Prologue
Callista
14 years ago . . .
I know better than this, than to open this can of worms that I’m certain won’t ever be closed. Yet, even in knowing what I do, I have this intense desire to ask the million-dollar question: where is he?
It’s unlikely my mom will understand the need I have, the urge to know what the other part of me is like . . . but I’m old enough to know now, to know the gritty truth. I’m not some kid anymore. I’m fifteen years old, and soon I’ll be driving a car, and then I’ll be graduating, and then I’ll be going off to law school.
“Salaam, Mama,” I speak in her native tongue, Farsi, hoping it’ll earn me some brownie points. She’s made sure we grew up here in Detroit with a very heavy cultural presence. My mother is Persian, fresh off the boat Persian. She moved here when she was sixteen years old, and my grandfather only had ten dollars in his pocket. How he did it, I have no idea.
Then again, I don’t dare wish to know the struggles they endured when they first got here. At that time, Iran was going through so many changes, and the danger was only becoming more obvious. I’m just thankful they all got out when they could.
“Salaam, what is it you want?” she asks me, her accent heavy and thick. While she’s a traditional Persian, she has the ability to cut straight to the point. She’s a no-bullshit kinda woman, and I love it about her.
My stomach flips around inside me, and I try my best to compose myself, not letting her see an ounce of weakness. If she does, she’ll gut me like a fish. “I’ve been thinking about my birthday since it’s coming up,” I begin to tell her, and she nods her head along as she continues washing the dishes.
“Good, I’ve told you many times you need to let me know what you want. You and Amira always change your mind. One day, it’s this. The next day, it’s that. So, what is it you want?” My mom stops scrubbing the plate and looks over at me, cocking her brows.
“I want to know what happened to Dad.”
The look on her face is enough to strike me down completely. She looks both angered and hurt. She sucks her bottom lip into her mouth and bites down hard. “I don’t understand why you want to know anything about the man that abandoned us.”
I don’t ever expect her to understand where I’m coming from, but I do hope she’ll one day respect it. “Mama, I don’t know anything about him. I barely remember anything about the man except his blue eyes and the creamy color of his skin.”
“Good. You don’t want to know your father, Callista. He abandoned us, cast us aside. He made his choices in life, and I’ve made my peace with it. You need to as well. He chose to let us go. He made that choice, and I know you’ve had a very hard time understanding what happened.” She angrily scrubs the sponge against the plate and then puts the plate on the other side of the sink with clean water.
“You’ve only said he’s left. Not once did you ever give me some sort of background on why. I just want to know why he left. I want to know what made him leave. That’s all I want, Mama.” I stare into her eyes, silently pleading for her to give me this. It’s the only thing I want, the one thing only she can give me.
“You haven’t realized what you’ve asked for, have you?” Venom laces through her tone, and I don’t understand what she’s saying.
She yanks her hands from the water and grabs a dish towel, wiping her hands while she continues to snap at me. “You want me to break your heart. That’s what you’ve asked me to do today. So, you want to know why he left?”
Even as I heed her warning, there’s nothing more that I want in the world. I need to know what happened. I need to know why the man who I vaguely remember taking me to the aquarium, going to the park for ice cream, and pushing me on the swing, suddenly vanished out of my life like he was never there in the first place.
I give her a nod.
“He left us for the biker club he runs. He chose them over us, dokhtar. He had a family, and he chose them!”
“What do you mean, a biker club, Maadar?” I shake my head, unwilling to let that process. The man who had taken me places, doted on me. The man with the beautiful and kind eyes—he runs a biker club? It feels wrong.
I know she warned me, and I shouldn’t be angry at the answer, but I am.
“No, that doesn’t sound like him. Even if he is part of some motorcycle club, he wouldn’t choose some sweaty men on bikes over his dokhtar.”
The rage swells up in my mother. I can see it, and tears well up at the bottom of her eyes, though I know she won’t cry. It’s not like her. She’s the strongest woman I know. She’s strong to a fault.
I hit her where it hurts, though, and while I know I shouldn’t have, I’m just so angry and confused. Of all the answers I had gone through in my head—affair, illness, a terrible fight—I never thought about him leaving us for some club. Some men riding motorcycles and possibly even doing illegal activities.
“So, you think he left me? That’s what you’ve thought all these years. That I did something terrible and ran him off. That’s why you are so curious.” Each sentence gets a little louder, and I wince.
She looks at me, her eyes piercing through to my soul, it feels like. “He. Left. Us. There is nothing more to it. It hurts. I haven’t told you in order to protect you from feeling this.”
I begin to whimper, tears streaming down my face I don’t even remember letting out. “He . . . left us?” I’m hearing it, but I don’t understand it.
“Yes.”
“No!” I cry.
Just like every time she does the dishes, she glances down to the porcelain dish she puts her rings in, and the gold wedding band he gave her all those years ago is amongst her others.
Still, she wears her wedding ring.
Still, she isn’t a divorced woman, and she hasn’t ever gone out on a date. At least not one I can remember. It’s exactly because of this I think there’s much more she isn’t telling me . . . and if she isn’t honest with me, I’ll just have to figure out a way to get the truth myself.
Chapter 1
Connor
Present Day . . .
“He wants us there, all of us,” Jack, one of the other prospects in the Sons of Gods MC tells me. He started prospecting a few months after I did, and I’ve been prospecting for about a year now.
“Do you know what he could want?” Abel, one of the other prospects, questions.
I shrug. “No idea. None of us have ever been inside church before.” Which only makes us all more nervous. This must be something good, but it’s not like Zeus is going to come out and tell us that. He’ll want us on our fucking toes. He’ll want us nervous as all hell with our boots shaking as much as they can. But it’s all right because we’re the people who have to prove ourselves to him and the club.
“Yeah, and if you keep chattin’ like a bunch of girls, you might never get the opportunity to.” Ares grabs me by the back of the shoulders and laughs as he makes his way past us. He’s the enforcer, and he’s a real standup guy. I’ve taken a lot of rides with him and done quite a few jobs on the other side of town. There’s been a few times he’s seen some women in trouble, and he always gets in the middle of the situation. Dude never has to, but he knows if he doesn’t, something could go sideways.