“Alex, listen to me, dammit. You were just a scared teenage girl who chose a path that maybe wasn’t the best route. In the long run, what you did wasn’t any different from going to a clinic. The end result would have been the same.”

“I did it to myself. That makes it worse.”

“But it’s not.” Gripping her chin, I tipped her head up to look me in the eye. “You didn’t kill your parents. Shit doesn’t work that way. Yeah, you killed your baby, but what you did didn’t start some cosmic chain of events to punish you.”

When she only sighed in response to my words, I said, “Fine. You want something about me? I’ll give you something. When I was fifteen, I killed my father.”

While I thought my statement might cause her to run, to cower in fear, or at least gasp in shock, she did none of that. She simply stared at me, waiting for me to continue. “That doesn’t freak you out?”

“I always knew you were an outlaw, Jesse James,” she said with a small smile.

“Is that right?”

She gave a slight nod of her head. “But without you telling me the history between the two of you, I can only imagine it was justified.”

The fucking eerie calm with which she said the words had the same effect as someone dousing me with a bucket of ice-cold water. “How can you of all people sit there and say that I was justified? I murdered my own flesh and blood,” I countered.

Easing up in the bed, she pinned me with a stare. “You want me to be judge, jury, and executioner? Then don’t just tell me that you murdered him. I may not know you that well, but what I do know tells me you would never kill someone unless you had to.” Jerking her chin at me, she said, “Tell me what he did to you.”

“I think you’re smart enough to already know.”

“But I need to hear it from you.” Inching closer to me in the bed, she murmured, “I think you need to say it aloud, too.”

Panic pricked its way over my skin. I couldn’t help glancing at the door, anxious to make an escape. No one knew about my old man but me and Preach. There was a possibility that Preach had told Case or some of the other guys, but I doubted it.

“My adopted father, Preacher Man, left his church in the summer. That fall, he came to me one day and asked if I’d ever wanted revenge on my father. I told him of course I did—it was something I thought of each and every day. I was fucking blown away when he told me he’d been able to track my old man down—something even the cops hadn’t been able to do—and if I wanted to, he’d take me to him.”

“What happened then?” Alex prompted.

I shrugged almost apathetically. “We drove to Texas, so I could end him.”

“There’s more to it than that.”

Flashing her a grin, I replied, “But then if I tell you, I’d have to kill you.”

“After what I told you, I thought we had established more trust than that.”

“Fine. You want the gory details so you can have nightmares and never want to be in the same room with me again?”

Lowering her eyes, she replied, “Not really.”

“Then don’t fucking ask me questions like that, because you won’t like the answers. All you need to know is he’s dead and will never be able to hurt anyone ever again.”

“How did he hurt you?” she asked, her dark eyes once again finding mine. They were so fucking hypnotic I could barely look away. She had to be doing some kind of hypnotizing hoodoo to make me talk as much as I had.

“He’s a waste of air to talk about.”

“I still want to know.”

I threw up my hands in defeat. “My old man was fucking evil incarnate. What the hell my mother ever saw in him, I’ll never know. Guess she thought she could change him, save him from what he was. But he only ended up taking her down with him. When I was two, he pushed her down a flight of stairs when she was eight months pregnant. Said he didn’t need another mouth to feed. Lucky for him, my sister came stillborn.”

Alexandra reached for my hand, but I jerked it away. Her expression saddened both at what I had said and probably how I reacted to her. “Your poor mother.”

“She tried leaving him a bunch of times. Before my grandparents kicked it, she stayed with them some, but they were both so old and sick that they weren’t any help to her against my dad. He’d threaten to kill them if she didn’t come home to him.” I shook my head as my voice choked off with emotion. “She must’ve felt like a fucking trapped animal.”

“Tell me about her.”

“She was beautiful, with long dark hair and dark eyes. Willow’s going to look just like her.”

“So you look like your mother?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

I tried to recall as much of my seven years with her as I could. “She smelled like apricots because she loved to wear this apricot lotion.” A shaky laugh rumbled through me at one particular memory. “One time she didn’t have the money to get any lotion. So being a scrappy five-year-old, I stole some off the shelf. I couldn’t understand why in the hell she dragged me back there. She made me give it to the store manager along with an apology. But then, in her own patient way, she made me understand how wrong it was to steal. More than anything, she said, she wanted me to be better than my father.” Reaching into my pocket, I tugged out a pack of cigarettes and my lighter. Alexandra didn’t protest when I lit up. After a long drag, I said, “After all her hard work, she probably wouldn’t be too proud of me today.”

“You’re too hard on yourself.”

“And you’re obviously too naive. What part of my world don’t you understand? I told you I killed my fucking father.”

“Why did you kill him, Deacon?” she repeated. Although she had asked it before, it seemed to be addressed in a different way. She must’ve known how I felt perfectly justified in killing him, but she still wanted more. She wanted to make me dig up that emotional grave where I had long buried the reasons that drove me to murder my bastard of a father when I was still practically a kid. After all, I was seemingly loyal, and the greatest breach of loyalty was killing your own blood.

Even though I should’ve ignored her question and stalked out of the room, I decided to give her what she was after. Then maybe she could once and for all know what an unimaginable bastard I was.

“Because he killed my mother! He tracked her down and tortured her like a fucking animal. He couldn’t just slit her throat or shoot her. No. He made her pay for running from him. He beat her until she died from internal bleeding and a fractured skull that sent bone fragments slicing into her brain.” Shaky hands brought the cigarette to my lips so I could take a drag. Sometimes late at night, if things were too quiet, I could hear her screams … hear her begging for her life. Then finally her pleading for my life.