Misha
Everyone’s eyes were on me—everyone’s. There were only a few of them who I didn’t know, but most I did. There was Brig, who’d filled out a lot since the last time I’d seen him. He wasn’t quite so thin, but then again, he didn’t have quite so many scars, either. He didn’t look like a boy anymore. Jackson and Prewet, the DeVos twins. I could still tell them apart after the years; I’d bet money it was Johnny with the long hair and Peaty with the short. There was Travis, too, with a patch over his eye. Arms folded. He looked dumbfounded like the rest, and I couldn’t blame them for it. I imagined that it was hard to look at someone who you had thought was dead sitting there in front of you, alive, well, and with a little, knee-high girl perched in lap. No one said a word, trying to process what I was doing there, alive and, surprisingly, with a child.
I never thought that I would find myself here again, Ace of Pride, the bar Bobby Oakland’s Pride worked out of. Though, talk was that Bobby didn’t run the Pride anymore. No …
I looked down at my little girl, and she looked up at me, a little shy. She had my auburn hair, falling in curls around her little cherub face, but she had her daddy’s eyes—blue as the sky over the sea and just as bright and full of mischief as I remembered Trip’s being.
He wasn’t here. He’d gone off celebrating on his own. I wasn’t dumb and knew what that meant. He’d either taken someone back to his place or gone back to hers. It didn’t bother me as much as it should. Lord knew I hadn’t saved myself over the years …
“Mama?”
Rose looked up to me. I hadn’t realized I’d zoned out.
“Yes, baby?”
“I’m sleepy.”
“I know, baby. It’s okay. It won’t take long, I promise.”
“Okay, mama.”
She tucked herself into me, drawing away from the big men in leather kuttes who surrounded us. I wished it was a sight that was unfamiliar to her, but I couldn’t boast about being a mother who had been able to keep her daughter from the things that had driven me away from the Pride to begin with. No …out of the fire, into the frying pan. That had been my life for the last five years.
I looked to Brig. He didn’t seem to know what to do about me, but we’d been friends back in the day. He’d always treated me kindly, especially since Trip had been so sweet on me.
“Is there a room in back she can lie in?”
“I dunno if that’s a good idea, Misha. Should keep you together in the same place and all.”
My face fell a little. It didn’t seem that our old friendship would win me any bonus points here.
“I guess you have a lot of questions.”
“T’s gonna have a lot of questions, too.”
Harsh.
I bit my lip.
Things had definitely changed.
# # #
I didn’t know how long we waited. The buzz from the bar up front went from steady to decayed and there was a lull that told me the boys who stayed had found their places in their rooms, and those that had left had taken their women and gone to spend their nights elsewhere. Brig had called Trip after I’d arrived, bringing his closest boysthe ones from five years ago, the ones that had come up with them—to the back with me.
It was so uncomfortable.
I almost started to fall asleep when the office door opened. My eyes widened falling on the man in the doorway.
“Trip …”
He was the same as he was five years ago. Tall. Handsome. His kutte fit him like a glove still and I was reminded how the look had drawn me to him, all those years ago. His black hair was military cut, and his arms, thick with muscle, were covered in tattoos. Idly, my fingers brushed over the one that I had, inside my left wrist. The only one I’d ever wanted.
Trip.
It wasn’t his real name, but it was the name that he preferred, and the name of the man that I had fallen in love with when I was a dumb sixteen-year-old girl. Before I realized that I was pregnant with Rose, before I knew that living this life and having her—having Trip—just wasn’t going to work if I was going to raise a child. Funny how things turned out.
He stood there at the door, as dumbfounded as the others had been. Looking at him, taking him in, I noticed the slight smudge of color on his lips; he’d definitely been with a woman before Brig made the call to have him come here.
He made no move to walk to me, he only stood and stared, as if I were a ghost. I might as well have been. He didn’t stir until there was a movement in my lap, a sleepy little girl who moved and blinked up at me once more.
“Mama, is it time to go yet?”
“Not yet, Rose.”
