“You’re an arrogant motherfucker.”
He huffed with amusement, his body barely moving. “Yeah,” he sighed. “I know.”
Dropping my hands into the pockets of my jeans, I took a few steps closer and stared down at the ground, hearing the stones crunching beneath the heavy weight of my boots.
“So, Ayda’s definitely pregnant, huh?” he asked casually.
My head snapped up at once, and I held his gaze—mine serious, his breezy. I searched his eyes, looking for something. A warmth, maybe? A connection. Something that made me think he’d felt the same way I felt when he found out Mom was pregnant with me.
Eric wasn’t like that, though. At least not the Eric I knew. He had complete control. None of us ever truly knew what he was thinking.
“Yeah,” I eventually answered.
He nodded slowly, processing his own thoughts.
“She’s pregnant, Eric.”
“You ready for it?”
“Honestly? I’m both dying inside with excitement and dying inside with fear.” I curled my shoulders in and shook my head. “Now is, quite possibly, the worst fucking time in the history of our club for us to be bringing another life into the fold. I’m only just beginning to figure out who I am. There are so many demons circling above me—I wake up some days not knowing which one is going to drop down to grab me first.”
“Son?” I didn’t flinch when he called me that then. His slow smile grew, the light of the porch making something I’d neverseen before shine in his eyes. “It’s all going to be okay,” he said quietly.
I swallowed the lump in my throat, unable to look away. “You think so, Dad?”
He nodded once. “On my life.”
Reaching up, I scratched the back of my neck awkwardly and looked back down at the ground.
Dad. Son.
We’d used those two words quickly tonight, and neither of them had made my skin crawl. I wanted to go to him, sit beside him on the porch with a beer in our hands, stare out into the night and clear a lot of old history away. There were still so many questions to ask, but only a few mattered that night. The rest could be answered when he was older, grayer, less… Eric.
With a sigh, I dropped my hand back into my jeans pocket and walked over to stand in front of him. No words passed between us before I allowed myself to drop into place on the porch steps beside him. Okay, so we didn’t have the beer or the perfect timing, but we were there, and I had my questions as we both looked out into the inky night.
“Where’ve you been?” I asked, resting my hands over my knees—a mirror image of him. Harry would be choking on his smokey laughter looking down on the two of us and our awkward relationship.
“Ready for this, too?” Eric side-eyed me.
“Probably not, but let’s hear it anyway.”
He spread his hands out, revealing the dirt and grease upon them as he turned the palms up to the sky and stared at them in front of him.
“The stuff Ayda collected from Harry’s room and from Owen’s place was good, Drew. She’s got an eye for what’s important. After you guys rode off from Owen’s place, I gathered it all up and got the hell out of there. Dumped it all inthe repo vehicle, rode someplace remote, not too far, to the outskirts of Owen’s land. There was water there. Did you know that? Water I could drive the front end into, flood the engine, make it so no one could move the thing without a tow truck.”
“To make it look like whoever burned Owen’s place and him to the ground also stole the car and wanted to get rid of it quickly?”
“Maybe.”
“What did you do with the evidence? There was a lot of it.”
“Left some of it in the car. I had a little time to flick through some of the paperwork. I didn’t leave much. Just enough to tie Owen, Jon Taylor, and Mayor Walsh in together. After you guys rode out of Babylon chasing Owen that day, you had a lot of witnesses to say he’d gone rogue. You also had a lot of witnesses see the look on Walsh’s face, by the sounds of it.”
“How do you know that?” I scowled, turning to study his aging yet familiar face.
He stared forward, his amusement lighting his eyes. “I have my sources.”
“Have you had those sources the whole time you’ve been gone from Babylon?”