Chapter 29 – Corvus
CORVUS
“ Y our son ?” I repeated, the throb in my skull pulsing double time now, seeing my adopted father through a red tint, my vision going hazy around the edges. “What the fuck do you mean, your son ?”
“Carson.”
“Carson? That’s it. Care to fucking elaborate?”
The dark circles around my father’s eyes deepened, making him appear as though all the energy had been sucked clean from his soul from uttering the name alone.
“That’s not right,” my Sparrow argued, shaking her head, staring at Diesel with narrowed eyes. “The initials were L.R.B. No ‘C.’ Besides, you would’ve recognized your own son.”
I caught the way Diesel’s jaw flexed, and no one failed to notice his lack of reply.
“Dies?” Rook asked, his tone even. The vocal equivalent of going dead-eyed. Hiding his feelings from the rest of us.
Diesel inhaled deeply, holding a long meaningful look with Pinkie. The big guy was a shade of green.
“That’s because they aren’t Carson’s initials,” Diesel finally replied, going for the decanter of good scotch by the far wall to pour himself a few fingers of amber liquid.
He drained them and poured two more, bringing the bottle to the table with him.
It thudded against the table as he folded himself back into the chair. “They’re his mothers.”
Rook curled his fingers, indicating the scotch and Diesel slid it all the way down the table, into Rook’s waiting palm.
“Pinkie, you mind? Leg’s bugging me.”
Pinkie rose to get Rook a class. “Sure it is. Lazy ass.”
“Diesel, I need you to start fucking talking here.” The words rushed from my mouth, chased out by the slow-building feelings of absolute betrayal in my gut.
Diesel had a son? One that shared his blood?
How did I not know this?
Why hadn’t he told anyone?
“L.R.B,” he said on a breath. “Lilliana Rose Bates. The lighter belonged to his mother. The first woman I ever loved. His name is Carson Gregory Bates. Born March 31st, ’96.”
Rook filled himself a glass of scotch before sliding the decanter back down the table to Diesel, who’d already drained his second glass. I stopped it before it could reach him. “Keep talking.”
Dies licked his lips, abandoning the glass to steeple his fingers in front of his lips. “I haven’t seen him since he was twelve. He didn’t look anything like he does now.”
I could tell there was more he was holding back, trying to decide what to say first.
“I wasn’t around,” he admitted. “When I got Lilliana pregnant, I was… I was with Jacqueline.”
“Are you serious?” Grey asked, disgust tainting his tone, offended on behalf of a woman he never had the chance to meet.
But meet her or not, we knew her from the countless stories Diesel and the guys told about her.
Their memories bringing her to life in our minds just as though we had known her ourselves.
Diesel was her everything. And we thought she was his, too.
“Not my finest fucking moment,” he sighed.
“Lily had this way about her. She could get you to do pretty much anything. Manipulative. You know the type. Anyway, Jacqueline and I had just gotten hitched and we were trying to have a kid. Well, Lily got it in her head to try to trap me before that could happen and split Jacqueline and I for good. She seduced me into her bed?—”
“No. You don’t get to put it like that,” Sparrow corrected him.
I nodded, glaring at our father. “You fucked another woman. That was your choice . Own it.”
His upper lip twitched but he gave a tight nod. “Yes. It was. She’d poked holes in the rubber and within weeks she was at my doorstep, waving a positive test in my face. She thought I’d leave Jacqueline on the spot. Do the right thing.”
“You obviously didn’t,” Ava Jade put in, tapping the table, clearly more than a little put off by Diesel’s past. But I had a feeling the worst was yet to come.
“Yes,” he answered plainly. “I did do what was right. I stayed with the woman I vowed to spend the rest of my life with, and I offered Lilliana more than she deserved. I bought her a little place in Lennox. I sent monthly payments. More than enough to cover anything she needed.”
Rook sipped his scotch before running the pad of his middle finger over the rim, not looking at Diesel. “And the kid?”
“Jacqueline and I just found out the week before that she couldn’t have kids.
I couldn’t…” He choked on his next words.
“I couldn’t do that to her. Make her see the one thing she wanted most in this world and could never have.
I never admitted the affair to her for fear she’d figure it out herself.
The house and the money, they were contingent on Lilliana never telling a soul who fathered her son. ”
“Where is she now?” I heard myself asking.
“Dead,” Pinkie answered before my father could. “For years now.”
