It was quiet in the chemotherapy room of the hospital. It was the kind of silence that penetrated my nightmares. There was a texture to it, thick and slippery against my skin so that it refused to emit noise even when I felt my body should have made some. It lent a muffled quality to the sound of nurses bringing in new patients and administering their drugs, little Dixie cups full of poison pills and IVs full of a different kind of toxins. Patients often sat with friends or families while they waited for the drugs to obliterate their blood but even their conversations had a hushed property that made my ears tingle.
I sighed deeply and tipped my head back against the high headrest then flinched when the needle pulled painfully at the back of my hand. I had “unfavourable” stage two Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, which basically meant that I didn’t have a tumor they could nuke with radiation or cut with surgery. Instead, the cancer was an invasion of micro-ants in my system, spread above and below my diaphragm, which made it the “unfavourable” kind. I’d already had something called a Stanford V twelve-week round of chemo last spring but it hadn’t done much so now the doctors were going for a short but dramatic combo; more drugs, higher toxicity but for a shorter amount of time. I’d have three cycles of treatment, once a week for three weeks with one week off so that my body could recover. The doctors had already warned me that the third cycle would be crueler than I’d ever experienced, that I had a high likelihood of losing my hair, vomiting excessively, diarrhea, infection and loss of respiratory function.
Something to look forward to.
I always wished someone would sit with me during the treatments. Bea would have if she didn’t have school or extracurriculars, but my parents made sure she was always busy so she wouldn’t be underfoot.
I knew Ruby would have, if I asked, but I felt she did enough by driving me to and from my appointments.
Zeus would have, but he still didn’t know about the cancer and with each passing day it became harder and harder to explain to him why I hadn’t.
Saying I wanted him to treat me like a normal woman—a whole person and not one half drowned by sickness—would not go down well with him. I knew that and still I put it off. We were having such an amazing time together despite everything going on with the Nightstalkers MC, with H.R. and my parents. I wanted to enjoy it while it lasted.
Which would probably be that night when I went over to the Garro house for Sunday dinner. I couldn’t believe that a biker family like that had such a banal tradition but Zeus told me that he’d started it after becoming Prez to encourage brotherhood and family. It wasn’t always a full house but usually a handful of brothers and their women and family would roll up to the Garro house on the far rocky edge of Entrance Bay Beach for beer and food.
It sounded like the kind of family fun I’d always wanted but never had.
Only Harleigh Rose would be there and, apparently, she hadn’t spoken to her father in the two days since our fight at EBA and most of that time, she’d been out with her boyfriend Cricket. So, even though I wanted to be excited about hanging with the brothers and seeing Zeus’s house for the first time, I didn’t have high hopes for the night.
This was exacerbated by the fact that I’d lied to Mute.
To say he’d become my best friend in the last few weeks seemed too trivial to define the way our friendship had developed. True to his orders, Mute was my constant shadow tracking all my daylight hours just one silent step behind me. Sometimes, I barely noticed he was there and didn’t really know the extent of his watchfulness. He took me to school and picked me up like a dad would (though not my dad) but when I asked him, he told me he usually worked at Hephaestus Auto during those hours. Whatever the case, if it was school or ballet or an appointment, he was there the second I was finished, waiting outside on the curb beside his bike like he’d never moved.
We also hung out though. He ate breakfast with me in the mornings and surprisingly, he loved to cook, only healthy things packed with superfoods and nutrients, but each morning he made me a delicious smoothie and some nights we helped Mrs. Henry, my parents’ chef, cook in the rarely used kitchen at the back of the house. We devoured cult classic films, played cards because I wanted to learn how to play poker and there was no one with a better poker face than Mute, and sometimes, I even read to him from a book. He liked books, he told me, but he couldn’t read very well. He still didn’t like to be touched unless I gave prior notice but he loved my hair and touching it, tugging it and wrapping it around his fingers seemed to center him in a way that playing with toy blocks soothed Sammy.
I found out a lot about Mute in the last couple of months and life before his presence in it seemed like a faint and lonely memory.
