to the Wind

Maxwell Dutton,otherwise known as White Snake, Dragon Head of the Red Dragon triad, was bound to a metal chair in one of the closed garage bays of Hephaestus Auto at The Fallen MC compound. He was middle-aged but not much older than me, with silver at his temples and in his goatee, lines beside his dark, shrewd gaze, and a mouth that was the same shape as Cleo’s.

It was almost unbelievable how much they looked alike.

Father and daughter.

Cleo had Kate’s beautiful grey-green eyes, but otherwise, she was a female replica of Maxwell.

Kate’d never told me who Cleo’s biological father was, and I’d never cared to ask. What did it matter, especially when it was probable the sperm donor had been one of her many johns back in her days of prostitution? What did it matter when I loved Cleo and considered her, almost from the first moment I’d decided to help them both, as my own?

So, it hit me hard, lookin’ at Maxwell from the corner of the room, knowin’ he’d fathered a woman so precious to me and knowin’ he didn’t deserve to be called anythin’ close to Father. He’d abandoned them both to misery and tragedy. And however he was plannin’ to spin his fuckin’ tale, I knew he had somethin’ to do with Kate’s death either directly or indirectly.

I’d been fightin’ a battle with the tumult of emotions this revelation had wrenched up inside me the whole ride back to the clubhouse with Maxwell tied up in the back of Boner’s SUV. The bodies from the last two cars were piled up on a tarp in the trunk while Carson, Ransom, and Dane stayed behind to drive the two SUVs that hadn’t crashed up into the mountains to disappear. We left the one that’d slammed into the side of the mountain pass. It looked like enough of an accident to pass with the law when someone finally called it in.

We’d dispose of the bodies later, but for now, the majority of the club was here, waitin’ for me to take the lead. Zeus was at my shoulder, a solid presence, a comfort. He’d given me the floor ’cause this was my life, and he knew better than most, a man needed to take the lead in vanquishin’ his own monsters.

The one that’d been hidin’ under my bed for the last twenty years was finally before me.

I wanted to kill him worse than I’d wanted almost anythin’ in my life.

But Cleo deserved to know what happened to her mother.

Mei deserved to have answers after pursuin’ them for us for near on her entire life.

I wanted death, and a small selfish part of me felt I deserved it too after all the shit life’d piled on me. But I was good at blockin’ out that voice.

And when the door to the garage swung open, and Mei walked in as if she had a right to be involved in Fallen business ’cause it wasmybusiness and I was hers in a way I realized now I’d always be, it soothed the last of the violence inside me that had me frozen on the sidelines.

She walked right up to me, looked up into my face as she grabbed my left hand, and smoothed her fingers over the place where my pinky finger’d once been.

“You got this,” she whispered, so soft it was almost soundless. A statement of trust meant just for me. “We get our answers, you can finally put the past to rest.”

A sound of loss rose in my throat, but I swallowed it down painfully as I squeezed her small hand in mine.

“I wanna kill him,” I admitted, duckin’ down a bit to speak into her ear. “Wanna rip him apart with my bare hands and set the pieces on fire.”

“Yeah,” she agreed without hesitation. “Me too. If he doesn’t have the right answers, wewill. But let’s make sure Cleo’s sperm donor is a real piece of shit before we take the option of knowing him from her forever.”

I grunted ’cause she was right.

Even though I had all my brothers supportin’ me in this, it settled me to have Mei there even though club business was usually closed to outsiders. It surprised me a little that I wanted to extend her this trust, but then again, maybe it shouldn’t have. Mei was on my team long before I’d even met most of my brothers in Entrance. She knew me, knew this situation, in a way they never could.

With one last look into those dark eyes to fill me with resolve, I stepped around Mei and stalked toward White Snake. I grabbed a metal chair as I went, draggin’ the legs against the polished concrete with an ear-splittin’ screech that made Maxwell Dutton flinch. When I was close enough, I spun the chair back and straddled it, casual, like we were just havin’ a little chat.

Retrievin’ the knife I kept in my boot, I lifted the wicked blade between us so it caught the light. It blinded Maxwell, made his eyes water and blink. Then I took his bound hands where they lay chained together on his lap and raised them to the chair back, loopin’ the metal through the bars before securin’ them to the chair with my knife stabbed between the links.

“I’m gonna ask you some questions,” I told him in a voice I didn’t hardly recognize, somethin’ dead and cold like I’d heard from Priest or Wrath when they interrogated men for the club. I felt like that now, like a corpse reanimated by somethin’ dark and evil, as I stared into the eyes of the reason Kate was taken from us. “And if I don’t like the answers, if I feel like you’re lyin’ to me, I’m gonna take a finger from you. And if I run outta fingers, I’m gonna start on your toes. If you’re stupid enough to keep it up, what do ya think? Maybe I’ll move on to your ears next and then your tongue.”

Maxwell stared at me for a long moment before sayin’, “I never took you for a man who’d enjoy torture.”

“Not torture if it’s deserved,” I countered.

“You’d really do anythin’ for the Kays,” he muttered, a little awed, a little puzzled. Somethin’ robotic confused over the depth of human emotion. “Even now Kate’s dead.”

“Just doin’ whatyoushoulda done as her lover, as Cleo’s father,” I ground out. “Now, start at the beginnin’ and don’t leave anythin’ out.”

It was a short story,love cut off by tragedy.

Maxwell Dutton met Katherine Kay when his buddies hired her for his twenty-first birthday party. She was sixteen, but he didn’t know that at the time. She was beautiful, and she moved like a dream, ethereal, otherworldly almost, like a fae dressed in tacky pleather. He could see through it, he told me, to the soft spirit beneath the body glitter and eyelash glue.