Diesel rubbed a palm over his beard. “Murdered, by her son…when he was twelve.”
“He fucking strangled her to death,” Pinkie added, his face twisting. “In her own bed.”
My Sparrow let out a little gasp, and I remembered her telling us about all the photos she’d found on Drake’s, no, Carson’s, computer.
Of women who’d been strangled. How they’d all sort of looked like her.
I had to wonder if my Sparrow looked a little like Lilliana Rose Bates.
His first kill. And whether that was why he’d been drawn to her.
Sour bile coated my throat, making my mouth fill with warm saliva. I choked it down. “That’s when you saw him last,” I said, not really a question, but I was damn sure expecting an explanation. “That’s what you said.”
“I went to see him in juvie. Offered to pay for him to get help. He didn’t even know who I was.”
“She hadn’t told him?”
“No.”
“I’m guessing he didn’t take your offer?” Ava Jade asked and I could see the gears turning behind her sharp eyes, putting it all together.
Diesel’s rings caught the light as he spun them round and round on his fingers. “No. But he found out soon enough who I was. He wanted in. To be a Saint. As if I could have someone like him anywhere near my Jacqueline. He started writing me letters after that. Pinkie?”
“Yeah, boss,” Pinkie said, leaving the room.
“You kept them?” Grey asked, and it was hard to miss the hurt in his voice.
I knew, for him more than the rest of us, our makeshift family was everything.
Finding out Diesel had another son, a biological son, wouldn’t sit right with him.
Neither would the fact that Diesel left that son, just like his mother had left him.
“I did. They’re in the office. The letters got more and more insistent, borderline psychotic.
Before they stopped altogether about five years ago.
The last one I got from him was the day he was released from Folsom State after a long lull between letters.
In it he said he understood why I couldn’t have him in my crew.
That he would work on himself. Become better .
Worthy of the Saint title. And then he would come see me. I never heard from him again.”
Pinkie returned with the letters, dropping them on the table in front of me. Each yellowed envelope was stamped with the Folsom State Prison seal. Printed with its address, Carson’s name almost illegibly printed in the blank space provided.
I lifted the one on the top before letting it fall back to the table. “I don’t give a fuck about some letters he sent you years ago. You should’ve told us.”
“I didn’t think he would?—”
“He was a threat,” Rook interjected, slamming his now empty glass onto the table. “Not just to you. But to us. And now to Ava Jade, too.”
“All because you abandoned him,” Grey growled.
“He was a fucked up kid who wouldn’t accept my offer to get him help, what was I supposed to do? He killed his mother.”
“Did you ever ask him why?” Ava Jade asked our father with murder in her eyes.
The still-beating thing in my chest ached at the pain in her eyes, realizing what made her ask the question.
The things her own mother did to her. Except that was before my Sparrow found her wings.
While she was still earthbound, trapped in the skin of her weaker self.
Diesel narrowed his steely eyes on Ava Jade. “The kid killed his mother,” he tried to remind her.
“And now that same kid has also had a hand in killing off half your fucking men,” she spat back. “He murdered at least twelve other women. For fuck sake’s, he had Corvus kill himself . He almost…”
She trailed off, her face turning a shade of pale green.
“And you think I could’ve stopped any of that?”
“Maybe,” Grey spoke up. “If you were there.”
Rook tapped his glass on the table, and I shoved the scotch back at him.
He poured. “Even if you couldn’t have changed how he turned out, at least you might’ve been there.
” He took a sip before reaching over the table to offer the rest to Ava Jade.
She shook her head, and he drained it himself instead.
“For what?” Diesel demanded.
“To put a piece of fucking lead between his eyes before he could hurt anyone else.”
Diesel jerked back at Rook’s words, and I knew my father well enough to see that he was coming to realize we were right. But they were all forgetting one thing.
“It doesn’t matter now. What’s done is done. Diesel might’ve had a hand in creating this monster, but now it’s all of us that have to deal with him. Grey?”
My brother was already nodding, lifting his phone from his pocket. With this new intel, there had to be more we could find on this guy. Hopefully, it would lead us straight to him. “I’m on it. We need to get back to the Nest. I need my fucking computer.”
We all stood, ready to leave. To get to work.
“I’m going to make this right, boys,” Diesel promised, making us all hesitate before leaving. His guilty eyes found mine, holding fast. “I’m sorry.”
I knew he meant it, but an apology wasn’t going to fix this.
Blood and lead would.