by Nicole Helm
“I haven’t even had her,” Cody said, his voice hoarse and anything but strong.
He was right. He was too right. He hadn’t had enough of Brianna. More important, Brianna hadn’t had enough of Cody.
Nina couldn’t think about how, if Ace truly knew about Brianna’s existence, Nina could have had those years of Cody and Brianna together—regardless of what might have happened between her and Cody, Brianna would have had her father.
But there was no going back. She’d learned to never finish what-ifs. She’d learned to keep going forward. She had learned that once she let the panic out, she had to rein it back in and move forward anyway.
She stood, though a few tears still slipped out, though her legs and arms shook. She crossed to Cody and she took his hands in hers. He’d likely never felt a day of true panic in his life, so she’d have to teach him that parenthood was forever a new panic—and you let it out, and reined it in.
When he met her gaze, she was all too familiar with that particular kind of devastation.
“Maybe Ace knew all along. Maybe that’s the only reason Brianna and I survived. But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t have survived. What it means is Ace gave me six years to practice.” She squeezed his hands. “This time, I don’t have to do it alone. We have to work together.”
* * *
ALONE.
It was a strange word to hit him sideways, at an even stranger time. They had so many bigger issues at hand than alone.
But that’s what he’d been since Nina broke up with him. He’d graduated, gone into North Star and dedicated his twenties to bringing down the Sons and his father. He’d succeeded at neither and he’d kept a good distance between him and his brothers. The people he’d met in North Star had become something like friends, but they hadn’t worked together exactly. Everyone had their own specialty. They worked in teams and as a unit, but not for any one reason. Only for one target.
They weren’t his brothers. They weren’t family.
Now this woman was holding his hand, telling him that teamwork was somehow the answer here. She didn’t mean like it had been in North Star. She meant like it had been when he was a kid.
And she was right. He knew she was right because what had saved each of his brothers and himself from the Sons?
Each other.
He would happily go on, singularly trying to keep Brianna safe, but it didn’t work. He knew what worked against Ace.
He looked down at Nina, awed, because he never would have realized that if she hadn’t reached out to him and said together. If she hadn’t looked him straight in the eye and understood this horrible clutching, all-encompassing fear that left all his normal faculties dimmed.
“Nina.” His voice was still rusty, but he forced himself to keep talking without trying to hide it. “Brianna is ours, but this fight isn’t. This fight is bigger than her.”
“There is nothing bigger than her to me, Cody. Nothing.”
Nina tried to pull her hands away, but he gripped them before she could let go. “I understand that. I do. But there is to Ace. Because I am just one of six betrayals. He wants us all to pay. Piece by piece. He wants his symbolic timing and his mind games.”
“I don’t care what he wants.”
“Exactly. You said you’re not alone this time—we can win this time. Okay, you don’t want to do it alone? Then let’s really not do it alone. And I don’t just mean my brothers. I mean all of us. Wyatts. Knights. We don’t just formulate a plan to keep Brianna safe. We formulate a plan to make her future safe. All our futures safe from him.”
“How? How? It’s been all these years, Cody, and...he knew. He knew.” She shook her head against that truth. “The more people involved the more people get hurt like this.”
“Maybe he knew about Brianna. Maybe he’ll target her to hurt me. Those things are likely.” He had to accept it, like he’d done in North Star when things hadn’t gone as planned. You couldn’t get emotionally involved. You had to be able to accept failure and move on to the next mission.
But his daughter wasn’t a mission and there was no failure he could accept here.
“But I am the reason Ace is in jail. Not because I did anything special, but because Jamison, Liza and I worked together. Now imagine what could happen if you put all fourteen of us together.”
“Sixteen,” Nina corrected. “Gigi and Brianna are part of this too.”
Cody nodded. “Together.”
Nina nodded in response. He could see her fears and worries parade across her face, but she nodded. She agreed.
They had a lot of work to do.
“First things first, we need to get everyone here.”
“The girls...” Nina trailed off, her expression taking on a new pain. “Sarah and Rachel especially. They don’t want to see me.”
“When you were in the hospital, and Brianna was bloody and wouldn’t speak or let us bathe her, who came over and helped? All of the girls. Brianna trusted them because of your stories. Maybe they don’t want to see you, Nina, but they all rallied together to help that little girl. They’ll keep doing that. That’s what family does.”
“I didn’t,” she said, and everything about how blue her eyes got with tears filling them was heartbreaking and painful.
“You did what you thought was right.”
She made a scoffing sound. “Be careful, Cody. That sounds an awful lot like forgiveness.”
He heard a peal of laughter from upstairs, Brianna’s laughter. Nina had kept him from that for six years, but in this moment he didn’t know how to focus on anger. He’d done questionable things to survive Ace, why shouldn’t Nina?
“Maybe after this I’ll manage to find some. Now. We need to round everyone up.”
He instructed Nina to tell Liza the whole story and send Liza over to the Knight ranch to get Duke and inform all the Knight girls. Cody called his brothers who’d left and asked them to turn around. He’d found Grandma and Dev in the barn and brought them up to speed.
