He swerved, pulling the car onto the shoulder of the Belt Parkway and shifted the gear into park before pinning me with a stare.
“You listen to me and listen good you are not property of the Satan’s Knights. You are no one’s property,” he shouted, startling me, making it the first time my father has ever reprimanded me.
So much for not being treated like a child.
“He didn’t endure anything because of you. That shit is all on me, Lacey,” he growled. “Is that what this is about? You feel some sort of guilt over Blackie?”
“Are you telling me I shouldn’t?” I asked incredulously. “There aren’t too many people who will choose your life over their own,” I added, angrily.
“It’s his goddamn job to put you first!” He fumed.
That stung, and another lesson was learned…words are one powerful weapon. I’d have to be pickier with my own, make them count, make them hurt, just like my dad’s did.
At least then I’d have a rebuttal.
Now, I just sat there like the young naïve girl he thought I was.
“He’s in the hospital, hanging on but he suffered a heart attack,” he said, finally.
My eyes snapped toward him and my mouth fell open as my heart lurched into my throat.
“A heart attack? What the hell happened to him?”
“Watch your tone Lacey, giving away a whole lot with the way you’re talking,” he warned.
“Giving away what? That I care about Blackie? Of course I do. You have yourself to thank for that because the moment you stepped foot onto that bus to Riker’s he was there for me and he’s never left,” I trembled as my voice shot octaves higher with each word I spoke.
“Shit,” he ground out. “Blackie’s not some knight in shining armor Lacey. He traded places with you because that is his job. It’s who he is. That man has a death wish and everyone knows it, including the man who took him. He loaded him up on drugs. Blackie should be dead right now but he’s hanging on because his body is so immune to the poison he keeps filling it with. He’s not a prince, Lace, he’s the devil clothed in leather. He is the same as me and don’t you forget that!”
“I know exactly who he is and I accept him as he is…the same way I accept you,” I insisted.
I wasn’t sure if he was trying to scare me away or warn me but either way it didn’t matter. I knew Blackie had a drug problem I saw it with my own eyes that night. But, he was still a man, a broken man who lost his way. He could push me away, try to make me hate him, but I’ve known him nearly all my life…I know how good he can be.
“Best-case scenario, he makes it out of this and gets the help he needs,” my dad added.
“And worse case?”
“He cheats death only to beckon for it to come again,” he said as he pulled the truck back onto the Belt. “Can’t make someone live when they don’t want to. You can’t keep them breathing when they want to suffocate.”
I stared at him as he fixed his eyes back to mine
“Blackie’s at the end of his rope, Lace.”
I restrained from shaking my head and telling him to shut up that he was wrong. Blackie may be at the end of his rope, but I was going to give him another inch, I was going to be the one who pulled him back.
Just watch and see.
I fell back against the seat and stared out the window.
“I’m sorry you had to see everything you saw,” my father whispered. “The world isn’t always pretty but the one me and Blackie live in is downright ugly.”
Duly noted.
Words.
They wound but they don’t change the way a person feels.
Luckily, neither of us uttered another until he pulled up in front of my mother’s house. She was on the stoop waiting for me, her arms crossed against her chest and a worried look adorned her pretty face. I climbed out of the truck just as my father slammed his door shut. He walked around the truck, meeting me at the curb.
“Lace…”
“Thanks for keeping your promise,” I interrupted, reaching up and throwing my arms around his neck.
Daddy’s little girl.
Until you’re not anymore.
Until there is another man.
And sometimes he’s just like the first man you ever loved.
Sometimes he's just like your dad.
Chapter Eleven
I conned my mother into lending me her car, told her I needed a break from the last few days. The reality of my father’s life was harsher than I could’ve imagined. She bought the act, handed over her keys and I made a beeline for the hospital.
To be honest, I don’t think she bought my little act at all. I think my mother knows me better than she lets on. In fact, I sometimes think she’s a witch and knows all my secrets. It wouldn’t surprise me if she even surmised that I was going to see Blackie but for whatever her reasons were, she didn’t try to stop me.
I should be more cautious, try to make more of an attempt to mask my emotions, make it harder for her to read me but it wouldn’t work. My mother knows me but, more than that, she knows herself. She lived what I am living. I wouldn’t be naïve to say she condones my feelings, but she gets them. She’d be a hypocrite to try to stop me.
It makes me wonder about my parents when they were young and in love, mainly my mother and what she was like when she was property of Parrish.
Property of Parrish.
I’m sure there are women who would cringe at being called someone’s property. But there are a few things I know about the MC world and being a man’s property doesn’t mean he owns you but more that you own his heart.
You belong to his heart…to his soul, whatever is left of it.
Love, it’s the only purity men like my father and Blackie have.
And to own that solitary piece of him…well, it’s bigger than all the I love you’s any man can say.
So, when I say I want to be Blackie’s property don’t look at me with pity.
Keep your pity.
Because being Blackie’s property means I own the only piece of him that isn’t black.
Being Property of Petra is owning his heart.
It’s restoring his soul.
