My heart pounded in my chest as I sucked in breath after breath trying to keep them slow and steady. It’s a fight against your body’s natural instincts when all your lungs want to do is stop the torture and suck in as much oxygen as possible, but you’re still trying to push further and longer and faster than yesterday without dying on the side of the street.
“Race you!” Chelsea called out as we hit the corner of the road and could finally see the clubhouse gates around two blocks down.
I groaned loudly, but she was already gone, her body kicking it up a notch like we hadn’t just spent the last forty minutes pounding our feet against the asphalt. “Fuck,” I rasped before ducking my head and pumping my arms and legs forward trying to force my exhausted and drained body to pick up some speed and not stop breathing at the same time.
Chelsea was a good twenty feet ahead, and there was no way I was going to catch her. The woman was like a machine. I swore she could run and run and her body would never give up, and on top of that, you’d never fucking guess she’d given birth to twins. Despite a few stretch marks, which Chelsea wore with pride, her stomach was as flat as it was before she got pregnant. Maybe even more fucking toned if we were totally honest.
She’d worked her ass off to get it there.
Running wasn’t my strongest point or the activity I loved the most, but when I was prospecting, it was Chelsea who piqued my interest in it. She explained to me why she ran. Why it was important to her, and how it helped her cope for a long time when she felt like she was falling to pieces.
When she had the twins and decided to start running again, it was around the time I decided to finally grow up and ask Wrench to help me find my siblings and get the answers to questions I’d spent years trying to avoid thinking about because I was too fucking scared. I thought maybe it would burn some of the frustrations out as I ran to the point of utter exhaustion, or at least until I heard something about Romeo and Phee. That’s how I ended up running beside Chelsea, three mornings a week at fucking 5:30 a.m.
I hit the ten-foot clubhouse fence with force gripping the wire netting with my hands and trying to stop my legs from collapsing out from underneath me, while my lungs screamed in pain. I had sweat in my eyes, and the last sprint home had caused something in my pants to move and chafe.
Chelsea laughed breathlessly as she fell against the fence beside me pulling one of her knees up to her stomach. “You’re getting faster,” she praised.
I scoffed in response, but it came out as some awkward choking sound that made her furrow her brows like she wasn’t sure if I was agreeing, or if she should give me the Heimlich. I waved her off and placed my hands on my knees, bending over, and trying to suck in all the air to satisfy my starved body before I passed out.
It was a good ten minutes before Chelsea managed to get me moving inside the compound and the clubhouse. I collapsed onto the nearest sofa while she fetched two water bottles from behind the bar. It was still and quiet inside, but strangely, the patio door was pushed open, and I could hear the muted shots of an air rifle obviously right out the back at the target.
I moved to reach for my shoelaces, ready to feel the satisfaction of pulling them off and dying right here for the next few hours, but Chelsea snapped at me before I could pull them undone. “Hell no, buddy, you’re going to do some stretches. You don’t want to damage a muscle because you were too lazy to prep your body properly and then wind down afterward.”
I groaned, drinking half the bottle of water before climbing to my feet and following along as we stretched out our muscles.
Whenever the club moved together as a group, there were always comments and questions about whether the club only let good looking men inside, given that at this stage, none of us had the dreaded beer belly that some of the older guys tended to sport. We were all toned, some more than others, but for the most part, we all had strong bodies.
And the truth was because it was required of us.
Joining the club was a commitment to keep ourselves healthy, strong, and able to fight to protect our families if that’s what it came down to—which it had before. We’re expected to be able to do whatever we could to keep our family safe and have our brothers’ backs, and you can’t exactly do that if you can’t walk a flight of stairs without having a stroke at the top.
I didn’t work out as intensely as some of the other guys, but I was definitely damn fit, preferring to work on cardio as opposed to building muscle every day. I wasn’t small, but I also wasn’t as hulking as half the guys in the club.
“Good work today,” Chelsea grinned, patting me on the shoulder. “I better go save Op. The twins will be up soon if they aren’t already.”
I snapped a lazy salute. The noise of the air gun floating in through the open doors at this hour piqued my attention again, and I fought my aching body, forcing it toward the noise. Stepping out, I froze when I spotted Leo standing at the grass edge with a cup of coffee in his hand. The air was already beginning to get warm, and I was glad I’d already run as the sun started to heat up as it rose.
“Hey, what are you doing up this early?” I asked Leo, leaping off the edge to stand beside him on the grass. I squinted my eyes out to the back of the clubhouse’s boundary where the shooting targets were, my brows pulling together in confusion. “Is that Meyah?”
His head bobbed up and down confirming my suspicions. “Yeah, had to go pick her up not long after she left the other night. She and her mom had a total blow out,” he explained, not taking his eyes away from her. He was protective, and she was holding a gun—not one that could do a lot of damage because it was too early in the morning to be making that kind of noise. Even then, and though Hadley had taught her the ins and outs and she was becoming better at holding a weapon than some of our brothers, he still refused to look away just in case something happened.
Wrench and I had only flown in last night from Nevada. We were both so shattered from making the round trip in less than forty-eight hours that we crashed the moment we got in. So, I didn’t realize Meyah was at the clubhouse or that something had gone down.
We both watched in silence as she lined up the shot, the air around her still for only a moment before she squeezed the trigger, her body barely affected by the kickback. She clicked the safety back on and place the gun down on the safety block before walking down to check the target.
“Shit. Her mom lost her mind, huh?” I asked, concerned just by the way she was holding her body, her shoulders slumped and defeated compared to when I’d seen her two days ago. She’d been so empowered, so proud of how she was finally taking control of her life.
“Carly has her own demons. Ones she’s been trying to hide those kids from for a long time. Ones she wouldn’t even share with Kim or me. Apparently, Carly told Meyah she was beginning to remind her too much of her dad. That she couldn’t even look at her,” Leo explained with a huff. “I wish Carly would stop seeing me as the enemy. The older Meyah gets, the more she’s desperate to know who her father is. There’s a piece of her missing. A part of herself that she doesn’t know. And she’s more determined than ever to get answers.”
I blew out a long breath of air. “That’s enough to drive anyone fucking crazy.” My heart hurt for her. I wanted to walk over there and pull her into my arms, tell her that I got it, and that it was okay for her to be fucking pissed off.
“She’s gonna go looking for him,” Leo said out of the blue, and I turned to look at him with my brows raised. “She didn’t tell me everything that Carly said, and Carly wouldn’t tell me either. Now she knows he’s out there, she’ll want to find him.”
“And you’re gonna let her go?” I asked in confusion. I was going to take a guess and assume that if Carly wasn’t willing to have him in Meyah’s life, then there was a pretty fucking good reason for that. But then again, I could be wrong. Carly’s track record for overprotecting Meyah doesn’t exactly scream in her favor.
“I love Meyah like a daughter,” Leo replied simply, but his muscles were tight screaming something completely different, and I had a feeling I wasn’t exactly going to like it. “Carly isn’t gonna tell me shit because she’s fucking stubborn and thinks she has Meyah’s best interest at heart. So, I’m gonna need your help.”
Before he’d even finished the sentence, I was already shaking my head. “You’re fucking joking, right?”