There was a choked sound from Trip, and I looked back at him. He was eyeing Rose, taking her in. I could see the wheels turning plain as day—she was old enough to have been born in the time I was gone. Old enough she was either his or some other bastard’s from around that time. But I knew who she looked like when she turned her face on him, and I could tell that he did, too. It was his own eyes that looked at him from Rose’s face; no other man could claim to be her daddy.
“Get out.” He looked to Brig and the others. When they didn’t move, he slammed his hand on the wall.
“Get out!”
One by one, his boys flowed out, Brig being the last to go. I watched as they exchanged a look, and wordlessly, Brig nodded and left too.
It was the first time in years that I was alone with Trip. He walked toward me, slow and deliberate. There was tension in the air. I didn’t know if it was sexual or anger or just longing from the years gone by.
I knew, when he came in front of me and wrapped his arms around me, that maybe it was a little something sweeter.
“I fucking missed you.”
“Language.”
It was a knee-jerk reaction, one that made him pull away from me for a moment. It was as if he’d forgotten about the little girl between us. Rose looked up at him curiously, as if she hadn’t expected him to get so close to touch.
“Oh. Oh fuck—”
“Trip—”
“Is she mine?” he asked, so quiet that not even Rose heard him.
He didn’t have to ask the question. He knew the answer. I gave him one anyway.
“Yeah.”
He sucked in a breath, looking down at her. His hand twitched, like he was going to reach out and touch her, but he never did. She blinked up at him in return. I hadn’t told her a lot about Trip, other than I loved him and I had to leave him, but that one day I’d come back to him and she’d be able to meet him in person.
“What’s her name?” He asked it like he was afraid to ask her himself.
“Sweetie, tell the nice man your name.”
She looked between the two of us, almost uncertain. I nodded at her, encouraging.
“Go on.”
“My name’s Rose.”
“That’s a pretty name.”
“Mama says it’s because roses are the prettiest flowers, and I got to have the name to match me.”
“Well, your Mama would be right, you know. You’re a pretty girl.”
Rose giggled at that, and I shifted her on my lap.
“It’s late …” I looked at Trip. “Can I put her down in a room? We can talk?”
Trip nodded.
“Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s a good idea.”
I stood with Rose in my arms, leaning down to get the duffle bag I’d brought with us. Trip didn’t seem to know what to do—whether to take her, or let me hold her—but he led us out of the office with one last little glance at her, and an almost disbelieving shake of his head.
There were a few locked rooms, and I knew what was likely going on or had gone on behind them. But the room that Trip brought me to was in the very back, set away from the others. I knew it well; we’d spent many nights there when we were younger.
His room hadn’t changed much. There were still pictures on his dresser, clothes sticking out of the drawers. He didn’t have proper curtains; there was an old blanket that his grandma had knitted him tacked up over where the window was.
As much as the nostalgia flooded back in, I wasn’t here for that. After setting our duffle off to the side, I set Rose in the middle of his bed, tucking her in.
“I’m gonna come back when it’s time to leave, okay, Rose?”
She nodded.
“Mmhm, Mama.” She was already closing her eyes and snuggling beneath the covers.
Back in the office, it was quiet. We stood there in silence, now that we were alone. Trip stared at me, long and hard. It was a surprise when he reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.
“I missed you.”
There was passion in his words. It lit a fire in me that I hadn’t felt in years. It was like there weren’t five years between us—
But when he leaned in, as if to kiss me, I remembered that there were five years. Five years and secrets, so many that it was hard to keep track of them sometimes. I stepped away from him before he could lean all the way and claim my lips. I’d be so far gone if that’s what he did.
There was a flash across his eyes. It wasn’t anger; it was hurt.
“It’s been a while,” I said, as if that made up for anything.
“Yeah. It has.”
Trip ran his hand through his hair. He sat back on top of the desk in his office and leveled a look at me. I hadn’t allowed that intimacy to connect, so now it was cut off. This was business. Perhaps it was better that way.
“What happened, Misha?” he asked. “What happened? We all thought you were dead. There was so much fucking blood! Your room was a wreck. And now you’re back five years later. You got a kid. You say she’s mine—”
“She is yours.”
