“Why Rex lets her stick around, I’ll never know,” I muttered gruffly. “She’s been trouble since she showed up.”
Giulia blinked at me.
“What?” I asked awkwardly.
“I’m surprised you know who she is.”
I watched as she knuckled her eyes, looking remarkably like the small child I’d once babysat many moons ago. She wouldn’t recall that, I didn’t think her brother Hawk did either, but I remembered.
My throat even tightened at the memory.
Babysitting her was what had led to my attack.
“I know everyone in the MC,” I told her easily, my tone remarkably free from the horrors that had haunted me since I was seventeen.
I balled my hands into fists as she questioned, “You do? Why?”
“Because it’s my business to know.” I studied her. “What’s the problem?”
“No problem. I’m just… I didn’t think you liked working for the Sinners.”
“I neither like it nor dislike it.”
I worked for a lot of criminals. I was good at getting them off the hook, and it was far more challenging than siding with the prosecution. If I didn’t like anything, it was working with Rex. But, I couldn’t forget that I was only here because of him.
I’d gone to law school with enough money to pay for college and housing. I hadn’t needed to work. He’d covered every single cost, all with the intention of tying me to the MC in a neat, pretty bow.
I didn’t mind that, either.
I just minded that on the face of it, he wasn’t simply tying me to the Sinners. Really, he was tying me to him.
Another tie I didn’t need.
Giulia shook her head at my unruffled response. “How are you so calm and collected all the time, Rachel? Even when your friend talked down to you, you didn’t react all that much. Don’t you get mad? Don’t you cry? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you laugh. Are you happy? Are you sad? I know you have nightmares; I hear them sometimes, but you—” Taken aback, I straightened up and shot to my feet, but her hand was on my shoulder, pushing me down. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to intrude, but is there something I can do to help?”
Giulia… help?
God, there really was something wrong with her.
“I’m fine,” I told her woodenly. “You’re the one who came bursting in here in tears.”
Her nostrils flared as she backed off, perching her butt against the vanity. “She said she fucked Nyx last night.”
I couldn’t help myself—I snorted out a laugh. Especially when I thought of how, the last time I saw her, Nyx had shoved Kendra’s hand away as if it were coated in acid.
“You can’t seriously believe her?”
She just bit her lip.
My eyes rounded. “Giulia, you know Nyx is nearly forty, don’t you?”
“What does that have to do with anything?” she defended with a huff, a gleam of outrage bursting to life in her eyes.
The woman was malevolence personified.
Seemed fitting that only Nyx’s hellspawn could be the chink in her armor—hormones, they were women’s true enemy.
“It means that most men his age are starting to look for little blue pills to get them hard. You and Nyx fuck like there’s an apocalypse the next morning. If he used it anymore, it’d fall off.”
“You’re right.”
Her calm glance was somehow more disturbing than her tears.
“I know I am,” I groused, just thinking about last night’s three-hour marathon which had sounded like one or both of them were dying.
Only to myself would I admit that I was jealous.
Just a quarter inch.
“The question is,” I plowed on when her look was more disturbing than any the Long Beach Butcher—a serial killer I’d defended last year—had given me during our interviews. “Giulia, why would you believe her?”
“I’m on edge,” she argued.
“You’re always on edge.”
“More than usual.”
“Why?”
Giulia huffed. “I’m pregnant.”
“So? You’ve been pregnant for the last six months,” I pointed out, then it hit me. “Oh.”
“Oh, what?” she snapped.
“She called you fat, didn’t she?”
Her mouth tightened. “That bitch.”
“Yeah. That bitch,” I repeated, even as I got to my feet and encouraged her to rest on the toilet seat. “Do you feel fat? You know Nyx looks at you like you can walk on water, Giulia, so I don’t think—”
She sniffled. “I burst the seam on my favorite pair of jeans today, and none of my clothes fit.”
“Do you want to go shopping for maternity clothes?”
I could think of nothing worse, but her misery hit me on the raw.
“I don’t want to be one of those women.”
I arched a brow. “One of those women whose clothes fit?”
Growling under her breath, she spat, “A mom woman.”
“What kind of woman is that? You are a mom,” I drawled, and though it was wrong of me to be amused, her disgust had my lips twitching.
“Yeah, but I can be a cool mom. A biker mom. I don’t want…” She sucked in a shuddery breath. “The doctor said we can’t have sex after I give birth for six weeks.”
“That’s normal.” Christ, after I gave birth, I didn’t have sex for years, never mind weeks.
“Might be for regular women, but Nyx is…”
Reading between the lines, I rasped, “If Nyx cheats on you because you’re healing, I will defend you in court if you chop off his dick.”
A snicker escaped her. “Thanks, Rachel. I needed that laugh.”
Though I smiled, I told her, “I mean it.”
“Yeah, I know you do.” She patted my shoulder before she leaned forward and awkwardly rested her elbows on her knees because her belly got in the way. “Everything’s changing, Rachel. Nyx isn’t killing pedos anymore, so the sex is helping control things, you know?”
Of all the things I’d expected to happen today, this conversation was not on my to-do list.
Even if I liked to stay in the dark, I knew Nyx’s days of killing pedophiles was on hiatus.
Gnawing on the inside of my cheek, I thought about the first one he’d ever slaughtered, and much as I’d done back then, I appreciated the gray.
That was why I defended the gray.
Because nothing was black and white.
Nothing.
“When you have the baby,” I spoke the words carefully, “Nyx will be looking after it too.”
Reaching for some toilet paper, she blew her nose. “Him. I’m having a boy.”
Pain twisted inside me. Sharp, unexpected. “Nyx will be looking after him too,” was all I said.
“I guess.”
“He’ll be exhausted as much as you are, and there’ll be things he’ll have to do that will take his mind off the hunt. He’s going to be a dad, Giulia. That’s going to affect him.
“He values children too much. He’ll value you above all other women as well because you’ll give him what no one else has—a child. A family.”