“He wasn’t my pop.”
His eyes flared for a second. “What do you mean?”
I could have shrugged it off. Said that Bomber had never acted like my dad, which was the truth, but what was the point in lying? I hadn’t come back here to withhold shit that mattered.
“Bomber wasn’t my dad.”
“The fuck are you talking about?” Wolfe ground out. His stomping feet approached and, within seconds, he was there, beside me, glowering down at me.
“I’m talking about shit that doesn’t leave this room.” My top lip curled a little. “Well, you can tell Flame and Axe, of course, but no one else. I’m Bomber’s to the rest of the MC, and that will make them accept us when—”
“There is no ‘us.’ Not yet,” Wolfe growled. “Now, what the fuck are y—?”
I reared up, my knees digging into the leather seat on either side of Dagger’s hips as I used my momentum to stick my finger in Wolfe’s chest. I prodded to punctuate each word as I declared, “There is an us. The second you accept it is the second your life gets a fuck ton easier.”
“If you think you can hold Amaryllis against me…”
Though inside, that was like he’d taken a knife to my belly, I just snorted at him. “You’re digging your own grave where she’s concerned. I don’t have to do a fucking thing to turn her against you, Wolfe. She may be five, but she’s smart. She sees shit. Just because she’s quiet, you’d be a dick to underestimate her.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” he spat, his cheeks burning with a heat that was sourced in his outrage.
“It means that you’re a dick, so you probably won’t see her for what she is—a clever little girl who’s beyond sensitive. Who sees more than you or me. She’s protective of me. You should take that into account when you talk to me like shit in her presence.”
Dagger growled, “What have you been saying in front of her, Wolfe?” And I loved him for defending me, for snarling at Wolfe and not letting him get away with his shit.
See, Wolfe and me? We were like two rabid pit bulls shoved together in a ring. Just before we killed each other, we’d stop to fuck, but we were two Alphas, always butting heads. Flame, Axe, and Dagger were no less Alpha than us, but for some reason, we just never argued as much.
I spent half my time wanting to throat punch Wolfe, and the other half, wanting to kiss that beautiful mouth of his. The others? I felt like I could surgically attach myself to them and never want to hurt them. That wasn’t to say they didn’t get my back up from time to time, but they were the peace in my endless war with Wolfe, who couldn’t seem to accept that I was theirs, not just his.
It was a war he was foolish to think he could ever win.
Wolfe’s jaw tensed at Dagger’s anger. “Nothing,” he bit off. “I didn’t say shit.”
I sniffed. “And what was that yesterday in the kitchen?”
“I was just saying it how it is,” he replied, with that irritating as fuck smirk on his face. The one that made me want to smack it off him.
“What? That I’m a lazy bitch?”
Dagger’s eyes flashed. “Baby, you’re many things, but lazy ain’t one of them.”
“Well, apparently traveling as much as we did and in less than three days with no fucking sleep makes me a lazy bitch for taking some time to get over the journey these past few days.”
“Women help out in the kitchen,” was all Wolfe said.
My brow puckered. “I was helping out in there, you dumbass. Why the fuck do you think I was in there? Having fun? Who has fun in the fucking kitchen?”
He frowned. “What?”
“Which part didn’t you understand?” I sneered.
“You were just sitting at the table when I came in.”
“After I’d been helping Dorie make breakfast sandwiches for everyone.”
Wolfe’s mouth softened. “Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh. I’m not lazy, Wolfe. Never have been and never will be, and you accusing me of that didn’t sit well with me or with Amaryllis. The only reason I didn’t lay into you was because she was there. I don’t want her to see us arguing. But if you talk to me like that in front of the rest of the MC again, I’ll be in your face faster than a rash follows poison oak.”
“That sounds like a threat.”
I snorted. “Your ears are working. That’s something.”
Dagger snickered, and when I shot him a triumphant grin, he patted my ass again. “Ignore Wolfe, baby. He’s got a burr up his ass where you’re concerned.” Wolfe growled at that, but Dagger ignored him. “Now, what’s this about Bomber?”
