Battles of the Broken (Sons of Templar MC 6)

“So we started giving a shit about each other.” He gave me a look, one I was supposed to find something in, but I could barely blink through the pain. “It was the wrong kind of love. It wasn’t natural. Organic. Especially not since we both loved each other only slightly more than we loved the junk. Or slightly less. Which was worse?”

The realization of what he meant, what he was saying, hit me so hard that it seemed my very bones shattered.

Junk.

Drugs.

The addiction that stole my brother away from me.

That was the reason for Gage’s hard looks, that distance that yawned between us when he retreated into his darkest of places.

He was a drug addict.

And I could taste his fear at the confession. I knew why he’d kept it from me, because he felt this insane connection too. And I imagined after what I’d told him about David, he thought the truth would sever it.

But it only made it stronger.

I wanted to tell him that. Wanted to salve that obvious fear lingering behind my strong man’s eyes. But I didn’t have the words. And Gage didn’t let me try to find them.

“But then she got pregnant,” he continued, his words razors on my soul. “And I found something I loved more than the junk. A fuck of a lot more.”

He paused, the silence long. And painful. Daggers in the air. I itched to go to him. To touch him. To somehow take away the utter destruction in his eyes. But there was nothing that could touch that kind of pain.

“My daughter.”

The two words bowled through my soul. Shattered my bones. Tears streamed down my face before I could even fully realize it.

Because I knew this story didn’t have a happy ending.

Because there was no way sorrow could inject itself so deeply, so profoundly into those two words if it did. And the man in front of me was someone who’d convinced himself that he didn’t have happy endings. Because of what the world had shown him—or more accurately, what the world had taken from him.

“She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in the shit-filled and ugly life I’d been livin’ the years after my folks kicked me out,” he said, voice empty. Because I knew that was the only way he could speak of her, with that detachment that was so cold it almost frosted his breath.

Because there was no other way for him to speak and stay standing.

“A whole head of dark curls the day she was born. Biggest eyes I’d ever seen. Saw fuckin’ into me. Like a baby seconds old somehow knew the fuckin’ secrets of the universe. Well, she knew the secrets of mine, at least. She was mine.”

My face was soaked, the tears like acid, searing through my skin.

“Those eyes alone, those curls, they were what I needed to get my shit straight,” he continued. “Because my girl deserved beauty every inch of her life. I didn’t know how the fuck to create it, since ugly was all I knew. Junk does that, takes away the beauty from your memories, erases it. But I tried. Stayed the fuck away from junk. Thought Missy did too. How could you want to touch that shit with the same hands that touched our daughter?” He shook his head, clenching his fists at his sides. “That was my mistake. Not my only one, but fuck, my biggest one. Thinking my wife would love my daughter, our daughter, more than a fucking high.” He hissed the word through his teeth and it seemed to turn to fire.

“Didn’t notice because I was busy. Too busy trying to create beauty by livin’ ugly. And in the end, that’s what killed her.”

His eyes were dry and empty and bowling through me.

“It wasn’t my life that killed them, both of them. I’ve always found that darkly ironic,” he said, voice still clear and flat. “I was running with some bad fuckers in those days. In order to run with them, I needed to rule them, so I became worse than all of them. I’m not gonna say I had good intentions beyond trying to stay clean and give my daughter a life that would one day not be stained by the filth of her parents.”

He glanced to the door to my studio that was no longer closed, where some of my paintings were visible, namely the reproduction of Gage’s chest tattoo I had just about finished.

“The road to Hell isn’t just paved with good intentions, and there’s more than one way to get there,” he said. “My intentions were all bad—when they weren’t connected to my daughter, at least—and they brought me to Hell.” He gritted his teeth. “Didn’t notice my woman was still using. Or maybe I did and didn’t want to notice. I was clean from junk but not a fuck of a lot else. Drank a lot. Dove into toxic pussy because my woman was starting to disgust me. But never around my daughter. My princess. I’m not a good man, so I wasn’t a good father. But I loved her. Fuck, did I love her.”