House of Payne: Tag

by Stacy Gail

  So there it was. After all these years, she finally had confirmation of who’d been behind the single worst day of her life. “The police don’t even know that for sure. How do you know? Were you there?”

  “I need you to listen to me, all right? I wasn’t a gangbanger, and I sure as hell wasn’t a member of the Yard Kings—”

  “Stop dodging the fucking question!” The shrieking was back, and it sounded so hysterical it worried her. Sucking in a lungful of air, she scrabbled for some kind of control. “Tell me straight up, Tag. Were you there when my entire family was killed?”

  “I didn’t know it was your entire family until you told me—”

  “Were you there?”

  “Ivy, don’t do this—”

  “Were you there?”

  “Yes.”

  No.

  Oh God, no.

  She wasn’t going to survive this.

  “I was there because I followed Teo, not because I was part of the goddamn gang that did it.”

  It took several seconds for those words to mean anything to her, because her world—her heart—was shattering into a million pieces, and she was dying inside. Little by little, word by word, Tag was killing her.

  Because what he said made no sense.

  “You’re lying.” It took most of her remaining strength to find her voice, because she couldn’t breathe. Only the living could breathe, and that wasn’t who she was anymore. “I can’t believe this. You’re lying to me.”

  He winced. “No, I’m not.”

  “The one thing I asked you to do, the one rule I had, was for you to always be honest with me, no matter how inconvenient or uncomfortable the truth was. And you’re standing there lying to me.”

  “I’m not lying to you, Ivy.”

  “You didn’t follow Teo. He was already at the shop with our uncle. He was there the entire time, so there was no following to be done, Tag. He was working.”

  “No, he wasn’t, and I think you know that.”

  What the hell. “No.”

  “When you first told me about that night, you said Teo must have been working, remember? Teo was allergic to work, yet you said he must have been working, even though it was after midnight. You also said you lost track of time that night, because you were working on a school project due the next day. So you know it was a school night, don’t you?”

  She shook her head to clear the chaos. It didn’t work. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “It tells me a helluva lot, Ivy, and it should tell you a lot, too. For one thing, it tells me that you just assumed all this time Teo was helping your uncle out with his business, yeah? That’s the only explanation your mind could live with as to why Teo would be there that late at night. But deep down you know it wasn’t like your brother to work after midnight, and unless I’m very wrong, your uncle wasn’t the kind of guy who would’ve kept a fourteen-year-old kid working that late on a school night.”

  Her mind tried to grasp the meaning behind his words, but it kept slipping away. “But… Teo was there. He was killed along with my uncle. He died there. He got shot, and then he got burned, and he died there with…with my uncle…”

  “I know, baby, and I’m so sorry about that.”

  “Fuck sorry. Teo died there. So he had to be working. There’s no other explanation why he would be there. My uncle must have made him…”

  Must have.

  There it was again. The assumption her uncle had been making Teo work late.

  Really, really late.

  But it had been a school night, she knew that for a fact. And Uncle Darius had always emphasized making good grades. He’d often said that his job was the auto paint shop, and their job was going to school.

  And yet…

  He’d had Teo there at the shop with him after midnight.

  That wasn’t right.

  At all.

  “You know what?” The abruptness of Tag’s voice made her start. “Forget it. Just forget everything I said. I’m the bad guy, okay? Blame me. Just leave it at that, and believe I’m the bad guy. It’s okay. All that matters is that they died, and I’m alive, so just…just hate me for it.”

  What?

  “Leave it at that, Ivy. Don’t think about it. Don’t question it. Just hate me and blame me. I’m fucking fine with it, all right? Fuck it.”

  She stared at him, while the irrational rage inside her yearned to do exactly what he said and just focus all her anguish and grief and crushing need for vengeance on him. He was an easy target, after all. He was standing right there. The warrior in her screamed for his blood, because hitting out at someone—anyone—would make her feel better. It would be so fucking easy to do.

  But…

  It still wouldn’t make sense out of anything.

  “You followed Teo.” She didn’t recognize her voice. It was thin, like a wire stretched so tight it was on the verge of snapping. “Followed him from where? And why? Why did you follow my brother?”

  The look he gave her was so bitter she could almost believe he hated her for questioning him. “Stop fucking pushing me, you hear me? Just stop. Trust me, you’re not going to like where this takes you.”

  “Trust you?” she repeated, her voice ragged. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Jesus,” he muttered, looking to the ceiling for strength.

  “And I might not like where these questions take me, but here’s the thing—I don’t like where I am now, so you need to tell me the truth, Tag. Stop all the lying and just…” A sob interrupted her as the enormity of her newly discovered reality hit her full force.

  He took a step toward her. “I know you’re hurting—”

  “Don’t.” She took a step back, her meaning clear. The last thing she needed now was for him to touch her. “All this time that we’ve been together, you let me go on and on about my brother. Never once did you give any hint that you knew all about his murder. That’s just…awful, knowing you were content to just leave me in the dark like that, and allowing that wound to stay open inside of me. So please, for once, just tell me the damn truth, Tag. I won’t rest until I know it, so you might as well just tell me.”

