I narrowed my eyes at him. "I have hard limits too."
"I’ll bet you do," he sniped back, rolling his eyes at me. "Let’s hear it. What are they?"
"No bullshit. Keeping things from me for my own good is one thing. Bullshitting me is another. I managed to wade into the world you tried so hard to keep me out of. I’m in it now, and I’m in danger. The truth is my vocation. Don’t lie to me when the only reason I’m doing any of this is to break these bastards apart."
With his back to the window, he leaned against it and folded his arms across his chest. "You sure you didn’t get involved just to rebuild your reputation?"
"At first, sure. Star got in touch with me and said she had a way to help me claw back some of my name.
"Right now, I’m persona non grata in most newsrooms, and I don’t blame them. There are a lot of toxic workplaces out there, and someone who’s willing to burn their reputation and their career isn’t exactly going to gel well with a touchy-feely editor who’s been there for thirty years. Who’s also a key player in steering the paper through the evolution of newspapers to digital formats… He’d definitely be the priority.
"Then, Star explained to me what was going on, and I saw, firsthand, the women who’d been brutalized…" My voice waned but I sucked in a breath before I started up again, "Star’s told a lot of lies over the years. She was a soldier, that much I knew to be true because she went to West Point.
"The rest, well, couched within the lies she told, most of us stopped listening to her, and when she cut herself off from us, I think we thought it was an extension of that." I swallowed, guilt choking me and making it hard to admit, "We had no way of knowing that she went quiet because she’d been kidnapped and sold into slavery."
Aidan stilled. "Star Sullivan was one of the women who was trafficked by the Sparrows?"
I found it just as hard to believe as he did. "Yeah."
"She’s why you’re doing this,’ he rasped.
And unable to lie, unable to deny it, I nodded. "It’s why, no matter how many times they try to come after me, that they try to shut me up, I’ll carry on."
Aidan’s nostrils flared as he stalked toward me. "Couldn’t she have found a different fucking way to bring them down?"
"This is the tried and true method." I shot him a weak smile. "We let her down, Aidan. We let her down so bad. All of us. Gerry turned his back on her, she just didn’t know it because she was too busy being a fucking sex slave."
Despite myself, despite how I viewed the world and respected how wicked it was, just as I knew and was cautious of the evil people were capable of perpetrating, I knew I’d never, ever forgive myself for letting Star down so badly.
I didn’t even know I was crying until his arms came around me, until he propped me up and I felt the wet fabric of his shirt clinging to my cheek as I wept in his embrace.
I wasn’t a cryer. I didn’t do tears. There was little to no point in shedding emotion that way. But everyone had a breaking point, an Achilles’ heel that proved just how vulnerable they were even though they’d reported some of the many cruelties that proved to me society was devolving.
Family was my breaking point.
And noxxious, for all its sins, for all that it was the most toxic thing in my life, everyone in it, the group, the band members, the roadies who’d been with them since the beginning, they were all family.
None more so than Star.
Gerry’s goddamn daughter.
The man whose legacy my dad, one of the most integral cogs of the band, said was impossible to replace. Impossible to emulate. Impossible to forget.
So I cried. Because we’d let her down. The one foundation we all had, the one unchanging fact, had abandoned her, but just as I promised myself as we’d FaceTimed that day when I’d met her as well as some of the other Sinners’ MC Old Ladies, Star would never be alone ever again.
Nineteen
Aidan
Savannah wasn’t the kind of woman who cried, so when she actually did, it took me by complete surprise. I had no alternative other than to hold her. To give her what I’d never been given—a shield of safety, a haven of comfort. The need to take her pain away was acute, but the need to hold her was even more powerful.
I had no idea how long we stood there like that, but I knew, and maybe she did too, that we reached a turning point.
She cried in front of me.
That was as much of a weakness as a creature like her was capable of.
Her walls had never been lower, and truth be told, I didn’t want them coming back up.
I loved her strength, loved that she was capable of going head to head with me, but this was more of a gift than she could know.
People weren’t weak around me.
They couldn’t afford to be.
I was Aidan O’Donnelly Sr.’s heir.
I was the future king of the Five Points.
Weakness around me was tantamount to asking for a target to be placed on your back.
Yet Savannah, in spite of knowing all this, hell maybe because of this, lowered her walls and handed me the key to the door that was her. Presenting me with something more precious than she could begin to imagine.
"I’ll help you make it up to Star," I told her, rubbing my lips along the still-damp hairline at her temple. Rage fluttered through me when I brushed against the Band-Aid I’d put there last night.
She gulped. "You will?"
Once upon a time, my word had been a promise. Pain and drugs had skewed that. Made me unreliable. Had taken away the power of the words that spilled from my lips. But she made me want to change that. If, for no other reason, than to help her claw back what she thought was broken between her and Star.
"I will," I promised, gently squeezing her. Curiosity had me asking, "You said you saw it firsthand. How?"
"I wasn’t talking to her and she finally got me to bite with news of the NWS. She knows I live for that shit. Anyway, I wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not, and I wasn’t about to risk the last of my rep on some of her BS, so she arranged for me to have a video call with some of the victims the Sparrows trafficked.
"I met them and I believed them." She rubbed her forehead against my chest. "We let her down so badly, Aidan." Guilt rippled throughout the admission. "Until that video call, I didn’t believe her. Not until she showed me proof. What kind of a friend am I?"
"We always hurt the ones we love the most," I murmured, trying to soothe her but knowing nothing would other than her being proactive in this and bridging the chasm that had been allowed to develop between her and her childhood friend. "You have time to resolve things between you."
A shuddery breath escaped her, and I felt the heat of it against my chest as the warmth seeped into the fabric of my silk shirt.
That heat resonated on so many levels.
I’d been cold for years. Internally frozen in survival mode. Had she just started a thaw?
What was it about her that made me feel human again?
How did she do that?
How did she make it feel so right?
I’d never believed in chemistry other than the sexual kind. I saw a woman, wanted to fuck her, we fucked, that was it. Orgasms usually cleared up most cases of it, but not only had this chemistry not abated after we had sex, I’d actively avoided getting involved with her for years.