Beard Up(58)

Lucky for me, he'd gotten all the way home, six hours away, before he'd decided that my face needed to meet with his fist.

But as I looked at him across the table from me, I realized that his anger hadn't lessened in all of that time.

In fact, if I was a guessing man, I'd say it'd gotten worse.

The rest of the men hadn't realized who I was yet.

That, I could tell.

Otherwise they would all be up in arms, collectively and individually trying to beat the shit out of me.

It was the face.

Not to mention I'd put on about thirty pounds in muscle since they'd last seen me. Oh, and let's not forget to mention that they all thought that I was dead.

I was no longer that naïve twenty-one-year-old kid. I was now a grown ass man who had the last six years of his life ripped away from him in the most savage way possible. I'd been tortured for a year of it, and the next five were spent living as half a man. I'd survived only on the promise of one day having revenge while I watched everyone else live their lives around me.

"What are we even doing here?" asked Torren. "My wife wasn't happy about the short notice. We had to bow out of a dentist appointment for the kids because I couldn't be there to help take them."

Sterling looked at him like he was crazy. "You had to bow out of a dentist appointment?" he jeered. "Poor baby. I had to bow out of a fucking practice. They fined me eighteen thousand dollars."

Sterling was a professional baseball player. Ever since he'd made it to the major leagues, he'd been on a hot streak, and I loved to watch him on TV. I'd been so fuckin' proud of him, too. I'd always wanted to tell him that.

"You can afford it," Kettle rumbled. "I had to call in sick."

Sebastian grunted. "Me, too. It worked out because I threw up on our last shift."

He did look a little green.

"Don't you fuckin' give that shit to us, either," Kettle grumbled. "I do not want to take that shit home. If I catch it, then that means Adeline will catch it. Then the fucking kids will. Then they'll give it right back to me once it's all over and done with. I do not want to deal with throw up."

I chuckled under my breath, drawing the attention of the one man who'd been eyeing me all night, besides Sebastian, who knew exactly who I was.

He was practically quivering in his seat, staring at me surreptitiously every chance he got.

I knew he was dying to talk to me. The only thing that'd kept him in check was Silas, and since he was in the hallway talking to Lynn, I knew that it was only a matter of time before he broke.

I looked away from Cleo's penetrating gaze.

Though my face was different, the structure of it was not. I had scars now where I didn't before, and my entire face looked like it'd been pieced back together after the fire.

The only real things that were left unchanged about my face were the color of my eyes and the shape of my mouth.

Everything else was different.

My pieced-back-together face, like Frankenstein's, was hard to look at sometimes. I was no longer that same handsome man that my wife had fallen for, and it made it hard for me to understand what my wife saw in me. She'd never once commented on the change, she just traced her fingers along my scars as if she was committing each and every one to memory.

"God, I'm fucking starving."


      ///
       
         
       
        

That was Truth.

I looked over at where he was sitting next to me. "Do you want me to order you a pizza, Truth?"

Truth tapped his lip. "Can we?"

I shrugged. "I don't see why not."

"Pizza doesn't deliver here," Trance, another member, said. His eyes were shrewd, and now they were on me, too. "We're too far out of the city limits."

I swallowed worriedly, turning my gaze away before he could read too much into my expression.

Jesus, this was about to get sticky.

I knew these men were going to be happy that I was alive, but I'd also let them think the unthinkable-that I was dead.

And it was going to go over like a cat turd in a sand box.

I kept my mouth shut after that, but the next ten minutes I could feel the tension rising in the room.

I'd stayed out of the limelight since I'd become a Dixie Warden. When there were club-wide celebrations each year, I'd skipped them. When there was any chance at all that I might see them, I purposefully went the other way.

But my gravesite rendezvous with Silas were being interrupted by my former club members, I'd had to watch them mourn me over and over again.

They were still mourning me, as a matter of fact.

God, this was a fucking mess.

Fuck. My fucking parents.