It’s the unspoken I love you.
It’s the unspoken vow to honor and cherish, protect and love one another.
It’s belonging to the one person in this world created just for you.
At least that’s what it means to me.
But what do I know? I’m just a girl who’s been sheltered from the life she was born in to.
My stomach twisted in knots as I made my way into the hospital. I had no idea what floor he was on or what unit he was in but I quickly learned he was in intensive care. They allowed me to go upstairs to the unit but when I was buzzed in the nurse told me there was already a visitor and there was only one permitted at a time. I pleaded with her to make an exception but she wouldn’t budge, closing the door to the unit and leaving me in the hallway.
Now what?
The elevator chimed behind me causing me to turn around as the doors opened and I came face to face with Riggs.
The universe isn’t my friend.
It hates me.
“Ah, shit,” he groaned, stepping off the elevator as he ran his fingers through his hair. “What the fuck?” He asked the ceiling before pinning me with a glare. “Your father know you’re here?”
I rolled my eyes.
“I suppose you’re going to run back and tell him,” I accused.
“Fucking, Blackie…Man. Shit! Shit! Shit!” He rambled.
“How do you know I’m not here for another reason?” I said, placing my hands on my hips, cocking my head to the side as I challenged him. “Maybe I’m here picking up a prescription for birth control.”
He narrowed his eyes.
“It was one time!”
“What are you talking about?”
“What do you mean what am I talking about? What are you talking about? You know what? I don’t
care. I have zero fucks left,” he ranted.
“Are you okay?”
“No! I’m not okay. I have a pea. And a baby mama. And Bones in my ear telling me to own it…imagine? Me owning responsibility for something? It’s fucking crazy. You should probably pick up that birth control or this could be you,” he said, as he swiped his hand down the length of his body.
“Breathe, Riggs,” I instructed, watching as the badass biker had a meltdown.
“I’m going to be a dad,” he hissed.
“Congratulations,” I smiled, earning me a glare in response. I guess impending fatherhood wasn’t on the agenda.
“Not funny,” he ground out, moving to walk around me. I quickly side-stepped him, blocking him by lifting my hand to his chest.
“Wait! Look, I’m sorry you’re having a crisis and all but I need your help,” I pleaded.
“Oh, hell no!” He shook his head. “I am not getting involved in this shit. Are you fucking crazy?”
“Riggs! I have to see him,” I said, desperately.
“No, I don’t know what the hell is going on with the two of you and shit, I don’t want to know but I am not getting involved.”
I raised an eyebrow when he stomped his foot to drive his point home.
Poor guy, he was falling apart.
“Riggs, please,” I tried. “I want to see for myself that he’s okay.”
“Your father will kill you, him and me!”
“He doesn’t have to know,” I countered.
“Right,” he said sarcastically, lifting his eyes to the glass door. “Fuck, I know I’m going to regret this. Wolf is coming this way, go fucking hide somewhere,” he hissed.
“Where?”
“Behind the goddamn plant. I don’t know just scram,” he said, shooing me away.
I scrambled toward one of the chairs in the waiting room, lifting a magazine to my face as Wolf strutted out from the intensive care wing.
“Well it’s about time you showed your pretty face,” he seethed. “I’m fucking beat.”
“Yeah, sorry. I was dealing with the end of my freedom,” Riggs replied. “How’s he doing?”
“No change,” Wolf said, yawning. “I’m getting out of here. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
“Yeah, no worries, I’ve got it from here,” Riggs assured him.
“You okay?” Wolf asked suspiciously.
“Peachy,” he replied.
“Being a father isn’t a bad thing,” Wolf told him.
“No, of course not. This coming from a man with three sons. I wonder if you had a defiant little girl, what you would say?”
That last part was definitely a dig toward me.
Riggs was a shit head.
Wolf laughed as I peeked over the magazine and watched him get onto the elevator. Riggs waved goodbye to him and once the doors shut he turned his eyes back to mine.
“Come on little Miss Defiant,” he called.
I knew it!
I dropped the magazine, rose to my feet and hurried the doors, ringing the buzzer before I turned back to him.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re not welcome,” he grunted. “I never helped you.”
“Of course you didn’t,” I winked, remembering the last time he caught me and Blackie.
“Hurry up, I have a refrigerator I need to pick up,” he mumbled.
The nurse buzzed me in and I ran through the glass doors, leaving my accomplice to his pity party. I went over to the nurse’s station and after I found out which room he was in, I started for him.
I was driven by my need to see him, to make sure he really was alive and that he didn’t leave me. I wanted to hold his hand, lace my fingers with his, and thank him. Not just for switching places with me but for every single time he’s been there for me, choosing my life over his.
I should’ve given his condition more thought, if I would’ve prepared myself maybe then my heart wouldn’t have stopped for the split second it did when I laid eyes on him. He looked so different lying there, powerless and at the mercy of the machines keeping him alive, so fragile. He didn’t look like the badass biker most men feared and woman tried to conquer, he wasn’t the hero sent to rescue me, or the poor widow who didn’t know how to grieve.
