“Do you think he’ll be okay?” I asked after my sister and Joker approached with their family.
My sister just sniffed and shook her head. “How could he be?”
“He laughed today, that has to be a good sign, right?”
“Why did you say that? I still can’t believe you called the priest out for being so darn long-winded.”
I giggled quietly. “Can I tell you a secret and not have you think I’m crazy?”
“Well, I pretty much know you’re crazy, but you can tell me and I’ll pretend as usual.”
“Brat!” I teased my little sister and then I told her about what prompted me to lose my patience with the priest. She glanced over to Toby’s grave and then smiled back at me.
“I believe you,” she whispered and then leaned in to hug me. My little sister and I had become so close since we both went through a pregnancy together. To be honest, it made me realize all that I had been missing by pushing her away when we were younger. Granted, I had my reasons and they revolved around protecting her from any taint she may have gotten from me, but still… I wished we had been closer for longer.
“How about we set something up, a timeshare if you will, about who stays with Daddy?” She asked me.
I narrowed my eyes on my little sister. “If you think dad will allow that, you have been smoking some pretty good shit, and I’m mad at you for not sharing!”
She grinned at me. “Well, we’re not going to tell him the plan.”
“Tell who, what plan?” My father asked, having walked up behind Anna as she was trying to convince me. She gave me a wide-eyed ‘what the heck’ look, since she never cussed. I knew she wouldn’t do it with her gestures or in her head either. I just grinned at her some more as I took Ashton’s hand and left Amber to stay cuddled up to her grandpa’s side.
“Well, your youngest daughter thinks we need to take turns babysitting you,” I told him bluntly.
He failed to hide the shock over me being completely honest with him. My sister didn’t hide hers either. “Ever!” She squealed my name in protest, obviously chiding me for being a little rat. I just shrugged my shoulders.
“You have a right to know that we will be looking out for you. I just don’t see the need to hide what we’ll be doing because you’re too smart,” I told him as I booped his nose with the tip of my finger causing him to offer up a genuine smile at my playfulness.
“Sounds like you two have it all figured out. What if I want to be alone?”
I shrugged once more. “Too bad!”
“Yeah, too bad, Grandpa! We’re going to stay with you until your heart stops hurting,” Amber told him. My heart melted on the spot, and I think everyone else who heard her was having trouble keeping their eyes dry too.
“Is that so, little princess?”
“That’s so!” Her word was princess law.
“If you insist, but be prepared. You might have to move in if you plan on sticking around that long.”
“That’s okay. We don’t mind. Our daddy is gone, so you can do all the things he used to do and then we can take turns making you smile.”
Lucky for me, Jay swooped in and took Ashton from me because I needed to turn away. My whole body vibrated with the effort it took not to completely break down right there in front of my girls, the rest of my family, and our friends. I did not see that kick to my heart coming, and there was nothing I could do to patch the wound up on the spot.
“Come along, lovey, let’s go get you sorted over here for a minute.” Sully, one of my dearest friends, had his arm slung around my shoulders as he dragged me off a ways, hid me behind a tree, and let me wail into his chest to muffle the sound. “That’s it, sweet girl, get it all out. No one is watching.” I had no doubt that at least half of the people in attendance were watching and the other half were busy trying to distract my children for me. God, I loved my family. We had some rough bumps along the way, but dammit, they had all come through for me in the end.
“Am I cursed?” I sobbed out to my friend.
“Cursed? What? No! Fuck that noise. You ain’t cursed. Where is this coming from?”
“The way my biological mother conceived me, it almost ruined the Brother’s family when they found out about me. She never told me, then she died in my arms. I came into the Brothers’ lives and caused trouble from the start. I made a divide in the family, my brother died, my husband is missing, and now my other mother is gone. How the hell am I not cursed?”
“Aww, babe, none of that is on you. You’re just unlucky enough to be touched by so much tragedy but you are not the cause of it. Not a damn ‘but’, you hear me? Don’t do that to yourself.”
“I know the logic, Sully. But I also know that shit is just stacking up.”
“I hate to break it to you, Little Sis, but this shit starts stacking up for everyone the older we get. It’s called life, experience, and age. The clock doesn’t stop ticking, and when it’s someone’s time, they go. Unless you held the gun to their head and pulled the trigger yourself, it ain’t on you.”
I knew that. I did. On a normal day, I’d be preaching it to someone else. “I’m so tired,” I managed to squeak out between my sobs that were finally ebbing away.
“I’d be worried if you weren’t. You know you can always ask us to help out. I’ll be more than happy to take my nieces off your hands for a day, a few hours, whatever you need. Hell, if you trust me with the little one and want to bottle up some of your lovely breast milk for me, I’ll take him too.”
“You need the daddy practice?”
“Nah, don’t think it’s in the cards for me, sweetness. Not after Billie left.” Billie had been the one woman I’d known Sully to love and be serious about. She took off, out of the blue one day, and while she had sent a goodbye, it had been received as more of an insult at the time. I didn’t think Billie’s story was as cut and dry as her simply not being ready to settle down and running on cold feet, but there was no convincing Sully of that. Ever since, he was dead set against a real relationship of any kind. It was sad, because he was closing in on his 40s and the man deserved to find happiness. He also deserved to be a father. He was one hell of a surrogate uncle.
