by Naomi West
“So, you’ll do it then?”
Jason turned to one of his men and clicked his fingers. “Get the girl.”
I released a breath and the tension was siphoned from my shoulders. Daria would be okay.
“As a gesture of my respect, you can say goodbye.”
“Thank you, Jason,” I said sincerely. He may have been aggressive and relentless, but he had integrity, and that was more than I could say for many others.
After a few moments, the man returned with a tied-up Daria in tow. She was gagged and her wrists were bound, but otherwise she looked physically unharmed.
“Untie her,” Jason demanded.
Once Daria was free, she immediately started rubbing her raw wrists and glared at the men in the room.
“Mom, what are you doing here?” she asked, finally settling her gaze on me.
That was what I would miss the most, her sweet innocence, not yet connecting my presence with her freedom. I wished she would remain untainted like she was forever. Unfortunately, I was about to blow that innocence straight out of the water.
“They’re letting you go, sweetie,” I smiled at her, taking a moment to put all the love I could never express into my face. I didn’t want her last memory of me to be of my fear taking over every part of me, though it was definitely rising up within me.
“Thank God. Let’s go, Mom.” She held out a hand to me and I grabbed it, pulling up to my lips and kissing it one last time.
“Not me, sweetheart. Just you.”
She furrowed her brows in confusion. “What do you mean? What are you going to do here?”
Ignoring her, I said instead, “You’re going to be okay. You know how much I love you, that will never change. There’s a bike outside, one of the men will take you to it. Ride home and get to Rocky straight away. I know he’s worried sick about you.”
“But how will you get back then?”
She still wasn’t getting it.
“I’m not going back, Daria.” I remained as calm as I could, trying not to get too emotional or Daria would never be able to leave.
“Why would you stay here? Mom, they kidnapped me.” She lowered her voice slightly as if her captors had forgotten what they’d done.
“Daria, I’m not coming back. A life for a life, that’s the biker way.” I repeated to her the words I’d told Jason, but they had a significantly worse effect on Daria than they’d had on him.
“What do you mean? No! You're coming with me, I won’t let you stay here.”
“Daria, you don’t have a choice. Go now back to Rocky and promise me you won’t look back.”
“No! Mom, I’m not leaving you.”
I nodded to one of Jason’s enforcers and he grabbed Daria around the waist from behind, hoisting her along with him as he turned to leave the room.
“No!” Daria screamed once more. “Mom! Mom!”
“I love you!” I called out as she was dragged out of the room, literally kicking and screaming.
“Mom!” Daria’s screams echoed as she was pulled from the building.
“I love you,” I repeated, a whisper now.
I turned back to Jason, face firm and resolve steady. “Make it quick,” I said. I knew he would be true to his word.
He shuffled a moment and grabbed his gun, lifting it up and aiming it at my head. Despite all my bravado a single tear dripped steadily down my cheek.
I didn’t want Jason’s eyes to be the last I saw before I died.
Instead, I closed my eyes and thought of Daria.
Chapter Twenty-One
Daria
It was all my fault.
Mere days had passed but it had felt like months.
It was odd how I’d spent so long despising the hotel room we stayed in, and now I would spend hours sitting there doing nothing.
My mother was everywhere. Her scent in the air, her hair on the brush on the vanity, her shoes by the door, her rumpled skirt on the bed.
When I first stepped into the hotel room, I wasn’t prepared for the onslaught of memories that bombarded me. I slid slowly down the door to the ground and sat there unmoving for a long while. She had been there hours earlier, lying in bed, using the phone, taking a shower, straightening her hair. She had been there hours earlier, breathing, awake, moving, alive.
It was all my fault.
I’d raced back to the clubhouse after Steele’s goon had manhandled me onto the bike. I’d never ridden alone before, but I was thankful that Rocky had taught me how.
Rocky enveloped me in a hug when I arrived at the clubhouse, but I was so incoherent I didn’t know who he was.
“They have her, they have her,” I chanted. “We have to save her, we have to go.”
Rocky’s arms had gripped me tighter as I struggled against him, muttering something over and over in my ear as I tried to free myself from him.
I met Cameron’s eyes over Rocky’s shoulder. His face was strangely blank when he said the words that would cause me to break. I could barely hear a thing around me but Cameron’s words were clear as day.
“She’s gone.”
A scream sounded out, filled with pure agony, but I didn’t connect it with myself until later. My shoulders shook with the force of my sobs and my body went limp, not having enough energy to hold itself upright any more.
