Chapter 38

Dane

I watch my woman wheel my sister away. I have no idea how I am supposed to fix my relationship with Emily. She thinks I abandoned her, she thinks I walked away from her. I was fifteen—I was child myself. I did go back, when I was nineteen. I waited until my father left for work and then I went and knocked on the door.

I can remember standing there and being nervous. I was a prospect then but I had regular work at the garage and an income. My mother opened the door and she had the biggest grin on her face. I don’t know what I was expecting but it wasn’t happiness.

“Dane?” She stepped out into the yard and looked around.

“Don’t worry; I waited till he’d left before I knocked on the door.”

She closed the front door and took two steps away from it. “What are you doing here, Dane?”

“I have a job, and I live in a really nice town. You’d be safe.”

“You need to leave, Dane. We are safe and we are happy. He’s changed.”

“He’s changed?” I asked her, disbelief in my tone.

“He’s stopped drinking. He has it under control. You need to leave before Emily sees you.”

“But I wanted to see her, to spend some time with you both.”

“No, you have to go.”

I reached into my pocket and gave her a card that had my phone number and address on. “Take this. If you ever need an escape plan or want to visit me—without him—this is where I am, and this is how to contact me.”

“Dane I need you to promise you won’t try to contact Emily or me ever again. He is better but if he found out you were here, it would be bad for us.” I remember her eyes were full of fear.

“I thought you said he’d changed?”

“He has but sometimes he slips, right now he’s good. It’s good.”

“I need to know, Ma, that if he ever slips you’ll call me,” I said.

“Yes, I promise. Now, please go.”

I remember that as I stood there and stared at her, I’d wished she’d just come with me. I guess I knew she wouldn’t. I walked away and that was the last time I saw her.

I slowly follow Kat and Emily to the cottage. I can hear Kat chatting to Emily about how nice she thinks  the cottages are. I normally only rent out the five cottages in winter, that’s peak tourism season here. People come from all over to ski. I charge a premium and I really don’t have to do anything as they are fully self‐ contained.

When we arrive at the door of the cottage, I move ahead of them and take the keys off Kat so that they can go straight in. Kat gives me a tight smile and Emily avoids all eye contact. When they go inside Kat immediately walks into the kitchen and begins opening cupboards and then the refrigerator.

“Dane, there’s no milk and it looks like the coffee wasn’t replenished after the last guests. I’ll need to go and find it at our house. Can you please help Emily into bed and be nice to her?” she says with more than a hint of sarcasm. “Emily, I’ll be back in a minute.”

I sigh and look at Emily. “Let’s get you into bed.”

“It’s fine, I can do it myself.”

“Em, at least let me wheel you closer to the bed.”

She nods. I push her closer and pull the covers down. I watch as she tentatively tries to stand, putting most of her weight on one leg, a small smile plays on her lips. “It doesn’t hurt as much as I thought it would.”

“Could have something to do with the injection that Doc Jordan gave you for the pain,” I say with a grin. “What about your hands, Em, are they ok?”

“Yes, a bit scraped and a little burnt but no permanent damage. Doc has put an ointment on them to help with infection and he’s given me some codeine tablets to help with the pain. He says it’s only second‐degree burns and that I was lucky. The burns were my own fault.”

“None of this was your fault.” She avoids my eyes and I try to imagine what she has gone through. She awkwardly moves onto the bed and I move the wheelchair out of the way then pull up the covers. The cottages normally have the bed raised up a few steps so that the occupants can see a view of the mountains and valleys. Obviously, this one doesn’t so we made one whole wall out of glass so that they get an awesome view from anywhere inside it. I walk and pull the sheer curtain across to give her some privacy.  This cottage is positioned away from the others and you’d have to be a mountain goat to see in it. I walk into the dining area, grab a chair and sit down next to her bed.

