“So tell me, I won’t judge you,” she replied, and I smiled down at her. Fuck, but she was perfect, and she didn’t even know it.
I took a deep breath. “I didn’t know what love was before this club. I’d never had that before. My mom, well, she was kinda like yours actually, but unlike you, I didn’t have any other family. It was just me and her, and she was never there. Or if she was, she was drunk. I was always hungry, always cold, always lonely. By some miracle, I made it to my teens. No idea how, given the hell she put me through. The people she brought into our lives, the things they did to both of us...the things she allowed to happen.” I shook my head, trying to banish the images that haunted me. “I broke out of our apartment one day and left. I had nothing but a pair of shoes two sizes too small and a backpack with a pair of jeans, a sweatshirt, a change of underwear, and a beaten-up copy of Huckleberry Finn in it.” I laughed dryly at that, remembering how I’d packed that bag, realizing that I had nothing but threadbare clothes and a single book to my name. How it hadn’t hurt, because at that point I was numb to everything. I felt nothing. Not physical pain, not sadness. I didn’t even feel hunger anymore because I was so used to feeling empty that it was just part of who I was by then.
Belle reached out and placed a hand on my chest, but by the furious look on her face it wasn’t because she pitied me.
I chuckled. “It’s all good, woman.”
“It’s not though, is it.” She shook her head, her feather-soft hair brushing around her face. “People like that don’t deserve to have children and they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with being so cruel.”
“Babe.” I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her against my chest. Just feeling her body next to mine made me feel a hundred times better than any of the medicine the doctors at the hospital gave me. “The thing is with women like that, is that everyone knows one, and everyone turns a blind eye to it.”
“That just makes me madder,” she mumbled against my chest, and I chuckled again.
“Yeah, me too.” I sighed. “But none of that tells you why it had to be me, so let me finish.” I swallowed thickly, my hands running up and down her back, needing her closer to me. “I left, and I never looked back. I was dull to everything. The world was gray and muted and I was just still just trying to survive. Just trying to get through each day and each night. No one sees these kids on the street as anything but a menace or an inconvenience. They turn away so they don’t have to see the ugly truth. But then I met Shooter.” I laughed. “Actually, I tried to steal his bike, but I was too skinny and weak to be able to ride it so I got barely five feet away and me and the bike fell sideways, trapping me under it. Thought I was going to die. Thought him and his friend were going to kill me there and then, but they didn’t. They took me back to the clubhouse and introduced me to his dad, Hardy, who insisted that I had to pay for the damage to the bike.”
“But you had no money!” she said, pulling back from me to look in my face. I loved that she seemed genuinely frustrated for me.
I smirked. “Yeah, and he knew that. So I had to stay at the clubhouse and pay off my debt. Didn’t really understand it at the time, but I was prospecting for them without even knowing it. I was still in the mentality that no one in this world was to be trusted and I was surviving day to day, but as time went by, I bulked up, I made friends, they became my family, and the day they voted for me to patch in was, and is, the proudest day of my life.”
Belle chewed the side of her cheek. “I think I get it. I feel even worse now.”
I shook my head. “You don’t get it, and I haven’t finished yet. A few months later I was on a run for the club, and I walked into a bar and saw my mom. She looked the same but older and sadder, and in her eyes I was still the same little boy she’d locked in the apartment every night while she went out drinking. The same starving kid she’d let her friends spend time with for twenty bucks and a bottle of vodka. There was no love there, no sadness that she’d missed me, no guilt about what she’d done to me.”
Belle’s face contorted in anger and sadness and back to anger and I leaned down and pressed a kiss to her lips to thank her for giving a shit. It would have been easy to keep kissing her and pretend that was the end of the story, but I wanted to get it all out in the open. I wanted her to understand.
“I killed my mom that day, Belle. Put a bullet in her brain and I didn’t feel a goddamn thing about it. Not anger, not guilt, not shame. Nothing. I didn’t even kill her because I was angry, I just wanted her gone from this world like she’d never existed.”
I felt her muscles tense at my words, but I kept on going regardless. She knew what I did for the club, so she knew I wasn’t a saint, but finding out that I’d felt no remorse at killing my own mom, I guess that hit a nerve for her. Still, I had to finish my story no matter what.
“I was picked up by the police for her murder a couple of days later and it wasn’t looking good for me. Thought I’d get the death penalty or at the very least life imprisonment, but then it all just went away. All of it. When I left prison, the club was outside waiting with my bike. We didn’t ever talk about how or why. Later found out that the cops had no real evidence and thankfully Hardy had someone on the payroll to make all of the circumstantial shit just disappear. They couldn’t prove anything even if they knew it was me. They had my back then and they’ve had it every other time since. I trust them with my life and they trust me with theirs. When I found out you’d been telling club secrets to those fuckers, I hated you, Belle. I hated you because for some inexplicable reason you had come into my life and I’d looked at you like family, and then you’d gone ahead and betrayed me and I finally felt something.”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, with tears in her eyes. I silenced her with another kiss.
“I know you are, but that’s not the point of me telling you all of this.” I stroked her hair back from her face. “Belle, as much as I hated it, it had to be me to kill you because you didn’t just make me feel something, you made me feel everything, and if you were to die I knew I’d never feel anything ever again once you were gone. I had to be the one to kill you because if any of those men laid a hand on you I’d send them to ground, and just the thought of that…” I shook my head. “I was tortured to the brink of death, but I still didn’t fall over the edge, and yet you…you could kill me so easily. You are the beginning and ending of me, Belle. You’re everything.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
~ Belle ~
People may have thought I was stupid to so easily forgive Beast, and maybe I was. But I didn’t care what anyone else thought. All that mattered was him and me and the stuff in between. All that mattered was proving myself to his family so that they accepted me, because I couldn’t imagine my life being anywhere but next to his.
Love made us foolish, but it also gave us strength. And at the moment I felt stronger than I’d ever felt before. Like I could take on the club, Mateo and Carlos, and even my mom. When I was with Beast, I could take on the world.
“I’ll do whatever it takes to show you that you can trust me again, Beast,” I promised.