Irrevocable (The Exiled Eight MC Book 1)

by Addison Jane

  He pulled back, his breathing heavy and his forehead pressed against mine. “I’d rather go to fucking jail than know he used you like that. To know he fucking touched you,” Ripley murmured, with a slight catch. He looked me directly in the eyes. He needed me to assure him that I didn’t do it, that his freedom wasn’t the result of me screwing Caleb. He needed that reassurance, and I couldn’t fucking give it to him. And it killed me.

  I couldn’t risk him asking more questions. I needed to protect them. Ripley especially because I’d already used my get-out-of-jail card, so if I wasn’t careful and he lost his shit again, that was it.

  When I didn’t respond, he slammed his palm against the wall right beside my head. “Fucking tell me, Dakota!”

  The wall shook, and I took in a sharp breath. My lips still stayed pressed tightly together even as tears dripped onto my cheeks.

  He started to back away, and I took a step forward to go after him, but he held up his hand, forcing me to stop. “Don’t… I just fucking can’t right now.” He was looking at me in a way I’d never seen before, shaking his head like he didn’t want to believe it was true.

  It wasn’t!

  He turned and threw the front door open, not even bothering to look back as he stomped outside. The wind rushed in, a cool breeze attacking my bare arms. With tears slipping silently down my cheeks, I rushed forward and used my shoulder to push it closed. The heavy wooden beast slammed shut at my back, the force vibrating through my body as I sunk to the floor.

  I felt angry, horny, and fucking confused.

  None of which were fun on their own, let alone together.

  No matter how I fought him, Rip didn’t play fair, he played dirty, and I needed to remember that. Especially given I had no idea what I was going to do yet. I was going into this blind and fucking confused.

  I wouldn’t let Caleb hurt the people I loved. I wouldn’t let him destroy Ripley. And I wasn’t going to give him a reason to go after my family either.

  I needed to protect them all.

  But in the process, I might just destroy myself.

  I needed to figure out a way to survive—and quick.

  Fuck my life.

  RIPLEY

  Being back in Vegas at least dulled the itch I had on my trigger finger. But only slightly. Caleb was a dead man, that was already something I knew for sure. I’d get my hands on him eventually, and he would regret coming after the club.

  “You look like fucking shit,” my always fucking honest father commented dryly, standing in the doorway to my room as he watched me pack up all my tools. I needed to get outside to my shed and focus my thoughts on something else.

  “You walk all the way up here just to tell me that?”

  He’d been speaking to the company’s lawyer downstairs when I arrived. I thought I’d be able to get in and out without having to hear his opinion on shit, but I should have known better.

  “We got back a couple hours ago, where have you been?”

  I’d chosen not to ride back to Vegas with Dad and Strip, I needed my space and the air to clear my head. Thankfully, that was something he understood pretty damn well so they’d let me be.

  “I had to go to the site and pick up some of my tools,” I muttered, trying to focus on placing one thing into the case after another and trying to fit each chisel piece into its rightful place like a damn puzzle. One that my brain couldn’t fucking compute today.

  “Hey,” Dad snapped, making me freeze. “The fuck is going on with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t make me ask again.”

  I spun around, narrowing my eyes at my father who glared right back at me just as fiercely. There was a reason Huntsman was in the position he was in, and there was a reason why no one talked back to him or questioned him about anything. Because he was fucking scary at times. Being his son wasn’t any kind of exception, if anything, he came down on Drake and me a lot worse than the other men because we weren’t just representing the club, we were representing him—his blood, his parenting.

  He let us know when he was proud of us, but he also let us know when he was pissed the fuck off. And he also wasn’t above laying us out if we disrespected him. That was a lesson both Drake and I had learned the hard way.

  “This about this shit with Dakota, right?” he guessed when after a few moments of silence, I still hadn’t spoken. “So, what the hell did you do?”

  I rubbed my palm over the knuckles of my right hand. The click they released made me feel only slightly better, that teamed with the fact there was nothing really here to punch, meant I had to actually face my problems. “I fucked her.”

  The words tasted like poison, and I instantly wanted to take them back. I knew it was more than that. Which is why the last conversation we’d had was still stirring in my gut.

  He leaned back against the doorframe. “You fucked her.”

  “Ain’t that what I said?”

  “Yeah, but it’s what you aren’t saying that has me fucking worried,” he growled sharply, not about to let me get away with avoiding this one. Dakota joined the family at the same time Meyah had, by default. They kind of came as a package deal I guess you could say. My dad cared for her like another daughter, and Drake treated her like a sister. I, on the other hand, saw her far differently.

  “So basically, you screwed her and now you’re starting to have feelings for her, and you have no idea what the fuck to do with them.”

  That was the absolute fucking truth. Every part of me wanted to know Dakota more. I wanted to know what made her the woman she was, what she liked and disliked, and try to figure out what the hell it was about her that dragged me in.

