The Notus men drank a beer together in the garage after returning from searching Gracie's house. She folded her arms in front of her and stood on the outside of the circle behind Clara, who leaned against Wayne. She couldn't believe how they were acting.

They let Rich walk out of the house alone.

They drank beer around Rich when they knew he was recently sober.

Why couldn't they involve Rich in the club business and treat him the way they obviously cared about him?

"This is ridiculous," she muttered, gaining her sister's attention.

Clara looked over her shoulder and mouthed, "What?"

She pressed her lips together and shook her head, giving a wild eye roll for Clara to look around. Getting a confused shrug in return from her sister, Gracie whispered, "I'm going outside."

"I'll go with—"

"No." She squeezed Clara's arm. "Stay here. I'll be fine."

She walked back into the house and peeked out the front window. The thought of going outside when someone was breaking into houses, snooping around properties, made her nervous. Nobody had said anything on the return back to Wayne's house, but she had a feeling what they'd found out wasn't something a neighborhood watch program would be interested in.

Someone was after Rich. They knew he lived at her townhouse. There were two incidents with someone snooping around.

She wanted to know who it was, what they wanted, and how they planned to make it stop?

At first, she failed to spot Rich outside, expecting him to be sitting on his motorcycle. Then, she found him at the end of the porch, staring out into the street.

Not wanting to interrupt, but wanting to check on him, she quietly slipped out the door and stood against the railing. She kept her distance, giving him room to walk past her if he objected to her joining him outside.

Comfortable in the silence that always permeated the air when they were together, she followed his gaze and found him looking at the house to the left of Wayne's home. She'd heard the story many times about how Wayne, Thad, Glen, Chuck, and Rich had all grown up on the same street, and she understood he was looking at the home he'd been raised in.

At the same time, she understood that twenty-five years changed him in a way that it hadn't affected the men inside the house. Rich had cut ties. He had different experiences. He'd created a life—whether voluntarily or involuntarily—away from Notus. But no matter the degrees of separation, he'd built a foundation that involved the others, and that inner strength and security couldn't be forgotten.

He couldn't outrun his history.

She'd learned the history of her past when her mom's serial killer brought her to a crime scene and forced her to experience what her mother had lived through. If she hadn't been abducted, she would've remembered a loving mother. The absent mother of the story from her father would've continued to breathe. Instead, she was violently pushed past her breaking point, taken from her twin, and forced to accept the ugliness and cruelty her father had tried to protect her from.

Rich wasn't alone. Their facts, their history, their experiences were different. But, she understood the emotions that had the power to cripple everything she thought she knew as truth.

"I returned to St. John's, too." She wondered if he could even hear her. The echo of her words in her head muffled her hearing. "It was after my dad died four years ago and left my sister and I some money, which set off a...rabbit hole of information that'd been kept from us our whole life. My dad had raised us believing our mother had left us when we were five years old, and when we were going through his records after his death, we found out the truth about our mom. She hadn't run away. She'd been murdered in St. John's. Our father had thought he was protecting us by moving us away and keeping the truth from us. He thought it was better if we believed she'd left us, and maybe for him, he was right. Clara and I were so young. We missed our mom, but believing she didn't want us made the hurt feelings turn to indifference as we got older."

Her fingers ached, squeezing the porch railing. She couldn't let go if she tried.

"When we found out about the crime done to our mom and her killer hadn't been caught, we moved back to St. John's with the idea of meeting Notus Motorcycle Club. We knew they searched for missing persons and we had the idea to pay them to find our mom's killer. That all happened four years ago, but it seems like a lifetime ago." She glanced at Rich. "We wanted to make him pay for raping and killing our mother, and what better way than to ask a biker gang to do the job. We were naive and stupid."

He hadn't moved. He still stared over at the neighbor's house. She absorbed the shudder that rolled through her. He couldn't see her, but the tension and stillness in his body told her he was listening.