  “Don’t you see that I’m trying to save you from this shit?” The roar that bellowed out of him put her shrieks to shame, and she couldn’t help a jump of alarm at the sheer violence of it. “Don’t you see that from the moment I understood who you were and what happened in your life, I’ve been working my ass off to shield you from it? I’d rather you fucking hate my guts and think I’m a goddamn murderer than tell you what really happened that night. That shit would crush you, and I fucking refuse to do that to you, the only person in this whole goddamn world that I’ve ever loved. I’d rather live with your hate than ever hurt you like that.”

  Ivy stared at him as each word slammed into the vast balloon of madness and grief inside her, poking holes in it until she could breathe again. Think again. And suddenly, as she stared at the man she loved—the man she knew loved her—there was only one question that mattered most in her mind.

  “So you weren’t a Yard King?”

  “Never,” he snarled vehemently, hands fisted. “I was never part of their evil shit.”

  “Was Teo a Yard King?”

  It was as if he’d been slapped. His head snapped back and his expression went scarily blank before he looked away, clearly unable to meet her eyes as he tried to find some kind of answer.

  He didn’t have to.

  She had all the answers she needed.

  “Oh, no.” Another jagged sob ripped from her even as her hands flew to cover her mouth, perhaps to stop a scream of agony. That was what was inside her—endless, screaming agony. “Oh no, Teo. What did you do?”

  “He didn’t know what he was doing. Ivy, baby, you gotta believe he didn’t know what would happen when he fell in with the Yard Kings.” In a heartbeat, Tag was holding on to her while inside the silent screaming went on and on, digging down all the way to her soul. “Ju
st remember him as your dorky little brother who didn’t know what he wanted to be yet, and leave it at that, please. Just let this fucking go.”

  “I can’t.” With that, she yanked away from his arms and made a beeline for the elevator, snatching up her purse as she went.

  It was dark by the time Ivy made her way to Oak Woods Cemetery, not the best time in the world to be wandering alone in south Chicago, but she didn’t give a damn. For one thing, she saw no one as she trudged her way through the headstones and grave markers before she came to a stop at the Gemelli family plot.

  For another, she was too numb to care whether she lived or died.

  “Teo.” Her voice was rough from all the tears she’d tried and failed to stifle on the way over. She was wrung out now, beyond exhausted. If she started crying again, she honestly feared she’d never stop until she was turned inside out and dead from grief. “All this time, you were my hero. Did you know that?”

  There was no answer, of course. Just the grave that she paid a little extra every year to be neatly tended, along with the rest of her family buried alongside her brother. Her mother’s birthday had been last month, and the flowers she’d brought were withered and needed to be thrown out.

  As she stared at those dried flower husks, all she could think was that she was glad their mother had never lived to see this day.

  “I believed you were the good guy, Teo, I really did.” She made herself focus on her brother’s headstone, but she didn’t really see it. In her mind, her little brother was there, with his air of innocence while pulling the wool over her eyes time and again. “But now I know you’re not, and you probably never were. Do you know what that’s like? It’s like you died all over again today, and as much as that hurts, the worst part of this is not knowing why. Why did you do this? Why did you do this to me? Because make no mistake, you did do this to me when you fell in with the Yard Kings. Whatever it was that you did, whatever actions you took, the result of those actions was that I was left all alone in this world. I’d still be alone, if Tag hadn’t come along.”

  Tag.

  As his name echoed through her, Ivy closed her burning eyes on a wave of pain. “You know what? Tag is the only reason I’m not cursing your name. As screwed up as you were, you’re the reason Tag’s in my life. I love him so much, Teo, and he loves me. I don’t know if you ever truly understood the meaning of love. It’s like you took it all for granted. But love is a fragile thing, and it can be lost in a thousand different ways. Today, I lost my love for you, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get it back. I want to. Not for your sake, but for mine, because right now there’s a hole in my heart where my love for you used to be, and it feels like it’s killing me.”

  The tears were back, but they were just a trickle now, like the last of an unnamed poison leaving her system.

  “It’s so sad that in your short time on this earth, the one and only great thing you ever did was to bring Tag into my life. And even then, you did it through stealing from me. In time, I’m going to try to forgive you and whatever it was you did that brought the Yard Kings into our lives, and I’m going to do it because of that one saving grace. As selfish as you were, you gave me Tag. For that, I’ll always be grateful.”

  A faint sound behind her caught her attention, and she turned without surprise to find Tag a few feet away, leaning a hand against an angel statue. A breath escaped her when her gaze met his, and with it went the tension stringing her body taut.

  “Hi,” she managed weakly, and nearly cried again when she saw he wasn’t in any hurry to approach her. No surprise there. He’d had it with the Gemelli siblings, no doubt, and who could blame him? Certainly not her.

  He nodded once, cautiously. “Hi.”

  “How did you know I’d be here? Minnie?” Minnie wouldn’t have known where she’d gone, exactly, but under the circumstances her friend would have known her well enough to have made an educated guess.

  He shook his head, his eyes never leaving hers. “I called down to one of the doormen and promised him five hundred bucks to follow you, then drove like a madman to catch up. Blew through a couple red lights, but I’m here. I’ll worry about the tickets when they come in the mail.” He took a couple steps toward her, then stopped. “How you holding up?”

