by Nicole Fox
“You’re such a sweet girl, Rose,” I told her. “I’m sure you’ll make a lot of friends, and they’ll all be very, very nice to you, too.” Her eyes lit up.
“You think so?”
“I know so. Besides, you’re cool and smart, too, and people will want to be your friend because you’re so cool and smart.”
She smiled brightly, and flung herself on me, wrapping her arms around me as she did so.
“Come on, Mr. Trip. It’s almost time for class!”
I laughed and stood up, taking her by the hand to walk her to her class. There was a small line as parents dropped off their kids. Apparently, there was stuff that we had to take. When it was my turn, I knelt down and kissed Rose on the head, letting her sprint into the room with the other couple dozen tiny Gremlins too. The teacher, a short, younger woman, smiled up at me and I caught the way her eyes lingered.
“Hello there,” she said, holding out a folder for me. “This is all the class information that you’ll need to help everything run smooth and easy this year. All my contact information is in there as well, in case you have any questions for me personally, Mr …?”
“Trip,” I said, taking the folder, making a mental note as the teacher continued to stare to bring Misha with me next time so that maybe I wouldn’t get the creepy, unnecessary bedroom eyes.
Hell.
When had I become the man that didn’t like the creepy, unnecessary bedroom eyes?
Pondering this, I made my way back out into the parking lot. I’d borrowed Travis’ truck, and knew that if this was going to be a regular thing, I might need to invest in an actual vehicle to take Rose to and from school, not to mention to and from other places. I still wasn’t very comfortable having her on the bike just yet.
Look at me, being responsible.
I walked out to Travis’ truck, and paused. Amid the realization that I was maturing a little faster than planned, I got that feeling you only get when you’re used to watching your back.
Like someone was following me.
I played it cool, though. Worst thing to do in such a situation was to tip off the person that was following you, that you knew that they were following you. It made them act rash, and I wasn’t about rash anymore. I got in the truck, turned it on, and pulled out. A few moments later, there was a beat up two-door pick-up behind me. The windows were grimy and I couldn’t get a good look at who the person was, but they were definitely tailing.
“Well, fuck.”
I pulled out my phone and rang up Brig. He answered on the second ring.
“What’s up? You piss yourself trying to figure out how to navigate an elementary school—”
“Someone’s tailing me?”
“What?” I heard some rustling. “Who? You get a face?”
“Nah, they’re in some shitty ass truck though, nasty windows.”
“That’s not a lot to go on when everyone in town has a shitty truck, Trip.”
“Suck a dick. I’m gonna ride around and see if I shake ’em. Expect me at the bar in twenty if not. Also—send someone over to the diner. Don’t tell Misha, just make it seem like a friendly visit. Rose will be safe in school and it’s only me, Misha, and you that can pull her out of school and they ask for I.D.”
“You got it, boss. See ya soon.”
I hung up and kept an eye on whoever the hell it was that was following me. I knew they were following, because they still hadn’t ditched me in all my random driving through town, and kept following me until I pulled up to Ace of Pride. Of course, they were greeted by about a dozen or so Pride boys hanging out front. I didn’t have a problem in stepping out of Travis’ truck and joining them.
“Who the fuck is that?” Travis asked, leaning over. I shrugged. The person hadn’t yet come out.
“Fuck if I know. They trailed me from the school.”
“Did you notice them following you to the school?”
“Don’t think so, but I could be wrong if they were all over my ass after leaving. Maybe they didn’t want me seeing them on the way to school …”
I kept my eyes on the car, and the person inside still hadn’t come out. I squinted, trying to make sure that it really was just one person, before the side door opened. Everyone stood straighter, at attention, and a man came out.
He was kind of small. Like, wimpy kid that gets shoved into lockers in crappy high school movies kind of small. He didn’t seem like much, and I relaxed.
“H-hi …” My brows furrowed as he stepped closer.
“The fuck do you want?” I asked. “And how about you just stay right over there, yeah? I don’t think you need to come any closer than this.”
The man stopped. He looked at each of my boys and gulped.
“I didn’t think you’d drive over here.”
“Yeah, well, you thought wrong, didn’t you? The fuck do you want, before we decide it’s time to get a little rough with you?”
“Listen, I wouldn’t have, all right? But I need to talk to Misha. She doesn’t know—”
I strode forward, backing the guy against his truck.
“You need to talk to Misha about what?”
He swallowed.
“Rigger,” he said. “He’s looking for her.”
It took about two seconds for me to have the man’s shirt in my hands.
