“You’re such a fuckin’ martyr,” I told him, aiming for sassy but falling uncharacteristically short. “This isn’t your fault.”
His hand tightened briefly on my face, but I didn’t flinch because if I knew only one thing in my life, it was that I was safe with Danner.
“I left,” he muttered.
“You did,” I agreed, then because I wasn’t the kind of girl to hold back, I added, “It hurt like a motherfucker.”
His eyes flared. “Same for me.”
“Your choice, so I got no sympathy for you there. That said, don’t be a fuckin’ idiot and assume that your desertion led me to staying with a madman for longer than I should’ve. You didn’t use to be so full of yourself.”
“Rosie—” he started, but I’d found a flicker of fire in my belly and I latched on to it.
I shoved him away and backed up a few paces. “Stop calling me that, Danner. I’m not your Rosie anymore. My life doesn’t have anything to do with you. I fucked up, I killed Cricket, I was the fuckin’ cliché that let her man beat her because my head wasn’t right. Not you. Not my dad like that Bitch Cop implied. Me. Thanks for coming for me, thanks for gettin’ me out of that fuckin’ box. If you need to pay penance, there, you did it. Now, we can be done. Again.”
“Fuck that,” Danner snarled, the tendons in his forearms clenching in a way that I noticed was delicious even through my increasing delirium. “You think that’s the end, you haven’t grown up as much as I would’ve thought in the last three years.”
“Fuck you,” I shouted out at him with bared teeth. “You don’t know shit!”
Infuriatingly, he just raised an eyebrow and crossed his corded arms across his chest. “I’m the one just got you out of this shit, Harleigh Rose, you think I don’t know shit?”
“This bullshit doesn’t define my life,” I yelled at him, furious at the idea.
Too furious to notice the way his lips twitched with satisfaction, to wonder why he was antagonizing me after what I’d just been through.
Too furious to realize that he was giving me strength in the only way I knew how to take it—furiously—so that I could go out into that main room and face my family with strength the way I wanted to but was just seconds ago, incapable of doing.
“It doesn’t,” he agreed. “But I knew you at seven, eleven and seventeen. I drove you and King to school, shot the shit with you at Mega Music for hours every Sunday for years. You think three years means I don’t know you, Rosie, you’re fucking wrong.”
“I don’t want to see you a-fucking-gain, Officer Danner,” I sneered at him, my anger like a flaming sword in my hand, weaponized and ready to take on any adversary.
I frowned as Danner pressed his lips together, to keep from smiling it seemed, and slid his gaze lazily over my body. I was covered in blood and bruised, my fingertips black with police ink, but he looked at me like I was something magnificent, something worthy of awe.
“I know you still amaze me,” he muttered, even as we heard commotion at the bottom of the stairs and then King was taking them two at a time to get to me while my dad shouted at a cop who was trying to restrain him from going up after me. “Know it in a way that I know you’ll never stop doin’ it.”
I blinked at him, my anger momentarily forgotten. Never, but never, had Lionel Danner confessed his attraction to me, not even after the kiss that changed everything so many years ago.
“H.R. Christ, fuck me,” King growled in my ear a second before he was wrapped around me, his long arms gentle as they wound me up against his chest.
I closed my eyes, breathed in a lungful of his clean laundry scent and forgot about Danner, about Cricket and blood and the weight of a cleaver in my hands. My brother was there and, two seconds later when even thicker arms clenched around the both of us, I knew so was my dad.
“My baby girl,” he croaked, and I knew there was a sadness in his gut so deep it made my big, bad biker dad close to tears. “I got you.”
“Yeah, we got you,” King muttered into my hair.
The fear I hadn’t realized was looming over me began to dissipate, because there was nowhere safer for me on this planet than between my two Garro men. My eyes snapped open to search for Danner, because I knew in a way I couldn’t describe that I felt the same way about him, but he was gone.
I went to the funeral.
It was a stupid idea.
Yeah, the police had swept the real details of Cricket’s murder under the rug, but there was no longer any reason for me to associate with the Berserkers MC and if you were given an out from a world like that, if you were anything but certifiably insane, you took it.
I’d always been a little off my rocker.
I wanted to go to that funeral.
Mostly, I wanted to spit in Cricket’s face before they incinerated him into ash, but another part of me, one that was born into the MC culture, had too much respect for the traditions of club life to ignore my duty as Cricket’s ‘old lady’ and not attend.
There was also the fact that my safety depended pretty fucking heavily on the Berserker brothers believing in the cover story the police had concocted for Cricket’s murder. I didn’t know the details, but I knew enough about cops to know it might be flimsy at best, so it was up to me to watch my own back.
So, I guilted Lila into giving me a ride out to North Vancouver’s secluded Cate’s Park for the funeral, decked out in my biker babe finest, skin-tight black skinny jeans tucked into chunky heeled black leather boots, a black lace-up V-neck and my requisite black leather jacket. My thick head of hair was a tousled, wavy mass down my back and my blue eyes were rimmed in kohl. Inappropriate for most funerals but this was a biker gathering, it was my duty as Cricket’s old lady to show up looking strong and beautiful, to show his brothers the kind of woman he’d been capable of keeping.
I felt no obligation to him, obviously, but I was still my father’s daughter and even though I’d been Cricket’s, I was a Garro first. I represented The Fallen MC and no woman born to them would be weak enough to look sullen or angry or unkempt.
I kept that shit inside my blackened heart and when I strutted through the caramel sand toward the black mass of bikers surrounding the hand-hewn canoe containing Cricket’s shrouded corpse, I did it with a smile pasted on my blood red lips.
“Afternoon, guys,” I practically purred as I stepped up to the front line of mourners.
My heart was beating strangely, too furious and too slow, brutal gong strikes against my ribs every few seconds that made my breath hitch. I tried to control my pulse because if anyone would notice something like that, it would be Wrath Marsden, Vice President of Berserkers MC and Cricket’s much older, much cooler cousin.
I could feel his eyes on me instantly, the hot, hard weight of them like one of his big, scarred hands pressing into my chest. He was bracketed by Berserkers Sergeant at Arms, Grease Montgomery, and the Prez of the entire MC, Reaper Holt. They were two of the scariest men I’d ever laid eyes on and definitely two of the most terrifying men I’d ever met, which was saying something given my upbringing. Despite the attention they demanded, I only had eyes for the man at their center.