"But, Clara fell in love with Wayne. I let her take the lead in how we progressed getting to know Notus and gain their help. I don't fault her for taking her time and second-guessing our plan. I don't." She closed her dry eyes.

"What happened?" whispered Rich.

She opened her eyes and looked down at her hands on the railing. "Our mother's killer found us before we found him. He broke into our house—Clara still lived with me at the time. Then, one time when Clara was driving us to Vavoom's Bar, she drove through a green light, and a car T-boned us in the middle of the intersection. I was abducted out of the passenger seat in front of all the witnesses and taken to the man's home where he tied me to the same bed he'd raped and killed my mother twenty-two years earlier."

She couldn't stop the emotional dam from opening. The words pushed to come out as if she deflected what happened to her onto Rich, she'd somehow understand him better.

"I-I heard every detail of what he did to my Mom." She panted, knowing she had to go on and tell him what she knew. "There were other women he'd killed. H-he had a ritual. A certain type of female he killed." She repeatedly swallowed, keeping the bile from escaping her throat. "He was a serial killer, and he was doing things to me that he was saying he did to the others. And, the whole time I couldn't move. There was a smell...a smell of his excitement and what he was doing to me." She gagged and swallowed the bitter taste down. "All I wanted was my sister."

"Gracie...?"

She shook her head, putting her hand up. If she stopped now, she'd never finish.

"Notus Motorcycle Club found me. They saved me before he could finish what he'd planned. I've never told anyone all the details, not even my twin sister, what happened before Notus barged into the room where the killer planned to rape, torture, and kill me. I didn't tell the police every detail of what happened afterward because I would do anything to protect the men who saved my life, but I'm going to take a chance and tell you because the men inside the house right now trust you."

He shook his head. She ignored his need to stay oblivious to what was happening and what had happened in St. John's since he'd left. He needed to hear what she had to say.

"Wayne ordered the others to take the killer outside while he stayed with me and untied my arms and legs. He tried to buffer what was happening outside, but I was aware of the conversation, the meaning behind the actions, the loyalty that bonded every Notus member to each other." She turned toward him but kept her distance.

Rich's gaze snapped up, and the intensity of his stare strengthened her. She lifted her chin and braced herself. He was listening, and she needed him to hear everything.

"The man who'd raped my mother and killed her was the same man who abducted, tortured, and planned to kill me." Her eyes burned and dared not blink because her information was too important. "There were other women over the twenty-two years that the man killed. H-he had this ritual where he always carved the same name on the female's chest with the knife he used on me that day he stole my life."

Rich turned away from her. She held her ground, knowing he would want to escape the truth.

"The day Notus saved me, Thad killed Roy Jenson, the serial killer, in the front yard, away from me, to protect me. But, I understood why he was the one chosen to put a bullet in the killer's head." Gracie's head pounded, she could no longer hear what she was saying. "Roy Jenson was the one who also kidnapped, raped, and murdered his sister...Thalia Bowers. She was killed because Jenson had an obsession with my mother, Barbara Nelson."

Rich's hand came up to his face. Gracie stared at his broad back. She hadn't planned to share that part of her life with him, but his alienation from the club wasn't right, and she wasn't sure if Wayne, Chuck, Thad, and Glen would ever tell him the information he needed to heal from the past.

They were all strong and stubborn men, loyal to a fault, and she believed if Rich understood the history of what happened, he'd open himself up to talking honestly with the Notus members. That he'd be able to heal from the answers only she could provide.

Rich lowered his arm and turned around. She couldn't read the blank expression on his face or the fire in his eyes. He walked past her and stepped off the porch, heading toward his motorcycle. Worried he planned to leave and it would be her fault for telling him the truth, she hurried after him, and when he sat on his bike, she stepped up on the peg and slid down behind him, wrapping her arms around his waist.

The engine rumbled underneath her, and the roar filled her ears. She closed her eyes, prepared to go wherever he rode, not knowing the reason why she couldn't let him leave alone.