He sat back down. “If you change your mind, I’ll understand.”
“Have you seen the tapes?” she asked.
“No, and I’m not going to. I lived it; I don’t need to relive it from another person’s viewpoint.”
She didn’t spare his feelings. “You’ll see them when we go to court if the D.A. decides to charge you.”
“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
“Fair enough.” Diamond opened her briefcase, taking out a notepad and a tape recorder. “Do you mind? This way, I can play it back in case I miss something.”
“No, go ahead.”
Pressing Record, Diamond held her pen over the paper. “Start from the night you were kidnapped.”
Reaper frowned. “Why do we have to start there? I just thought you would need me to tell you that I killed the woman. Slate would have taped that one. Either he had a fascination watching people die or the people who paid for his tapes did. I don’t know which. He catered to a lot of sick fantasies.”
Diamond pressed the Stop button. “Earlier, when you said that finding out who you killed wasn’t the only thing you needed from me, does it involve other things that you did?”
“Yes.”
“What other fantasies did he cater to?”
“Slate had auctions to buy a night with me. He’d drug me until I did anything they asked.” He rubbed his forehead hard with the heel of his palm, trying to erase the bits and pieces he remembered of those auctions.
“Okay. Scrub that question. I’ll watch as many of the tapes that Jonas can find. I’ll also ask Knox to search through Crash’s computer to see if any are there. When I’m done, not only will I have a clearer picture of what happened to you, but so will you.”
He nodded.
“I want you to go back to the earliest memory. I need to know the details of what happened, so I will know your mindset when each incident occurred. You’re going to have to be brutally honest about what you remember ….” She held her hand up authoritatively when he would have interrupted. “If I can’t take it, I’ll tell you. If you have trouble discussing with me in person, I can leave the recorder, and you can do it at your own speed.”
“We can do both.”
“That’s a good compromise.” She brought her finger to the Record button. “What’s the first thing you remember?”
His lips curled into a smile.
Surprised, Diamond lifted her pencil off the notepad.
“I know it sounds strange, but the first thing I remember about that night was a song.”
“A song? What was the song?”
“‘In the Arms of an Angel.’”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Reaper was dressed all in black, from his boots to his jeans, with his black leather jacket unzipped, showing the black T-shirt that clung to him. On the outside, he was the healthy, vital man that he was before his kidnapping, but on the inside, he felt as if Slate warped his DNA into the diseased man who was now walking into the circle to exact the punishment that Crash deserved.
The original members who circled Crash still couldn’t understand that the old Gavin was gone. They kept looking for traces of him, despite the truth they knew deep down. They were searching through a graveyard and didn’t even know it.
Crash paled when he saw him. “Gavin …,” Crash started. “Broth—”
Reaper struck his hand out, backhanding Crash across the cheek. “No brother could do to me what you did. I wouldn’t do that to my worst enemy. I don’t have to tell you what they did—they sent you the videos. I would have died before I let someone I call brother suffer through what I did.”
Crash started crying. “I didn’t know what to do—”
Rage filled him at Crash’s excuse. Striking him again, Crash didn’t even try to avoid the fist that knocked him back a step.
“I know what I would have done. I know what every brother in this circle would have done. I fucking know what Stud and Calder would have done, and they aren’t Last Riders!” Bearing down on him, Reaper was finally able to say the words that he’d been unable to say when Crash stared down at him from those basement steps. “You ate and slept in your nice, clean bed, while I slept in filth and had to piss in a bucket! You ate food on a plate, while I ate leftover slop. You fucked women who you wanted to fuck, while I was fucked by men and women who wanted to get their sick kicks out on me.” Slate might never have videoed him when Crash was present, but the brother had been sent the tapes, so Crash knew the extent of the torture he endured.
“I’m sorry!” Crash cried harder at his condemnation.
“If I could kill you a thousand times, it would never pay me back for what I went through.”