“Leave Mark out of this.”
“Not about Mark. About everything else.”
“Ox, I told you. It needs to come from—”
“Gordo.”
“Fine.” He sounded slightly irritated. It reminded me of the Gordo I used to know. “Three questions. And I get to ask the same of you.”
My skin itched. “Fine. I’ll go first.”
He nodded. For some reason, the tattoos on his arms flared.
“Why did you ditch the phones?” I asked.
Gordo stared at me. He obviously hadn’t expected that.
I waited.
“Joe thought it’d be easier,” he said slowly. “He thought if we cut ties, we could focus on what we needed to. That being reminded of home, of all of you, made things harder.”
“And you all went along with it.”
“Was that a question?”
“Statement.”
“We went along with it. Because he was right. Because of what we had to do. Because every time he picked up that phone, every time we saw a message from you, it became that much harder to not turn around and come right back. We had a job to do, Ox. And we couldn’t do it with being reminded of home.”
“So instead of letting us know you were okay, that you were alive, you decided—excuse me, Joe decided—you’d all be better off keeping us in the dark.”
Gordo winced. “Joe said Mark and his mother would know. That they’d still feel—”
I slammed my fist down on the desk. “I didn’t,” I snarled at him. “I didn’t feel a goddamn thing. And don’t you tell me I had them to know, because it wasn’t the same.”
“You think we wanted this?” he snapped back. “Any of this? Do you think we asked to be put in this position?”
“Was that your question?” I said, throwing his own words back at him.
The ghost of a smile, long since deceased. “Why did you tell them?”
Rico. Tanner. Chris. Jessie.
“Because they needed to know,” I said. “Because they didn’t understand why you’d
left them. Because whether you knew it or not, they were your pack too. They needed to understand that they weren’t alone, even if you were already gone.”
He closed his eyes.
“Why did you come back?” I asked.
“David King.”
I frowned. “What about him?”
“What was left of him was found in Idaho.”
“What was left,” I repeated.