“I needed to take a blood test.”
He blinked. “So?”
I shrugged. “When I went to my first check-up for Amaryllis, I had to pee in a cup and bleed out for their tests.” When he stiffened, I squeezed his shoulder. “All routine stuff, baby, you don’t need to worry.
“Anyway, when the results came back, there was something weird with my blood work. There was nothing wrong, and it turned out to be something funky with the lab they used, but because there were concerns, we had to get access to my medical records. My mom and dad’s too.” That had been a nightmare considering we were on the run and living under false identities… Ryan had shed a shit ton of cash because of that fuck up.
“So?” he repeated, evidently not getting where I was heading with this.
“My mom and I share the same blood type. AB. My biological father would have to have A, B, or AB type blood.”
His eyes widened, and he shot Wolfe a concerned look. “And Bomber didn’t?”
“Nope. He was O type.”
Wolfe’s jaw tightened and, even though I wasn’t unaccustomed to violence and was sure as fuck no shrinking violet, the slamming of his hand against the desk was so loud and so unexpected that it had me jumping in place.
“Son of a bitch,” he ground out.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Think you mean daughter of a bitch.”
Wolfe scowled at me. “Not you, him. That motherfucker.”
“What is it? What’s wrong?” I demanded.
When he just turned his back on me and stared out the window, I frowned at him then shot Dagger a look. He winced. “It just makes sense is all, Lucie,” he explained, his tone grave.
“Why?”
“Well, the way he cut you out. The way he treated you. The—” Dagger blew out a sharp breath. “He didn’t leave you anything in his will.”
I shrugged. “I didn’t expect him to. He hated me. I think he always hated me.”
Wolfe’s voice was low, seething with rage and disgust as he twisted around to stare at me. “Baby—” Just when my heart felt like it was going to melt at that, his first endearment to me in years, he broke it when he continued, “I think Bomber killed your mom.”
4
Wolfe
“What the hell are you talking about?”
I couldn’t blame Lucie for being confused. Even though I knew more than she did, I was confused too.
We’d been raised with the knowledge that Bomber had adored his woman so fucking much, he would take no other. His house in town was like a shrine to her, and the only women he let near him were sweetbutts. The second any bitch tried to put her claws in him, that chick had to haul ass or be gutted—Bomber wasn’t exactly a gentleman.
As I looked out onto the yard outside my office window, the view gave me a prime shot at the gates. I was addicted to watching those gates, had been since I’d watched Lucie walk through them, taking my fucking heart with her. And now she was back? Readjusting to having that heart back was hard going.
Scraping my hand across my jaw, I savored the rasp of my stubble as it eased the itch because I needed to shave, and turned away from the gate because my demons had returned home and I didn’t have a fucking clue what to do with them.
“He told me something when he was in the hospital,” I started gruffly when I turned around to face her.
“What?” she demande
d. “Something about my mom?”
“It didn’t make sense at the time. But he asked me to get Flame to burn down the house.”
Her eyes widened. “The townhouse is burned down?”
“Yeah. We did it after his wake.” I reached up and rubbed the back of my neck. “He was talking about hiding something, but he wasn’t making much sense.”
“Those last few days, Luce, he was delirious. It was a wonder he lived as long as he did. Shot in the gut like that?” Dagger rocked his head from side to side. “He was hopped up on meds when he wasn’t unconscious.”
She blinked at him, then stared up at me. “I hope he suffered,” was all she said, and though I wanted to wince, wanted to tell her not to say shit like that about the Prez of this club, I couldn’t reprimand her. Not when Bomber had treated her the way he had.
“He did,” I told her softly.
“What was he mumbling?”
“Like I said, about hiding shit.” Blowing out a breath, I admitted, “I thought he was talking to your mom at first. He kept calling out her name, then he’d call her a bitch for leaving him. And, this is the truth, ‘for making me do it.’”