It took a few hours to collect them all, but it worked out for the best because it was after Brianna’s and Gigi’s bedtime. Cody himself had set up a high-tech listening device and camera in the girls’ room, though Liza had pointed out drily it was just a baby monitor on steroids.
Grandma had made a big platter of ham sandwiches, an array of sliced fruits and vegetables, and was frosting brownies as they spoke. It had taken Cody twenty-eight years to realize feeding them was how Grandma dealt with stress, fear and worry. He saw it clearly in this moment, with everyone he considered family pressed together around Grandma’s kitchen table.
“I think we still need to pay Ace a visit,” Cody announced. “We should act like we don’t have any suspicions he might know about Brianna.”
“Nina isn’t going to visit that sociopath,” Duke announced.
“Nina will make her own decisions like she has been for the past seven years,” Nina replied.
Cody had made her lie down earlier, but he wondered how much she’d slept based on the bags under her eyes. She needed to rest if that bullet wound was ever going to truly heal, but this was hardly a time for resting.
“You can’t get anything out of him,” Duke said resolutely. “It’s a pointless exercise that plays into his hands.”
“That isn’t exactly true,” Jamison countered, a lot more diplomatically than Cody would have. “Ace’s biggest flaw is ego. He thinks he’s a god of some kind. He believes he knows better than everyone—which is how he’s able to be patient and ruthless when it comes to payback.”
“For years that man has left you alone.” Duke looked at Jamison, then Liza. “If you two hadn’t gone interfering—”
“And left Gigi there?” Liza demanded. “Don’t play that card, Duke.”
Duke shut his mouth and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Personally, I think if Cody and Nina go in acting like they’ve won, he won’t be able to resist telling them how they’ve lost,” Tucker said equitably.
“And in telling us how we’ve lost, we might just get an idea of what his plan is,” Cody continued. “If we don’t, we haven’t lost anything.”
“That you know of,” Duke replied darkly.
“It’s a risk,” Cody returned, holding Duke’s angry gaze. “But so is sitting here just hoping he doesn’t come after Brianna.”
“I say you take that girl and Nina and move to Saskatchewan or some such place and keep them away from danger instead of throwing them headlong into it.”
“Brianna deserves her family,” Nina said quietly.
“You didn’t think that seven years ago,” Duke pointed out.
Cody opened his mouth to order Duke to back off, or shut up, or something. But Nina shook her head and held up a hand to ward him off.
She looked at Duke, met his gaze head-on. “I was barely twenty-one and had been threatened by the leader of a powerful biker gang. I’d also spent the first eight years of my life in hell, so I figured whatever I gave Brianna would be better than that—especially if it meant everyone else I loved was safe. I can’t say I was wrong because I did the only thing I knew how to do in the moment.”
She took a deep, shaky breath and let it out. “But I wish I could have given her this sooner. If it’s true that Ace knew all along, I could have. Which means he has to pay. And I want to be the person collecting. Not just for my daughter, but for the years he cost me with you.”
Silence shrouded the room, a rare feat with fourteen Wyatts and Knights in the same room. Footsteps sounded above, and the monitor crackled with the sounds of movement.
“Let me,” Cody murmured as Liza and Nina both stood. “You’ll win Duke over better if I’m not here for a few minutes,” he whispered to Nina before exiting the kitchen.
He went upstairs and found Brianna standing in the hallway.
“What are you doing up, Brianna?”
She looked up at him solemnly. “Drink of water.”
But he could see questions in her eyes. Fear. He crouched to be eye level with her. “Did you hear anything you want to talk about?”
She shook her head, but when she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around his neck he knew there had to be something. Maybe not right now, but she sensed things weren’t right. She’d likely overheard something over the past few days.
Not to mention she knew her mother had been hurt and her entire life had changed. She had every reason to be frightened no matter how much she liked living at the ranch.
He lifted her as he stood. “Come on. I’ve got something for you.”
“A present?”
“Sort of.” He walked to his room, carrying her weight easily—and reveling in how she held on to him. He had a daughter, and she loved him, no questions asked.
He moved into his room and set her on the bed, then went to his dresser, where he’d been keeping what he’d been working on for her. It wasn’t perfected, but he had no doubt the necklace would do what he needed it to.
“This is a very special necklace,” he said, holding out the piece of jewelry. It was sturdy, made more for purpose than because it was pretty—though he’d tried to give it some pretty touches so she’d want to wear it.
“Is it magic?”
He didn’t want her to believe in magic, because some day she wouldn’t anymore. But for that same exact reason, he desperately wanted her to believe in possibilities.
“Yeah, I guess it is. But it’s emergency magic only. See, if you open it up...” He opened the locket for her and showed her the tiny device he’d attached inside. “See that button?”
She nodded.
“If you push it, I get a notification. It’s only for emergencies though. If you’re in trouble—real, scary trouble—hit that button and I will come find you.”