“I didn’t say I thought she wasn’t; her face may as well be mine.”
“That’s what I always thought.”
He ran his hand through his hair again. His arms folded across his chest.
“What happened?” he repeated. “There was so much blood … You disappeared. No one saw you; everyone knows what those Jackal bastards are capable of when they take someone out.” He was desperate for answers, and I couldn’t say that I blamed him for that.
I had known that this was going to come up. How could it not? It didn’t make me feel any better about telling him.
“That night … they came to my place. Packed. Said they were tired of Bobby and the boys—and especially you—footing around them. Not giving them what they wanted. So, they decided to take something that you had.” I tugged at my ear, a reflex, before showing him my palm. A thick, ugly scar arced across it. “They made me cut myself so if you did perhaps get the cops involved, my DNA would be there. The rest was pig blood, just to make it look like they messed me up real bad. They wanted to scare you, maybe bait you into doing something really stupid. I suppose you did, just … not in the ways they expected. When you didn’t show up when they thought you would, looking for me—”
“It wasn’t that I didn’t wanna come looking for you—”
“I never said that was it,” I said sharply. Christ, he’s defensive. “It would have been suicide back then. It’d be suicide now. That’s not … that’s not the point. Trip, let me finish.”
He nodded, letting me continue.
“They assumed you’d do what you always did. Act rash. Come guns blazing. They were going to keep me and rough me up. They did, the first few days.” I shifted where I stood; it wasn’t like that was a lie, and the memory of those days wasn’t something I liked to remember, let alone talk about. Especially not to Trip. “When you came, they were going to show me to you, make you flesh out a deal that they wanted from you. When you didn’t, they thought about killing me to make their point drive a little harder than it apparently already had. I told them I was pregnant and—”
“You knew you were pregnant?”
I sighed, looking away from him. My hand found my ear again.
“I was going to tell you. Before the Jackals decided they wanted to use me as Pride bait.”
“Hm.”
“Anyway … I told them I was pregnant. They didn’t believe me, but their president has this thing against killing the unborn. Obviously once I started to show, they knew that I was telling them the truth. So, when that was confirmed, he thought it would be more elaborate, then, to keep me and let me have Rose, and then show up with me and our baby one day and shock you then. Real theatric, Holland.”
“What changed his mind?”
“Me.” I shrugged. “He took to me.”
Something dark flashed across Trip’s face. I wasn’t sure if I should be scared or turned on by the possessive streak that was clearly still there.
“…You were his old lady or something?”
“I wouldn’t call it that. He had an old lady. He just liked me, kept his boys off of me.”
“I see.”
“It’s not like I loved him or anything.” No, I could never do that, no matter how relatively well Holland had treated me.
“Holland’s been out of the game for months now,” Trip said, moving the conversation on like it made him uncomfortable to think aboutme and Holland together in any sort of capacity. “His nephew, Rigger—”
“Is president right now, yeah. Holland got into a crash and went into a coma, I’m sure you know. Not a lot he can do from a hospital bed, hooked to IVs.”
“We threw a party when we heard it happened.”
“I’m sure you did. Rigger’s in charge now, and he was never happy with the fact that Holland didn’t use me as bait for you. He decided, though, since I was already a part of the family, that I ought to stay,” I said bitterly.
“He wanted you,” Trip guessed.
“Holland kept the boys off me. I wasn’t an old lady. I wasn’t a club girl, either. We had sex, but he never treated me bad, at least not after he started to take to me. Rigger is another story, and he’s not too picky when it comes to who he sleeps with or hurts to get a point across.”
There was a twitch in Trip’s jaw.
“He ever touch you?”
I didn’t answer him, which was enough of an answer.
“That son of a bitch.”
“It’s been five years, Trip,” I reminded him gently. He scoffed. Fair enough; five years didn’t make it any better, I supposed.
“He ever touch Rose?”
“Like I’d let that bastard lay a finger on my daughter.”
That, at the very least, placated him, if only a little. No … if there was one thing that I had been able to keep Rose from, it was the touches of a man and the strikes of fists. I’d have taken more and more for her if I had to.
