Misha
“Johnny, you’ve been here for three hours.”
“Is there a reason you’ve been here for three hours?”
“I like the diner.”
“Mmhm.”
The long-haired DeVos twin sat at one of my tables, eating through a second plate of the breakfast sampler. Where he was putting it, I had no idea, but I knew that he was stalling something fierce. At first I had just thought that he was in for breakfast and had come by to say hi. But then he’d lingered.
I didn’t have time to babysit him, however. We were slammed. I was pulling a double, and I was tired and a little down from not being able to see Rose off to her first day of school. There was something that was up, however, and I knew something was up with the way that Johnny kept checking his phone, as if he were waiting for some kind of signal.
I wasn’t going to kick him out, either way. I worked through my first shift, took a five-minute break to shove food in my mouth, and then worked through about thirty minutes of my second shift before I saw Johnny take Big Mama into the back office. They were gone for a time, and I was able to take two more orders and clear out a table before he came back around.
“Hey, Misha, we need to go.”
I looked at him incredulously, carrying a tray of dirty dishes in my hands.
“What do you mean, we need to go? You sit here all day and you don’t tell me what’s going on, and you expect me to leave in the middle of a double shift rush?” I scoffed. “Johnny, I don’t know what’s going on, but if Tripp is keeping me out of things, you guys need to settle on in or out and—”
“It’s about Jared Longman.”
The tray dropped from my hands.
“Shit!”
I scrambled to pick up the mess, but my mind was racing. Jared Longman … why was he here? What the hell did he think he was doing? Had he talked to Trip?
Trip.
Shit!
“Listen, Johnny—”
“Misha, we need to go and we need to go now.”
I frowned. “Big Mama—”
“Already knows. Come on.”
I didn’t bother clocking out. I just knew that if Jared was in town, then there was nothing good that was coming from it. I just hoped that he hadn’t caused some sort of irreparable damage by opening up his mouth.
# # #
Johnny rode me to the bar. Checking my phone when I got off, it was only a couple of hours until it would be time for Rose to come home. I wondered what she would be coming home to.
The bar was shockingly deserted, save for just the boys. All their eyes turned on me, and I had the intense sense of deja vu, as if it was the day that I had come back, rather than a few months into all of this. They were all up front, and in the center closest to the bar were Trip, Brig, and Jared. He looked worse than he usually did. He had always been a thin man, and small, and not much of a biker boy in reality, but he’d been roped into some shit with the Jackals, and they were all too big on letting go of assets.
“Misha,” he said, breathing out a very large sigh of relief as he saw me.
“Hey, Jared,” I said warily. “What are you doing here?”
“Apparently, he came to warn you,” Trip spoke up. My eyes flicked to him, and his were controlled … but I could see that something was wrong. My stomach sank at the possibilities.
“Warn me?”
Jared’s eyes flicked over to Trip, and Trip nodded.
“Tell her.”
Jared swallowed.
“Ah, yeah, well. Rigger’s put out a bounty on you. Holland’s not looking too good, and he’s been putting pressure on Holland’s old lady to pull the plug, you see. Either she does it officially, or he’ll do it unofficially.”
“He’s going to kill Holland?”
“In one way or another, yeah. Get him out of the way, solidify his hold. After your boys took his shipment of drugs—” Jared’s eyes flicked over to Trip “—people started saying that maybe they should start doing shit like Holland said they should. You remember what it was like before you left. Rigger letting all sorts of crazy shit slide—”
“What does this have to do with the bounty on me, Jared?”
“It has to do with it because with Holland legitimately out of the way and no one willing to challenge Rigger without someone that they know can handle him, people are more than willing to fall in line with what he wants—which is you back with the Jackals. You didn’t actually think he’d just forget about you? Especially if you came back here?”
“I hadn’t intended to stay.” I avoided looking at Trip; I’d never admitted that to him—that this hadn’t meant to be permanent until I realized that I couldn’t leave him again.
