Page 219
Lance hears it and keeps going because he believes the people surrounding us make him safe.
“You arrived in her life with nothing and treated her like something you were entitled to claim. You hated every standard she possessed because meeting one required more than aggression and vulgarity.”
Fuck me, here we go again but he wont control the room like last time.
“No.” I step around the table. “You hated that your daughter loved the brown foster kid from the barrio more than she feared disappointing you. You dressed your racism in words like standards and class, but I heard exactly what you meant every fucking time.”
Lance’s face flushes. “This has nothing to do with race.”
“It has everything to do with race. My skin, my language, my clothes, my neighborhood, my mother, and every other part of me you decided made me unworthy before I opened my mouth. You never cared what kind of man I was. You cared that Charm choosing me proved your opinion didn’t control her.”
I catch the hem of my blue shirt and lift it high enough to expose NAVARO inked across my lower abdomen.
“My white junkie father gave me Decker. My mother was traditional enough to give her son his father’s name, but don’t ever confuse the name I carry with the blood that made me.” I hold Lance’s stare without lowering the shirt. “I am Navaro through and through. I am Chicano, barrio-raised, and every fucking thing about me you’ve spent years trying to make sound dirty.”
His attention drops to the ink before returning to my face.
“You think violence is the only thing I learned in the streets because that’s the limit of your imagination.” I release my shirt and let it fall. “You cannot fathom what I’m capable of doing to you without ever laying a hand on you. I know how to cut a man apart with the truth and leave him standing long enough to watch everyone else finally see him.”
Lance laughs, but the sound carries a nervous edge. He didn’t expect me to cause a scene here. He counted on the tables, the wedding guests, and my loyalty to Cade and Bliss keeping me under control.
My boys know better.
They know I won’t destroy this night without being pushed beyond reason, but they also know Lance has given me an entire terrace of witnesses who have heard every word he’s said. If I break his fucking jaw now, nobody gets to pretend they don’t know what provoked me.
Lance drops his napkin beside his plate. “Your junkie father?” His mouth twists. “I suppose that would make your mother a junkie too.” He stands now too. “What is the Spanish word? Puta, I believe.”
Rage opens inside me so violently that, for one blinding second, I can already feel his face collapsing beneath my fist.
Briggs shifts closer, every trace of amusement gone from his face. He and Cade are already standing, but now they brace like men who know the second before violence when they see it.
“Fuck him, Ry,” Briggs says, his voice low and urgent. “He isn’t worth it.”
“I get it,” Cade adds. “We all fucking get it, but don’t. You hit him, this becomes about what you did instead of what he said. That helps him. It fucks him, not you, if you make him sit here and own it.”
They’re right, but knowing that does nothing to loosen my fists or quiet the part of me already calculating how many times I can hit Lance before they drag me away.
I look at Charm and see the shocked horror in her eyes, not from me but from her father. It’s the only thing that stops me.
I move closer.
“You can insult my clothes, my neighborhood, or the name Lance left me. None of that shit can reach me.” My voice drops until he has to listen carefully to hear the promise inside it. “But say another fucking word about my mother, and I will change my mind about touching you.”
“You are proving my point by behaving like a thug.”
“I haven’t behaved like a thug yet.” I spread my hands away from my body and invite him to make the mistake burning behind his eyes. “Atrévete.”
Lance’s gaze shifts past me to Cade. “Look at you. Raised with every privilege, handed an education, a family name, and opportunities men like him spend their lives resenting, yet this is what his influence has done to you. You stand beside gutter scum while he threatens the father of the woman he claims to love.”
Cade’s expression doesn’t change. “He didn’t influence me. He showed me what loyalty looks like when money isn’t involved.”
“You call this loyalty?” Lance gestures toward me. “He has spent years dragging all of you down to his level. He turns every room into a street corner, and you mistake defending his inability to control himself for brotherhood.”
“You don’t know a fucking thing about our brotherhood,” Briggs says.
“I know he needed wealthier, better-connected men to make him legitimate.” Lance looks around the table as though he’s presenting evidence instead of exposing himself. “Without Cade’s family, without hockey, without my daughter’s obsession with rescuing damaged things, what is he? An abandoned child with a criminal vocabulary and enough tattoos to disguise the fact that nobody ever wanted him.”
Charm makes a wounded sound behind me. My lungs continue working, but everything they pull inside me feels poisonous.