“So, you were basically kept there … A hostage. Personal little thing for Holland until his accident and Rigger sent things all on their fucking head.”
“Being under Holland wasn’t ideal, but it was safer than trying to escape while pregnant and safer still after I had Rose. He might have treated me decent, but he made no mistake about letting me know that I wasn’t to leave. There was security and protection I wasn’t willing to risk with Rose in the picture. That security went away when Holland went under.” I’d been living in fear ever since I learned that Holland’s bike had been hit by that truck on the highway. It’d sent a fear in me that I’d never known quite so hard before and it had been … eye opening to the reality of my situation. I had gotten comfortable. I shouldn’t have. That comfort could have cost me my daughter.
“So how did you get out? Someone else take sweet to you and help you?”
I ignored the mild accusation in his tone.
“No. I escaped after a party they were throwing. Rigger’s birthday. After the partying and … the after party, he passed out drunk as a skunk. I was able to get out of the bed, get Rose, and leave. Everyone was plastered or high, so no one noticed me slip out. I’d been planning it for weeks. I caught a ride hitchhiking—”
“You hitchhiked with her?”
I raised a brow.
“It’s what I had to do. Everyone over the border is likely to give up information if the Jackals ask for it, whether it’s nicely or not. I needed to get out of there with someone that wasn’t going to be coming back.”
“… That’s fair.”
I laughed a little, despite knowing that in telling Trip all of this, I was likely putting more distance than five years already had between us. I shook my head.
“What’s so funny?”
“You’ve known you’re her father all of five minutes and you’re already overprotective.”
“I just think it’s a bad idea to hitchhike with a child.”
We lapsed into a silence again, and my fingers tugged absently against my ear. Trip eyed me a bit. “You guys got a place to stay?”
I raised my brow.
“I was going to go to Daddy’s.”
He stared at me.
“You don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
He shifted.
“Your dad left on out after you died—or, I guess, were taken. He stayed around for a while but he couldn’t stay in that house with all of that. He packed up and sold it. No one knows where he went, just that he’s not here anymore.”
My heart sank.
“No one knows where he is?”
“He didn’t leave an address, didn’t leave a phone number.”
That made my plans up until that point fall through rather hard. Where was I supposed to stay if Daddy was gone? Where would he even have gone? We didn’t have any family, and Mama wasn’t around anymore.
“You can stay here.”
I looked at him sharply in surprise. After what I had told him and his reactions?
“What?”
“I said, you can stay here.”
“Where? Back there?” I gestured to the rooms. “Trip, this isn’t the place for a child—”
“Why did you come back, then?”
I stalled.
If only I could tell him.
I stood there for a moment before I sighed.
“It can only be temporary,” I said. “I hadn’t expected. I mean I didn’t—”
“You didn’t come back here for me.”
“I came back because it’s what I needed to do for Rose.”
“Then let me help.” He stepped closer to me, into my space, but not as close as he had when he had tried to kiss me. “This is my daughter too, right? And we were something … even if it was five years ago,” he said evenly. “Even if I and everyone thought you were dead. You never stopped being a part of this family.” You never stopped being my old lady.
I almost wish that he’d have said it aloud, but that would have shortened the distance that I had promised I would keep between myself and the Pride. I was back because I had nowhere else to go—not because I was coming to tag along again.
“Just until I get on my feet again,” I said. “And … you can get to know Rose, if you want to.”
“I want to.”
I shouldn’t have felt warmth hearing that, but I did. There was something that I needed to know, though.
“Trip … All the club stuff. I don’t want that around Rose. I know how things are—”
“Things are different now, Misha,” he said. “We’re not … we’re not like that anymore. We’ve cleaned up. We keep the town and our own protected. That’s what we do.”
Trip left after that. I figured he was going back home—maybe back to whoever it was he’d been with before Brig had called him over.
I looked around the room.
Honestly, nothing about this had changed.
I let Rose sleep as I undressed. I wanted a shower, hadn’t had one in a while. Trip’s room had an adjoining bathroom, and though I hadn’t been here in years, there wasn’t an awkwardness in allowing myself in his space. He still had towels and everything strewn in the same places, his soaps organized in the sense that there were three different bottles of the same scent in his shower, because he never could remember if he had the right amount in what was left in his shower when he went to the store.
