She regarded me shrewdly. Not only did Bex not buy into bullshit, but she saw right through it all. Once you’d made it through the other side of Hell, you recognized the people only halfway there.
“I think you need a break from the rescuing,” she whispered, reaching out to squeeze my hand. “Sometimes even the kick-ass biker babe needs rescuing too.” She said it so low, even her eavesdropping husband couldn’t hear.
We shared a moment, both too long and too short before the rest of the family interrupted.
Steg yanked me into his chest, and I inhaled the smell of the man who had turned out to be my father when I lost mine.
He held me back, regarding me with shrewd, wrinkled eyes. He didn’t say anything for the longest time. I knew he was like Bex. He saw it too. But he wouldn’t say anything. He may have loved me like a daughter, but he wouldn’t rescue me. Knew he couldn’t. He was one of the ones who’d taught me how to rescue myself.
“’Spect there’s a story behind those eyes. Guessin’ it isn’t pretty,” he observed.
I blinked at him. “Is it ever?” I whispered.
He stroked my cheek. “No, baby. But you always will be. Despite the ugly that surrounds you. Best remember that.”
Then he let me go, not one to linger on the emotional shit. I silently thanked him for that.
He let his wife, the only mother I ever knew, descend upon me.
Unlike a mother, she didn’t cry or yank me into her arms, declaring how worried she’d been.
She put her hands on her hips, narrowing her blackened eyes at me.
“You took your time to turn up,” she said sharply.
“Had a long trip,” I replied.
“I don’t know how. Hell isn’t that far from LA,” she deadpanned.
I got it now, those lonely people you saw withering at the end of the bar, staring into a glass as if something could be found in there.
That was me, staring into my own, realizing I’d never felt more alone. And because I felt alone, empty, I had to fill it up with something.
I pushed the glass away. “Another.”
He complied.
And although I’d traveled from the hellish destination where I’d taken my demons for vacation, in that dark and dirty LA bar, it was like I was back there. I could’ve been anywhere.
But I was nowhere.
Maybe that was the idea.
Chapter Eight
Rosie
Age Twenty-Five
“You’re gonna need to stop doin’ that,” Evie ordered. “You’re annoying the piss outta me.”
I glanced at her and saw her narrowed eyes were focused on my knee. I had been jiggling it up and down furiously since we’d been sat here by a grim-faced orderly after we’d been ‘bothering’ the nurses too much.
I didn’t do well with sitting still. Being helpless.
Didn’t do well with sitting in a hospital fighting for both joy and agony.
Joy that my little niece was born healthy and beautiful and that my sister-in-law was okay.
Agony because in order for my niece to be born and my brother to still have the love of his life breathing and whole, the man who was the closest thing I had left to a father had to get shot.
In the chest.
I’d dealt with a lot of shootings in my time with the club. More than I cared to admit. Some were stupid accidents by idiotic prospects. Most were results from fights with rival clubs.
Some of them required me to stitch up flesh wounds.
Others required our off-the-books doctor to come and perform minor surgery.
Then there were these ones. The life-or-death ones that required hospitals.
Hospitals meant cops.
Which was reason for my churning stomach, but not for my jiggle.
Hospitals, more often than not, meant death.
But I stopped. Because of Evie’s narrow eye. Evie’s dry, narrow eye. She hadn’t shed a tear, hadn’t cracked her hard façade. She’d sworn at a lot of doctors, though.
Then she’d just sat there, still, her hands clasped on top of her knees, displaying the huge rock standing amongst the array of silver on every finger.
Steg got it for her for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.
“I can’t do this,” I whispered. The first time I’d done it. Given up. Sank down from the weight on my shoulders instead of continuing to put one foot in front of the other—in heels, no less.
She regarded me shrewdly, with none of the emotion I expected on her face. None I could see, anyway. None anyone could see. I expected that was the point.
“Yes you can,” she said in her no-bullshit, no-sugarcoating, gravelly voice. “You can because you have to.”
“What if he doesn’t make it?” I choked out.
She didn’t look at me. “He will.”
“But what if he doesn’t.”
Her gaze cut to me, sharp and venomous. “He will,” she snapped. Her hand squeezed mine at the same time as she addressed me harshly.
I got it. She said he would because there was no other option for her. He would because he had to.