She snorted. "C-I-N. You met her already. It’s Dead To Me."
I had a name. Holy fuck. I had a name!
"And S-I-N, the unimaginative kind, is a biker. Why?"
"I have someone here called Mary Catherine—"
"Yeah, I know her. She’s sweet. How’s the kid doing? She gave birth like, what, five weeks ago or something."
"I’m watching him nurse. He’s alive and well."
"Alive and well? What are you? On TVGM?"
I snickered. "We have a problem."
"Problems are my jam."
"Mary Catherine—"
"We call her MaryCat."
"—well, MaryCat, then, has an issue with her mom. Apparently they’re trying to take the kid away from her."
"Huh? Why?"
"They’re saying she’s hormonal or something."
MaryCat stared at me. "Is that Lodestar?"
I nodded.
"Can I talk with her?"
"Sure. You’re going on speaker, Star. I don’t want you to think I’m being rude. God forbid."
She sniffed. "Hey MaryCat, what’s going on?"
Which was how an ex-TV news anchor and a hacker smuggled a woman and her kid out of a Five Points’ Mob post-Christmas get-together.
Never let it be said that I didn’t know how to cause trouble.
When I’d sneaked MaryCat and her kid, Maddox, off the compound, with Star helping to open the gates where a car was waiting for her—I had no idea why or how, but that was on Star—after I waved her off, satisfied with having fulfilled my one good deed for the day, I retreated to the wintergarten and made it back just in time to see both Aidans climbing onto a raised dais that had appeared in my absence.
Eying it, and eying how Aidan was standing, I twisted my head to the side to see why he looked so straight.
That was when I saw the cane.
I smiled at the sight. I didn’t see him use it yesterday, so I guessed it was going to be a habit I’d have to knock into his skull, but that was okay. We were going to have to build a lot of habits together.
Things had been crazy since the twenty-first. Over the next weeks, months, and years, that was when the pill addiction would rear its ugly head, so my way to fix it was to take away the reason for its existence in the first place. If, of course, that was even possible. I hoped it was, but we had time, plenty of it, to get him back on track. For us to share a less than orthodox, but nonetheless happy future together.
"The Christmas period is a special time, brothers," Aidan Sr. rumbled, breaking into my musings about his son. Not just about the cane, either, but about how fine he looked in that navy suit.
Dayuuuum.
"For the children, it’s when miracles happen, but for adults, miracles can happen too, and miracles are what we need right now.
“We’re at war. There’s no evading it, no getting away from it. While my daughter-in-law-to-be is helping bring the biggest names to the table in her exposés—" Oh, shit. Aidan had told his dad that he proposed? "—they still messed with our holy sanctuaries.