Her nostrils flared. “Why burn down the house? You think he buried her body in the walls or something? Were any bones discovered at the property or in the wreckage?”
I shrugged. “He warned us about the bones, said it was an enemy. He told us to pay off the cops, and we did. Your mom… he always just said she ran off. Didn’t he talk about her to you?”
“No. Why would he? She ran off. That had to sting his pride and he spent most of his time pissed at me, I wasn’t about to make him even angrier. It didn’t even matter because I remembered nothing about her anyway.”
And she’d never asked either. At least not us, and we were the ones she asked everything. Fuck, we’d even had to talk to her about sex and periods—information Axe’s mom had given us to prepare her for what was about to happen.
That had not been a fun conversation.
To this day, I wasn’t sure who’d been more mortified. Her or us. Fuck, yeah, now I thought about it—us. The guys who’d killed at eighteen to get in as prospects had been mumbling about periods and menstruation. Knowing Lucie, she’d probably already Googled that shit and had made us discuss it just to embarrass the fuck out of us.
Now that I thought about it…
Fuck, I bet she had.
Shame I couldn’t call her out on that right this second.
Instead, I just told her, “She supposedly ran off around your fourth birthday. Maybe she never did. Maybe he found out you weren’t his biologically.”
A grunt escaped her. “It would make sense, considering he’d never have let her go without chasing her down, bringing her back here, and making her life fucking miserable.”
I shrugged. “Wasn’t like we could argue when he didn’t go after her. His bitch, his wishes.” I cut Dagger a look and saw his concerned gaze was focused on her. “We all thought it was weird, but we weren’t about to argue. Not with Bomber.” Who put the psycho in psychopath.
Her jaw flexed at my statement, but I wasn’t about to change it. Whether or not she liked being called a bitch was tough shit. She knew how it rolled in this world. Trouble was, Ryan had probably been the softest of us all. Not that he’d been a pansy ass or anything like that, but he’d been raised by non-bikers. People who didn’t understand how things worked.
Though he’d wifed her, he probably hadn’t called her his old lady.
“I wonder who your pop is,” Dagger mused, and I shot him a look.
“Really? That’s where you’re taking this conversation?”
He shrugged. “What else is there to wonder about? I mean, fuck. If he killed his wife, they’re both dead, it’s not like we can get justice for Maria post-mortem.”
“I hate that you’re right,” Lucie whispered, and there was such starkness in her eyes that it hurt me. Literally fucking hurt me. Worse than that time I’d had a bar stool wrapped around my goddamn head.
I blew out a breath as the desire to comfort her hit me just as hard as that stool. Lucie had always called to me in ways no other woman had. Back when she’d been seventeen, that had felt right. After? It had felt like I’d been condemned to a life sentence. Loving a manipulative, lying bitch who’d tossed over the MC for some cash?
A living nightmare.
It was hard, but my free will was snatched from me by this conversation. I’d never anticipated talking to her about this today. I’d wanted to discuss how Amaryllis was ignoring me, but even then, it wouldn’t have been much of a conversation. I knew, in my heart of hearts, Lucie wouldn’t have said shit to turn Amaryllis against me.
A woman who’d introduced her daughter to four men as her ‘daddies’ wouldn’t do that. All along, Lucie had been working up to bringing Amaryllis back, to returning her to the fold.
Trouble was, as Prez, I couldn’t give her what she wanted.
I couldn’t share my old lady. If I did, then that would undermine me to the men. But my brothers deserved her just as much, if not more, than I did.
Pressing a hand to her shoulder, I stepped closer and was stunned when she snapped her arms out, curved them around my waist, and burrowed into my embrace. It was kind of awkward considering she was straddling Dagger like she was about to give him a lap dance, but then, was it really?
We’d gone past awkward a long time ago, hadn’t we?
