All Sinner No Saint

by Serena Akeroyd

  That he’d befriended Ryan came as a huge surprise.

  “I’m building up to it,” was how Dagger replied to Flame’s question.

  Flame, of course, made a disgusted noise. “Why? She ain’t a DEA agent. You don’t have to think before you speak. Fuck, you can even swear. Lucie said she knows not to copy what we say.”

  My lips quivered as I recalled that conversation. Flame had tried, I had to give him that, but he’d lasted about a minute before dropping F-bombs here and there.

  Dagger grunted. “Just give me time.”

  “How much time? She’ll be eighteen soon.”

  Laughing, I patted Flame’s knee. “Don’t worry, love. There’s no rush.”

  “Sure there is,” Flame grumbled. “She needs us all around her. Especially if you’re taking her to live elsewhere.”

  My nose crinkled at that. “You’re coming with me.”

  Dagger cleared his throat, but I knew he did that only to hide his laugh. “We are, huh?”

  I tilted my face to the side. I could only see part of his expression, thanks to the light on the back wall, but I shrugged. “Of course. You didn’t think I was moving away, did you?”

  “Well, you should probably have led with that, Luce,” Flame groused, and I squeezed his leg again.

  “Sorry. I thought the whole ‘you’re mine and I’m not going anywhere’ was clue enough.”

  He grunted. “Maybe a man likes things clarified.”

  “Maybe a woman doesn’t like repeating herself,” I retorted, twisting around to glower at him. “You got a problem with moving out?”

  “Nah.”

  “Well, then why you arguing?”

  “Just making a point.”

  “Your point sucks,” I grumbled. “Anyway, where the hell do you think we’d sleep here?”

  Flame rubbed his chin. “I was thinking about that today.”

  Dagger sighed, relaxing deeper into the swaying bench seat. “Me too.”

  “Even when people know, Wolfe will want to keep things quiet—” I started.

  “You okay with that?” Dagger asked.

  “Honestly? No. But I don’t care. I’m just not going to keep shit a secret. I’m discreet by nature—”

  “Since fucking when?” Flame said around a hoot.

  I glowered at him. “Since always.”

  He gaped at me. “You were almost expelled four times, Lucie. You threw a Molotov cocktail at your teacher’s car. You almost set fire to the clubhouse that time you were messing around with that shit your pop used to make his toys. And you stole his bike and got brought home by six cops because it took that many to get you to stop.”

  My nose wrinkled. “I’m a mom now.”

  “Since when did becoming a mother change your DNA?”

  I grunted at the new voice. “What is it with you guys? Just sneaking up on people is rude.”

  Wolfe snorted. “Because we care so much about being rude. What’s this about moving out?”

  “You were listening in?”

  He shrugged. “Should have checked who was sitting out here before you started opening your mouth.”

  Nostrils flaring, I hissed, “You’re all impossible.”

  “And we’re all yours.” His smile was toothy. “Ain’t you glad you came home?”

  My heart almost came to a stop at his words. Did that mean he was coming around to my way of thinking?

  Instead of pouncing on his comment, I told him, “Most of the time.” Then I huffed. “But don’t forget, I’m the one who knows all your weaknesses,” I finished smugly, amused when he just rolled his eyes at my threat. A threat he had to know wasn’t just me mouthing off.

  “Why did you guys come out here anyway? I was enjoying some peace and fucking quiet,” was all Wolfe said.

  “I wanted to talk to Lucie,” Dagger explained softly, and I turned to look at him and saw his head was resting back against the seat.

  “About?”

  “About when she left.”

  Wolfe grunted, but he didn’t get up and leave, which I half-expected, to be honest. Wolfe wasn’t one to give apologies, and today had already come as a huge surprise. I’d never expected what had gone down today to go down period. At least, not until he opened up to me some more. Sex definitely hadn’t been on the cards, but I couldn’t regret it. Wouldn’t. Not when I’d been craving them and missing them for as long as I had.

  Was he sitting outside, on his lonesome, when there was a party going down just a few feet away because he was regretting what we’d done?

