Stitch: Satan's Fury MC
Page 19
“Please… please don’t do this,” she begged as she grabbed my arm. Her eyes pleaded with me to listen as she said, “This is a mistake. You’re going to regret this for the rest of your life!” I couldn’t listen to anymore. Trying my best to block out her cries, I walked past her and out the door.
I was relieved to see that the parking lot was empty as I sat John Warren into his car seat. When I clicked his seatbelt around him, he reached for my hand and smiled. That smile would be forever burned into my mind. I took his little hand and brought it up to my mouth, gently kissing the fingers that wrapped around mine. “I love you, JW. Always will.”
I handed the little guy his giraffe as I put the rest of the bags in the seat beside him. I closed his door and got into the car. I sat there for a few minutes in the silence, trying to pull my shit together. Everything was so quiet. It was like I was stuck in some kind of nightmare, lost in a deep fog, and then JW started to babble. He was talking to me like I knew exactly what he was saying.
I turned back to him and said, “I know, little buddy. I know.”
I wiped the tears from my eyes and started the engine. It didn’t take him long to fall asleep, leaving me with a whirlwind of thoughts and questions. I still couldn’t believe how much had happened over the past year. If I had just known… if I hadn’t been so stupid and realized everything that was really going on with Hailey, maybe things could have been different.
I’ll never forget the first time I laid eyes on her. I’d pulled my bike into an old diner out on Highway 19. It was an out of the way spot, but it was raining, and I was wet and cold. The moment I saw her walk across the floor, I wasn’t cold anymore. She was waiting tables, and I wondered why a sexy woman like her was working at a place like this in the middle of nowhere. She had a figure that made a man want to peel her clothes right off, and I would’ve done just about anything to do just that. I instantly craved the touch of her skin against mine. Her long black hair was pulled back into a ponytail showing off the most beautiful blue eyes I’d ever seen. Her smile though, that mouth, those lips… damn, she was perfect.
One date was all it took. After that, the months rolled by so fast that I lost track of time. It was a whirlwind. She was everything I ever thought I wanted and more. She liked being on the back of my bike and enjoyed hanging with my brothers at the clubhouse. We spent hours talking and drinking with them. She fit. I loved that. We were happy. We’d even started talking about our future, making plans for our life together. She had enrolled in a nursing program and worked every day at the diner to pay for her tuition. Life was good.
Then the nightmare hit. Everything went up in smoke. It was hell. A stupid drunk crashed into Hailey’s car, leaving her severely wounded. The dashboard crushed in on her, breaking her leg and fracturing several vertebrae in her neck. It was my fault. I was being selfish that night. I just wanted to be with her every second, and I didn’t listen when she told me she was too tired to come to the club. She’d been working all day and just wanted to go home. I should have listened to her, but I was too selfish. I’d had a long day and just wanted inside her.
That crash stole her spark and replaced it with pain and anguish. Her injuries were so painful that the doctors prescribed her strong pain medication, and it seemed to help, giving her some relief from her misery. After she’d been home for a while, I noticed that she was taking too many pills. I figured she was just hurting, and since she was going to school to be a nurse, I thought that she knew what she was doing. A month later, when I saw her taking three at a time, I confronted her about it. She became defensive, but finally admitted that she might have a problem. As time went on, I tried to get her help, sending her to rehab and trying to find doctors that could stop the pain. But nothing worked. The pull of her addiction was already too strong. She tried to hide it from me, over and over again. Each time I discovered that she was still using, she’d promise to try harder. She’d swear that she loved me, and would do whatever it took to get better. I believed her, until the day I found another hidden stash of pills. That day, I knew I was done. She chose the drugs over the life we shared, and I refused to be a part of it.
The day I walked out of her life, I prayed that she would straighten herself out and find her way back to me. Instead, she became more and more determined to get her hands on her next fix. When her desperation took hold, she decided to give information about our club in exchange for more drugs. Her betrayal to the club was a decision we’d both come to regret. I should have known that if she would do something like that, she was way past just being in trouble… her life was in true jeopardy. I should’ve seen she was still struggling, and tried harder to help her. But in truth, it was too late… her lies would send her to her grave. All of her damn lies.
She disappeared for months. No one knew where she was. The club never lets a betrayal go. They searched for her and finally found out that she had been living in a small town just outside of Washington. It looked like she was finally getting her shit together. She’d gotten a job and had a nice place to live. She’d even had a baby. Her neighbor said Hailey was really trying, but it all fell apart. It was just too much for her, and she ended up taking the baby to her mother. My brothers found her dead in her apartment from a drug overdose. It was obvious that it was no accident. Her death hit me hard. I couldn’t help but blame myself for what had happened, and the guilt of her death was crippling. But it was nothing compared to the hurt that I felt when I discovered the mountain of secrets she had kept hidden from me.
It was several months after her death when I got an unexpected phone call from a hospital in Paris, Tennessee. A nurse called to tell me that my son had just been in an accident. My son. I felt like someone had knocked the wind out of me when I heard those words. My name was listed on his birth certificate, right under Hailey’s. It was right there in black and white. I never dreamed the kid that she’d had was mine, and now I had missed almost a year of his life, because Hailey never told me about him. Instead, she took our son to her mother, asking her to protect him from me. Trying to keep her promise, Hailey’s mother sent John Warren away. She decided that Lily was the only one that could keep him safe from me and my club. Lily packed him up, and took off for Tennessee. I would have never even known about my son if it hadn’t been for his accident. Her mother prayed that I would never find out. She blamed me for Hailey’s death. In truth, she was right. Hailey would still be alive if she hadn’t been with me. I will never forgive myself for what happened. I had failed her then, but I wouldn’t fail her again. I wouldn’t let anything happen to our son. I would make sure that he had the life that I couldn’t give his mother.
I could barely keep my eyes open by the time I pulled into Lily’s driveway. It was Christmas Eve, and the house was lit up with lights, making what I was about to do feel even more impossible. I tried to shake it off. This wasn’t about me. It was about John Warren. Giving him a life like this… filled with Christmas trees and family. The life I’d never be able to give him.
Goliath lived the club life, and although his club was different, safer, he understood the danger that came along with it. He would know better than anyone why I had to do this. As VP of the Devil Chaser’s, he’d seen the hard times of living in a one percenters’ club… the uncertainty… the danger. They had put that all behind them, and his club had worked hard to become a legitimate club that was focused on the brotherhood and their families. It was one of the things that I respected most about these men. Nothing was more important than keeping their families safe. I put the car in park, and by the time I turned off the engine and opened the car door, Lily was standing on the front porch.
“What happened to you? Are you ok?” she asked. Her eyes filled with fright as she studied my cuts and bruises. I knew I looked like hell, but I had no intention of telling her what had happened. When I didn’t answer, she asked, “What are you doing here, Maverick?”
For more – Check out Maverick: Satan’s Fury MC
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