  At first, it was the way she wasn’t afraid to stand up against me. That made me even more determined to bend her, to see if I could get her underneath me. Maybe that was all ego, maybe it was fucking arrogant, but that was where it started, and that was definitely not where it ended. When you meet the person whose demons are the same as yours, it’s a strange feeling and a weird emotion surfaces that you can’t explain. It’s like you can see that other person’s destruction. The cracks that run through them, the pain that radiates out but that not just anyone can see because you’ve spent so long disguising it. All that, it’s all on show. And you think you look like a broken piece of glass, all jagged edges, sharp and unwelcoming with pieces missing.

  Then you realize so are they, and they’re beautiful as fucking hell. And they get it. They get the need to hide, the need to protect yourself, and the way you sometimes struggle to just show your face to the world.

  They get it.

  She fucking gets it.

  And holy fuck did it scare the ever-loving shit out of me.

  “Love isn’t a weakness, Ripley. We’ve had this conversation before.”

  My dad knew me better than almost everyone else—except for maybe Drake. He knew my reasons for the way that I am. I’d made the decision a long time ago that I would never let someone get that close, that I would never let myself get into a position where I could have another woman I loved ripped away from me within the short space of a breath. I made a conscious decision not to allow them the opportunity to destroy me. Or to ever put someone I cared about in a position where I could destroy them.

  “Yeah, and I don’t fucking want to have it again.” Every single fucking time it came back to one thing—Mom. I watched her live through hell. I watched her cry every day. I watched her break down until she was a shell of fucking nothing.

  I still fucking loved her.

  I loved her when she ignored me.

  I loved her when she told me she hated being near me.

  I loved her when she blamed me for her hell.

  And I fucking prayed every single day that things would get better and she would be happy. That maybe one day I would get a mother who would kiss me goodnight or pat me on the back and tell me I’d done a good job.

  “I’m done with this conversation,” I snapped, turni
ng my back on my dad. A move that I should have known he would have never let me get away with. A loud bang had me freezing.

  “Turn your ass back around and stop running from your problems.”

  I ground my teeth together as I turned around. His fist was still pressed hard against my wall, and I knew that shit must have hurt like fucking hell.

  “You’re gonna listen to what I have to say.”

  “I’ve heard it before.”

  “Well, then you can hear it one more fucking time, and this time fucking listen to what I’m telling you because one day, whether it’s right now or in the future, someone’s gonna come along that’s perfect for you. Goddammit, Rip, don’t screw it up. Because if you ignore the way you feel about that person, you’re gonna lose something that could be fucking amazing, and this time it will be all on you.”

  I’d heard the speech before. Usually, it came on the day we went to visit my mom. My dad was adamant that we did, even though I knew Drake hated it. He and I saw the situation differently. He blamed her for what happened, I blamed everyone else.

  “What if Dakota is it? What if she’s the one?” he continued to push, striking all the right buttons to get a response.

  “What do you want me to say?” I asked in frustration, throwing my hands in the air. “Yeah, for a moment maybe she started to change my mind. Maybe there was a part of me considering something different. But you know what? This is exactly what I knew would happen.”

  “And what exactly was that?” Dad asked, seeming to be unfazed by the temper tantrum that was growing.

  “This,” I fumed, getting more and more frustrated by the minute, feeling my heart start to ache in my chest, and it wasn’t a feeling I liked. It was one I’d actually spent years trying to avoid. An Old Lady was something I never wanted, something I never imaged I’d ever even craved.

  “We are like a fucking bomb ready to go off. I’m trying to protect her, and in the process getting my ass thrown in a jail cell,” I explained, stomping back and forth across my bedroom floor. “And then Dakota thinks she needs to do the same.” I rubbed my hand over my face and turned back to my toolbox, snapping it shut. “I don’t know wh—”

  “Rip,” he cut in, his tone softening just a little. This was my dad, this wasn’t the MC President. This was the guy who raised me, who knew when I was about to lose my shit and when I wasn’t in control.

  I slammed my palm against my desk. “He made it sound like she’d fucked him to get me out of there,” I finally admitted, leaning my head back and squeezing my eyes tightly shut. “Did she fuck him or did she not fuck him? I don’t know! But what I do know is that she did whatever the hell she did for me, and it hurt her. She was fucking broken, and she was broken because she chose to protect me.”

  “But she didn’t do it to try and hurt you,” Dad urged, shaking his head like he was struggling. “How many women do you think would go to the lengths she did, whatever they fucking were, to get someone they care about out of jail? How many women do you know who would fight that hard?”

  The truth was, sure as hell not any of the other women I’d stuck my dick in.

  But did that mean it fucking made sense?

  No.

  “Where do you draw the line?” I threw back. “Where do you say enough is enough? Does she have to give up her freedom next? Maybe her life?”

  The look in his eyes was hard. I knew this was a difficult subject for him to approach. But he wasn’t about to let me walk away until I heard what he had to say. “When you find the one you want to be with, there will never be an ‘enough is enough.’ There will never be a step too far when it comes to protecting them.” His words were beginning to make some sense, and the fog around me was starting to clear. “You tell me, how far would you go to protect her? What would you risk to make sure Dakota was safe and happy?”

  It wasn’t a hard question to answer, but it was having to acknowledge the fact that I felt a certain way I was struggling with.