It made me smile in spite of myself, though I had to school it off of my face as I turned the water on, set the heat high, and started to wash. I was here for Rose, not for the nostalgia and not for Trip’s love, if it was even still there. The way he’d reacted to what I’d told him of Holland was enough to know that the thought of my being with someone else hadn’t pleased him, even in those circumstances. Pride boys were just that—prideful to a fault, and especially about their women.
But I hadn’t been his woman in a long, long time, and there were secrets enough in those five years apart that I knew would keep the distance between us.
# # #
The next morning, I woke up with the scent of Trip in my nose. My face was buried in his pillows, so soft, with the lingering hit of his cologne clinging to the fabric. It was familiar, and I sighed as I buried my face further into it. I was taken by that scent, by the memory—until I realized that the tiny weight beside me that I had gone to sleep with was gone.
Rose!
The comfort vanished, followed quickly by panic as I sat bolt upright. Rose wasn’t with me, and Trip’s door was wide open.
“Fuck!”
I shot up. I paid no mind to the fact I was in the short-bottomed, no-bra tank pajamas I had put on the night before after my shower. I knew, in theory, that Rose was safe with the Pride. But mother’s worry and years of always having to worry propelled me out to the front of the bar, my daughter’s name on my lips.
“Rose?!”
“Mama!”
Her yell was a melodic tinkle, happy and unafraid. I rounded the corner from the hall up to the front. A few of the boys were around, and they looked up at me with amused faces. Rose sat up at the bar with them—literally on top of the bar—with a plate in her lap stacked full of pancakes.
I walked over. Travis waved.
“Misha! This li’l girl came out wondering and hungry, so I whipped her up some pancakes. Hope that was okay? She got a big appetite, this tiny thing.”
I sighed, relieved, and feeling a little silly myself over the reaction that I’d had.
“Yeah … Yeah it’s fine. Did you say thank you, honey?”
“Mmhm.” She nodded with a mouth full of pancake.
“She’s a polite li’l thing. What about you? You want some pancakes? Eggs? Bacon? Trip keeps the kitchen locked and loaded; we practically live here.”
I almost declined, not wanting to intrude too much. The growl at my stomach answered for me, and Travis grinned.
“Full plate coming up, cupcake.”
Breakfast came fast and hot. I hadn’t had a breakfast that tasted quite so good in years, though maybe that was because everything I’d eaten back with the Jackals had been taken with a grain of salt and didn’t have the same kind of heart that eating with the Pride did. Whatever the case, I enjoyed my food, and Rose enjoyed hers. There was a little small talk between the boys, talking a run here and there, some business they had in town. I was surprised they talked so freely in front of me.
“I can go, if you boys need to talk business,” I said. “Me and Misha can eat in the room.” After all, it wasn’t like I could forget how the club worked.
“Nah, nah,” Travis said, waving me off. “You’re Trip’s girl. I don’t think he’d care—”
“Morning.”
“Well, hell. Speak of the devil.”
I had already turned at the sound of the voice. Trip and Brig walked through the front doors of the bar, suited up in their kuttes as if they were ready to start business. Brig gave me a narrowed looked, but it was Trip that I focused on instead. When his eyes fell on me, I was reminded of the lack of clothing I was wearing; his eyes widened and roamed over me. It was odd … it’d been so long since I’d really enjoyed the gaze of a man, I didn’t know what to do with the heat that flowed through me, having Trip’s eyes on me like that.
Maybe it’s because it’s him. You never stopped loving him. Never stopped wanting him. That heat was something that I knew all too well and it was only something that Trip had ever been able to draw from me, make pool low between my legs with that uncontrollable need—
But I didn’t need to be having those thoughts. Not about him, not anymore.
Before Trip could come over, I stood, gathering my food and Rose’s . I had a good excuse that would make for a quick escape. Let Trip try to keep me there, I dared him.
“Come on, sweetie. Let’s let them talk, okay?”
