Chapter 90 Confronting him
Ryder's POV
"We need to talk about your late night phone calls." I kept my voice even and my tone casual, the way you'd bring up the weather or ask about a football game. But the words landed exactly the way I knew they would, like a stone dropping into still water.
His hand froze on the coffee pot and stayed there for a beat too long before he put it down carefully and turned to face me fully. "What phone calls?"
"Don't play stupid with me, Snake. It wastes both our time and I don't have a lot of that to spare right now." I moved closer to the counter and watched his face the way I'd been trained to watch faces, looking for the micro-expressions that slipped through before a person could put their mask back in place. "Tommy saw you making shady calls outside during meetings. Always alone, always where no one else could hear you, and always cutting the conversation short the second anyone got close. Who are you talking to and why are you hiding it from the people you're supposed to trust?"
Snake removed his hand from the coffee pot with a careful, deliberate motion and then he just stood there for a moment, his jaw working like he was chewing on the words before he let them out. The sweat that appeared on his forehead wasn't from the heat of the kitchen.
"It's personal business," he said finally, and even he didn't sound convinced by his own answer.
"Everything starts as personal business until it affects the club or the people in it. Then it becomes everyone's business whether we want it to be or not." I crossed my arms and held his gaze. "Start talking or I start assuming the worst, and trust me, you don't want me assuming the worst about you right now."
"The worst being what exactly? That I killed Vincent? That I have something to do with the attacks on us? On Sage?" His voice went hard and defensive, the way it always did when Snake felt cornered. "That's bullshit and you know it, Ryder. You know me better than that."
"Then explain the secret calls. Explain why you're sneaking around like you've got something to hide that would destroy you if anyone found out what it was." I didn't back down or soften my tone. "Because from where I'm standing, that's exactly what it looks like."
Snake's jaw clenched so tight I could see the muscles jumping under his skin. He stared at me for a long, hard moment, like he was weighing the cost of telling me the truth against the cost of continuing to lie, and trying to figure out which one was going to hurt him less. Then something in him gave way, like a dam that had been holding back too much pressure for too long, and his shoulders dropped and the fight drained out of his expression all at once.
"I've been talking to a lawyer," he said, and his voice came out quieter than I expected to hear it.
That stopped me cold. "About what?"
"About custody of my kids." He looked away from me and focused on the coffee pot like it was the most interesting thing in the room, which told me he couldn't bring himself to look at my face while he said the next part. "My wife wants to leave me. She's tired of the violence and the uncertainty and all the shit that comes with being married to someone in this life. She wants to take the kids and move three states away where they'll be safe from everything connected to the club and to me."
The pain in his voice was real. I'd known Snake for eight years, through some of the worst moments the club had ever faced, and I had never once heard him sound like this. Broken wasn't the right word exactly, but it was close enough.
"I didn't know things were that bad between you and your wife."
"Because I didn't tell anyone, and I didn't want anyone to know." He finally looked back at me and the rawness in his eyes made something twist uncomfortably in my chest. "This is my family. My kids. My marriage. It's the one part of my life that I thought I could keep separate from everything else, and now it's falling apart and there's nothing I can do to stop it."
"Why hide it from the club though? Why not just tell people what you're dealing with and let someone help?"
"Because admitting that my wife wants to leave me because I chose the Steel Wolves over her and our kids makes me look weak." Snake's voice was bitter. "Makes it look like I can't hold my own life together, let alone handle my responsibilities in the club. And because I didn't want anyone thinking I might walk away from the club to try to save my marriage. I'm not going anywhere, Ryder. This is my family too, the only one I've got left if my wife actually goes through with it."
I studied his face for a long time, looking for any crack in the story, any sign that the pain and the exhaustion and the desperation were being performed rather than felt. The dark circles under his eyes were real, had been there for weeks if I was honest with myself about noticing them. The way his hands shook slightly when he reached for his coffee cup was real. The way his voice cracked just slightly when he talked about his kids was something no amount of acting could fake convincingly.
But real pain didn't mean he wasn't also hiding something else underneath it.
"I need you to be completely straight with me about one thing," I said, keeping my voice level.
"What?"
"Did Vincent know about your wife wanting to leave you? Did he know what you were going through?"
Snake nodded slowly, like the movement cost him something. "Yeah. He knew. I told him about three months before his death when things first started getting bad between me and Lisa. He didn't say much at first. He just listened to me talking, the way he always did, but then he gave me some time off from club business so I could focus on trying to work things out with her."