Chapter 1

Lawson

“This is possibly the worst idea you’ve ever had,” my younger brother Drew complains as we walk down an ill-maintained gravel road. “What do you expect? For him to just answer the door and welcome us with open arms?”

“That’s the last fucking thing I want,” I sneer. “I want some damn questions answered. We’ll probably be out of there in an hour.”

“Sure is a long ass trip for an hour of time,” he grumbles.

“Watch your mouth,” I warn.

“You cuss,” he whines. “I should be able to cuss now, too.”

I look over my shoulder at him, nearly tripping on yet another pothole in the road. How anyone on a bike navigates this road without ruining their suspension is beyond me. That realization makes me pull my phone from my pocket, checking the map for the hundredth time since we got off the Greyhound bus.

“I’m a man. When you’re grown, then you can use whatever language you want.”

He laughs at me, sputtering “a man?” in a way that makes my already simmering anger bubble to the top.

“I’m eighteen,” I argue. “Legal in every way.”

“Not drinking,” he challenges.

“I have a fake ID for that,” I mutter as my eyes catch the sight of a compound with numerous houses gathered behind it.

“I want one,” he says excitedly.

“You wouldn’t pass for twenty-one, idiot. I bet you don’t even have hair on your nuts yet.”

I smile, facing forward so he can’t see me.

“I do, too.” He mumbles something under his breath two steps behind me.

My fifteen-year-old brother has always tried to keep up with me despite our three year age difference.

“Wow,” he hisses as our destination comes into view.

“Yeah,” I agree. “The assholes in life always seem to have more than everyone else.”

A half dozen houses are the backdrop for a more industrial type building. It pisses me off more, even as a part of me hopes this is the wrong place. Facing my past isn’t something I ever thought I’d have to do.

I don’t break stride as we head through the open gate and onto the porch. I press the doorbell as Drew, visibly uncomfortable, shifts from one foot to the other.

I look over my shoulder, making sure he’s behind me and safe as the door swings open.

Unfamiliar brown eyes stare back at me. This man has auburn hair with gray sprinkled in at his temples.

“You’ll know him when you see him,” Mom says, using one of her final breaths.

As if he’s seeing a ghost, he just stares at me. My eyes narrow at his scrutiny.

He breaks the eye contact first, turning his head to speak over his shoulder. “Babe, can you come here?”

I watch as the most tatted up motherfucker I’ve ever laid eyes on walks up to join us. His hand makes contact with the man who opened the door before his eyes even look toward me.

Recognition marks his face also. I stare back at him for a brief second. His ice blue eyes, the same color as mine, fight for understanding.

“You must be my dad,” I sneer.

“What the fuck?” the blue-eyed fucker hisses, earning a slap to the chest from the other man.

“Please come in.” The untatted man offers his hand. “I’m Robert.”

I side saddle past him, finding more than a dozen pairs of eyes staring back at me while my younger brother apologizes for my rudeness and introduces himself. Regret swims in my gut at the sight of all of these spectators. The bravado I mustered on the walk here, dwindles away quickly as I take in the tough-looking grown men scattered around the room. I don’t miss the handful of gorgeous girls in the room, either.

Just as I’d suspected, these old fucking bikers are still doing what bikers do; fucking young girls while throwing the used-up ones out like trash. Several older women, gorgeous in their own right, stare back wide-eyed and confused. They must be the ones training the new ones as their replacements.

“Time to clear out,” a bald man with sleeves of tats peeking out from his t-shirt booms.

Groans and complaints echo around the room, but everyone begins to stand, gather their things, and disappear down the hallway at the back of the room.

The man barking orders must be Kincaid, the club president. The soft look he gives to the two assholes behind me isn’t in character with what you’d expect from the leader of an MC. Information on the club was limited during my research over the last couple of weeks since Mom passed, but the internet had plenty of information on other clubs.

A pair of teenagers gawk at me. Clearly twins, or very close in age, they linger, eyes darting from the intruders in their world and back to the guys standing at my back.

“Go,” one of them insists.

The boy moves quickly, but the ice blue eyes of the girl hold mine, the delicate column of her throat working on a rough swallow under my attention. It’s clear she’s attracted to me when her tongue swipes at her bottom lip. I’ll fuck that mouth later, given a chance, but I have other shit to deal with right now.

“Dad?” she whispers.

“Go,” the booming voice comes again.

She scurries away as disgust sends goosebumps down my arms.

Dad? I can’t decipher which pisses me off more, that I may have just envisioned my sister on her knees deep throating me or that my father has other children he stuck around for when my mom, pregnant with me, was tossed to the curb.

I spin, my eyes first searching for Drew, something I’ve done my whole life until they land on the other two.

