She nodded.
“Did you run?” I asked, already figuring out the answer.
“Eight years ago, when Olivia was a baby. Rev was only four, but he’d already been subjected to so much.” Her voice broke as she turned her head, but I wouldn’t let her hide away. She didn’t have to shoulder her secrets alone.
Gently grasping her chin, I turned her head. “Gina, you don’t have to keep running. The club will protect you.”
She sniffled.
“I’llprotect you. All three of you.”
Chapter 5 Gina
“I’ll protect you. Allthree of you.”
God. I wish I had met Diablo instead of Jack on my seventeenth birthday. Maybe my life would have turned out a lot differently. Better. If for no other reason than the health and safety of my children.
Diablo promised he could keep us safe. I wanted to believe him, but I couldn’t prevent my doubts. I’d run with the kids for four years, from state to state, before we rolled into Tonopah with the gas tank on empty and three hundred bucks in cash I’d earned from odd jobs.
I decided I wasn’t running anymore. If Jack wanted to keep hunting us, I couldn’t stop him.
Hope slowly crept into my heart after three years, and no sign of Jack. Tonopah was small enough to keep us hidden. Or so I thought.
I found a job filing patient charts and answering phones during the weekdays at a dentist’s office while the kids were in school. On the weekends and two nights a week, I worked at a diner to bring in extra money. We didn’t have much, but we were together and safe, which meant a lot more than a house full of expensive things.
And then the past caught up to us.
I knew Jack lingered in the background, watching the house, the kids, and me. He’d always been relentless, controlling, abusive. When he wanted something, he went after it. Viciously.
There wasn’t a thing I could do to stop him. File a restraining order? I did that once. He found and beat me so bad I spent three days in the hospital away from my kids, leaving them vulnerable. When I returned home, Olivia had a severe diaper rash and a cold. Rev arms and legs were covered in bruises. I never found out what happened, and Rev had been far too young to explain.
I knew I had to get out, and I planned my escape one night almost three months later. With a black eye, a car full of stuff for my kids, and two thousand dollars in cash I stole from Jack, I drove out of North Carolina and toward freedom.
“You’re quiet,” Diablo observed, his tongue playing with the tiny silver hoop on the right side of his upper lip. “I’m not messin’ around. I mean every word I’m sayin’.”
“I know you do,” I admitted, lifting my hand to touch the stubble on his jaw. Diablo. A devil. A man who looked every bit the dangerous outlaw and criminal but couldn’t be more opposite in personality. Was he tough? Ruthless? A killer?