The math I’d done when I could think clearly hit me again. Nell would have been five weeks pregnant when she’d found out about the wedding, and then she’d been missing in action wherever it was she’d gone for solace for three months. That would mean she didn’t realize until she was four and a half months into the pregnancy. Jesus Christ!
Reading me correctly—even though I never wanted him to be able to do that—Hunter nodded. “Yeah. The first day she came around, she was wearing a baggy t-shirt. We were just so happy to have her back that we didn’t see anything different, except for the shadows under her eyes.
“But the next day when we all went to her place to move her shit to the new house, she had a tank on, and there was no missing it. The day after she told us, she had the scan, and you know the rest.”
And I hadn’t been there for any of it.
“So, I’m going to ask the question one last time,” he said quietly, his voice now back to its usual hard. “What is your fucking plan?”
He knew well that you could make some plans on the spot to resolve a situation, but a lot of them needed to be done carefully—and this was one of those moments.
Whatever I did now had to include keeping her and the babies safe, and it also had to protect the Bratva and MC too. Our families were wrapped up in both, and to jeopardize them would jeopardize us.
One of the things I’d learned early in my life, was that you needed to keep your emotions in a box to keep a clear head. It also kept an opponent off balance. If they could read you and see the impact of what they were doing had on you, they knew where your weaknesses were.
He might not be an enemy, but he still didn’t get to read what I was feeling. But I’d give him something.
“You and I both know that if I just go in and claim her and my kids, I’m putting her life on the line. The Azarovs would want retribution, whoever is fucking with us would have a new target on his list, and the alliance between us,” I motioned between the two of us, “would be weakened. This is a time when we can’t afford to have any weaknesses, as you know from the news today.” His eyes flashed as I laid it out, but he nodded begrudgingly when I paused.
Seeing that he understood where I was going with this, I continued, “That said, I’ve spent almost eight months looking for ways to get her back. I’m not quitting now, but what I do now needs to be done in a way there’s no blowback on her, the babies, or our families.” He frowned at the mention of the MC’s inclusion in my words, so I explained, “The Road Kings are part of me now, too, so my choices include you in everything.”
Until you’re in a situation where you have someone you love, a human being who’s your weakness, and you can’t have them until you fight a war—be it physically or verbally—you’ll never know how fucked up life can be.
In addition to that, families like ours have a code of loyalty and duty to each other, and to go against it means turning your back on them. It was unheard of, and usually ended in death.
I wasn’t about to risk her life, and that’s who they’d have come after if I did it.
My family’s allies were solid when you were part of them, but deadly when you weren’t.
As if this wasn’t enough weight, I had added into that situation the fight of having to get Nell back, while not destroying a vital link between our families and our soldiers because someone was skinning them. We needed to be stronger together instead of weaker apart, now more than ever.
No one would ever know how suffocating it was to be in this situation until they experienced it.
I could survive that suffocation, though. I’d been doing it for almost eight months without her in my life. But I was resentful as fuck—even more than I had been, which had already been immense—that I had a duty to my brotherhood and father that took as much priority as she did.
If I fucked up, it wasn’t just going to cause arguments and tension. It would mean blood, big lakes of the stuff, and the death of people close to us. Just the thought of something hurting her and our babies was like a punch to the solar plexus.
Knowing all of this, because he would be in the same shoes as I was, Hunter blew out a breath as he closed his eyes. I knew it was costing him not to lose his shit, but he knew the consequences as well as I did.