Keeping my expression blank was easy, but I couldn’t stop my jaw from tensing.
His eyes went straight to it, and he nodded his head and sighed. “I’m fucking furious at you right now, brother. If it were anyone else, I’d have snapped their necks and left their body for the birds,” he told me, keeping his voice low as he leaned in slightly. “And there’s still a chance I’ll get a wild hair and do just that.”
He could try.
“When Nell told us she was pregnant, we asked her who the father was so we could kill him. It was obvious that, seeing as how he wasn’t with her when she did it, and the fact she’d never even mentioned having a man, he wasn’t a part of her life.”
I couldn’t help it, I had to know. “What did she say?”
“She said he was the biggest mistake of her life.”
The acid resumed its destruction inside me.
“Did she—” I stopped, hating to even say the words. “Did she talk about getting rid of them?”
He stared at me, his eyes locked on mine, and then ground out, “Not once. My sister knew the second she found out that she was keeping them. That said, she didn’t know she was pregnant until she was quite far into it. She had a scan a week after the discovery, and that was when she found out it was twins.”
I can’t say the news helped the pain, but it sure as hell didn’t make it worse.
“We tried to find out who the asshole was, even looked into all the guys she’d ever dated, but none of them were in the area when she got pregnant so we had to leave it. We’ve asked her constantly since, but she sticks with the same answer—that he’s out the picture, and not coming back.”
I was coming back, I’d never have lived without her, but she didn’t know I’d fully intended to do that as soon as I could.
“Fuck,” I growled, wanting to punch something.
“He was the biggest mistake of her life,” but she’d never thought about not keeping my babies.
Hunter scanned the room, taking in the faces of the MC’s members—some with their women—and made sure that no one was within listening distance of us.
Once he was sure, he turned back to me, his face blank. “Your plan?”
Of course he knew that his sister would be different for a man who had the fortune to have her as his. And it was a good question, but one I only had part of the answer for. I also had to be careful how much I revealed before I was meant to. I knew I could trust the guy with some of it, but I also had to hold some back.
“You know my marriage was an alliance, correct?”
Everyone knew it, but I needed to make sure he knew the circumstances.
When he nodded, I continued, “Nell and I were in a relationship before it—something deep, that meant things to me I’d never had before—when I had to go through with it. I tried to tell her, but I kept putting it off until it was too late.”
When he went to talk, I added, “She found out about it the same day you did, when you asked her to be your plus one.”
Sitting up straight in his seat, he looked around again and then leaned in until he was two inches away from me. “You know, I’m itching to slit your throat right now. My sister went away for three months, just disappeared without any contact with her family, and when she did come back she was empty.
“This life isn’t easy, and it destroys your sense of humanity, but she’s always been a light in the dark. Ever since she was little, Nell’s always smiled, and given without expecting anything back because she loved doing it. And we went out of our way to make sure she had a bubble none of our shit—or any shit—touched. Until you.”
What he’d said was true, and it was what had attracted me to her from the first day I’d met her. She was clean, pure, bright, and untouched by the darkness and destruction that both our worlds were overflowing with.
She’d given me light for the first time in a long time, and I’d taken it without giving back.
And then I’d taken that light from her completely.
“I tried to find her, man, but she was safer away from me,” I rasped, and fuck me was that the first weakness I’d shown since I was a child. “She didn’t just disappear for you, she disappeared for me, too.”
Half of his mouth lifted into a smirk, but it wasn’t an amused one. “Yeah, good thing she moved and got a new number. She gave us the new number just before she left, and then we got her new address after she came back and told us she was moving. It wasn’t until we were helping her move her shit into the new place that we found out she was pregnant. We were cut out of all the decisions until she was ready to tell us, that’s how much she needed to be on her own.”