So, I felt like shit for lying to him. I’d told him I had cramps and would stay in my room until dinner at the Garros that night but instead, I’d slipped out the back door just in case he was watching and hitched a ride with Ruby, who’d been waiting a block away for me in her red convertible.
If he found out, he’d be pissed and even worse, so would Zeus.
“There’s my darling girl,” Betsy’s voice sung out, the only thing to cut through that laminated silence.
I opened my eyes to smile at the middle-aged woman who’d nursed me as a child and passed my letters back and forth to Zeus until I was old enough to go to the post office myself.
She hooked a stool with her foot and slid it beside my chair then ducked down to look into my eyes and check the pulse at my throat.
“Always a nurse,” I muttered as I rolled my eyes. “I thought you’d give me a kiss before you inspected me like a prize horse.”
She clucked her tongue and then sank onto the stool. “You know I care about you, that’s why I do it. I know this sucks, honey, but I think Dr. Radcliffe’s course of treatment is the right one.”
I nodded because we’d already talked about this. “I know.”
She tucked a piece of hair behind my ear. “How are you, honey?
I bit my lip because I hadn’t seen Betsy in a few months so she didn’t know about Zeus.
Apparently, I didn’t have to worry about telling her because her eyes widened like camera apertures zooming in on me. “You’ve seen him, haven’t you?”
“You could say that.”
“Oh God, he finally did it, didn’t he?” she asked the heavens. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him.”
“Absolutely nothing,” I said fiercely. “You of all people shouldn’t judge us.”
“I don’t, sweetheart. I’m just concerned. He’s…an intense guy with an intense life.”
“I know all about it,” I told her with hard eyes.
She nodded slowly. “He told you about what happened with his uncle Crux?”
Fuck.
“Of course,” I lied boldly.
Her face softened with empathy as she reached out to pat my thigh. “He didn’t. You ask Zeus Garro what happened with his uncle ten years ago and then we’ll still see if you have stars in your eyes over him.”
I glared at her as she pulled out her knitting and went to town on a hideously ugly olive-green sweater. “This is for you,” she beamed at me.
“Great,” I muttered, looking away and hoping to hell that what she’d said about Zeus wouldn’t destroy anything between us.
The Garro’s lived off the main beach drive down a packed dirt road behind a chain link fence, overgrown sea grass and about five signs that warned of Danger, No Trespassing and Cross At Your Own Risk.
It wasn’t exactly a warm welcome but as Mute and I passed down the weaving road lined with parked cars, I looked around in awe at the surroundings. The ocean ran alongside the lane, the high tide line just a meter or two off the path. The blue water sparkled with fragments of shattered gold cast by the setting sun and the mountains cupping Entrance like a hand loomed up all around us, capped by snow and shrouded in perpetual mist.
I breathed the briny sea air into my lungs and then lost it all when we rounded a bend and caught sight of the house.
Zeus had built this one as well.
It was a pale wood clapboard house with thick slates around the windows and doors stained a darker wood. The roof had pale green tiles that blended in beautifully with the ocean at its side and the forest at its back. There was a wraparound porch with potted plants on it and a huge three-door garage built in the same style as the compact, two-story house.
I fucking loved it.
I was off the bike and running toward the painted forest green front door when it opened and Zeus stepped onto the porch, his feet bare beneath the frayed hem of his jeans and his torso snug in a criminally tight Henley the same colour as his pale grey eyes.
I launched myself up the stairs and into his arms.
He caught me easily with his hands splayed across my ass and planted a long, wet kiss on me before I could get a word out. When he was done with my mouth, I’d forgotten what I was going to say and blinked at him dazedly.
“How’s my girl?”
I stared into his grey eyes, cracked and lined like an ancient boulder over time. They were beautiful eyes thick-lashed under heavy brows, given character by that radiating fan of wrinkles to either side of them. I decided right then that I’d be happy to spend the rest of my life looking into those eyes.
“I think you dazzled her,” a well-known but surprising voice said from behind Zeus in the house. “King does it to me all the time, so I know.”
I peered around Zeus’s hair to confirm my suspicions and immediately jumped down to the ground as I yelled, “Miss Irons!”
She laughed as I used my entire body to move Zeus’s bulk out of the doorframe and then pulled my ex-teacher into a full body hug.