She chewed on her bottom lip, running her fingers over the edges of the now-closed locket. “Who’s Ace?” she asked, keeping her gaze on the necklace.
Cody closed his eyes against the wave of pain. He hadn’t expected that question. It was easy to talk about bad men in broad strokes. A little harder when the evil in question came from your own father.
“Ace is a very bad man, Brianna. He wants to hurt us. I know that’s scary to hear, and I hate scaring you, baby. But I need you to know he’s very bad, and no matter what anyone says, he doesn’t ever want to help us.”
She finally looked up at him. “Why does he want to hurt me if I don’t even know him?”
That question was worse by far. Still, she’d asked it of him—her father—which meant he had to find an answer. “Some people only understand how to be mean. That’s why...that’s why I—and all your uncles too—became police officers and the like. We wanted to help people instead of hurt them.”
She half smiled at him. No surprise since fear and danger were all around them. Even if he’d lied to her and told her nothing was wrong, she would have felt it. She would have known.
He had to hold on to that, and the fact he had a daughter who loved him.
Which meant for the first time he had to go after Ace and also care about what happened to him. Because he wouldn’t leave Brianna, and he wouldn’t lose her.
“I know we haven’t known each other that long, but I want you to know I love you, Brianna. More than anything in this world.”
She crawled off the bed and wrapped her arms around his neck, snuggling in as he pulled her close and stood.
“I love you too, Daddy.” She leaned her head against his shoulder, her whole body relaxing. “I know you’ll keep me and Mommy safe.”
No matter what.
Chapter Ten
Nina looked at herself in the mirror. No amount of makeup seemed to hide the exhaustion that had marked itself across her face. She was pale, and looked weak.
Maybe that could work in their favor. The point was to make sure Ace underestimated them, because if he did, he would give them something they could work with.
Nina closed her eyes and gripped the sink. She didn’t want to take the pain pills for her aching side because they made her too fuzzy, but the over-the-counter painkiller wasn’t doing much of anything to take away the dull, throbbing ache.
She breathed, steadily and mindfully, trying to find some peace for a few minutes of meditation.
It didn’t work. At all. But she didn’t have any more time. She had to face the music.
Not alone though. She’d barely slept all night turning that over in her head. She wouldn’t be the scared young girl in a coffee shop parking lot this time. She’d have Cody at her side and the Wyatts and Knights fully behind her.
She was older, wiser, and had people supporting her.
And had so much more to lose this time around.
Which was not a particularly meditative thought, so she left the bathroom and headed downstairs. Jamison and Cody were in the kitchen with Grandma Pauline and a furious-looking Duke.
None of the sisters. They’d all come over last night, but none of them had really addressed her. She noted that there was an uneasiness between them and Liza too. Nina and Liza had left and cut ties.
It wouldn’t easily be forgiven, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t help.
“Ready?” Cody asked, getting to his feet.
Not even close. “Yeah.”
It had been decided they wouldn’t arrive together. Cody and Nina would drive in one car, trying to give the appearance to anyone who might be watching their moves that they were a happy couple.
Jamison would borrow the Knights’ truck and also drive to the jail. Gage would already be there in his cruiser on his shift. Tucker had specifically made an appointment before theirs so that he could be in the jail for investigative reasons in hi
s detective role while Cody and Nina were visiting Ace. Brady and Dev would stay home at the ranch and make sure nothing out of the ordinary was happening on the property while Liza and Grandma watched the girls.
Duke took her by the shoulders. “Just remember, you did this on your own for seven years. You can handle that monster. We’ll find a way to destroy him yet.”
It was the exact opposite of what he’d said last night, but that was why Duke had been such an excellent foster father. He might express his opinion, he might loudly disagree, but if anyone was going to go through with whatever he didn’t approve of, he turned all that disagreement into support.
She smiled and nodded. He gave her a squeeze, then let her go, and she followed Jamison and Cody out the door to their vehicles.
If the drive felt interminable, she could blame that on nerves and the pain in her stomach. She’d also blame it on Cody’s silence and stoic expression.
Even when they finally arrived, Cody said nothing. He led her into the jail, nodding at Jamison in the parking lot, then Gage in the lobby.
When he finally spoke, it was to the woman at the front desk. They filled out the necessary paperwork and were led to various places. Out of nowhere, Cody took her hand and linked it with his.
She stared at it for a moment, surprised by the contact, the warmth and how much that simple gesture steadied her. She wasn’t so sure she liked that reminder that she was stupid enough to still be in love with a man who’d never forgive her.
She thought about last night, but shook it away. Cody had been shaken by the realization Ace knew about Brianna. He didn’t actually mean anything he’d said about forgiveness.
It would hurt too much to hope for that and not get it, so she had to pretend like it wasn’t possible.
They were finally led to a narrow corridor that, unlike the rest of the jail, reminded her of a movie. A small room, rows of cubbies with plastic partitions between this side of the room and the other.
They were led to one of the cubes and told to sit, so they did. After a few minutes of waiting, a door on the other side of the partition opened and Ace was led inside.