  It was hard to imagine Wolfe regretting anything.

  He tended to do what he wanted, when he wanted. He was an asshole like that. Damn his sexy hide.

  “Pepper found the drugs in your room. When Bomber confronted you, you didn’t deny you’d taken them. Just got into a fight with him. Then he exiled you,” Wolfe growled. “That was pretty much how it went down as far as I remember.”

  I blinked. “I totally did deny I’d taken the drugs.”

  “You didn’t, Luce,” Flame replied, and his voice was soft, loaded with regret.

  I cut Dagger a look, but he was shaking his head too. “You didn’t,” he confirmed. “We were all waiting on you to deny it, then you didn’t, and when he told you to get out, you did.”

  “And you didn’t follow,” I replied with a snarl, furiously thinking back and trying to recall whether they were speaking true or not. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember. That day wasn’t a blank spot in my mind, but it was clouded over with heartbreak and loss. So much so that the details were beyond hazy when I needed them to be crystal clear.

  “No. Because you were a traitor and we were loyal to our Prez.” Floorboards creaked as Wolfe moved, and in the shadows, I saw him appear from the gloom.

  Christ, it was spooky how I saw his eyes first, and it reminded me too much of coming across a wolf in the wild. Shit, a wild wolf might show someone more pity than my Wolfe. I knew he was a killer, knew what he and the rest of my men were capable of, and I loved them anyway.

  “You should have known I didn’t do it.” My eyes loaded with tears. “You knew how I was with him. I was always causing trouble, always getting into fights with him. I was a stupid attention seeker—”

  “And taking the drugs fit the fucking pattern, Luce,” Wolfe ground out. “But this time, shit had deeper consequences. The drugs weren’t ours, were they? You got us into a whole heap of shit with the cartel we were running them for.”

  “It wasn’t until later, and I’m talking years on, that I started to think you hadn’t,” Dagger told me, and by his tone, I got the feeling he was trying to reassure me. It didn’t work.

  “Thanks, I think,” I muttered unhappily.

  Flame lifted his arm and curved it around my shoulders. “I didn’t care if you’d done it or not, Lucie. I just missed you and didn’t care what you’d done.”

  “You’re not making shit any better, Flame,” Wolfe retorted, and I had to withhold my laugh.

  He wasn’t wrong, but nor was he right.

  Somehow, Flame’s earnestness was all the more touching because I knew how he rolled. The pyromaniac didn’t even speak to many people, and when he did, it wasn’t like he was trying to be eloquent. He didn’t give a fuck about what anyone thought of him, and yet, here he was, trying to make me feel better.

  He couldn’t. Not where this topic was concerned. But hell, I’d been set up with the drugs by my dad who, biological or not, had not only sucked at fatherhood, but who, apparently, had murdered my mother and had my men potentially burn any evidence down after he died too.

  Yeah, none of this was going to make me feel better, and we weren’t even talking all that much about the situation itself.

  One day, I’d come home with Ryan after an afternoon at the mall. It had been his turn to ‘guard’ me because my father didn’t trust me not to get into trouble—the dumbass didn’t realize I got into even worse shit with my guys around me. But, by t
hat point, there’d been some kind of search in the clubhouse for a kilo package of cocaine that had gone missing.

  It had been in my bedroom, tucked underneath my bed—because that was the best hiding place, right?

  Wolfe had hauled me into Dad’s office the second I’d made it inside the clubhouse where Bomber had proceeded to rail me.

  Truth was, for the first time in my life, I’d been terrified. There hadn’t been an ounce of pity in his face. I was used to that, but in this situation, I knew brothers were killed for less. Fuck, if I’d been a brother, they’d have dragged me to The Pit, a room in the clubhouse I wasn’t supposed to know about, killed me, and fed me to the pigs at the farm the MC frequented to dispose of their little ‘accidents.’

  That I’d been exiled was a blessing.

  That Ryan had been allowed to leave with me? Well, I wasn’t sure why, because my father had been more than capable of making sure he stayed—

  Wait.