“Aw, but Mama, Travis was gonna tell me about his eye!”
“Another time, baby. Come on.”
If I hadn’t known any better, there seemed to be a disappointed flicker in Trip’s eyes as I took Rose by the hand and led her away.
# # #
I kept my eyes on her, until she was gone. I frowned watching after her; why the hell had she gone? And that little girl … fuck. Made me feel some type of way just getting another look at her.
“Aye, lover boy.” I looked over at Travis, who was, for some reason, waving a piece of bacon in my face. “You gonna eat before we get into work, or nah?” I grumbled at him.
“Shut up. Meet me out front and round up everyone. We got work to do.”
Work that day was simple. There were some thugs harassing Big Mama up at the diner that needed cleaning out, and rumors of a drug den somewhere in the backroads. Shit that the cops were legally responsible for, but tended to not be able to legally handle on the radar.
So, that fell to us.
I hadn’t lied when I told Misha things weren’t the way they were when we were kids. The violence, the showmanship—back then it had just been to see whose dick was bigger. We were no better than a gang, really. Now, we had a purpose. I had made sure of that after Misha was killed, or after I thought Misha had been killed.
If you couldn’t protect your own with the power you had, what was the point of having the power?
We rolled up to the diner at noon, about when Trixie said that the assholes usually showed up. Their bikes were parked out front, but they weren’t an MC like the Pride. The Pride wouldn’t invite themselves to sit at other people’s tables and eat their food, grope their girls, and use fear to keep people from saying shit and doing shit about it.
There were five of them. Not a lot. We had three extra guys on them. There was one, a big guy I figured was the leader because all his little goons sat around him while he had his arm around some woman that didn’t look like she was all too willing to have him touching her.
“What say you, sweet cheeks, huh? You hop on my bike and I show you a good time?”
“I—I don’t think that’s what I want—”
“Come on, ain’t you ever heard of me? Roy Jackson, I’m pretty big around here—”
“Please, I was just here to eat—”
“Is there a problem here?”
I walked over, flanked by Travis and Brig. The others moved around, placing themselves near the other fuckers there in the diner, making a nuisance of themselves and getting into people’s business where they didn’t belong. The big one looked up at me and scoffed.
“What do you want, whippersnapper? Can’t you see I’m busy here?”
“Can’t you see you’re not welcome here?”
The man’s lip twitched beneath an impressive mustache.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?”
Rather than tell, I decided to show. I walked up to him, took that big dumb meaty head of his in my hand, and slammed it against the table. His boys tried to stand but mine kept them at bay. The man was too slow to react, and I did it again, and again, spraying his food over his table from the force of everything.
“I said, you’re not welcome here. Get the fuck out and don’t show your face again here, or there’s more Pride you’re gonna be dealing with, asshole.”
The man tumbled out of the booth, sputtering, but he wasn’t fighting back, either. He and his guys left in a scramble, and we watched and made sure that they were long good and gone. When they were, a voice called to us from the kitchen.
“Y’all done made another mess, ain’t cha?”
I turned and saw Big Mama come around. She was a huge woman, almost as tall as me, but with a lot more meat than I had stuck up on her bones. She was intimidating to a lot of people but she was a good woman, and I appreciated her. She always had good gossip and always knew where to point us in the direction of trouble when it was headed toward the town.
She lumbered over and eyed the mess on the table, and the shaken woman that had been victim to that fat-fuck’s harassment.
“And y’all done shook up one of my customers! You all right, cupcake?”
The woman nodded.
“Y-yeah. I just didn’t want that man sitting with me. He kept trying to get me to leave with me to do … stuff.” She turned her head up at me with a bit of a teary-eyed smile. “Thank you, though. I don’t know if I’d have been able to tell him no.”
“Aye, don’t worry about it.” I was already fishing into my wallet, pulling out a decent handful of bills. I handed them over to Big Mama. “For the trouble—”
“Boy, now you know I don’t want or need none of your damn money. It’s enough you cleared those wannabes out of here. Now go on, git, before I changed my mind.”
I laughed as she hobbled away, but I set the money down on the table in front of the woman.
“For your troubles.”