"Admitting to anything you do wrong is hard," she whispered sullenly.
"Especially when you like to be right all the time."
"Who doesn’t like to be right all the time? That’s normal."
I snorted. "You won’t make friends with a sucky-ass attitude, baby. You want to roll with the Sinners, you gotta befriend their spawn."
A glimmer of something whispered behind her eyes. "I don’t care if they don’t like me."
"But do you want their respect?" I questioned. "There’s a fine line between both, after all. You know who I aspire to be?"
She blinked. "Who?"
"Rex."
Her grin turned dopey. "Uncle Rex is awesome."
"He is."
"I miss him. I miss everyone in West Orange." She sighed. "This is home now, though. This is where you are. Why did you have to leave? I wanna be back there."
"Because aspiring to be like Uncle Rex ain’t enough for me anymore, honey. I had to go out and act as if I were him, not just talk about it. I had to stop running my mouth and start doing.
"You know we call each other brothers?" At her nod, I told her, "To me, Rex, Nyx, Link, Steel, and Maverick are like we all popped out of the same mom. We grew up together, we were like this." I crossed my middle and pointer finger. "I miss ‘em every day I wake up here.
"I don’t know these guys. I don’t know ‘em, but I’m supposed to trust ‘em. I have to have faith in the fact that they’re Sinners, and that they’re looking up to me, wanting me to be their leader.
"They don’t have to like me, but they gotta respect me. You have to be that way too. You earn the kids’ respect because you’re the Prez’s daughter."
"I’m a biker princess," she told me proudly.
My lips twitched. "You are now, that’s for sure."
She peered at me, those green eyes of hers making and breaking my heart as she pondered my words. Then, she blurted out, "Is Mom a whore?"
My eyes widened. "What? Why would you ask that? Of course she isn’t."
Cyan didn’t cower from my harsh tone, just firmed her chin. "I knew she wasn’t."
Confused, I frowned at her. "What’s going on, Cyan? Did someone call your mom names?" Had that little bitch in there dared to call my woman a whore?
Her top lip curled up. "I dealt with it."
For a second, I was too taken aback at her very adult response to figure out what she was talking about, then I shook my head. "What did you deal with? Who the hell called your mom that?"
Who did I need to go beat the crap out of?
"It was some guy at the community center back home, where I took gymnastics class." She shrugged, but I saw the turmoil she couldn’t hide in her eyes when she ducked her head.
Considering she’d met that bastard London there, as well as this jackass who’d apparently called her mom a whore, was it wrong of me to never want her to do goddamn gymnastics ever again?
Jesus Christ.
When she shivered, I knew the adrenaline had died down, and though I was too livid to feel the cold, I wrapped this up fast.
"What did you do to him?" When she bit her lip and her sneaker started to toe into the snow, I smiled. "It’s okay, honey. Whatever you did, I won’t punish you for it."
She sniffled. "Martin saw me do it—"
My heart sank.
"—he told me I was naughty and that I was a bad girl—"
My temper surged.
"—that was when he started talking to me more."
Nostrils flaring as I inadvertently uncovered the reason that pedophile bastard had targeted my kid, I rasped, "Baby, what did you do?"
"I got one of your screwdrivers, started carrying it around until I saw his car in the center’s parking lot. I sneaked out and poked it in the man’s tires." Her expression turned earnest. "He deserved it, Daddy. No one should be allowed to call an O’Shea that."
I reached over and grabbed her shoulder, then squeezing it softly, murmured, "You did the right thing." Well, for our world, she had.
A small welter of pride filled me. Sure, it wasn’t the legal way to go about this, but retaliation was rarely on the books.
I just didn’t have the heart to tell her that the guy who’d called her mom a whore was, in all likelihood, Derek Miller.
Only the promise I’d made to Keira to never harm her family, no matter how they blocked her out, how they dissed her, stopped me from pulling out my phone and calling Nyx and getting him to send a bunch of Sinners around to the Millers’ house to make that bastard pay for his words.
Because Cyan, without knowing it, had met her grandfather for the first time in her life, and the way he’d chosen to use that introduction was to call his daughter a whore… how wasn’t that deserving of a beatdown?
Eight
Keira
PRESENT
When I found them outside in the cold, I frowned past my tears, rubbed at my eyes as I stepped outside, huddling into my coat as I trudged over to them.
"What’s going on? Why are you guys out here? It’s freezing!"
I had no idea why, but Cyan burst into tears. She started to move, and I was pretty sure she was going to head back into the clubhouse, leaving me alone with Storm, but she didn’t. She barreled into me, her skinny arms going around my hips as she pushed her face into my throat, hiding away from the world like I was her calm in the eye of a storm.
Of course, that phrase held more meaning than it usually did.
Only difference was, this Storm was over six feet of gorgeousness who just happened to be my estranged husband.
As I held her tighter, I stared at him in confusion, wondering what had triggered this.
He surged to his feet with a grace that always surprised me for a man this tall and muscled, and I tipped my head back to look at him.
One thing they never told you when you got married young? Watching that person grow old was never tiring.
Sometimes, when we were in bed together, even if things were bad and we’d argued, and he’d come back home after a run where Cyan and I hadn’t seen him for days, I would look at him while he slept, tracing every single one of the differences between then and now.
That streak of gray was as full length as the rest of his hair, and it offset the pure black of the rest of his mane, making it seem even more luxurious. I loved feeling that silk against me, loved when he was on top of me and it spread around my face in a curtain.
His golden skin was pale from the cold, his strong jaw clenching like he was angry, something that was visible through the short beard he had. A strong nose led to a tightly pursed mouth that, after the few dates I’d had this year, I knew were perfect kissing lips. Soft, yet giving, I’d even come to miss the tickle of his beard when I kissed another guy.
His wide eyes, dark green, rumbled with a fire that was born of outrage as he looked at our kid. I saw the little nerve flickering at his temple and took in the rest of his expression as I watched him deal with an anger that apparently affected Cyan.
I knew my kid, knew my ex-husband. Well… recent revelations made a liar out of me, but I knew him as a father. Her tears weren’t related to his temper as in, I knew he hadn’t made her cry, but that didn’t enlighten me much further.