Caged (Mastered 4)

Tag’s surprise this morning: No one told me about the family dinner last night.

His mother had gone to such trouble to keep it under wraps. Too bad he was about to blow the lid off her motherfucking world. He faced her and said in a tone that hinted at his rage, “Julianne. A word. Now. Outside.”

She set down her china teacup. “Deacon. Don’t be rude.”

“You haven’t seen rude yet.”

His dad looked at him strangely. “What’s going on?”

“I need to talk to you both. Privately.”

“Bing, dear, do you mind handling it? Gina and I were in the middle of—”

“I’m sure Dad would love to hear what I have to say about my cousin Warren. Since it appears he’s inherited his grandfather’s love of golf.”

Julianne didn’t miss a beat. “Gina, will you excuse us?”

“Of course.”

Deacon started to walk out of the room.

“Where are we going?” Julianne demanded.

He whirled around and loomed over her. “I’d suggest a soundproofed room so your friends don’t learn the truth about what a lying, conniving bitch you are.” He stormed down the hallway, so focused on not losing his shit any more than he already had that he nearly plowed Molly over when she stepped in front of him.

“Deacon?”

“Not now.”

“But I need to talk to you. It’s important.”

Deacon stopped and glared at his parents, who’d hustled past him and ducked into a room to the left. “So is this. I have to deal with them and this situation I’ve been kept in the fucking dark about. I’ll find you once I’m done.”

“Do you need me to . . . ?”

“No.”

As soon as he was in the room and had shut the door, Deacon exploded. “I don’t have to ask if it’s true, because I can see it with my own eyes. Warren is Dante’s kid, isn’t he?”

His mother looked over at his father.

“No. You look me in the fucking eye and tell me why you’d keep something like this from me.”

Her eyes held the mean glint Deacon knew so well. “Shall I start with the fact you’d already run off when the girl approached me about her pregnancy? We didn’t know where you were for years, Deacon. We weren’t sure we’d ever see you again. So I was supposed to . . . what? Try to track down a sixteen-year-old runaway so I could ask his advice on what to do about his dead brother’s unborn child?”

“Julianne,” his father murmured.

Deacon slapped his hands on the table in front of his father. “How long have you known?”

His dad rubbed the furrow between his brows. “I found out about two weeks after you came back.”

“And it didn’t bother you that she kept that from you? That she willingly gave your grandson—your only physical link to your dead son—to her sister to raise?”

“Of course it bothered me. But what was I supposed to do at that point? Rip the boy away from the only parents he’d ever known? Fracture our family even more? Annabelle and Derek adore Warren. He has a happy life and everything he’d ever want or need.”

Rage continued to build, and Deacon knew he hadn’t hit the point of explosion yet. He didn’t bother to keep his voice down, his fury absolute. “Annabelle and Derek could provide for him better than you could have? Bull. Shit.” He shot his mother a disgusted look. “All because Julianne didn’t want to be called Grandma. God forbid anyone ever thought she could be old enough to have a grandchild. That was it, wasn’t it? Or maybe, since Warren’s birth mother wasn’t a society girl, you were afraid her lower-class traits would appear in your grandson? And how would you ever explain that at the country-club brunch?”

“Deacon,” his father barked. “That is enough.”

“You’re trying to muzzle me because you know it’s true. If Aunt Annabelle thinks her sister arranged for a private adoption out of love for her, or the child, she’s got a fucking screw loose. Julianne has never done a goddamn thing if it hasn’t benefitted her. She thought providing Aunt Annabelle the child she’d wanted for so long made her selfless, but it’s the most selfish thing she’s ever done. Julianne didn’t want the boy, but she couldn’t quite let him go either.”

“You have no idea what I went through,” his mother retorted. “Your recklessness killed two people, Deacon.”

Recklessness? It was a fucking accident.

“The scandal that followed . . . You were a surly teen who didn’t see it, and even if you had, you wouldn’t have cared. It destroyed our lives. We had to move because the hatred for us in the community was so thick that I couldn’t show my face anywhere. Everyone—and I mean everyone—assumed your father had bought off the authorities. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t. The mere suggestion of it made him just as guilty as you in their eyes.” She took a breath. “So I lost one son, my other son vanished—and don’t think for a second that your disappearance didn’t cause new and ugly rumors. And then this young girl of fifteen showed up on my front doorstep claiming to be pregnant with my dead son’s child. What kind of girl starts having sex at that age? She was a child, pregnant with a child.”