Rocky kept muttering the same thing over and over in my ear but I still couldn’t hear him, still couldn’t understand him.
It could’ve been hours or moments until I pushed away from Rocky, who was so shocked he stumbled back a few steps.
His lips were still forming the words that I could not yet hear. Though I was never good at reading lips, I finally understood what he was trying to say to me.
“I’m sorry.”
I was, too. Sorrier than anyone could ever know.
Unable to deal with him or anyone else anymore, I sped out of the clubhouse and back onto the bike, racing to the hotel room. I’d stayed there against the door for a long time. It was bolted shut so even though someone, most likely Rocky, had tried to get me to open up. I refused.
A few days later someone slid a paper under the door. The only reason I read it was because it appeared right next to me. I was glad I did.
The note brought me to the morgue, staring at my mother’s lifeless body.
It was all my fault.
She looked calmer and more peaceful than I’d seen her in years, even more than when she was sleeping. The weight of the world was no longer on her shoulders.
I still couldn’t bring myself to say that she was dead. She was just … gone.
For so long I’d resented so much about her. Everything from her choices to what she’d say to me.
Turns out she was right the entire time. How could I have involved myself with something as dangerous as a motorcycle club? She’d spent years of her life involved with one, and I knew that she had infinitely more knowledge than I did.
She’d begged and pleaded for me to distance myself from the club, to keep myself safe.
And what did I do?
I ignored everything she’d told me, convinced myself that I knew better. That in my barely twenty years of life I knew more than her almost fifty years.
How could I be so stupid?
I thought I was in love. I thought Rocky was my entire life.
Fuck love.
Love brought nothing but misery and heartache and death.
I’d loved my mother but never showed her, never told her that I did. And now she was … dead. Dead, and she never knew how much she meant to me.
She didn’t know that she was the one constant that had always been in my life.
She didn’t know that she’d been my best friend for years when I had nobody else.
She didn’t know how much I admired her, respected her.
She didn’t know how grateful I was that she’d spent her entire life trying to protect me, whether it was from the club or my stepfather.
She died without knowing any of that.
She probably died thinking that I didn’t care at all about her.
Her face was seared into my brain as I was dragged out of the room at the Nightmare clubhouse. It was filled with so much affection, so much love. How could she love me so much when I had done nothing to deserve it?
The only thing she’d ever asked of me was to stay away from Rocky and I couldn’t even comply with that one simple task.
But now I was going to do things differently. I was going to honor my mother’s wishes, even though now I knew it was far too late. Nonetheless, I was going to stay away from Rocky like I’d first promised. Maybe now nothing else would happen. Maybe now I would be able to get away from the life my mother had always wanted me to get away from.
I had enough saved in the bank from the few months of working at Rocky’s to start a new life for me. It wouldn’t get me much, maybe a bus ride to another state and enough for a room in a run-down motel in another small town. That would be enough for me though. I would start over fresh, somewhere where no one knew me or about me.
Somewhere I could disappear.
Yes, I would leave Springville. And I would never come back.
I convinced myself that the ache in my heart had nothing to do with this decision. There was nothing left for me here anymore and I was determined to make my mother proud, at least once in my life.
###
I’d stayed staring at my mother’s body for longer than I’d expected, almost an hour. I’d known the mortician, Adam, since I was young and he’d kindly told me that I could spend as long as I needed here. He was on his lunch break and wouldn’t be back for a while, leaving me with ‘enough privacy to grieve.’
Was it wrong to be all grieved out even though it had only been a few days?
I hadn’t even had a funeral yet and I was already sick of crying and screaming and arguing with what had happened. Suddenly, there was the sound of footsteps echoed down the stairs to the morgue. The only reason I could hear them was because the deadly silence that surrounded me.
In the back of my mind it might have registered that there was no way that Adam could have been back yet. If it had, I would’ve moved right away, stormed out of the building without seeing whoever was coming down the stairs and avoiding the conversation that I knew would have to happen sooner or later.
“Daria,” he said.
It had only been a few days since I’d laid eyes on Rocky, but my heart still skipped a beat at the sight of him.
Quite frankly, he looked run ragged. There were deep purple bags under his eyes which were bloodshot and irritated, his beard which was normally at least neatly trimmed looked unkempt and frazzled and his clothes were rumpled and mismatched. He looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks.
Knowing it was too late to leave and that he’d either attempt to stop me or follow me, I stayed silent, moving my eyes away from him and back to my mother. I knew if he touched me or got anywhere near me that my resolve may crumble so I needed to keep a solid distance between us. The face of my dead mother certainly helped steel my resolve against him.