“How do you want to do this?” I ask the man who looks like an older version of the guy I see in the mirror each morning. He has tats on nearly every part of his body, stars on his pierced cheeks, and despite his age, it’s still working for him. A look into my future doesn’t seem so bleak, even if vanity is the only thing I honestly want to focus on right now. All of the other things that need to be said come with a pain in my chest that’s difficult to get rid of.

“However you want,” the brown-eyed man says. He motions to the vacated couch across the room. “We can sit.”

Drew, always obedient, follows him while I stand locked in place staring at the man who ruined my mom’s life. It isn’t until I see the pleading in my brother’s eyes as he looks at me after sweeping his attention around the room, that I cave and move to sit beside him. I didn’t miss the pool table, arcade games, or the TV too big for any person to own when I first walked in. Those materialistic things don’t mean shit to me, but Drew is easily impressed

“Nice place you have here.” I avoid eye contact as I look around the open area of the room. “It begs me to wonder just how many pregnant women you forced out after they got used to such luxury.”

Drew trembles beside me, and I hate having this conversation in front of him. I haven’t given him the gory details of what Mom whispered in my ear on her last day in this world.

“None,” Robert says.

I huff a laugh. “Funny, that’s not what happened to my mother.”

“And who is your mother?”

The gall of this motherfucker.

“What’s wrong, Snatch?” I hiss. “Can’t remember the last time you fucked a woman?”

He narrows his eyes at me but keeps his mouth shut.

“I’ll give you a hint. I just turned eighteen.”

Robert’s eyes widen as my sperm donor hisses. “Darby.”

I hear Drew sniffle at the sound of our mother’s name and it pisses me off coming from his lips more than I ever thought it would.

“Don’t speak her name, ever again,” I growl.

The men across from us share a private look before turning their attention back to us, making my blood pump harder, thicker in my veins. It’s taking everything I have to stay seated and not attack both of them.

“Are you sure?”

I glare at him. “Are you kidding me? I would tell you to take a long, hard look in the mirror,” I point at my face, one I’d been proud of until seeing him. “But you’re kind of looking in one, don’t you think?”

Tattooed fingers sweep over his head as he soaks all of this in. Minutes drag by before he speaks again. “I’d like to speak with your mother. There seems to be a lot of things we need to discuss.”

My eyes sting at the possibility of speaking to my mother again. “Like what? You want to bitch her out for telling me how to find you? Reject her one more time since I’m interfering in your life again?”

He shakes his head, but I continue.

“Tell me, Snatch, what was it about her or me for that matter that would make you reject us but have two more children with some other woman? Did we not fit into your life or was it her specifically that you couldn’t stomach?”

“That’s not what—” Snatch holds his hand up to stop Robert from speaking.

“One,” he says with no anger or agitation in his voice. Cool, calm, collected, and more than a little infuriating. “You can call me Jaxon. I haven’t gone by Snatch in over fifteen years. Your mother wouldn’t know that because I haven’t seen her in over eighteen years. She never knew my real name.”

I bristle at the implication of my mother being the type of woman who would sleep with men before getting to know even their names. It’s Drew’s hand on my forearm that keeps me from knocking this asshole out.

“Two,” he continues, not bothered by my restrained anger. “Your mother never told me she was pregnant. She disappeared one night, and we never heard from her again.”

“Bull—” I get the same hand he held up at Robert. Even enraged, I silence my words, which pisses me off even more.

“Three, even though it doesn’t make any difference, Samson and Delilah are adopted, so there was never another woman.”

“Law,” Drew whispers drawing my stunned eyes to him. “Just hear them out.”

I shake my head, but words are impossible to form.

“Please,” he begs, exhausted from traveling through numerous states to get here. He leans closer and whispers. “I’m tired and hungry.”

Protecting Drew has been my focus since I was old enough to understand that my mother’s continued bad decisions left him fending for himself many times. This time is no different.

I stand from my place on the couch. “We shouldn’t have come here. Come on, Drew.”

He hesitates at first, but I feel his presence at my back as I grab my duffel bag from where I dropped it on the floor when I’d first walked in.

“We’ll find a hotel or something,” I mutter to him as my hand encircles the doorknob.

“We don’t have the money for that,” he adds.

“I’ll figure it out.”

“Like last time,” he whispers just as Jaxon calls out, “Don’t go.”

“Please stay,” Robert says walking closer than Jaxon is willing to at this point. “We have plenty of room in the house.”

I ignore him and look down into the pleading eyes of my baby brother.

“What will happen if you go to jail?”

“I won’t,” I promise and turn back to the front porch.

“You said that last time,” he persists.

Guilt and a flood of memories hit me all at once. They’re troublesome enough to make me turn in the direction of the two men I never wanted to see longer than to say my peace.

“I’m not calling either one of you dad.”

Relief at my concession is clear on Robert’s face. Jaxon looks like he could puke any minute.