It was midnight before Zack and Nicole could drag themselves out of bed long enough to eat the food he’d already reheated twice. It was dry and tasteless by then, but Zack was starving and Nicole was so sweet and grateful that she pretended like she didn’t notice. After they ate, she was beyond exhausted and so was Zack. They left the dishes for morning and climbed back in bed. As soon as she snuggled into him she fell asleep, and Zack was just about to go under himself, when his phone started ringing. He didn’t want to move to answer it but after the third ring Nicole opened her eyes and said, “Are you going to get it?”

“Nope.”

She sat up suddenly. “I think I left my phone in the kitchen. Maybe it’s Mom about Liam.” Zack smiled at her and sat up. He got slightly annoyed sometimes when she worried for no reason, but he really couldn’t have asked for a better woman to be the mother of his child and he knew it. Coming from Mona himself, he appreciated even more how much Nicole loved and sacrificed for her babies.

He reached over onto the bedside table and picked up the phone just as it stopped ringing. He had a missed call from Detective Samuels. “Shit,” he said, before he realized the look of panic forming on Nicole’s face. “It’s okay, baby. It’s not your mom. It was that detective from Texas.” His phone dinged with a voicemail, and he and Nicole both looked at it. He hadn’t heard from Samuels in six months. He had to guess that at almost one a.m. it meant only one thing…they’d found Mona.

“Are you going to listen to it?” she asked in a sleepy voice.

“In the morning,” he said. He started to put the phone down and she said:

“You’re not going to sleep all night thinking about it.”

He sighed; she was right. He picked it back up and pressed voicemail and then he put it on speaker so Nicole could hear. “Mr. Leoni, I’m sorry to call so late but I thought you biker types kept late hours.” Zack rolled his eyes as the detective went on to say, “We located your mother. She’s quite…interesting. Anyways, she’s not talking to us, but that’s no surprise since she managed to keep her part in this a secret for over ten years. She is asking to talk to you, however. Give me a call when you get a chance. Good night.”

Zack sat looking at the phone after he’d pressed “End.” Finally, he said, “What the fuck does she want with me?”

Nicole reached over and ran her hand through his long hair, brushing it back out of his face, gently. She let him sit quietly for a few minutes and then she said, “I know you don’t want to see her, but maybe it would be better to just get it over with.”

He was thinking the same thing. But if she wasn’t talking that meant she didn’t plan on pleading guilty and he’d have to see her eventually anyways, in court. He still couldn’t fathom the idea of being the witness that sent his mother to death row. “Fuck,” he said, running a hand through his own hair. “I wish I thought I could talk her into taking a plea.” Nicole knew how badly he didn’t want to testify against his mother, no matter how badly Mona deserved it. He’d have to live with that forever, and he hated the thought of it.

“Maybe you could talk her into it. Maybe if you tell her, face to face, how badly you don’t want her to get the death penalty…”

“Did I say that? I never said I didn’t want her to get it, just that I didn’t want to be the one that sealed it.”

“Zachary, this is me. I know your mother was horrible to you, but I also know that no matter what, we always have that bond with our parents. It’s okay for you to not want her to die.”

“She’s a terrible person.”

Nicole laid her head on his shoulder and pressed them both back into the bed. “I know, baby, but you’re not.” She kissed him and said, “I will support you, whatever you decide to do.”

Zack put the phone down and pulled Nicole into his arms. He almost wished they had never found Mona because Nicole was right, horrible woman or not, he still didn’t want her to die.

* * *

Detective Samuels was waiting for Zack when he stepped off the plane at the San Antonio airport. He would have much preferred taking his bike, but with Nicole so close to delivering the baby, he didn’t want to be two days’ ride away. “Mr. Leoni, thank you for coming.” It had been three days since the night Samuels called. It took Zack that long to decide he had to go talk to her – he had to at least try and make her realize that she might as well be suicidal if she went to court on a dual murder charge in Texas.

Zack shook the detective’s hand and as they walked toward the entrance he asked, “Did she get an attorney?”

“Court appointed,” Samuels said.

“Is the D.A. going to offer a deal?”

They walked through the exit and toward the detective’s car that he had parked in the loading zone right in front. Once they were inside the car Samuels said, “Twenty-five years without the possibility of parole as long as she pleads guilty to all charges and tells them what happened to the rest of the jewelry taken that night. I guess there was a diamond taken from one of the benefactors of the benefit that was worth over six hundred grand and it wasn’t with the jewelry they found.”

“Fuck. Who wears a diamond worth over six hundred grand?”

The detective chuckled as he pulled the car out of the airport exit. “Spoken like a true biker. You’re not shocked by the robbery, only that someone who paid for that diamond would wear it.”

“I’m not a thief.”

“I didn’t say you were. But you are of a certain mindset.”

“Agreed, I guess,” Zack said. “I was brought up with questionable morals, I’m not denying it, but it’s possible not to get stuck where you came from.”

The detective raised an eyebrow and then said, “I know that full well. I grew up in one of the roughest neighborhoods in Chicago, on the south side. I almost didn’t get out of there; I had to move far away to get away from the influences that led me astray.”

Zack smiled. “Is that your subtle way of telling me I should move far away from my club?”

“Not at all. What you choose to do with your life…and the lives of your children…is of no consequence to me.”

