“More what?” I whispered back.
“More fuckin’ darkness to eyes I wanted to make sure never had a shred of shadow in them,” he replied.
I was surprised, at what he said and the tone of anger in regret in his voice. “I’m not designed to exist without shadows. It’s in my blood,” I said, cupping his cheek.
He furrowed his brow. “Fuckin’ trouble’s in your blood,” he muttered.
I was relieved. I didn’t need heavy when I was already carting the world around on my shoulders.
“Now can we please go see my soul sister?” I whined.
He looked me up and down, face blank once more. “Yeah, once we get you showered.” He paused. “On second thought, maybe if you don’t, she’ll smell you and wake right up,” he said dryly.
I smacked his arm, bruising my knuckles in the process. “Personal grooming wasn’t really on the agenda when I got the call, buttface.”
We started walking toward the entrance, his brow raised at me in warning.
I rolled my eyes. “The super-badass routine doesn’t work on me, remember? I don’t care if your patch says ‘President,’ you’ll always be my buttface brother,” I teased.
He shook his head. “And you’ll always be my Roe,” he replied. “Which means I’ll always be the one to put the bullet in the temple of the people who put the shadows in your eyes. Sooner or later.”
His words weren’t teasing like mine.
They were a promise.
I hoped to God that he didn’t find out it wasn’t rapists or murderers or general scum of the earth who put those shadows there.
It was Luke.
Because if he found that out, he would follow through on the promise.
Law be damned.
Then again, there were a lot of things that Cade would never find out about Luke.
What he’d done for the club.
What I’d done that Luke had turned a blind eye to.
Chapter Six
Rosie
Age Twenty-Five
I learned a lot from the men I grew up around. How to throw a punch. How to hack into a computer. How to pick locks, hotwire a car, load and shoot a gun. The basic bread and butter of outlaw life.
I also knew how to blow things up.
Not so much the bread and butter, but a handy skill.
Handy when the same gang that raped, tortured, and murdered my best friend then kidnapped, beat and almost killed my brother’s girlfriend. The woman I was certain would become my sister and the mother of my nieces and nephew.
When she was taken, the club lapsed back into that dark and colorless version of hell that haunted us. The one we thought we’d left behind in the past but the one that had been waiting, biding its time to strike again, when we didn’t expect it. And we didn’t. Cade didn’t.
I didn’t recognize my brother in the hours that Gwen was missing. He wasn’t the man who’d taught me how to ride two different kinds of bikes, who let me crawl into his bed for two months after we lost our father. Who screamed at my mother when she came back into our life after that loss, telling me my father had failed making me into a ‘woman.’
He wasn’t that unseen kind, caring, and selfless version of my brother.
Nor was he the man who’d crushed a man’s jaw when he’d heard him talking shit about me at a club party. Or the man who’d ordered a hit on the guy who took my virginity. Or even the man who had told me my death, or at the very least my exile, would come from a romance with the enemy,
He wasn’t that cold, calculating murderer who the outlaw and inlaw world feared and respected.
He was something different entirely.
Something that scared me almost as much as what was happening to Gwen in those hours that he was like that.
It terrified me, the thought that he might permanently be like that if we didn’t find Gwen in the way she’d been hours before: laughing, beautiful, happy. He’d be Bull. And that man’s loss was felt in all of our souls. I didn’t know how the club would survive something like that again. It would crush them.
So when we found her, badly beaten but still herself, we dodged a bullet. A big fucking one.
Cade had called Luke in the second she was missing.
That meant a lot of things for me. A lot of things I couldn’t focus on. I focused on what it meant for the club. It meant that any retaliation couldn’t come from them.
The law would be watching them closely. The law, on the other hand, would not be watching me at all. And it hurt for other reasons, but it was great for my current ones.
I sat and watched the last of the bikes pull into the Spiders’ clubhouse. The one I’d snuck into earlier and planted my homemade bomb in. I’d shooed out some women, most of whom were beaten, and all of whom were defeated. I promised them that I’d take care of them, get them away from this life for the price of their silence.