"No bullshit. Keeping things from me for my own good is one thing. Bullshitting me is another. I managed to wade into the world you tried so hard to keep me out of. I’m in it now, and I’m in danger. The truth is my vocation. Don’t lie to me when the only reason I’m doing any of this is to break these bastards apart."
With his back to the window, he leaned against it and folded his arms across his chest. "You sure you didn’t get involved just to rebuild your reputation?"
"At first, sure. Star got in touch with me and said she had a way to help me claw back some of my name.
"Right now, I’mpersona non gratain most newsrooms, and I don’t blame them. There are a lot of toxic workplaces out there, and someone who’s willing to burn their reputation and their career isn’t exactly going to gel well with a touchy-feely editor who’s been there for thirty years. Who’s also a key player in steering the paper through the evolution of newspapers to digital formats… He’d definitely be the priority.
"Then, Star explained to me what was going on, and I saw, firsthand, the women who’d been brutalized…" My voice waned but I sucked in a breath before I started up again, "Star’s told a lot of lies over the years. She was a soldier, that much I knew to be true because she went to West Point.
"The rest, well, couched within the lies she told, most of us stopped listening to her, and when she cut herself off from us, I think we thought it was an extension of that." I swallowed, guilt choking me and making it hard to admit, "We had no way of knowing that she went quiet because she’d been kidnapped and sold into slavery."
Aidan stilled. "Star Sullivan was one of the women who was trafficked by the Sparrows?"
I found it just as hard to believe as he did. "Yeah."
"She’s why you’re doing this,’ he rasped.
And unable to lie, unable to deny it, I nodded. "It’s why, no matter how many times they try to come after me, that they try to shut me up, I’ll carry on."
Aidan’s nostrils flared as he stalked toward me. "Couldn’t she have found a different fucking way to bring them down?"
"This is the tried and true method." I shot him a weak smile. "We let her down, Aidan. We let her down so bad. All of us. Gerry turned his back on her, she just didn’t know it because she was too busy being a fucking sex slave."
Despite myself, despite how I viewed the world and respected how wicked it was, just as I knew and was cautious of the evil people were capable of perpetrating, I knew I’d never, ever forgive myself for letting Star down so badly.
I didn’t even know I was crying until his arms came around me, until he propped me up and I felt the wet fabric of his shirt clinging to my cheek as I wept in his embrace.
I wasn’t a cryer. I didn’t do tears. There was little to no point in shedding emotion that way. But everyone had a breaking point, an Achilles’ heel that proved just how vulnerable they were even though they’d reported some of the many cruelties that proved to me society was devolving.
Family was my breaking point.
Andnoxxious, for all its sins, for all that it was the most toxic thing in my life, everyone in it, the group, the band members, the roadies who’d been with them since the beginning, they were all family.
None more so than Star.
Gerry’s goddamn daughter.
The man whose legacy my dad, one of the most integral cogs of the band, said was impossible to replace. Impossible to emulate. Impossible to forget.
So I cried. Because we’d let her down. The one foundation we all had, the one unchanging fact, had abandoned her, but just as I promised myself as we’d FaceTimed that day when I’d met her as well as some of the other Sinners’ MC Old Ladies, Star would never be alone ever again.