Zack left the conversation at that. He wasn’t going to argue the point. He knew that what he did in the club was not always on the up and up, but they had come a long way. Stone had ended their affiliation with the Defenders after the fiasco with Spider. It had turned out that Spider wasn’t looking for something the day Nicole found him digging in her parents’ back yard. He had been trying to hide something. The night he blew up the meth lab he had stolen ten bags of meth before he set the lab on fire. Levi told Zack later that Spider had been using a lot of meth, and Chaney finally confronted him about it the night of the drug deal gone bad that started his downward spiral. During that conversation, while Chaney was urging him to talk to his parents and get them to pay for him to go to rehab, he told his president that the meth they were cooking had something in it that made him “immortal.” Chaney had laughed at that and when Spider left for the meet with the street gang that night, he’d been angry and, according to the guys he rode with that were left alive, smoking the meth pipe like crazy. Chaney had to draw the line at that point and kick him out, no matter who his father was. That was what pushed Spider over the edge of his tenuous sanity, and he started a quest to get revenge on everyone that had wronged him. What shocked Zack the most was that the Defenders didn’t learn their lesson after all of that. They were still cooking meth in a new house and still dealing guns to street gangs that used them to kill innocent people. Zack knew his club would never be completely eye-to-eye with the law, but they were absolutely better than that.

The rest of the ride to the station, Samuels kept his opinions about “bikers” to himself and Zack got lost in his thoughts. By the time they got there he was again on the verge of refusing to see her. He was convinced that there was no way he could get through to her. Her court-appointed attorney probably stood a better chance of talking her into the deal than he did.

“Where did you find her?” he asked Samuels as they walked inside. It was the one question he hadn’t asked, because he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

“Brownsville P.D. did a raid on one of the strip clubs near the border. They were hiring underage dancers and a few of the women were turning tricks out of the back. Mona was working the bar when the raid took place. She wouldn’t have even been arrested in the sting, but one of the vice cops recognized her from a BOLO we had out.”

“I guess knowing she wasn’t turning tricks in the back should be of some comfort to me,” Zack said as they stepped inside the jail. Samuels laughed and said:

“Believe it or not, kid, I had a mother of my own that I had to count every small favor to tolerate.” Zack sighed and began the process of turning over everything he couldn’t take inside with him and signing the visitor paperwork. Once that was done, he was led down the hall and put into a tiny room with a scarred-up table and two folding chairs. He didn’t have to wait long before the door opened again and a female guard ushered his mother inside. Zack wasn’t sure how to feel when he saw her. If he’d run into her on the street, he would have been hard-pressed to recognize her. He realized that it had been years since he’d seen her without her make-up on, and the gray strands that ran through her usually jet-black hair were almost disturbing to him. It made her seem almost…human.

“Hello, Mona.” The officer didn’t remove the shackles around her waist and she used the ones on her feet to attach her to a ring in the floor under her seat. Mona waited until she finished with her and stepped back against the wall before saying:

“Zachary, I’m surprised to see you. Or did the police want you to see what kind of information you could get out of me? Are you listening, Officer Bale?” The woman against the wall didn’t flinch. Zack had spent enough time in jail as a juvenile to know that if they reacted to every slight, they’d never stop reacting. “I’m sure they have the place wired for sound anyways.”

Zack sighed. “I’m not here to get anything from you, Mona. I came to see how you were doing and ask you to take the deal the D.A. is offering.”

Mona laughed. “You came to tell me to plead guilty to robbery and two murder charges? What would I do without you?’

“Mona, this is Texas. You know what your alternative is. If you go to court and you’re found guilty, you’re looking at the death penalty.”

“And what do you care? You would finally have me out of your life…isn’t that what you want, Zack?”

“You think any of this is what I want, Mona? You think I want a mother who is facing life in prison or death?” He rolled his eyes and tried to quell the anger she so easily provoked in him every time he talked to her. “Look, Mona, you can plead guilty, or not…but you have to know that you wouldn’t be sitting here if they didn’t have a good, strong case against you. I know you’d rather be free, but the likelihood of that happening is as likely as finding Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness monster. Take the plea and live, Mona.”

“Live in a cage like an animal with nothing to look forward to…that’s what I should do?”

“If it beats the alternative.”

“No. I’m not going to plead guilty and when I am exonerated, I am going to say I told you so.”

Zack stood up. “Okay, then I guess I’ll see you when you go to trial.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You would come to my trial?”

Zack realized than that she didn’t know. He sat back down and said, “Mona, I’m the one that told the cops about the jewelry.”

“Excuse me? You went to the cops…about your own mother?”

“Not really. I had no idea you were involved. I told them that Swinger admitted it to me and I told them where to find the jewels. I did it to save my own ass, so of that you can be proud. You taught me so well that it took me thirty years to understand how good it feels to put someone else’s happiness and needs above your own. But that day it was for me, and today is for me as well. I don’t want to get on the stand and testify against my mother. I don’t want to put the grandmother of my children on death row.”

“Excuse me? Your children?”

“Yes. I’m adopting Liam after Nicole and I get married.” She rolled her eyes and looked at him like he was an idiot. That look changed to surprise when he said, “We’re going to get married after the baby is born.”

“The baby? Your baby?”

“Yes, Mona, I’m going to be a father and you’re going to be a grandmother. Nicole and I just found out recently that it’s a girl. Are you willing to die without ever meeting your granddaughter?”

Mona stared at him for a long time and finally said, “Like I would know her otherwise?” Zack stood back up.

“I have to get back home. If you decide to take the plea, let me know. I’ll send you pictures of the baby when she’s born. I don’t think I could ever bring her to prison to see you, but one day she’ll be able to write and you could talk to her on the phone. It’s something to live for, Mona. Take it or leave it.” Zack motioned to the guard who walked over and unlocked the door. As he started to step out the door Mona said:

“Zachary.” He stopped and forced himself to turn and look at her.

“You know, I did the best I knew how.”

She said it like that made all the difference in the world. Zack knew that it didn’t, but his life was good now and he didn’t want to waste any more time being bitter. He nodded at her and then without looking back, he turned and left.