  Dakota had been around for a while now. And while during that time, we’d argued, we’d fought, we’d driven each other fucking crazy, I didn’t realize just how fucking much I loved that.

  The truth was, I’d risk everything. I’d go to hell and back happily if it meant she didn’t have to.

  Dad was right, I don’t think enough would ever be enough. Even if she decided she never wanted anything to do with me, I’d still fucking fight for her.

  Dad scratched his hand over his beard—it was something he did when something weighed heavy on his mind. So, when I didn’t answer him right away, I was surprised when he started to talk about Mom.

  “When your mom and I got married, it was basically just a business agreement. We’d known each other for a long time, but we’d never been friends, and there sure as hell was never a connection between us.” He cleared his throat, and my body froze as it absorbed his words. “But the more I saw her hurting, and the more I saw her fucking father force her through hell, the more I wanted to fight for her, the more I wanted to protect her, and the more I fell in love.”

  I swallowed the hard lump that formed in my throat.

  His voice was raspy and thick. There were men out there who would tell you my father had no emotions. That, because of the things he’d done in his life, he wasn’t capable of feeling. But the honest fucking truth is that all you had to do was listen to him talk about my mom, and you’d see exactly the kind of man he was and just how deep his fucking emotions ran.

  Dad didn’t like to talk about Mom. I knew it hurt him still to this day that he couldn’t do enough to help her, and that he allowed things to get as bad as they did. He hated that he didn’t have the power back then to change things because the laws were the laws, and he had to respect the older members of the club.

  He felt responsible for the impact it had on Drake and me too. But even though the situation had been crap, he was an amazing fucking father.

  “You know, sometimes it takes seeing a person hurting for us to realize that we would do anything to protect them from that pain.”

  A chill ran through me. I hated that he was fucking right.

  Seeing Dakota’s blood on my hand had set me off. I wanted to find the bastard who’d hurt her and kill him, and on top of that, I wanted to take her and hide her God knows where until I did just that, so I knew she couldn’t be hurt again. My blood was still boiling, but now, the lid had popped off and things had escalated to a whole new level. I tried to ignore the fact that my father knew me so well, and he was hitting every nail on the damn head. He fucking knew it too.

  “Are we done here?”

  I could tell he wanted to talk more. He wanted to push harder because my father was an asshole, but he was an asshole who cared enough about his kids to dig into the places that neither of us liked to visit in order to hopefully help them through their problems.

  He took a deep breath and nodded, stepping to the side just as I grabbed my tool case tightly in my hand. I needed to work on something, I needed to attack something with my hands.

  Goddammit, I hated when he was right.

  DAKOTA

  “Flour. One cup…”

  “Dakota!” Meyah’s cheerful voice called from the front door.

  I huffed a breath of air upward trying to magically scratch the itch on the end of my nose, knowing that if I had to do it with my fingers, I was going to end up looking like I’d snorted an illegal substance.

  I hadn’t resorted to that yet, but I wasn’t crossing it off as an option.

  “I’m in the kitchen,” I finally managed to call back, instantly wondering why, when there was only half a wall between my kitchen and the front door, and Meyah had already appeared under the weird and outdated archway opening.

  “Ham said you called in sic—” The smile dropped from her face and her eyes instantly grew slightly wider as she took in the mess. Her mouth did the same when she finally spotted the fifteen to twenty Tupperware containers which were stacked on my tiny
kitchen table with various baked goods inside. And those didn't even include the twenty-four muffins I had in the oven and the fourth batch I had in my bowl.

  I had called in sick.

  It had been about five days since shit went down, and I’d avoided everyone since then. Meyah, Ham, Austin, Mom, and even Amelia when she left a voicemail from Evie saying how much she missed me.

  She eyed me carefully as she slowly bent down and placed the grocery bag she was carrying on the ground. “You’re baking. What’s wrong?”

  I tried to ignore the fact that she knew me so well and dumped the perfectly measured cup of flour into the sieve that was floating above my bowl. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I murmured back. My eyes scanned over the recipe in the well-worn book which was off to the side. “Can you pass me the milk, please?”

  She didn’t even question me, dumping her handbag in the small amount of free space on the counter before pulling the fridge open and grabbing the small bottle of milk. “Don’t bullshit me, Dakota.” I reached for the bottle, but she snatched it away, holding it just out of reach and forcing me to actually look directly into her eyes.

  The fucking sneaky bitch.

  I threw my hands up dramatically, not even caring that the white powder left on my hands puffed up into the air. “Can I have the milk, please?”

  “You only bake when you’re stressed, or sad, or angry,” she continued, ignoring my pleading tone. Usually, she would have gotten a kick out of me using the magic ‘fucking’ word, but she was far too focused on the bowl of blueberry muffins I was trying to fucking make.

  “I bake whenever I damn well feel like it,” I tried to correct her. Abandoning the milk, I searched for the other wet ingredients. “I had a hankering for some fresh and fruity muffins. So, sue me.” I was trying to be Betty Crocker, but it was all coming out as Betty Crock-of-shit.