My mother loved Harleigh Rose. She loved King.
She’d never fully understood the dynamic between the Danners and the Garros even though she was one of us, and she complained over the years of separation between our two factions, that she missed the kids.
She’d wanted a big family, kids and animals running around the way she’d had on her parent’s ranch outside of Entrance, the same one she’d given me as a graduation present.
Dad hadn’t.
He wanted one perfect son and got it.
Well, he got the gender anyway, and the perfect son up until the day I blindsided him by taking down the Nightstalkers MC, the same club his shady business partner Javier Ventura had financially backed.
I hadn’t talked to him in three and a half years.
He was not one of my visitors, and my mother, in the process of divorcing him because he’d driven away her beloved son and never given her much love himself, didn’t speak of him.
The Garros, though, were there every day.
It started with Garro, sitting sentry by my bed as if he was concerned the Berserkers wouldn’t buy the police and Harleigh Rose circulated version of my death.
At first, we didn’t speak much. I lay there, he sat there, two very different kinds of Alphas with very different types of lives.
Only, maybe, not so different after all.
We talked about Farrah and Garro let me read the shameful anger in his tone when he spoke about how she’d turned like Lilith after the fall, how it started the year before he went to jail, but with shit going down in the club, he hadn’t gotten around to divorcing her and then it was too late.
Divorce proceedings in jail took time.
He didn’t thank me for taking care of his kids, but I told him some stories about the time we spent together because he seemed to need it, pressure on a knotted muscle. I told him about teaching King to shoot his first gun, how he’d fallen on his face from the recoil on the shotgun, how Harleigh Rose had once convinced Old Sam to let her put on a concert for her friends and then only invited brothers from The Fallen.
He laughed.
It was weird, making the Prez of an outlaw MC laugh.
But it was oddly, deeply gratifying too.
The end of the second week, Loulou, Cress, and King showed up.
Loulou waddled right up to the side of my bed, her hugely pregnant belly partially exposed by a cropped top that read “Biker Mama,” and pressed a kiss to my temple.
“Nice to visit you in here for a change,” Cressida joked as she sat on the edge of my bed and placed a book on my thigh. “Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil. It’s about moral ambiguity and faith.”
I blinked at her. “Right.”
“You don’t have to read it,” she said happily, leaning forward into the bed with happy eyes. “I’m opening my own bookstore, you know?”
“Ah here she goes, Danny,” King laughed, tugging on a lock of his woman’s hair as he passed her to lean against the window. “Once she gets started on books, it’s hard to stop her.”
“This is true,” she said with a shrug.
I looked bewilderedly at Loulou as she settled herself in Garro’s lap, but she only laughed huskily and said, “You took care of Harleigh Rose when we didn’t, Danner. Welcome to the fold.”
I’d never been alone in my life.
Not like this.
Not by myself and hating it but knowing that there was no one to call.
My family thought I’d betrayed them.
My lover was hospitalized because of me.
Even my fake family wouldn’t come when called. They weren’t that kind of MC, and wasn’t that the reason I was doing this?
I tried to fill the void yawning open all around me with that reason and others. I was doing this for a purpose. The Berserkers MC were a threat that needed to be eliminated. My dad had taught me from a young age that evil couldn’t be excused or ignored. It had to be decimated, torn out from the roots and incinerated. I’d never been so directly faced with evil as I was now, embroiled in the Berserkers, but now that I was, I had a duty to end them and it was my dad who’d taught me that. So even if he couldn’t understand, wouldn’t even love me after I’d done it, I’d stay until the bitter, blackened end of them. Because it was simple, I’d do anything for my family. Even if it meant going to war against them.
It was two weeks after I’d stabbed Danner in the chest, but the moment still haunted me at all hours of the day. I’d called a nurse I trusted, Betsy, at the hospital to make sure he was okay, and she assured me that with rehab, he’d be right as rain in a few months.
Thank fuck.
I’d had a pretty good idea that stabbing him high in the left chest would cause the least amount of damage, but if my hand had slipped or I’d miscalculated at all, if Cressida wasn’t a softie and she hadn’t gotten to the house when she did, Danner would have been killed.
And I would have been his murderer.
My only solace was the fact that Sergeant Renner and my handler Diana Casey were thrilled with the progress I’d helped them make on the case. Grant Yves was organizing a massive shipment of guns in from California that would be arriving that very night and they were ready to make a bust. It might not be enough to take all of them down, but it should be enough to dismantle the organization.
Thank fuck.
I was tired to the marrow of my bones, my spirit a dead thing I carried dragging behind me like road kill. I needed this to be done so I could figure out what to do with my life, a life that would no longer involve Danner.
I thought my family might forgive me. There was hope like burning coal inside my chest that convinced me of it, and it fueled me through every pain-soaked day without them.
But how could Danner ever forgive me for what I’d done?
I parked in front of the Berserkers clubhouse with Hero in the passenger seat.
He’d showed up at my apartment two days after the stabbing, sitting on my doorstep with his leash in his mouth, his bag of doggy stuff beside him.
I didn’t question how he got there.
He was the only creature I had left to love.
So, I fell to my knees in the door and burrowed my face in his fur as I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed until there was no moisture left in my body to give.
I’d taken him everywhere with me since.
I was at the clubhouse looking for Wrath.
In the last two weeks, we’d spent a lot of time together, so much that he’d even trusted me enough to meet Kylie.
It shocked the hell out of me, but they were adorable together. She was a short, curvy black woman about my age with a gorgeous array of honey tipped brown curls and a sweet smile. Wrath was Wrath, huge and imposing. But somehow, like Danner and I had, against all odds, they worked.
She made him laugh.
He made her feel safe.
Hanging out with them had been like punching a tender bruise, but I’d enjoyed it.
If I couldn’t be happy, at least I could watch others be happy.
Wrath hadn’t been around in three days.
For another biker, that may have been normal, but Wrath liked to keep his pulse on the action both because he was VP and because he needed that to make sure Kylie was safe.
So, I was concerned.
I opened the door, swung out of the car and waited for Hero to follow.
No one had commented on my sudden addition of a dog, and I realized Danner had never brought him around before, so they assumed he was mine.