I mean, hell. I’d seen my brothers’ cocks so many times that I pretty much knew them like I knew my own. Not only because we’d gotten into the habit of fucking Lucie as a group except for the first time she’d seduced us all individually, but because after she’d gone, we’d tried to replace her, to replace those feelings, that euphoria of sharing a bitch, but it hadn’t worked.
No woman could compare to Lucifer Steeler.
I glanced at Dagger and saw his jaw flexing as he studied Lucie. Her distress was hitting us both, but the worse thing was, everything was in the past. There wasn’t a fucking thing we could do to help her. Shit, if Bomber was still alive, we couldn’t do shit either. Bomber was our Prez, which meant he had carte blanche to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted.
Even if that meant offing his old lady who’d cheated on him and had been lying to him about his daughter for years.
Technically, even the Prez was supposed to get a vote from his council when it came to murder. Mostly because we had to be prepared to deal with any backlash from a murder investigation. Also, we dealt with getting rid of bodies on the regular—that wasn’t something the council handled on their own. Once you had power in the MC, dirtying your hands died a death.
But Bomber always had been a wild card, and it was something we all just dealt with because he was one of the Originals. The founding member who’d herded five other brothers together to form the MC back in the day, before spearheading it into the brotherhood it was today.
Because he was a nutcase, there were some messed up rules that, in my time as Prez, I intended to eradicate. Like the way prospects got in by making a kill for the MC. Sure, after you were tied to the Rebels’ for eternity, I had no issue with getting brothers in on murder-for-hire jobs—it was how we’d made our money all these years. But just to get in as prospect? Nah. That was hardcore, but then, that was how Bomber had always rolled.
I couldn’t stop myself from running my hand over her hair, tangling my fingers in the silken locks that I’d missed seeing mussing up my pillows. Shit, you knew you were smitten over a bitch when you even missed all the fucking hair that got clogged in the goddamn drain, or missed seeing her panties sharing space with your laundry.
Christ, how had I lived without her?
My eyes closed of their own volition as need and want and love for her rammed its way home inside me. Like a punch to the gut, I was reminded of all the crazy that Lucie brought to my world. My days had never been predictable when she was around, had never been boring or bland when she was there
to fuck shit up for me.
She was my personal Pandora, except I welcomed the chaos, and there was no point in fighting that. No point at all.
“Lucie, baby,” Dagger rasped, when she just sat there shivering on his lap, her arms around me.
We both knew she was crying, but Lucie just didn’t cry. That wasn’t something that was supposed to be in her repertoire, but it figured that after these past couple of months, this news was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.
At that moment, I really wanted Ryan to be here. But he’d gone now, and he’d left Lucie in our care.
Our shitty care.
Fuck, if there was ever a time in my life I’d had to man up, it was now. Today.
I had a kid, and her mother needed me. Even though she gave off the impression she needed no one, Lucie was one of the loneliest people I’d ever known.
Unable to stop myself, I dropped my head and pressed a kiss to her crown.
“Everything will be okay, baby,” I rasped.
“You can’t say that,” she whispered. “My entire life is a lie.”
“No. Not all of it. Just some.” I blew out a breath. “And that doesn’t define you either. You’re Lucifer. Doesn’t matter what your last name is, you were born to raise hell, and that’s exactly what you’re going to do.”
That had her lifting her head so she could look up at me. “The ghost guns?”
Amused that she’d known exactly where my mind was running, I shrugged. “I’m game. I just need to put it to a vote.”
Her eyelashes were spiky with tears, but she nodded solemnly at my words. “I want to pull my weight. I’m not lazy, Wolfe.”
Shit, I could be a mean motherfucker sometimes. I’d known that was one of her weaknesses, yet I’d used it anyway like the cunt I was. Bomber had always made a big deal about how she never pulled her weight, how she was a noose around his neck.
Jackass.
“I know, baby,” I told her on a sigh. “I’m a mean bastard.”
That had a startled laugh bursting from her. “Well, at least you can admit it.”
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