  Another breath huffed out of her. It was the best she could do for a laugh. “Better than you’d think. I can take the truth, you know,” she added when his expression turned a darker shade of grim. “That’s why you haven’t been honest with me, yeah? You didn’t think I could take it, so you were doing your best to protect me.”

  He nodded. “It didn’t hurt anything, letting you believe what the police told you about Teo. I was prepared to just let it go, for your sake.”

  That hit her like a velvet-covered fist. “I’m sorry I didn’t understand that you were trying to protect me, Tag. I’m so sorry for doubting you. I’m so sorry for…for everything.”

  “You don’t have to apologize. You laid out that one rule about honesty, and I didn’t abide by it. I had good reason, though. And since we’re being totally honest now, you should know that if things were different, I’d still be doing my damnedest to keep this shit-show away from you.”

  That sounded like her man. “Believe it or not, when it comes to losing my family the way I did, it’s the not knowing that damages the soul. Wanna hear something messed up? There have been times when I’d meet someone, and as I’d be chatting and laughing with them, in the back of my mind I’d be wondering in this horrible, obsessive sort of way if I was chatting and laughing with the person who’d killed my family.”

  He flinched. “Jesus.”

  That made her feel worse, and she looked down at her feet with a defeated sigh. “Yeah. Guess that makes me pretty crazy.”

  “Shut the fuck up. You were traumatized, yet you kept pushing on with life like the warrior you are, doing all that chatting and laughing shit. You didn’t let it bury you. My God, that makes you the strongest person I know.”

  She nodded to let him know she heard him, but was too choked up to speak.

  “And you don’t have to worry about that kind of shit anymore, okay? You put that right out of your head and you find yourself some peace. The ones responsible are all dead or in prison, so they’re gone from your life forever. You don’t get to retirement age when you’re a gangbanger.”

  It took a lot to not do some flinching of her own. “Like Teo.”

  “Teo was just a stupid kid trying to find a place where he belonged.” He took another couple steps toward her. “You asked why I was following your brother that night, remember? Teo had been with me and Malik out by the caretaker’s hut at Sherman Park—just hanging out and staying out of trouble. Then some Yard Kings showed up at the basketball courts and he jetted off to shoot some hoops with them. That worried me. A gang’s strength is in its numbers, and they’d been trying to recruit Teo for a while. I guess someone said just the right combo of words that night to get him to dive headfirst into their brand of bullshit. When he came back to pick up his leather jacket he’d left with me and Malik, we tried to talk him in to staying with us. But talking sense to a fourteen-year-old kid who thought his balls had dropped was like teaching string theory to a duck.”

  She nodded. How well she knew.

  “I got pissed off, so I headed into Malik’s hut, and through an open window I heard Teo talking to someone. At first I thought it might be Malik, but then I heard what Teo was saying. The Yard Kings had an initiation planned for him, and that initiation was to rob a place. It’s their way of getting their hooks into a kid,” he added when she rubbed her hands over her face to try to erase the strain there. “They dirty up a kid, corrupt them so much they feel they can’t tell their family and loved ones about the shit they’ve been forced to do. Their shame drives a wedge between them and the rest of the world, and who are the only ones they feel will support them? The very gang that pushed them into the damn cesspool in the first place.”

 
; “I know.” She knew how the process worked. Every kid who grew up in Back of the Yards did. What she didn’t know was how her brother could be so stupid as to fall for it anyway. “So Teo agreed to do it?”

  Reluctantly he nodded. “Don’t forget, your brother had a taste for playing the big shot by borrowing accomplishments and knowledge from other people. He did it with me when he painted your tag and called it his own, then told me he’d won all those scholarships—something you had done. I realize now, all these years later, that Teo pulled that same crap with the Yard Kings.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Teo said in his best tough-guy voice that he’d been casing a joint. Honest to Christ, he actually used that ridiculous phrase, like he was starring in some dumbass, low-budget gangster movie. He said the place he’d had his eye on looked ripe for the picking, because it didn’t have a lot of extra security. He even knew where the safe was, and that no one was supposed to be there once the Closed sign was lit. Little shit had everyone salivating by the time he was done laying it all out for them—made it sound like a toddler could’ve hit the place.”

  Ivy closed her eyes. “My uncle’s shop.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So… no one forced Teo to go there that night?” Opening her eyes, she looked to him as she grasped at that one last straw. “Like, they didn’t hold a gun to his head, or something…?”

  He shook his head. “If it helps any, I think Teo believed no one would get hurt. He obviously thought the shop would be empty.”

  The acidic pain that burned her insides made her gasp. “It wasn’t.”

  “I know.” At last he closed the distance between them and wrapped his arms around her. Warmth had never felt so good, and she leaned into him with a broken little sigh. “I followed them, looking for a good time for when I could get Teo away, because I couldn’t stand the thought of all that artistic talent being destroyed by gang life. But there was never an opportunity to get to him. When they got there, shit went sideways fast, and before I knew it gunshots and fire were happening, and the Yards Kings were bailing like rats deserting a sinking ship. All except Teo.”