Ryder (Slater Brothers 4)

I exhaled an unsteady breath. “How were your brothers involved?”

“As you know, Dominic got a job fighting for Brandon. With his money being gone, and being a personal trainer not making enough income, it was the perfect cover to Bronagh. He’d fight under Brandon, get paid, but also keep his ear to the ground to help me with any information he could find. That’s why there’d be days here and there where I was out with him all the time. He was helping me. Kane and Alec too. Kane came with me on a few jobs to watch my back because I don’t trust anyone in Brandon’s crew—except Gavin, but he’s only a small ranked solider, and he wouldn’t have any information that I wouldn’t already know.”

Aideen’s little brother was caught up in Brandon Daley’s world still, and I hated it. The stubborn little bastard wouldn’t bow out no matter how much Aideen and his brothers tried to force him to. Keela was working on having her uncle just kick him out of the gang, but he was proving to be just as difficult.

“Alec can charm a snake, and I was dealing with a lot of snakes, especially when I was trying to close deals on weapons. Once or twice I’d be dealing with a hard-ass woman, or a stuck up man, and that’s when I needed Alec. I’d bring him along with me, and without making it obvious, he would do his thing—flirt, and effortlessly make people like him. He didn’t even touch anyone; he just smiled and struck up conversations with them. Typical Alec style. It made closing those kinds of deals with greedy people a lot easier.”

I lifted my hands to my face and rubbed my eyes. I lowered my arms, and shook my head, not being able to comprehend the depth of what I was hearing.

“This is a lot to take in.”

“I know it is, but you need to know everything so you understand how tied my hands were.”

I couldn’t begin to imagine what he felt like, or went through, but… I understood that he had to do what he was made to do in order to remain prison free. I got that. It was so hard to believe it was real life, but I got it. My mind pieced together all the fall-outs, fights and the general break down of our relationship and concluded it was inevitable.

Ryder wasn’t a God; there was only so much he could control. His experience with his past life made his task a familiar one, but this time the stakes were a lot higher, and by trying to protect me from it, he unwillingly subjected me to another kind of horror.

My mind understood all of that, but my heart didn’t. I couldn’t just erase the pain I felt, or get over what I saw. The most superficial and idiotic thing I could have said left my mouth when I thought about the night I was kidnapped.

“You really weren’t cheatin’ on me with that Lucy woman?” I whispered.

“No, I swear it.” Ryder said without hesitation. “She was only my contact to the Feds. I’d meet her every night at a different location, get wired up, and find out what shit they wanted me to do.”

Oh.

“I just thought… when I saw you lean into her car, and she laughed... I just thought the worst.”

“She laughed and giggled like that every night in case I was followed by Brandon’s men to make it look like I was meeting up with her for a hook up, but I swear, it’s only ever been you, Branna. I have never touched another women since the night we met.”

My hands were trembling.

“What was I supposed to think? I saw what I saw and came to a conclusion most people would come to as well,” I said as my lower lip wobbled. “You pulled away from me, you left the house every night and showered before you would come near me. When I saw you with ‘er, I started to piece all of that together and it just made everythin’ worse inside me head.”

Ryder frowned. “I felt dirty every time I walked through the front door of our home knowing the shit I came from. I didn’t want to taint you with it. You’re pure to me, and I didn’t want any of what I’ve been doing to affect you.”

“But it has affected me,” I whispered. “You… you made me think you hated me.”

“I never meant for it to go this far,” he stressed as he leaned forward and took my hands in his, shocking me as the familiar feeling of his calloused hands instantly soothed me. “I meant to distance myself from you just until this was done, and when we started arguing, I couldn’t stop the spiral. You, your sister, the other girls, you all mean everything to me, to my family. We agreed that keeping you in the dark was the best thing to do. Damien, too. We didn’t tell him anything because we knew he’d want to help us, and it was decided a long time ago he would never be involved with what we had no choice in. If anything went wrong and me and Dominic did go to prison then none of you could be implicated. You wouldn’t know about any of what was going on so they couldn’t try you as an accessory.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “This just doesn’t feel real.”

“I wish it wasn’t.”

Me too.

“You said you did want the FBI wanted, does that mean Brandon has been arrested?”

Ryder shook his head. “No, I got all the information I could, but they still don’t know any of his contacts, sources and distributors. Brandon never directly gave me my orders either, it was another man who told me what to do and where to go, so even if there was a bust, it wouldn’t trace back to him. Brandon was good to me, but he knew what I was doing in his gang, and why I was there. He was very careful during my time with him.”