“You’re not talking fast enough for my tastes,” I said. “So you better start making some chatter—”
“Listen, I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you! I just don’t want her hurt!”
“Come on, Trip. Let’s take him inside and see what he’s got to say.”
Chapter Twelve
Misha
“Johnny, you’ve been here for three hours.”
“Is there a reason you’ve been here for three hours?”
“I like the diner.”
“Mmhm.”
The long-haired DeVos twin sat at one of my tables, eating through a second plate of the breakfast sampler. Where he was putting it, I had no idea, but I knew that he was stalling something fierce. At first I had just thought that he was in for breakfast and had come by to say hi. But then he’d lingered.
I didn’t have time to babysit him, however. We were slammed. I was pulling a double, and I was tired and a little down from not being able to see Rose off to her first day of school. There was something that was up, however, and I knew something was up with the way that Johnny kept checking his phone, as if he were waiting for some kind of signal.
I wasn’t going to kick him out, either way. I worked through my first shift, took a five-minute break to shove food in my mouth, and then worked through about thirty minutes of my second shift before I saw Johnny take Big Mama into the back office. They were gone for a time, and I was able to take two more orders and clear out a table before he came back around.
“Hey, Misha, we need to go.”
I looked at him incredulously, carrying a tray of dirty dishes in my hands.
“What do you mean, we need to go? You sit here all day and you don’t tell me what’s going on, and you expect me to leave in the middle of a double shift rush?” I scoffed. “Johnny, I don’t know what’s going on, but if Tripp is keeping me out of things, you guys need to settle on in or out and—”
“It’s about Jared Longman.”
The tray dropped from my hands.
“Shit!”
I scrambled to pick up the mess, but my mind was racing. Jared Longman … why was he here? What the hell did he think he was doing? Had he talked to Trip?
Trip.
Shit!
“Listen, Johnny—”
“Misha, we need to go and we need to go now.”
I frowned. “Big Mama—”
“Already knows. Come on.”
I didn’t bother clocking out. I just knew that if Jared was in town, then there was nothing good that was coming from it. I just hoped that he hadn’t caused some sort of irreparable damage by opening up his mouth.
# # #
Johnny rode me to the bar. Checking my phone when I got off, it was only a couple of hours until it would be time for Rose to come home. I wondered what she would be coming home to.
The bar was shockingly deserted, save for just the boys. All their eyes turned on me, and I had the intense sense of deja vu, as if it was the day that I had come back, rather than a few months into all of this. They were all up front, and in the center closest to the bar were Trip, Brig, and Jared. He looked worse than he usually did. He had always been a thin man, and small, and not much of a biker boy in reality, but he’d been roped into some shit with the Jackals, and they were all too big on letting go of assets.
“Misha,” he said, breathing out a very large sigh of relief as he saw me.
“Hey, Jared,” I said warily. “What are you doing here?”
“Apparently, he came to warn you,” Trip spoke up. My eyes flicked to him, and his were controlled … but I could see that something was wrong. My stomach sank at the possibilities.
“Warn me?”
Jared’s eyes flicked over to Trip, and Trip nodded.
“Tell her.”
Jared swallowed.
“Ah, yeah, well. Rigger’s put out a bounty on you. Holland’s not looking too good, and he’s been putting pressure on Holland’s old lady to pull the plug, you see. Either she does it officially, or he’ll do it unofficially.”
“He’s going to kill Holland?”
“In one way or another, yeah. Get him out of the way, solidify his hold. After your boys took his shipment of drugs—” Jared’s eyes flicked over to Trip “—people started saying that maybe they should start doing shit like Holland said they should. You remember what it was like before you left. Rigger letting all sorts of crazy shit slide—”
“What does this have to do with the bounty on me, Jared?”
“It has to do with it because with Holland legitimately out of the way and no one willing to challenge Rigger without someone that they know can handle him, people are more than willing to fall in line with what he wants—which is you back with the Jackals. You didn’t actually think he’d just forget about you? Especially if you came back here?”
“I hadn’t intended to stay.” I avoided looking at Trip; I’d never admitted that to him—that this hadn’t meant to be permanent until I realized that I couldn’t leave him again.
“Well … they found where you were. Whoever ends up bringing you back is basically set with Rigger as far as any of them are concerned.”
“So I have to leave.”
“Basically—”
“Wait a second.” Trip stepped forward, between me and Jared. “No one is fucking leaving—”
“You think that Rigger’s gonna give up his favorite club girl—”
Before anyone could stop him, Trip’s fist connected with Jared’s face, giving a sickening, crunching sound. Blood spurted everywhere from Jared’s nose, and he cried out, deeply in pain.
