“Nah, she’s a good kid,” I agreed.
And she was. She was goin’ through a time but I figured it was normal for a teenage girl to rebel, however well she’d been raised. She partied too much and dated that fucktard Cricket, but she got good marks in school despite the lacka studyin’ and she loved her brother, her club and her dad like nothin’ else.
And for that reason, she’d been good tonight. Not great ’cause it was weird as shit for her to see her dad who never brought women home—usually fucked ’em at the clubhouse—be all over a woman and that woman bein’ the same age as herself.
I got it.
Lou got it.
It was cool.
H.R. was tryin’ and she was tryin’ by mostly leavin’ Lou to her own devices but my little Loulou didn’t seem to care. She’d thrown herself into befriendin’ the biker babes, even Skell’s woman, Winona, who was dull as death and Bat’s bitch of a wife, Trixie.
By the end of the night, everyone loved Lou if they hadn’t already before.
I was a happy fuckin’ man.
That is until Lou shifted on my chest to ask, “What happened between you and your Uncle Crux?”
“The fuck that come from?”
Her eyes narrowed ’cause she knew I didn’t want to fuckin’ answer.
“Told ya I had an uncle who was President of this club ’fore me.”
“Yeah… why’d he step down?”
I rubbed a hand over my beard and up into my hair. “He didn’t. I killed ’im.”
She stiffened. “What?”
“You heard me. I killed my Uncle Crux and to be fuckin’ honest with you, Lou, not crazy about you jumpin’ to conclusions ’fore I can explain myself. You knew I was a killer.”
She swiveled to sit cross-legged on my stomach and crossed her arms under her tits. “I knew it. I did not know you’d killed your own uncle.”
“You expect me to explain myself you do it askin’ fuckin’ nicely, Lou. I may be the man in your bed but I’m still Prez of The fuckin’ Fallen,” I growled.
“Fine, pretty please with a fucking cherry on top, can you tell me what went down with your uncle?” she sassed.
I threw an arm over my eyes and pressed my head back into the pillow. “There goes a great fuckin’ orgasm high.”
She hit my chest.
I lifted the arm to peer at her then scowled as I propped it behind my head. “Fine, you wanna know? I killed my Uncle Crux by puttin’ a bullet through his brain. I put a bullet through his brain ’cause there’d been disappearances happenin’ for a while. Brothers just there one day and gone the next. They didn’t have much in common, first glance, ’til Bat and I noticed a pattern. They’d all talked back or dissented to Crux. One day Bat pretended to go at the old coot just to bait ‘im. The next day he invited Bat to have a ‘chat’ with ’im somewhere private. Bat got him to confess to killin’ brothers and the bastard stabbed ’im in the stomach and threw him into the backa one of our trucks to take him somewhere in the forest to bleed out and die. He didn’t know I’d come with Bat. Didn’t know ’til Bat and I showed up in Chapel next mornin’ as if nothin’ had happened. He asked for a meetin’ somewhere public, his half of the club versus mine. He chose First Light Church.
I’da put a bullet in his brain just for the stuff he’d done ’fore but he sealed his fate and he did it quick when he put a bullet through a fuckin’ kid to get to me. So, I killed ’im right there in front of the fuckin’ cops ’cause the bastard deserved more than jail. He deserved hell.
Half the old guys left, angry and confused or just fuckin’ done with the life. The rest voted me in as Prez, youngest in history.”
“And Ace Munford was one of those brothers who left?” she asked ’cause she was a smart girl and she was puttin’ the pieces together.
I nodded, watchin’ her eyes for any signs her devotion to me had slipped and smashed like a religious idol to the floor of our church.
She blinked, those ocean-blue eyes settled and there she was.
My girl.
She pressed her hand to my cheek and then kissed me, soft, slowly without tongue and fuckin’ sweeter than sugar pie.
“You’re a good man, Z,” she told me.
I laughed.
“I’m serious, you may live by your own code but you do the right thing at the end of the day and you adhere to your rules and loyalties like a knight would.”
“Told you to stop romanticizin’ it.”
“Won’t ever stop,” she promised. “Now, swear to me you won’t keep shit like that from me again.”
She offered me her little pinky like she had as a kid. I took it solemnly in mine and shook her thumb with my own.
“Deal,” I said even though there were a ton of skeletons in my closet and I had no plans to share ’em all with Lou.
I was doing a math equation in my fifth period biology class at the whiteboard when dizziness slammed into me like a hand to the back of the head. I stumbled then steadied myself against the wall.
“Louise?” Reece’s voice came at me through my sudden fog.
I tried to lift the red dry erase pen to the white surface, but my hand wouldn’t lift. Frowning, I looked down at it where it lay limply by my side.
“Louise?” Reece’s voice was closer to me then. “Mr. Warren, call the hospital.”
“Don’t need the…” I tried to say with my heavy tongue then gave up because I was falling then crashing into blackness.
When I woke up, I didn’t open my eyes because I could hear the familiar beeps of whirs of the hospital all around me and I hated the hospital.
My first thought was of Zeus.
I didn’t know what time it was, and I’d had plans to meet him after a few hours with Sammy at the Autism Centre that day. If he didn’t know where I was, he’d flip.
My eyes shot open as I sat up and then closed again when the dizziness hit.
When I was orientated again, I looked around the room and gasped because Zeus Garro was sitting beside my bed.
He stared at me angrier than I’d ever seen him, his harshly constructed face gone granite with wrath.
“Zeus,” I tried but he cut me off immediately by lifting a hand in the air.
He leaned forward, his lips pulled back over his teeth like a wolf about to snap. “Didn’t know where you were for hours. No one did. Mute went fuckin’ crazy, tore up the inside of Hephaestus Auto in one of his rages when he realized we didn’t know where the fuck you were. I sent boys out to every fuckin’ place I could think of to find you.”
He paused and his eyes sharpened to the colour of shrapnel. “Didn’t think to look at the hospital ’til H.R. told me she’d heard you’d left school in a fuckin’ ambulance.”
I flinched but he wasn’t done.
“Not once since I took you as my woman have I regretted it or had to face how young you still are. This is the first time I’m hit and hit hard with both’a those things.”
Fuck.
“Z, please let me explain. I know I waited too long to tell you but if I’d told you right away then you wouldn’t have wanted me.” Tears came and they did it like a tropical storm, tearing up mucus and heavy sobs, whipping my chest into a painful frenzy. “If you’d known that you were attracted to a seventeen-year-old girl with cancer and then that you were fucking and fucking hard a woman with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, we wouldn’t have what we have now.”