No one could say my woman wasn’t smart.
“Why’d you leave the class?”
So she’d noticed that?
Fuck.
“Jodie-May went missing today.”
She tensed in my arms. “You found her?”
“No.”
“She take Aaron?”
“Yeah.”
That had her peering into my face. “Fuck. You think she’s going to tell someone?”
“I doubt it. It’s all hearsay anyway. There are no bodies, no evidence, no motive, and she’s not the most reliable witness, is she?”
“Of course there’s motive.”
I shook my head. “If the feds asked around for any grudges Rodriguez had with us, they would be old. Ancient for his organization. With the shit he’s dealing with, his issues are in the north, not down here.”
She pondered that for a second. “True.”
My lips twitched. “Nice to know you have faith in my reasoning skills.”
Her eyes twinkled. “I have faith in something,” she retorted, bumping her hips into mine.
Laughing, I hefted her into my arms, loving how her knees clung to my hips. On the brink of walking her toward the staircase, I froze when I heard the cat’s claws scrabbling against the floor like the kitten was on the run.
Fuck.
I knew what that meant.
“Momma! Jezebel ruined my dress!”
Lucie cursed under her breath. “That damn cat. What the hell possessed Flame anyway?”
My shoulders shook with laughter. “She loves her,” I managed to get out.
She huffed. “Until she wrecks her dresses.”
Amaryllis was a surprisingly fussy little thing. I hadn’t realized that until I’d found Lucie ironing every single one of our daughter’s dresses. Even her socks received that treatment because Amaryllis felt ‘dirty’ unless everything was starched.
I swear, I didn’t know where she’d come from. Half of Lucie’s clothes had holes in them. Some of them strategically placed, others made by design. But still, Ryan had been like the rest of us—wife beaters, cut, jeans, and boots all the way.
Amaryllis liked patterns, flowers, and girly shit that had Lucie cursing because she struggled with the tasks—turned out Ryan had been the one to French braid Amaryllis’s hair, not Lucie.
Swear, I’d have paid to see the fucker do that.
Fuck you. You’ll learn too. She’ll bat those big eyes at you until you learn.
My heart almost stopped in my chest as Lucie jumped down from my hold and stalked off to go and threaten a cat who had taken a fancy to digging her claws into Amaryllis’s dresses.
You gonna die on me, big man?
“Seriously hope I’m not going to,” I rasped, unsure of who the fuck I was talking to exactly.
Anyway, wanted to warn you against fucking up. Just because I’m going for a while doesn’t mean I won’t be watching.
“Going? Going where?”
Lucie’s safe. That’s all I ever wanted for her. You keep that up and I won’t be back.
Was I being threatened by a voice in my head?
Christ, this was how schizophrenia started, right?
You’re not schizophrenic, dumbass. I’m dead. You think that protecting that woman was going to stop just because I died? Think again.
My throat clogged with emotion as I whispered, “We let her down.”
Yeah, you did, but I didn’t. She was safe with me, but she wasn’t happy. She was made to be ours, and life got in the way of that. But she’s back where she needs to be and that’s all that matters.
“Miss you, man.”
I miss you, too. More than you fucking know. Was hard being without you guys.
We’d gone to school together, had been raised together, had prospected together, had even been inducted into the MC together.
Losing him had been hard, and the only thing that was worse was losing Lucie at the same time.
I licked my lips as I walked down the empty hall toward the office. I knew Wolfe was working out, Dagger was learning how to fabricate the guns so he was probably back at the Shed, as we were calling the factory, and Flame was, undoubtedly, somewhere near Amaryllis. He was pretty much her shadow, and had been ever since Lucie had told us her biological father had threatened to abduct her.
Didn’t matter that the Satan’s Knights hadn’t been seen for three months around these parts. Flame believed in long term planning.
Ensconced in the office, in private, I pressed my back to the door and spoke to the voice in my head, “Is she safe?”
Wouldn’t be going if she weren’t.
There was a finality to his tone that settled me. “What happened, man? Do you know?”
Found Bomber hiding the drugs in Lucie’s room. Took a picture of it. When he exiled Lucie, I knew some shit was going down and that she needed me with her. When I went to leave, he told me I couldn’t. I knew then that he wanted her isolated. I showed him the picture, told him I’d sent it to someone I trusted and that if he didn’t let me go, I’d show the club. The rest is history.
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell us? Show us that picture?”
Because you had to stay here.
“What? Why?”
This was Lucie’s home. She was always coming back here, and she’d always need to come back to you. You weren’t ready for her. Weren’t ready for what she needed. She’d already told me she was pregnant, and I knew you fuckwits couldn’t deal with that.
I’d already seen the way you were starting to get interested in the sweetbutts, and I saw heartbreak on the horizon. I made sure to limit that, made sure that you were a safe haven for her to come back to. If you’d cheated, she’d never have forgiven you. She isn’t the sort.
My throat worked as I thought back to that time. We’d been in our early twenties, and yeah, had been thinking with our cocks. We still did to some degree, but over six years of fucking whoever we wanted whenever we wanted, of being without Lucie, had pretty much soured me for anyone else. I knew the others were the same too.
If he’d been alive, I’d probably have beaten the shit out of him for his presumption, but I didn’t. I didn’t know how long he’d be able to talk to me like this, and sure, maybe I was losing my mind, but Ryan seemed to have answers to questions that we were all dying to know.
One day, before all this shit went down, I heard Bomber on the phone with someone. He was concerned. He’d been skimming from the shipments and the cartel had just figured it out. When, a few days later, I caught him planting that shit in Lucie’s room? I knew what was going to go down, knew he was going to let her take the fall. So, I blackmailed him with the picture. I made him let me go, but also, made sure that he cut a deal with Ramon to keep her safe from the cartel’s reach. Plus, I got the kilo of coke and used that to fund our new life.
Kid had always been a clever bastard. Even as respect for him filled me, I questioned, “Who did you send the picture to?”
A neighbor of my sister-in-law. The one who lived in Graceville.
I frowned. “What the fuck? Why her?”
She was an old lady of a Satan’s Knight.
Fuck.
“She showed Lucifer?”
Figure as much. Knew we had Knights tailing us.