“Oh, shit, what the hell—”
“Misha. With me. Now.”
I didn’t have it in me to protest. I looked back at Jared, who was fairly on his own in taking care of his face. None of the boys were looking to get him anything, and it was unlikely that they were going to. I followed Trip back to his office, where he snapped the door closed.
“Trip—”
“What happened the night the Jackals took you?”
I tugged at my ear.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean—shit—what the hell do you think I mean, Misha? What happened that? What actually happened?”
I stared at him. I felt my chest tightened.
“Jared told you.”
“And now you’re gonna tell me.”
I drew in a breath.
“Trip … I was scared, okay? I found out that I was pregnant, and I looked at our life and how we were living it, and it scared me. All the partying and the fights and the shit—you don’t think about it when you’re a stupid teenager, but then there’s a baby growing in you—”
“So you turned to the Jackals to help you get out. You didn’t trust me to do the right thing. You—”
“You need to let me finish, Trip, if you want to know what happened.”
I saw the muscle in his jaw twitch, but he stopped talking. Instead, he paced, hand going through his hair.
“I was scared. I started looking up all sorts of ways to get rid of it, but I—I couldn’t. Everything always made me sick and I always thought about, well, it’s not the baby’s fault it’s there. It’s yours. Now what are you gonna do about it? I hadn’t even intended to go to the Jackals, but … I met Jared. He was in town for a funeral. I was sitting at Mama’s grave talking to her and he just came up to me. Said I was looking sad. Asked if I needed to talk. I let out everything, I didn’t know who the fuck he was until I mentioned the Pride and he freaked out. That’s when I found out. It didn’t really register with me, I didn’t think, I just knew that he didn’t wanna get caught up in Pride territory alone with your girl. Jared’s always been a scared kind of man.”
“I could tell.”
“Anyway … I told him if he helped me with the situation, I would never tell anyone he was walking around Pride territory when things were getting so tense between the two. He was willing to. He felt bad for me and he didn’t want to get his ass kicked.”
“It’d have definitely gotten kicked.”
“Trip.”
He grunted, but let me continue.
“Jared is only a year older than me, so … Our plan was kind of stupid.” I shook my head. “Looking back after everything happened, I realized it was just too much and too dumb. I wanted to make it look like some sort of home invasion or something. It couldn’t look like I had just left, but it couldn’t look like anyone specific had done it, either.”
“We assumed it was the Jackals either way.”
“Yeah, well. In hindsight I should have realized you would. I had this … brilliant idea that as long as some of the blood was mine, the DNA would show it on the off chance the police were involved. The thing about the pig blood, that was true; Jared actually does a decent bit of hunting despite being incapable of shooting an actual person. So, we spattered some of that, too, and headed out.”
“How’d you end up with Holland, then? If Jared was supposed to ride you out into the sunset?”
“It wasn’t like that, Trip. And we only got caught because Jared didn’t realize that Holland had put one of the boys on him to make sure he didn’t get into trouble. They’d been watching us the whole time, had followed me, seen me with you guys. They flanked us and rode us across the border. I knew Jared would get in trouble if it came out he was actually helping me; I nudged him in the direction of spinning some kind of tale that we fell for each other.” I rolled my eyes. “Jared was barely a Prospect. Nothing belongs to Prospects, especially not women. Holland gave him a beating for stepping out of line and told him that he could have me when he’d earned me. When I told him I was pregnant, it made him stop from passing me around in case the baby would get hurt, and over nine months I guess I grew on him. So after Rose was born, he still kept people off me. No one ever knew the real reason behind Jared trying to smuggle me out, and I’ve been with them for five years because when you’re a dumb little girl making dumb choices, you do what seems like it’s gonna save you.”
Trip was silent when I was done. When it was all out, from my mouth. It was silence that was the worst. I wanted him to say something.
“Trip—”
“Why didn’t you just try?” he asked. “Why didn’t you just try to stay here with me? We were dumb, but Misha—”
“Do you honestly think we could have raised a little girl the way things used to be, Trip?”
“Was raising her with Jackals better?”
“It wasn’t what I wanted to have happen!” I yelled. “I was going to go off, shack up with some family in the East. They didn’t talk to Daddy much, but they’re the sort that wou
ld never turn away a pregnant girl. But it would have been away from all of this! I was scared, and pregnant and was trying to do the right thing! You don’t understand, because you weren’t the one looking at five pregnancy tests after nights of parties and watching you fight people twice your size, and hearing about gun fights on the border with Jackals! You wouldn’t have understood then, just like you fucking don’t now!”