“There are many things I need to talk to you about but I know you have questions. Ask me anything, Emily, and I’ll tell you the truth. My only condition is that you repeat what I tell you to no one. If you can’t do that then we can’t have this conversation.” I have done many things in my life but not all of them have been legal and not everyone knows everything about me. I am trusting her to keep my secrets; I will never go back to prison.

“Why did you leave me? Why did you never come back?” Her voice is raised and I feel as if she is on the verge of tears.

I rub a hand over my face and sigh. “Dad threw me out when I was fifteen. I begged Ma, Emily, to choose me and you and to throw him out.” I meet her eyes and continue, “But she chose him, Em.” She shakes her head. “Tell me what you were told.”

“Dad said you stole a car and fell in with a bad crowd, the Savage Angels. He said he asked you to come home, he said you told him you never wanted to see us again. You didn’t even come for Ma’s funeral.” She sounds hurt and angry. I don’t know how I am going to convince her that her whole life has been a lie.

“After Dad threw me out and Ma turned her back on me, I hitched a ride and kept going. One night, I was walking past a garage and I could see a group of men around a bike, revving it. I could tell by listening to it that the engine was slightly misfiring. I walked in and said I could fix it. They all laughed but the guy who owned it let me play with it. That was how I met the Savage Angels.”

“You hitched by yourself? Weren’t you scared?”

“I was scared of everything.” I chuckle at her. “But I learned very quickly not to show fear. The old saying fake it till you make it holds merit. Outwardly, I looked like I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t. I was lucky I fell into the club. Then one night I stupidly got into a car that was stolen and when we were caught, I wasn’t fast enough to run away. I rang Dad when I was arrested and he hung up on me. The Judge threw me into a juvenile facility until I turned eighteen. I had no one, but while I was incarcerated the guy whose bike I fixed, Roy, came to visit me. He wore his colors.” I point at Jonas’s jacket that she still wears. “The other prisoners left me alone after that. I was unofficially a Savage Angel and everyone knows you don’t fuck with them. When I got out, Roy was there to pick me up.”

“You rang Dad and he hung up on you? Really?” she asks and I nod at her.

“I like to think that Ma didn’t know but she probably did.” I stand up and start to pace. “I did go back for you when I was nineteen; I’d been working here in the garage that the club owns. I had a steady income and came to get you both, but Ma told me he had stopped drinking and that you were both happy and safe. I left her my number and told her if she ever needed me all she had to do was call.” I stop pacing and look at her. “In a way, it was a good thing for me. I had no ties, so I went up through the ranks of the MC really quickly. If I had enemies, I had no family or loved ones for them to try to hurt me with. The MC was...is my family.” A tear falls down her cheek and she quickly wipes it away. “But, Em, there’s room here for you too. I always thought you’d find me, especially when you went away to college. Why, Em?”

“She never told me you came to visit. And he had many relapses.” She looks down at her hands. “When he would come home from work, Ma would sort of hold her breath—”

“And she’d ask you to stay in your room until she called you for dinner. If she never called, you knew he was drunk.” She lifts her eyes to mine and nods her head, more tears run down her cheeks. I sigh, walk into the bathroom and grab the tissues. “He never changed did he?”

She shakes her head, confirming what I already knew, and holds the tissues to her eyes. “All these years I thought you abandoned me. Why didn’t you come to her funeral?”

“I was there, Em, I just didn’t make myself known to you or Dad. You stood next to him and he had his arm around you while you cried. You came home from college, stayed for a week and then you went back. Why didn’t you stay away, Em? Why’d you go back to him?”

“There was no one else, what was I supposed to do, Dane? He was lost without her. He started drinking, he was close to losing his job, and he was behind in all of his bills. He needed me. I thought I’d stay till the end of the year and go back but it became clear that he wasn’t going to cope without someone there full‐ time.” She sounds angry now; her voice sounds hard and resigned.

“How long before he started to hit you?” I ask and watch as she averts her eyes.

“I spent most of my time in my room, barricaded in. He was...unpredictable when he was drunk.”

