“Know a lot of what he left behind was death,” he said. “Didn’t know a thing about the things he’d left livin’.”
I gritted my teeth. I knew when people were lying. Hansen wasn’t lying.
“He cares about you,” he said finally when I didn’t respond.
I scoffed. “If he cared so much, or even a little bit, he wouldn’t have let me believe he was dead for the past fourteen years.”
Hansen gave me a long look. “Or if he cared too much, that’s the reason why he let you believe that.”
Then he stood.
“Gonna have to get used to this place for a while, sweetheart,” he continued. “Though I expect you gathered that already.”
I blinked up at him. “So you’re not gonna kill me?”
Hansen chuckled. “Got a wife and two kids I love very much. Don’t plan on leaving this earth or leaving them, which would be what happens if Jagger even thought he caught a whiff of me considering doing that. Even without that, no, I wouldn’t be killing you. What you did, it doesn’t sit well with me. Don’t like it. Doesn’t mean I don’t understand it. Also know you’re not a threat to the club. You weren’t trying to bring us down.”
“And if I was a threat? If I was trying to bring you down?” The question was asked almost instinctively, my reporter’s brain still intent on getting more information about the story that had become my prison.
He didn’t hesitate. “Then I’m afraid we wouldn’t be havin’ this conversation. But you already knew that.”
Then he walked off, leaving me to contemplate the clubhouse that I’d been staring at one month ago, intent on finding a story. And instead I’d found a ghost.
Instead I’d found my destruction.
I didn’t want to go back inside.
I really, fricking, didn’t want to go inside.
No one had come since Hansen.
Not Liam.
Not even Claw, to kill me when Hansen wasn’t looking.
And he was capable of doing that, killing. A woman. Someone he’d become friends with. Because that’s the way of the club, they valued it so highly that life became cheap when betrayal was present.
I didn’t judge him for it. Not really. Life was cheap everywhere.
But then again, the change after I spoke—after I spewed all those words out at Liam—was palpable. His murderous fury simmered down. He had a human reaction to my story. The sorrow in it. That didn’t surprise me either. He was a good man. As good as this world allowed him to be, I guessed.
I didn’t know if Liam was a good man now.
Liam was alive.
The thought ricocheted through my skull with the speed and damage of a bullet. It hadn’t sunk in yet. Though his death had sunk in. Since the second I heard that horrible, animal scream from down the street. There was no adjustment period, no blissed moments in the mornings when I was ignorant of the truth. No, I woke up every single day lucid with the knowledge of what my life was now, constant dark, storm clouds.
“It’ll be better tomorrow,” my mother whispered, voice no longer strong and sure as I’d come to expect from her in times of crisis.
Because this wasn’t a time of crisis.
I didn’t even know what this was. There was no word for this kind of ugly, soul-destroying, unfathomable pain.
“I don’t want tomorrow,” I replied, my voice was soaked with the tears I hadn’t shed. It was slow, almost slurred, saturated with medication my childhood doctor had injected into me at some point earlier. “I want yesterday. I would trade every single tomorrow there ever could be for one moment of yesterday. Where he wasn’t gone. Where I didn’t have a hole punched through my chest.”
I rubbed that same spot, feeling that same empty space underneath the skin. It hadn’t healed, grown over, with the evidence of what put it there being a lie. Because it wasn’t really a lie.
He was still gone.
Even if he was here.
I went inside because I was cold, because my ass was going to sleep, and because I knew I couldn’t delay the inevitable.
I wasn’t one to delay the most horrible of things. Mostly because my living was made out of staring at the most horrible of things. Making other people stare at them.
It was still quiet when I walked into the clubhouse, the common room illuminated with a dull light that showed a figure slouched at the bar.
No one else was around.
I could tell it was him by the shadows.
Even though his shadow was different. Bigger. Inkier somehow.
He moved the second the door shut behind me. I was surprised that it took that to notice I was in the room. I would’ve guessed he would’ve caught on to my presence the second the door opened. When I started walking across the parking lot. Wasn’t he meant to be a badass outlaw criminal who could sense danger?