My chest tightened. “Oh my God. How did you find her?”
“When he got sick he asked Wrench to do some digging, but he really didn’t have much to go on, and it was basically a dead end,” Leo explained. “After the shit storm that went down, we asked Judge if he would use the resources the FBI had, the same facial recognition that Simon had used to find us. We used the only picture Slider had of him and his sister, and they managed to draw up a sketch of what she would look like now.”
“And you found her,” I whispered quietly.
He nodded. “She’s living in Seattle, has a family of her own. And the funny thing is, she’s married to a member of an MC.”
“Wow, they both ended up in the life?” Rose asked, her and Chelsea now listening intently.
“Turns out they weren’t completely unknown to the lifestyle,” Optimus interrupted. “Slider’s mom was the daughter of a club president. He didn’t like the man she chose to be with, and she did a runner with her new man. When things turned bad, the kids were thrown into foster care and eventually split up.”
I took a step away from them, trying to process all this sudden information.
“What club is her husband in?” Chelsea asked.
“Royal Rebels MC,” Leo answered, watching me as I moved toward the open doors.
“He never got to say goodbye,” I said, a haze of guilt and anguish settling over me. “He wanted to find her because he knew things were bad and he needed to say goodbye.”
“Hadley…” Leo said, reaching out for me.
I shook my head, ducking inside the patio doors and heading for the stairs.
“Hadley!” Leo called after me, but I ignored him, taking the steps two at a time, not completely sure of what I was running from, but knowing that I couldn’t be there any longer.
Slider was gone because of me.
He could have had more time, months, maybe years.
Doctors were wrong all the time, right?
He could have met his sister again, his nieces or nephews, his blood, his family.
But instead, he was about to be buried.