“What are you doing here?” I asked as I stepped away.
It was only then that I noticed what she was wearing.
Miss Irons had been a young and pretty teacher that wore sweet little dresses and feminine suit combinations like a classy secretary. Now she stood before me in jeans with the knees ripped out and a purple tee shirt with a crown emblazoned on it that said Queen. Her long golden brown hair was wild all around her in a way that said she’d arrived on the back of a bike and enjoyed the hell out of it and, not only that, she hadn’t bothered to fix her mane because she liked the windblown look of it.
Totally different woman.
I took a step back as I frowned at her.
She laughed lightly as she looked from me to Zeus, who stood leaning against the wall of his house with his arms and feet crossed, an unlit cigarette in his mouth. “I should have known it would be just as weird for her to see me as it would be for me to see her with you.”
Zeus pushed his tongue against the cig in his mouth but didn’t say anything and for another second, I got stuck on how goddamn sexy he looked standing there as the man of the house, cool and casual but potent with masculinity and harnessed power.
Miss Irons laughed again and hit Zeus in the shoulder like they were friends. “Totally dazzled by you. Way to go, Zeus.”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “As if it’s that surprisin’.”
I couldn’t help myself when I rolled my eyes and said, “Yeah, you get dazzled first thing when you look at him but as soon as he opens his mouth, you come back to earth real quick.”
“Oh my God, you two are freaking adorable,” she breathed, her eyes sparkling with delight.
I felt like I was in the twilight zone.
“Queenie, you gotta start swearin’,” Nova said, appearing behind her.
The golden light of the sunset hit him full in the face and highlighted the utter perfection of his bone structure. I bet if I took a ruler and measured it out, his features would be exactly symmetrical.
“Seems dazzled enough by pretty boy,” Zeus grumbled.
Miss Irons or Queenie grinned and waved a dismissive hand through the air. “Oh come on now, you know any woman with eyes in her head is dazzled by Nova.”
“This is true,” Nova agreed with a wink and a rakish grin.
“Come ’ere, little warrior,” Zeus ordered with a glare at his brother.
I went without thinking under his arm and leaned hard into his side before reaching up to pluck the cigarette from his lips and put it between my own. It was a strangely intimate thing to do and I knew Zeus understood that when his hand cupped my hip and pulled me closer.
“So, are you with him?” I asked, pointing a finger between Nova and my old teacher. “Because there were these bizarre rumors about you sleeping with a student when you left. I told anyone who would listen that it was utter horseshit—”
I stopped talking when a motorcycle came roaring into the wide driveway and King Kyle Garro swung off his bike. He turned to grab the bag of ice strapped to the back, and then his long legs ate up the space as he came up the stairs to the porch. I thought distractedly that it was easy to get dazzled by The Fallen men. If women knew how fucking handsome bikers could be, it would blow their minds.
I was thinking this when King’s booted feet hit the landing, the ice hit it a second later and Miss Irons was hauled into his arms the second after that. He slid a hand to the back of her neck, banded the other over her hips and planted a hot, wet, super long kiss on my ex-teacher.
His ex-teacher.
“Um, okaaaaay,” I said slowly.
They kissed on.
Nova smirked at me. “They do this a lot.”
King pulled away from eating at her mouth but kept his face close to say, “How’s my Queen doin’?”
She sighed dreamily, clutching his wrists as they cupped her face. “Better now you’re back.”
Zeus snorted. “Boy went to get fuckin’ ice, woman. He didn’t go off to war.”
Miss Irons blushed fiercely but shot my man a sidelong look filled with sass. “Your women just run from Mute’s bike the second it stopped and jump into your waiting arms like you’d just returned from war?” she waited a beat for her point to sink in then grinned and placed a smacking kiss on King’s smiling lips. “That’s what I thought.”
“So obviously, the rumors were true,” I clarified drily.
Zeus’s body rumbled against mine with a deep chuckle.
King’s boyish smile was absurdly handsome with pride. “Better believe it. Worked fuckin’ hard to snag her, let me tell ya.”
