Does Franks have something on Landon?
I had no idea. As far as I knew, Landon had no family, no ties, nothing at all to hold over his head except his loyalty to Franks’ organization and his dedication to the fighters he trained.
Back to the more immediate issue: explaining all of this to Raine. She wasn’t just going to be pissed off; she was going to shit kittens over the whole idea. She knew about the kind of people I had been associated with from her father’s days as a cop, but she’d never been immersed in it. Raine prided herself on being a good, upstanding citizen. She hated what I had done in the past. It’s not like she was the kind of girl who would have married into the mafia for any reason. She was with me under the pretense that I was no longer involved in any of that shit.
But I was. I am. On some level, I always would be.
There was no getting out of it once you were in unless it was in a coffin or tossed in a convenient body of water. Around here, they even had the added bonus of gators to clean up the mess. I had never discussed any of this with Raine because it simply hadn’t come up. I wasn’t expecting my retirement from the games to be subject to recall.
Pretty fucking naïve.
There was only one way to make her understand, and that was to tell her everything. It was going to scare her half to death, and I didn’t want to do it, but if she didn’t realize all our lives were on the line, she was going to fight me the whole way, and I couldn’t have that.
If I was going to keep us all alive, I needed her to have my back. I needed to know she would be there with me, even if she didn’t like it, all the way through to the very end. With her on my side, I’d make it.
I shook the raindrops out of my hair and looked at the watch on my wrist. I had about twenty minutes to get back, and I was going to have to run faster to avoid being late. Adding tardiness to Raine’s list of my screwups would be bad. I raced along the shore, grabbed my shoes and socks when I got to them, and made it back to the condo just in time.
In my head, I told myself I could do this. One more fight. One more fight would get me my son—the only child I would ever have. All of that was much easier than explaining to Raine everything that was happening.
Focus. One thing at a time.
I took a deep breath and opened the door.
Raine was still there on the couch, looking like she hadn’t moved since I left. She glanced over to me, picked the remote up off the arm of the couch, and flipped off the TV.
“You ready now?” she asked.
She’d been crying. I could hear it in her voice, and it threw me off my game immediately. I just wanted to wrap her up in my arms and tell her everything was going to be just fine, but that was a bigger load of bullshit than I could have pulled off.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”
“You have a lot of explaining to do,” Raine said. “Where are you going to start?”
“Are you going to leave?” I asked. I swallowed hard as I braced myself for her answer. If she decided she was going to leave, everything else was moot.
“That depends a little on what you say next,” Raine said as she crossed her arms. “I’m pissed at you, Sebastian Stark. I can’t deny that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone that wasted, and I have no idea what to think about your finding out you have a son.”
“You knew I had one out there somewhere.”
“But you never knew anything about him,” she said. “You didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl before, and you never talked about him at all. Obviously, something changed. Did you see that woman?”
I shook my head. I had seen her, kind of, but I knew that wasn’t what she meant. The picture of Jillian with her brains blown out scurried around in my head until I pushed it away.
Raine raised an eyebrow at me, and I looked at the floor for a moment to gather myself before I sat on the couch. She turned toward me and tucked one leg underneath her. After a moment of silence, it became clear that I was supposed to start.
“I got drunk,” I said quietly.
“That much was blindingly obvious.”
I nodded and went with what I knew.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s not going to happen again. I just…I just slipped.”
“Into a bottle of booze?” Raine uncrossed her arms and leaned back against the arm of the couch with her elbows. I shrugged in response. She stared at me a long moment before sighing. Her expression softened. “Please just tell me what happened. How did you find out about your son?”
Might as well get it over with.
“I saw Landon yesterday,” I told her.