“Did he ever...” I pause and wait for her eyes to come back to mine, “touch you, Em?” I whisper as I hold my breath. If he did that to her, if he hurt her like that, how could she ever forgive me?

“No, Dane. Ma always made sure I was safe. She always kept him away from me,” she whispers too.

I let out the breath that I was holding then I sit down and reach for her hand. “I didn’t know, Em, I would never have left you if I’d known, I swear.” Now I have to ask her a harder question and I don’t know how she’ll react. “Emily, did Johnnie rape you?” I ask.

“Johnnie?” She looks puzzled.

“The man who kidnapped you. The one who took you to that cabin.”

“He was going to. He put...” I watch as she gulps in air, “he put his hands...everywhere. Then he got a phone call and I escaped.”

I grip her hand tighter and I move so I sit on the side of the bed. “You escaped? You were out in the woods overnight?”

She nods and says, “I spent a lot of nights at home locked in my room watching TV. I’ve watched every survival show there is, so I wasn’t frightened. Well, I was worried I was going to die from dehydration, but I found shelter though and built a fire.”

I laugh and she looks shocked. “You found shelter, built a fire and I am told that when they found you, you had a spear and you did all this naked? But all you were worried about was dying from dehydration after only one night?” I know my laughter is from relief that Johnnie didn’t have a chance to do anything more to her. Slowly a smile spreads across her face and then she laughs too.

When we both stop she says, “It wasn’t a spear, it was a stake.” Then I laugh all over again. She waits until I am under control and she says, “Dane, I don’t want this to go to court. Maggie said you have ways of making sure that doesn’t happen. I don’t want everyone knowing what he did to me, can you help me?” She sounds desperate and all the laughter goes out of me.

“Anything for you, Em. Don’t give this another thought. Could you help me?” I ask, knowing that I am taking advantage of the situation.

“How could I help you?” She sounds incredulous.

“I would really like to get to know you. Would you consider staying here until you are all healed? Let me take care of you? Kat is an awesome cook and she’s funny as hell. Please, Em, will you think about it?”

Then Kat comes back through the door with bags of stuff. She takes one look at Emily and her face clouds over. She drops the bags on the floor and heads towards me, shakes her head and points a finger at me.

“I thought I told you to be nice to her!” she yells at me. “Kat—”

“Don’t you Kat me, Dane! Look at her!” she yells. I stand up and walk towards her, hoping to calm her down.

Then I hear laughter coming from Emily. Both Kat and I look at her. “I’m sorry,” she says between fits of laughter and then Kat smiles. “It’s just that Dane is huge and compared to him you are little but he actually looked scared for a second.” Then more laughter fills the room and Kat laughs as well.

“I was not fucking scared,” I say with a smile. Both women laugh harder. I put my hands up as though to surrender and Kat embraces me around my middle. I engulf her in a hug and I say, “I think you two are ganging up on me and I’m not fucking sure if I like it.”

I look down at Em and she smiles at me. “Babe, I think you need us to gang up on you. Everyone around you does as they are told. It’ll do you good to have a little chaos in your life,” replies Kat.

I shake my head in the negative at them both. “Darlin’, my life is full of chaos. Trust me, at home I need peace, quiet and tranquility.”

I kiss her on the mouth and she pulls away from me. “I’m still mad at you.” Then she says to Emily, “I have coffee, milk and I got a couple of Dane’s old T‐shirts for you to put on. They’ll be huge on you but good to sleep in.” She bends over, picks up the bags and walks towards Emily. “Ok, I also got some body wash, perfume, moisturizer, chocolate—‘cause every girl needs chocolate—a dressing gown—”

“Did you leave anything in the house?” I ask her with a smirk on my face.

She whirls around to face me with one hand on her hip and is about to let loose when Emily laughs again.

We both look at her. “I think Dane has a point! But you are right, every girl needs chocolate!”

Both women smile at me, and then there is a knock at the door. I open it to find Salvatore on the other side with at least three shopping bags in each hand. I open the door wider, he walks in and both my girls laugh.