  My throat felt tight as I whispered, “Why did my dad let Ryan leave with me?”

  Flame shrugged. “Why wouldn’t he?”

  I twisted in my seat to gape at him. “You’re kidding me, right? You’re a Rebel until you die, Flame. But he let Ryan leave. Why?”

  “To keep you safe, Lucie. You were still his daughter—”

  At the face Flame pulled, I realized he’d just heard the mistake he’d made. “Yeah, we both know that totally makes sense,” I scoffed. “He knew I wasn’t his, so he didn’t have to go gentle with me. But he did, he assured my safety by letting Ryan go with me. Why?”

  What happened, Ryan?

  Of course, he didn’t answer. He never did. He only popped up at frustrating moments to scare the shit out of me and make me think I was going crazy.

  Wolfe’s brow puckered, as he slowly stated, “I have to admit, I never really thought about it. I was too busy getting high and drunk and fucking anything that moved in the aftermath.”

  I scowled at him. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” That Wolfe had sunk to taking drugs blew my goddamn mind. The sex? Hell, I wasn’t stupid. I didn’t even want to know where they’d been. It was why I’d asked if they were clean though. Man whores.

  “Yeah, actually, it is,” he rumbled. “Any other traitorous bitch, I’d have celebrated instead of trying to forget every fucking day, until I began waking up and you weren’t the first thing on my goddamn mind.”

  As I gaped at him, I processed that, for Wolfe, that was probably one of the most romantic things I’d ever hear spill from his lips.

  My mouth quivered as I dug my nails into my upper thighs, needing to ground myself before I flung myself at him and made him aware of what his words did to me.

  Flame rasped, “We were miserable for a long time, Lucie.”

  “Yeah,” Dagger inserted gruffly. “Things were shit. And then dickface over there got married to that bitch and shit derailed even faster.”

  Wolfe flipped him the bird before he squatted down in front of me. With his back to the railing, he sat with his legs sprawled flat in front of him. “You’re right, Lucie. Bomber would never have let Kid go if he didn’t want him to.”

  “But, why? I thought everyone loved Ryan?” I queried, trying to hide from how much it hurt to hear his road name.

  “Yeah, I thought so too,” Flame replied, and suddenly, the lighter was out and the hiss and spit of it as he brought it to life interrupted the suddenly heavy silence.

  “We might never find out the reason, guys,” Dagger said softly. “Both of them are dead and the dead don’t talk.”

  Tension whirled around inside me because I knew this was important. Knew this mattered. They weren’t wrong about the aftermath of that day. With my world in pieces at my feet, I’d spent the subsequent weeks in deep mourning. I’d missed them like I’d miss my left hand if it was amputated.

  Being without them had been a living hell.

  Until that point, every single day of my eighteen years had involved them all. There hadn’t been a day where I didn’t see them, and when they’d been moved into the clubhouse, that had only deepened because I’d eaten with them, spent all my time with them. Doing without them had been pure torture.

  Because that memory was enough to make tears fall and I wasn’t a fucking crier, I ground out, “Okay, we need to move on from that. Agreed?”

  Silence fell at my words, and I knew it was because I’d surprised them. Maybe they thought I’d hold a grudge, and let’s face it, with my record I couldn’t blame them. But I was a mom now. It had changed me in ways these guys were still learning, and this was one of them.

  What was the point of wasting more time on something that couldn’t be changed?

  I had Ama to think of now, and the future, too. We’d spent so long apart that anything that might add to more time spent separate wasn’t something I could deal with.

  I just needed us to be together, needed for them to accept that I wasn’t going to be anything other than these sinners’ old lady.

  If it seemed like I was rolling over, then maybe that was because I was. I was fucking tired. So tired. My grief was like a thunderstorm rumbling overhead, and I needed them more than I needed my next breath to help me chug along, to get to a point in the future where things started to seem brighter than they were now.

  Without them, there was only darkness.

  I’d die in that darkness. Perish. They weren’t saints, anything but, but they were my light at the end of the tunnel, and I couldn’t be without them a second longer.

  “Agreed.”