“Daria, look at me.”
There was no way that was happening and no way I was going to give in to him. She may be dead but I found that I couldn’t do that in my mother’s presence, no matter how much he begged or pleaded.
“Daria, please.” His voice cracked at the end and it took all of my might not to look at him.
“Please leave.” My voice was so monotone and detached that I almost shocked myself. It sounded as though I had never known happiness in my entire life; it sounded as though my entire soul had been ripped out of my body leaving an empty carcass behind.
I could tell that Rocky, too, was taken aback by my words and tone because it was a while before he took another step forward and spoke.
“Don’t do this to me, Daria. You need me.”
Rocky took another step forward and reached an arm out. It reminded me of when I was younger and I tried to lure in birds from my windowsill, reaching an arm out slowly so as to not frighten them.
“Don’t touch me.” My voice was like a whip and it had the desired effect, his arm dropping down to his side as if he’d been electrocuted.
“You're not coping,” Rocky tried again. “You can’t keep shutting everyone out. You need help. I want to help you.”
“You can’t help me. No one can. Just leave me alone.”
“That’s not true. I can help you if you let me.”
“Get out.”
“Daria please—”
“Get out!” I screamed, turning on him with more fire in me than I’d ever experienced before. “How dare you come here and try to do this in front of her? How dare you think I would ever forgive you? It’s your fault that she’s here, that she’s dead.”
“That’s not fair, Daria. I didn’t kill her.”
“You may as well have! You could have stopped her. You could have let me die!”
A pause.
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do,” I whispered. “I really do.”
“Daria, I need you in my life. Please don’t shut me out.”
“It’s over, Rocky,” I said calmly. “I’m leaving town and you’ll never see me again.”
The unsaid ‘and I will never see you again either’ seemed to settle in the silence between us.
“Where will you go?” he asked, his voice hoarse and his eyes clenched shut.
“Anywhere but here.”
That was a jab that I almost regretted. I could very nearly see Rocky flinch from the blow of my words.
“At least tell me if you need something.”
“I don’t need anything.” From you.
Many moments passed with both of us standing mute beside each other, a lifetime of unspoken words filling the air around us and threatening to choke me.
“I guess that’s it then,” he said finally.
He stepped a little closer to me and at first, I thought he was going to touch me, something that would most definitely cause me to unravel, but instead he leaned down over my mother and placed a soft kiss on her forehead.
“I’m sorry, Corinne. Thank you for being the only mother I’ve ever known.”
My eyes filled to the brim with tears, but I blinked back the moisture, knowing that as soon as the first teardrop flowed the rest would follow in a waterfall.
He left the room without looking back, something that I appreciated more than he’d ever know.
I waited for the sound of his footsteps to disappear completely before I allowed myself to exhale.
Hopefully, that would be the last time I’d ever see Rocky Weston again.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Rocky
I’d been riding for hours. It was just past eleven when I left the house and it was now well and truly dark. I didn’t know the time, I didn’t know where I was, all I knew was that I couldn’t stay there.
Not in the town that was filled with every bad memory I had, not in the club that had taken everything and everyone I loved away from me, and especially not in my apartment, where Daria and I forged a bond that brought us closer to each other than I’d ever been with another human being before.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stay there and pretend everything was okay. It wasn’t. Daria was gone, Cameron was still around, and I was more alone now than ever.
It had been days since I’d found out about my lying, cheating, betraying uncle, and yet I’d done nothing. I’d ignored the fact that I was living moments from the man responsible for my father’s death. I could go over to his house at any time and put a gun to his head, but I knew I wouldn’t. There was no way I could even look at him now. I hadn’t seen him since the night that Corinne had died and I wasn’t planning on it either.
Corinne.
I still couldn’t believe that she was really gone.
Daria was right, it was all my fault. I should never have dragged Daria into my revenge bullshit. I should’ve kept the promise I’d made t
o Corinne all those years ago. If I had, none of this would ever have happened. Corinne would be alive, so would those several men caught in the shootout in the alley, and Daria would at least be still in my life.
She wouldn’t have been mine, not truly, but I could live with that if I knew she didn’t hate me. If I knew she was safe. I hadn’t seen her since the other day and I didn’t even know if she was alive anymore. If anyone had asked me a few weeks ago if Daria was capable of hating anyone, I would’ve replied that there was no chance in the world.