road name for that mop of bright red hair, but nope. It was because the fucker was a pyromaniac and proud of it.
“You can’t toss her out, Wolfe,” Axe, my VP, growled, his arms bunching through his Henley. Apparently, his agitation was fucking with his brains if he thought I was letting Lucie and my goddamn daughter go anywhere other than inside the clubhouse.
“I wasn’t going to,” I rumbled, pissed at the very idea. “Fuck, you think I’m going to toss the mother of the only kid I have out? What the hell do you take me for?”
Axe shrugged, but there was misery in his eyes as he followed Lucie’s trajectory. “You were as bad as Bomber when he made her leave.”
“Only because it—” I gritted my teeth, not about to make the admission that even the barest whisper of Lucie’s name had hurt.
Worse than a knife to the belly, or a bullet to the chest, and I knew, because I’d experienced both under the club’s banner.
A hand clapped my back and Dagger squeezed. “It’s okay. We were all fucked up back then.”
My jaw ached from how hard I was clenching my teeth, but it was nothing compared to the pain in my chest as I watched Lucie’s car drive up toward the clubhouse. It wasn’t a piece of shit rust bucket, so I knew Ryan had taken care of her. And my daughter.
Holy fuck, I had a kid.
“Where do you think Ryan is?” Axe questioned, telling me our thoughts were, as usual, in alignment.
That’s what happened when you grew up with brothers. Not blood brothers, but brothers by choice.
Axe, Flame, Dagger, and I were all usually on the same page. Once upon a time, Lucie and Ryan had shared that page too. Until everything had gone to shit.
“He has to be dead.”
I glared at Flame. “You don’t know that,” I spat out, my tone grim because I knew he was right, even if I didn’t want him to be.
He shrugged. “Yeah, we do. No way he’d leave her, or the girl, unless he could help it.”
Inside, everything began to break down. But it was only on the inside because the Prez of a fucking MC couldn’t burst into tears or drop to his knees with grief if that was the truth.
“He can’t be,” Dagger rasped, telling me he was just as affected by what Flame said. And even though my resident pyromaniac looked like he wasn’t hurting, deep in his eyes, I knew he was ready to set some shit on fire. Which meant Dagger was ready to get stabby with someone if we weren’t careful.
“He is,” Flame insisted grimly. “You know it, and I do too.”
“What happened to him?” Axe whispered rhetorically. “What happened to them?”
“She had a baby,” Flame replied, his tone loaded with a mixture of worry, shock, and awe. “Lucie became a mom.”
“She’s only a kid herself,” Dagger gritted out. “We made her leave and she—”
I held up a hand, not able to hear him say the words. Shaking my head, I bit off, “We wait for her to tell us what happened, and we sure as shit don’t talk about this with the others around.” The last thing I needed was our past fueling the MC gossip mill.
“She’s just as cocky as ever,” Flame warned. “If you go in there like you usually do, you’ll just knock heads. That won’t get us anywhere.”
“He’s right,” Axe agreed grimly. “Let me talk to her.”
Because they were both right, I didn’t slam my fist into either of their faces. Lucie and I were too alike. Had she been born a boy, she’d have easily worn this cut, carried the Prez patch, led the Hell’s Rebels with ease, and contained the fury of a brotherhood that was over three hundred members strong.
She should have been born with a cock, but she hadn’t been, and what was between her legs was like pure heroin to a desperate junkie like Axe, Flame, Dagger, and me.
Always had been, always would be.
She was our weakest link and our strongest.
Well, that was until she’d brought my daughter into the world.
Trying to maintain a stoic face was one of the hardest things I’d ever had to do as my brothers and I headed back up the driveway toward the clubhouse.
It was an old motel that Bomber had redesigned back in the seventies. I’d seen pictures of the dump before he’d gotten his paws on it, and it had consisted of nothing but bedrooms, but