Every muscle in my body locks up, and I have to physically force myself to take a breath through my nose and out through my mouth so I don’t lose my shit in front of my kid and terrify him. But on the inside, I’m screaming and imagining a hundred different ways to kill Z with my bare hands. He left my baby with violent fucking criminals? What in the hell was he thinking?
I snap my head up and there Z is, standing with his arms crossed, looking every inch the stranger he’s become.
His right hand is laid casually over a gun holstered on his belt like it’s the most natural thing in the world to be armed in front of his nine-year-old son.
A gun. Z has a fuckinggun.
When Bruiser stands up to obey, instinct takes over and I grab his shoulder and push him behind me as I stand up, shielding him with my frame. Over my dead fucking body am I letting my son out of my sight around this armed stranger wearing my best friend’s face.
Everything’s starting to fall into place like puzzle pieces clicking together, each one revealing a picture I really, really don’t want to see.
Silas used to run with an MC back in the day. He tried to keep it separate from his family life for the most part, but I witnessed his “friends” at work one time when I was with him.
Mom was out of her mind after snorting powder off the kitchen table. Silas must have thought he didn’t have any choice but to take me by the clubhouse with him. I was young, maybe five, and I seriously didn’t understand what was going on around me.
My memories are still just flashes of images that barely make sense even now. Naked women with glazed eyes sitting on men’s laps. The sharp copper smell of blood in the air like someone had sprayed it on the walls. A man’s screams coming from somewhere in the back that went on and on until they suddenlycut off. And the bloody, chained-up guy in the corner with a face so swollen I couldn’t tell where his features were supposed to be, begging in this wet, broken voice that still sometimes wakes me up screaming from nightmares about it.
Dad was never a patched member, but he was always on the periphery for some reason, doing their dirty work and taking their money.
Somehow it’s all come back around full circle, connecting to Z and looping back to me in some twisted fucking pattern I can’t escape no matter how hard I run.
“We’re leaving now.” The words come out cold and flat because it’s the tone I use when I’m two seconds away from violence.
“Mom?” Bruiser asks, and I hear the uncertainty creeping into his voice because he’s never heard me talk like this before.
“Go get in the car,” I say over my shoulder, never taking my eyes off Z.
“Don’t you fucking move,” Z barks, and there’s something in his voiceI’venever heard before these past few days. Something sharp and ugly and mean that doesn’t belong in the mouth of the boy who used to make me laugh until I couldn’t breathe.
“Mom?” Now Bruiser sounds officially scared, and I fucking hate Z for doing this to him.
But I’m not playing any more of Z’s games because I know now that’s all they’ve ever been. Games where he holds all the cards and I’m just supposed to play along and pretend not to notice.
“Dad?” Bruiser tries in an even more devastatingly small voice, and my heart just shatters into a thousand pieces. That little questioning lilt at the end is like he’s asking Z to be the person Bruiser thinks he is. The person Bruiser needs him to be. His dad.
Except Z was never his dad. That was all a lie. I don’t even know how he did it because I read the paternity report myself.
It would be a less bitter pill to swallow if I was theonlyone who believed the story Z had been selling all these years. But he brought an innocent child into this.
I push Bruiser farther behind me when he tries to peek out at the man he’s known his entire life as his father. My hand finds his head and presses it down, keeping him small and safe behind my body.
“Harper,” Z says, and his voice is quiet and shaking, like he still sees himself as the victim here. “I didn’t want it to be like this.”
The bruises under his eyes are darker than they were yesterday, and I wonder how long it’s been since whatever drugs he’s on have allowed him to sleep. Has he been awake for two days straight? Three? Justhowvolatile is he right now?
“It didn’t have to be like this, but you made it this way!” He gets louder with each word until he’s shouting at me, like this is somehow all my fault. His paranoid, drugged-out brain probably believes it is. “All I wanted was for us to be a family. Why couldn’t you just let us be a family!”
The words make my skin crawl because we were never meant to be a family the way Z wanted. Not when every cell in my body has belonged to someone else since I was seventeen years old, and Z knew that, and he did all this anyway.
“I did exactly what you said.” I keep my voice controlled and reasonable even though I want to scream back in his face. “And now my son and I are leaving.”
“No!” Z yells like a toddler being told he can’t have candy. And then his face darkens. “It’s time to go back to the closet.”
Bruiser starts making little whining, scared noises from behind me that are high-pitched and anxious, just like when he was a toddler and sensed danger he couldn’t understand. It cutsright through me and activates every protective instinct I have. I want to tear Z apart with my bare hands for making my child feel so afraid.
“You said you’d let me go after I did what you asked at the prison,” I remind him as calmly as I can manage.
“Well, I’ll only know you actually did it when I get a call from Viper,” Z says petulantly.