“Well … they found where you were. Whoever ends up bringing you back is basically set with Rigger as far as any of them are concerned.”
“So I have to leave.”
“Basically—”
“Wait a second.” Trip stepped forward, between me and Jared. “No one is fucking leaving—”
“You think that Rigger’s gonna give up his favorite club girl—”
Before anyone could stop him, Trip’s fist connected with Jared’s face, giving a sickening, crunching sound. Blood spurted everywhere from Jared’s nose, and he cried out, deeply in pain.
“Oh, shit, what the hell—”
“Misha. With me. Now.”
I didn’t have it in me to protest. I looked back at Jared, who was fairly on his own in taking care of his face. None of the boys were looking to get him anything, and it was unlikely that they were going to. I followed Trip back to his office, where he snapped the door closed.
“Trip—”
“What happened the night the Jackals took you?”
I tugged at my ear.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean—shit—what the hell do you think I mean, Misha? What happened that? What actually happened?”
I stared at him. I felt my chest tightened.
“Jared told you.”
“And now you’re gonna tell me.”
I drew in a breath.
“Trip … I was scared, okay? I found out that I was pregnant, and I looked at our life and how we were living it, and it scared me. All the partying and the fights and the shit—you don’t think about it when you’re a stupid teenager, but then there’s a baby growing in you—”
“So you turned to the Jackals to help you get out. You didn’t trust me to do the right thing. You—”
“You need to let me finish, Trip, if you want to know what happened.”
I saw the muscle in his jaw twitch, but he stopped talking. Instead, he paced, hand going through his hair.
“I was scared. I started looking up all sorts of ways to get rid of it, but I—I couldn’t. Everything always made me sick and I always thought about, well, it’s not the baby’s fault it’s there. It’s yours. Now what are you gonna do about it? I hadn’t even intended to go to the Jackals, but … I met Jared. He was in town for a funeral. I was sitting at Mama’s grave talking to her and he just came up to me. Said I was looking sad. Asked if I needed to talk. I let out everything, I didn’t know who the fuck he was until I mentioned the Pride and he freaked out. That’s when I found out. It didn’t really register with me, I didn’t think, I just knew that he didn’t wanna get caught up in Pride territory alone with your girl. Jared’s always been a scared kind of man.”
“I could tell.”
“Anyway … I told him if he helped me with the situation, I would never tell anyone he was walking around Pride territory when things were getting so tense between the two. He was willing to. He felt bad for me and he didn’t want to get his ass kicked.”
“It’d have definitely gotten kicked.”
“Trip.”
He grunted, but let me continue.
“Jared is only a year older than me, so … Our plan was kind of stupid.” I shook my head. “Looking back after everything happened, I realized it was just too much and too dumb. I wanted to make it look like some sort of home invasion or something. It couldn’t look like I had just left, but it couldn’t look like anyone specific had done it, either.”
“We assumed it was the Jackals either way.”
“Yeah, well. In hindsight I should have realized you would. I had this … brilliant idea that as long as some of the blood was mine, the DNA would show it on the off chance the police were involved. The thing about the pig blood, that was true; Jared actually does a decent bit of hunting despite being incapable of shooting an actual person. So, we spattered some of that, too, and headed out.”
“How’d you end up with Holland, then? If Jared was supposed to ride you out into the sunset?”
“It wasn’t like that, Trip. And we only got caught because Jared didn’t realize that Holland had put one of the boys on him to make sure he didn’t get into trouble. They’d been watching us the whole time, had followed me, seen me with you guys. They flanked us and rode us across the border. I knew Jared would get in trouble if it came out he was actually helping me; I nudged him in the direction of spinning some kind of tale that we fell for each other.” I rolled my eyes. “Jared was barely a Prospect. Nothing belongs to Prospects, especially not women. Holland gave him a beating for stepping out of line and told him that he could have me when he’d earned me. When I told him I was pregnant, it made him stop from passing me around in case the baby would get hurt, and over nine months I guess I grew on him. So after Rose was born, he still kept people off me. No one ever knew the real reason behind Jared trying to smuggle me out, and I’ve been with them for five years because when you’re a dumb little girl making dumb choices, you do what seems like it’s gonna save you.”