He was just a man.
A man who had been knocked off his chrome pedestal, a man flawed and fractured by the shitty hand dealt to him. He was Dominic Petra, not Blackie, not one of Satan’s Knights, not even the man I call Leather but, simply Dominic.
We weren’t Leather and Lace.
We were strangers.
It was that moment, with the steady hymn of his heart rate playing in the background, Dominic Petra and Lacey Parrish first met.
We were both stripped of everything we’ve come to know about each other.
We were the flawed characters of a story.
He was the addict who chose the wrong path.
And I was the mentally ill girl who loved him.
I’ve never admitted that to anyone.
That I think I’m ill.
Or that I love him.
I don’t know when it happened, if it was something that grew over time or what but, it felt as if I had been doing it my whole life…like I was born to love both Dominic Petra and the fractured soul of Blackie.
I walked to the side of his bed as my eyes swept over in him, taking in every machine, wire and tube attached to him, the one that breathed for him, the one that monitored his heart rate and the other half a dozen—I had no idea what their purpose was. I leaned over, gently I brought my fingertips to his cheek.
“Leather,” I whispered, as a tear escaped the corner of my eye.
As much as I wanted to know the man Blackie was before all the pain, the man in the photograph he kept in his room, I never wanted it to be like this.
Our timing has always been off.
An alarm sounded forcing me to drop my hand from his face and divert my frantic eyes to the machines as a nurse came into the room.
“What’s happening?”
“The I.V. finished,” she explained, disconnecting the empty bag from the pole and replacing it with a full one. My eyes followed the tube and saw it was plugged into a port in his bicep. She must’ve noticed I was staring at the port strangely because she explained.
“His veins were collapsing, so we had to put the port in his bicep,” she said, glancing back at the machine. “Everything is good. I’ll give you some privacy,” she added.
I nodded, waiting for her to leave the room before I lifted his hand, turning his arm over and stared at the bruises that angrily marked his skin. I bent my head, trailing my lips over the track marks.
I lifted my eyes, peering up at his face from under the fringe of my lashes, wishing to God he could hear me.
“Everybody deserves a rewrite,” I whispered. “Even you. Come back to me Blackie, let me help you this once, just like you’ve always helped me. We can rewrite our story together. I’ll help you silence your addiction the way you silence my mind,” I promised as I gently placed his hand back down beside him.
I brought my hand up to his head and touched the hair that hung shaggily around his face, brushing it back with my fingers.
“I remember the first time I saw you like it was yesterday. I thought you were the most handsome guy I ever laid eyes on,” I smiled, blinking away the tears that temporarily blinded me. “All these years later and it’s still true, no one else compares. You had me then Blackie, you had me at ten years old, you’ve always had me…and I want you—no, I need you to know you’ll always have me. I want you to stop pushing me away. I want you to accept that I’m a part of your life. Stop thinking it's wrong because nothing that feels this right can ever be wrong. There is a lot of wrong in your life, change that, or don’t but, leave what’s right, what’s good…leave us, let us be. I promise you we’re worth it. Give me a chance to make you smile like you used to in that picture you have in your room. I’m not asking
you to forget about her, or change your past. I’m asking for you to let me help you rewrite the rest of your life. It doesn’t have to be like this. You don’t need to keep punishing yourself.”
You’re wasting your breath.
Once an addict, always an addict.
You’ll always be Jack’s daughter and nothing more.
I shook my head, not willing to allow my maker take control of my mind. I was in control and I needed to hang onto it with everything in me because today Blackie needed me. I didn’t have time to succumb to the lies my mind tried to make me believe.
I embraced the truth, the truth I’ve always known---Blackie needs me as much as I need him. He saw me long before that night I went to the clubhouse and asked him to look at me---the real me. He tries to deny it; he fights it but he feels it…the unexplainable connection between us.
They say everyone has a soulmate.
And his broken soul belongs to mine.
I leaned over his body and pressed my lips to his forehead.
“You’re my hero,” I whispered, pressing a kiss to his nose before pulling back and wiping my cheeks with the backs of my hands. “Wake up and I’ll be yours.”
Chapter Twelve
You know you’ve committed too many sins, fucked too many people and ruined too many lives when the devil don’t even want your ass. I should be dead but even Satan didn’t want to save me from the nothing I had become. Nope, that prick bastard turned his back on me too.
That’s when you know you’re fucked and you start to wonder if you’re fucking immortal. When I get the fuck out of here I’m going to Atlantic City, putting all my cash on Black because motherfucker I can’t lose.
I beat the odds every-fucking-time.
Now, I was sitting in a hospital bed, hours after waking up from a coma. One I apparently had been in for nearly two weeks and trying to make sense of everything. When I first woke up I freaked the fuck out and judging by the frightened look of the nurse, held some sort of resemblance to the exorcist. I had a tube down my fucking throat and couldn’t speak until they took it out. I tried to pull the damn thing out myself but the jerk off doctor stuck my hands in restraints and gave me a sedative because being out cold for two weeks wasn’t enough.
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