He looked up at me finally and his eyes were blank grey slates. “Saw ya on the back of their brother Wrath’s bike, talkin’ to Reaper as he stood in the doorway with your fuckin’ mum, Harleigh Rose. One great big biker family.”
A whimper was trying to work its way out of my throat like some small, disgusting bug, slithering, crawling toward the light.
Only, there was no light, not in this apartment, not in this situation.
There was only black tunnel.
“So, there I was thinkin’ my girl was in some kinda trouble, the kind only she seems to find ’cause she’s her father’s daughter, likes to live wild an’ free, flyin’ through life like she doesn’t have a fuckin’ care. Thinkin’ I needed to hightail my ass down the mountain even when my woman’s nine months gone with twins, just to make sure my princess doesn’t need some savin’.”
God, his conversational tone played cruel contrast with the dead look in his beautiful eyes. He’d never been angry with me like this. We were fighters, the Garros, my dad and me especially. We burned bright and tall like whiskey on fire, then settled, mellow enough to talk through the trouble and work away the pain.
This was different.
This wasn’t my affectionate, crazy cool father lecturing his wayward, beloved daughter.
This was Zeus Garro, outlaw biker, ex-con and righteous murderer sitting on his rebel throne accusing one of his soldiers for disloyalty.
Disloyalty.
The word burned a hole through my thoughts and fell like a hot coal into my gut, eating away at the lining there until my stomach cramped.
“Daddy,” I tried to explain, my voice more helium than sound, high and bright with terrified emotion. “Let me explain.”
He stared at his ringed hands, at my name inked into the inside of his strong wrist. His other hand covered it up, as if it hurt him to bear witness to his love for me.
“Called home, tried to get Lou to help me understand where my little girl coulda been coming from. How she could be shunnin’ her family for a mother that don’t deserve the name, a man who’s taken Fallen blood, a Prez who wants your family dead. Shocked the shit outta me when Axe-Man took the phone from ’er and told me he’d seen ya at the ambush coupla weeks ago, stealin’ from your own goddamn family.”
No, God, no.
My skin felt like it was coming apart at the seams, like my stuffing was falling out, instinct driving me to plug the holes, sew myself shut by confessing to my father all I was doing for him, not against him.
But I couldn’t.
I’d been loved all my life by the greatest men I’d ever know.
A brother who beat up my bullies on the playground and stood up to our mother even when it meant going without food.
A father who treated me like a princess, placing me so high on a pedestal I was safe from harm, open to admiration and removed from the tragedies of reality.
And an entire battalion of brothers, uncles, and friends from The Fallen who enrobed me in a love so fine it felt like silk spun by fingers so rough from callous and stained by grease it only made the contrast more exceptional.
I don’t know how I went wrong, how I chose a love so black it consumed me in its inky folds before I could think to break free. But I chose it over them even before I knew there was a decision to be made between the two.
And even though that lover was gone, I was still sunk deep in that dark mire, battling to be free, to rejoin my family in light.
They said I was a thing of beauty, but all I’d ever caused was pain.
It wasn’t intentional, but did that really matter in the grand scheme of things?
The same men who had loved me so well all my life would hate me now, reeling against the reality I’d forced them to face.
That I was no longer a member of The Fallen family.
That I’d turned my back on everything I’d ever known in order to take up with the very MC that wanted my father killed, my pregnant step-mum raped and my clubhouse burned.
In their eyes, I was fucking a man named Wrath who used his infamous fury to pound in the faces of Fallen brothers caught unawares on dark roads and crowded highway bars. I was no longer the princess of The Fallen, but an old lady of a Berserker.
To make matters worse, if they knew the truth, they’d be horrified to learn I was also fucking a cop, working undercover for the men in blue my culture was founded on hating.
I was involved in a war, but on the wrong side of the battlefield, a turncoat of the highest order. And I knew with a certainty I felt in the pit of my gut, in the marrow of my bones and the tick of my heart, that I would never be accepted back home.