  I wasn’t surprised that Flame said it first. He was the one who found connections the hardest to forge, and him and me? Our connection went soul deep.

  “Agreed,” Dagger rasped.

  Of course, Axe wasn’t here, but I knew he was like them. He’d want to focus on the future rather than the past.

  The salt in the wound here was the big bastard lying on the floor…

  Swallowing, I looked at Wolfe and whispered, “What do you say?”

  His eyes gleamed in the dark night, the wall light making the whites shine harder as he stared me down like the feral fucker he was.

  My heart almost stopped as I watched his mouth open, and when he ground out, “Agreed,” I knew, somehow, everything was going to be okay.

  Axe

  A few days later

  “Hey, Ama, don’t you want to head outside with us?”

  When she stared at me like I’d grown another head, I almost laughed, but I was too concerned. Lucie was as well. She hadn’t left the clubhouse since she’d gotten here, had stayed inside all the damn time, and though she was adjusting, it was weird, right?

  Hell, I didn’t know shit about kids, but they needed to play, didn’t they? The rest of the brats that were running around outside like they were high on Monster did, that was for damn sure.

  The family BBQs on Sundays were important to the MC. It was where the dual lives of most brothers came to a head, and bringing them around for a helluva meal, some drinks, and a bonfire was a great way to do it. With all the kids around, I’d been hoping that Amaryllis would head outside and play, but she was cooped up in the family room, reading a book.

  Cutting Wolfe a look, I took a seat beside Ama and watched as he took the sofa opposite. The TV was on, some stupid cartoon on the screen, and as he watched it, he murmured, “Ryan loved cartoons.”

  We’d planned this. Lucie said it was too hard talking about Ryan, but that she didn’t want Amaryllis to forget him, so we’d come up with ways we could mention him so that Ama didn’t feel like she was alone in her grief.

  I was relieved as fuck to notice her eyes drift from the book to the screen at his words.

  “Yeah, he loved Cartoon Network, didn’t he?” I replied.

  “The old shit. None of the new stuff.” Wolfe’s laughter was soft, reminiscent with memories. For a hard ass, he was showing a different side of himself around Ama. “Captain Caveman, do you remember that?
That little dude with all the hair who ran around with a club solving crimes?”

  Chuckling, I sank back into the sofa and relaxed—sure, there was a point to this conversation, but it didn’t mean I couldn’t think back to times that had been so simple it was surreal. “Yeah, I remember. But that was when he was real young. Amaryllis’s age, right?”

  “Definitely. After, it was the Power Rangers.”

  I snorted. “We were all Power Rangers.”

  “I was blue, Flame was yellow because he had big enough balls to play that when the yellow one was a chick in the show, you were green, Dag was red, then we made up black for Ryan, remember?”

  “That means momma was pink,” Amaryllis chimed in, and my eyes widened at her voice because I hadn’t expected her to chat with us if I was being honest. “Momma hates pink. She’d never play that.”

  “She had to play it. We weren’t going to be pink,” I retorted with a laugh. “And if she wanted to play with us, then that was the rule.”

  “You were mean. Momma hates pink,” she repeated stubbornly, like she had the creed on her mother.

  “You’re right, sweet pea,” Lucie said softly, her voice making me look up so I could see her, standing in the doorway, a soft smile on her lips. “I do. I did then, too, but I’d have even dressed up in purple if it meant playing with your daddies.”

  Ama gasped. “No!”

  Lucie’s nod was solemn. “Yes.”

  “But you hate purple more than pink!” Amaryllis argued, closing her book and holding it to her little chest as she twisted to face her momma.

  “I know I do. See the things I do for your daddies?” she teased, and Ama huffed.

  “I’d never play brown to play with some boys.”

  Lucie grinned. “You wouldn’t now, maybe. Let’s wait until you’re older, huh?” When Wolfe and I growled at that, Lucie shot us a look with eyes that were twinkling with amusement. “Although, I think you like playing with Lawrence, don’t you?” Ama’s cheeks burned. “He’s outside. Why don’t you go play with him?”