“Tell ya what, how about I come over twice a week, give you a couple hours to go do your thing, whatever that is, and we’ll go from there. If you need more, we’ll work with it. I have plenty of time off coming to me since I never take a vacation.”
“Sul, you should take a vacation without wasting it on me.”
“You are never a waste of my time, Little Sis.” He hugged me tight for a minute then reached up with both hands, cupped my jaw, and used his thumbs to swipe away residual tears and help dry up the salty tracks that ran down my face. “Let’s get you sorted and back over to your family before they start to worry after you, okay?”
“Thanks for being here, Sul,” I whispered before leaning up on my tiptoes to kiss his cheek.
“Aw, shit girl, you’re gonna make me blush.” I smacked his chest and turned to head back toward my family. It appeared some of the extras around the periphery were starting to trickle out. That was good. My mom didn’t know a stranger and made friends everywhere she went, so there were a ton of people there to pay respects to the woman everyone admired. My Momma Luce was an amazing woman. She would be so terribly missed.
Before we left, I moved to my mother’s casket and touched my fingers to it. “If he’s with you, take care of him for me,” I told her in a hushed tone so no one would overhear me. “I hope he’s not, but… just… I’m going to miss you so much, Momma.”
Chapter 21
Determined
Double-D
I held her letter tight in my hand. It had to be the fiftieth time I’d read it. My woman had been gone for almost two months. We were closing in on Thanksgiving soon and Ever was refusing to celebrate with anyone. She said they weren’t doing holidays until Deck was back or they knew he was never coming back. One way or another, she was stuck in lim
bo. My mind kept whirling back to Lucy’s letter to me.
“…Love our children and grandchildren with all of you… Live your life and love our family and do it with all of you because you’ll be doing it for the both of us until we meet again.”
Those words, more than anything else snapped me out of my stupor. Luce was right. I needed to do more for our family. She would expect it, but more than that, they should know I was doing everything I could to make sure my grandbabies didn’t need surrogates. The girls had been trying to find men in their lives to replace the hole their father’s absence made. It was heartbreaking. One was clingier than she ever had been, the other was so withdrawn it had Ever talking about getting her into therapy. My grandbabies wouldn’t be needing the extra help much longer if I could manage it.
“I’ve mourned long enough, Luce. I’m getting my butt in gear and bringing our Deck back home where he belongs.” I could almost hear her answer back in her sassy, know-it-all way, “‘Bout time!”.
That it was. I stood and walked into my side of the closet. Lucy’s things had been cleared away by Anna one day while she set the kids to distracting me. I kept a few things, the girls kept some keepsakes, and we set aside things for the grandkids. For the most part, the rest of it was gone now. I still wanted to reach over to her side of the closet, the one that stayed empty now, and run my fingers through all of her things. At first, it had angered me. I never let it show when the girls were here, but I threw an ungodly fit the night I discovered the closet had been emptied out. Then I realized, it was for the best, because for the first time in over a month I hadn’t fallen asleep in the closet among her things. I’d used the bed.
I snapped out of my thoughts and started packing for my trip. Once I had everything I would need, I made sure anything important was left out where the girls could find it, just in case, and then I took off for Ever’s house.
She was already on the porch before I got my bike parked. “Dad?”
“Ever,” I called back.
“What’s going on?”
She no doubt noticed the packed saddlebags. “We can’t keep doing this thing we’ve been doing.”
“What thing is that?”
“The one where I’m lost in my grief and you’re losing hope.” I watched my daughter crumple before my eyes, and I made it to her in time to catch her as she drew in on herself. “I’ve got you. I’m heading out soon, Ev. I’m going to get your man and bring him back to you if it’s the last fucking thing I do. I’m not coming back without him this time, I promise you that.”
“Dad, please, don’t promise me that.”
“Why the hell not?”
“What if he’s not out there anymore and you can’t bring him back? We’ll need you here.”
I pulled her into a tight hug and held on the best I could for the both of us while we let her words simmer between us. “Okay, how about this, I’m going to do my best for the rest of this year to bring him back. If he’s not back here, or we don’t have a solid fucking lead by then, I’ll come back and we’ll regroup. Sound fair?”
“Daddy,” she whimpered into my chest.
“Yeah, baby girl?”
“Please, do your best to bring him home, but we need you back with him too.”
“I’ll do my best.”
We said our goodbyes, ‘I love you’, and I left to go repeat the same process with my youngest daughter too. I don’t know how, but it was as if she already knew what I was up to when I pulled up.
“I was wondering how long it would take,” Anna told me as I stepped into her house.
“What do you mean?”
“There was no way you were going to allow anything, mom’s passing included, keep you from letting Ever down again.” Her words hit me hard, not just because they were true, but because of the conviction she spoke them with.
“You believe in me that much?”
“Daddy, I’ve believed you were magic my whole life, I’m not stopping now,” she admitted. Jesus, my heart did a somersault in my chest as her words sunk in.
