"I need to say something to this club," Rex said, addressing the crowd, Joker, and the decades of shared history standing around him in leather, road dust, and complicated feelings. Joker studied him for a moment, then he nodded once. "Say it." Rex turned to face the full circle of men around him.
He didn't straighten his posture or clear his throat or do any of the things a man does when he's preparing to perform. He just turned and looked at them, and when he spoke, his voice was level and quiet and cost him something visible with every sentence. "I put the wrong parts in that engine," Rex said. "Not once.
Multiple times. Eight years of it. Every time someone got close, every time it looked like someone might actually finish what Victor started, I found a way to stop it." He paused, not for effect, because the next part required him to stop and gather himself and he was past the point of pretending otherwise.
"I told myself it was justice. I told myself Victor owed a debt he never paid and this was the only way I had left to collect it." He stopped again. "I was wrong.
I was wrong for eight years and I was wrong last night when I gave the Wolves the route information. I told them before, before the conversation that changed things. That doesn't excuse it. I'm not here to be excused."
The silence in the compound was absolute. 50 men not breathing quite normally. "I also contacted them this morning to call off the secondary block," Rex said. "They didn't listen.
That's on me, too." He looked at his boots for a moment and then back up. "Victor Ryder did not cause my brother's death. I knew that on some level for years and refused to let myself know it on the surface because the anger was the only thing I had that felt bigger than the grief."
His jaw worked. "I'm done carrying it. I'm done letting it cost this club things it can't get back." He looked at Ethan directly. "I'm done letting it cost his son things he never did anything to deserve losing."
Nobody spoke. Joker looked at Rex for a long time with an expression that contained the full complexity of a decades-long relationship, the friendship, the fracture, the loss, the years of watching something go wrong in someone you cared about and not being able to stop it. "You understand what this means?" Joker said.
Not a question. "Yes," Rex said simply. "Then you know what I have to ask you."