Trip was silent when I was done. When it was all out, from my mouth. It was silence that was the worst. I wanted him to say something.
“Trip—”
“Why didn’t you just try?” he asked. “Why didn’t you just try to stay here with me? We were dumb, but Misha—”
“Do you honestly think we could have raised a little girl the way things used to be, Trip?”
“Was raising her with Jackals better?”
“It wasn’t what I wanted to have happen!” I yelled. “I was going to go off, shack up with some family in the East. They didn’t talk to Daddy much, but they’re the sort that would never turn away a pregnant girl. But it would have been away from all of this! I was scared, and pregnant and was trying to do the right thing! You don’t understand, because you weren’t the one looking at five pregnancy tests after nights of parties and watching you fight people twice your size, and hearing about gun fights on the border with Jackals! You wouldn’t have understood then, just like you fucking don’t now!”
I didn’t know where such anger had come from. Did I blame him, for the things that had happened? For not being what I needed him to be when I found out I was pregnant with Rose? Maybe I did a little. If he—if we—had both been the people we needed to be, none of this would have happened. It had been a joint effort.
“Why didn’t you tell me all of this when you came back? Why did I have to hear all this shit coming from a Jackal’s mouth before I heard it coming from yours?”
I looked at him, shaking my head.“Would you have taken it well then, knowing what happened?”
“I’m not taking it well, now.”
“You would have taken it less well then.”
“That doesn’t make it any better.”
“I know.”
We stood there, quiet for a time. I had known that this would come up eventually. I merely wished that I had been the one to bring it to him.
“Back there. You said that you hadn’t intended to stay. Was that … Was that still the intention, even after you moved in?”
I looked to him, hurt.
“I wouldn’t have asked if I hadn’t wanted to make this permanent, Trip. Do you think I’m that cruel?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“If I didn’t want to stay here now, I would still be living out of that back room. I wouldn’t have gotten Rose’s hopes up and enrolled her in a school. I wouldn’t—I wouldn’t have let you touch me and love me again, Trip. I’ve made bad choices, but that never would have been one of them.”
I walked over to him. I didn’t know how to ease the hurt. I knew that I had made the choice that I thought was right back then. I just—
“I never did anything to hurt you, Trip,” I said softly, placing my hands on the sides of his face. “Nothing that I ever did or ever will do was ever done just to make you suffer. I love you far too much for that.”
It took him a while before his eyes met mine again. I leaned up, knowing there weren’t words in the universe to convey any of that to him. So I kissed him, putting all my love for him into it. I pressed to him, letting my mouth move against his until he was reciprocating, until his arms circled back around behind me. It didn’t go further than that. It was the first time that it didn’t go further than kisses. It was just us feeling each other out, trying to get on some sort of common ground with each other.
“I love you, Trip,” I breathed against his lips. “I’m sorry for lying, even when I thought it was what I had to do.”
“I know … I know …” He pressed his forehead to mine, and I looked into those blues of his. “I love you more than my own damn life, Misha. You know that, right? I always have. I’m always going to. Holland, or Rigger, or that limp fuck out there, isn’t going to change that, not in the damned slightest, you understand? I wish you wouldn’t have left. I wish none of this would have happened.” He laughed. “Can’t change the past, can we? But I meant what I said, Misha. I told you, I am gonna protect you and Rose, and I fucking meant it. You’re never gonna have to run away again. Ever. You hear me? It was my own damn fault for all of this—”
“Trip, no, it wasn’t—”
“It was,” he said. “It was. You were my girl, and you didn’t feel like I could do what needed to get done. Not this time, Misha. This time, I set things right.”