“So much like your mom,” I told her. “Either you speak the truth, you’re full of shit, or a little mixture of both that goes a long way to motivating people.”
Anna laughed softly. “She did have a knack for that, didn’t she?”
“So do you, Princess.”
“Bring him home for her, okay?”
“I’m going to do my best.” I got ready to tell her more, but she once again proved how very much like her mother she was. “Don’t worry, I’ll look after them while you’re gone and Joker will help me, so will all the rest of the men, because that’s what family does.”
I said my goodbyes to my other girl and headed back to the clubhouse. There had to be something we missed in all of our searches. Once I was there, I called up Christina and got her on the line. “I need some new information.”
“You going hunting?” She asked, knowing already who it was.
“You’re damn right I am.”
“Want some company?”
“You offering to head to Canada with me? What would your man think?” I teased.
Christina laughed. “He would think I’d finally laid the bike down and took a good knock to the noggin’. Don’t you know he is God’s gift to this fine Earth as far as his woman is concerned?”
“Jesus,” I huffed out. “Remind Jason that he’s named after me for a reason,” I informed her only to hear her laugh again.
“He’s in between jobs right now and itching to find his brother and bring him home too. He should be there any time now.” She chuckled. “He was on his way to put his foot up someone’s ass or light some fires, whatever he had to do to get the ball rolling again.”
“It should have never been dropped.”
“Losing Lucy hit everyone hard,” she offered quietly.
“Yeah, but she’d never want her loss to cause Deck to be lost for good too.”
“I sent Jay with some information that might be helpful. Keys and Quickshot spent a good amount of time tracking down a guy named Durbin. He specializes in caring for severely drug addicted people and getting them back to a healthy place. He’ll be your first stop. I don’t think it will take much to convince him to talk, but if you need to convince him, I have plenty of ammo.”
“The dirty kind?”
“All kinds,” she let me know. “When Jay gets there, be sure you tell him he’s supposed to check in.” Christina laughed again, knowing I’d do it and embarrass the hell out of her man while I was at it. I attempted a response, but she was already gone by the time the words made it out. They already anticipated what I would need done. What we would all need done in order to bring Deck home. All that was left was to get the hell on the road.
Chapter 22
Survival
Deck
She was back again.
My brain hurt every time Sasha walked through the doors. I was no longer in the hospital where they’d been holding me. It became obvious that I was gaining some of my memories so my captors decided that I was better behind lock and key than a place where I could easily escape.
Unfortunately for me, that also meant that I didn’t have the same level of security that was helping to keep Sasha at bay before. Her brother, the man in charge, never graced me with his presence again and I was beginning to wonder if the evil witch hadn’t killed her own flesh and blood in order to gain access to me. “Did you hear me?” Her voice grated on my nerves, of course I heard her yammering on from the time she waltzed through the door.
“What do you want?” I was tired today and my head was killing me.
“Is that any way to talk to your old lady?” She asked. The dumb bitch had been trying on all sorts of titles with me lately. At first it was my woman, then my wife, and when I told her I thought she was lying about that, she decided to swap it up again. Now, it was ‘old lady’. No doubt, she was tipping her hat up to the fact that I may have realized I was a biker in my past life.
>
“Old lady? Really?” I asked, unable to hide the derision in my tone.
“What crawled up your ass today?” She snapped back at me.
I cradled my head in my hands and groaned at the noise level. “My fucking head is splitting wide open today, that’s what’s wrong. I just want to lie down and hope like hell the pain ebbs.”
“I can help you with that,” she offered. I knew her kind of help though, I saw it in my nightmares. There was no way in hell I was taking her up on that.
“No.”
“But it will help, you will be pain free so fast…”
“I’d be pain free quicker if you’d just shut up and leave so I could turn the blazing ass lights off and get rid of this headache naturally.”
“Fine!” she huffed at me. “I’ll be back later though, to check on you, and if you still have a headache, we’re taking care of it my way.”
“Great,” I muttered as she got up and left. The fucking bitch made sure to slam the door on her way out too. “Fuck!” I groaned the word out. I couldn’t take this shit much longer. I needed to be gone from here and soon. There was no way I could deal with going back to being a junkie. I still had horrid flashbacks about the detox I went through before and something told me a man like Durbin, whoever in the hell he was, would not be brought in a second time to save my ass from hell.
I had been moved to a large estate near a lake. Actually, I was beginning to think it was on an island in the middle of a lake or something because all I could see from the window were trees and water. The third floor, where I was housed, was the only one I was allowed to traverse. There were security doors requiring a code to get in and out on every access point to the lower levels. This level was literally built to be someone’s prison. I often wondered what would happen in case of a fire. I imagined they didn’t really care about me in that scenario. Being expendable left a bad taste in my mouth, but at least this was better than the nightmares I still had of when Sasha kept me tied to a fucking bed and drugged up. Yeah, it became obvious as my memories started becoming a little clearer that the nightmares were just as real as the dreams of my family. I didn’t want to reconcile the two as belonging to the same person, the same life, but that was my reality. At some point along the way, I had been taken from a life where I was happy and thrown into a miserable existence. Wondering what happened to that family left me feeling worse than I did during detox though.
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