She shoved him and then immediately followed him as he stepped back from the force of it and slotted herself into his side before looking at me. “Apparently, you’ve got yourself a Garro man so you can’t tell me you don’t get it.”
“Oh, I get it,” I said with a nod, tipping my head back so I could look up into Zeus’s rugged face. “I almost feel badly that there are no Garros left for anyone else.”
“There’s one,” Nova drawled as, on cue, a clunker of an old Toyota came barreling down the drive and fish tailed to a stop about five inches from the porch stairs. Even through the cacophony of the music thudding through the shit speakers, I could hear the couple inside yelling at each other. A second later, Harleigh Rose climbed out in tiny denim shorts over fishnet tights and combat boots, a tight black leather jacket zipped up to just below her cleavage and her masses of hair tossed all over her head. It was like an ad for the original bad girl, rock music playing in the background for special effect as she slammed the door and yelled, “Fucking fuck you!”
The car roared out of the drive and into the lane a moment later, kicking up dust that swirled around Harleigh Rose as she stood staring after it, flipping him the bird.
“Pity the poor bastard that gets saddled with H.R.,” Nova muttered.
And Mute, my lovely friend who had been so quietly standing against the porch railing the entire time softly added, “Seconded.”
The entire porch burst into laughter, which was shit timing because when H.R. turned on her boot and stomped up the stairs it looked like we were laughing at her. She scowled at everyone as she came to a stop in the middle of the porch, planted her hands on her hips and said, “Well if this isn’t a motley fuckin’ crew.”
“Harleigh Rose,” Zeus growled, tightening his hold on me. “This is Loulou. Think you two ’ave met but why don’t we give the introducin’ part a second go ’round, yeah?”
“Hey, Harleigh Rose,” I said on a small smile, hyper aware of the healing cut her ring had left on my cheek and the fact that her dad had me pressed to his side from tip to toe.
Her jaw worked as she struggled not to say something mean. It wasn’t necessary, her acidic eyes, an aquamarine blue that was so startling they seemed to glow, said it all for her. She hated my fucking guts.
She cut her eyes from me to her father and did something with her face that might have been a smile but seemed to me more like a painful grimace. “Welcome to our lovely home, Louise. Can I offer you a refreshing beverage?”
“A beer would be good,” I suggested, careful because I wanted to show her I wasn’t going to back down, but I didn’t want another throw down.
“While you’re at it, I’ll take one too,” King added casually but his eyes were sharp on his little sister.
“Me too, honey,” Cressida put in.
It was only then that Harleigh Rose flinched like Cressida throwing down for me was the worst possible betrayal. Her head turned to look at her and even though I couldn’t see H.R.’s face, I knew there was pain in it.
Clearly, she did not have the same problem with King’s woman as she did with me.
“Beer, honey,” Cressida said in a way that meant she expected Harleigh Rose to do as she was told and do it with a smile. “You need help carrying it out?”
“I’m capable of carrying some fuckin’ beer,” she muttered petulantly.
“You capable of rememberin’ your fuckin’ manners?” Zeus asked and immediately drew a glare from his kid. He shrugged. “Hey, you’re proud of the way you’re actin’ like a fuckin’ fourteen-year-old brat just cause I found a woman happens to be your age with twice your life experience, then go at ’er, sweetheart. Just thought I raised a girl bright, kind and true. Fuck me if I was mistaken.”
His words hit her like a ton of bricks; the stubborn cruelty in her eyes shattered like mirrored glass and revealed the wounded heart of her.
I knew the words were coming before they came.
“She’s a fuckin’ Lafayette, Dad. You think the minute comes that she has to stand up for our family, she’s going to sacrifice hers for ours? She lives in a house like a fuckin’ castle up on Entrance Hill. You want young pussy, fine, who am I to stop you. Guess I just expected you to have better taste than that.” She sneered as she waved her hand over me, her eyes like fingers ripping apart my big curled hair tied back with a black velvet ribbon, my pink lipstick and spike heeled black leather boots.
They seemed to tell me that I was too rich to be authentic, too young to be wise and too fuckin’ privileged to be wild.
I stepped forward away from Zeus and smiled prettily at her. “You can insult me until the cows come home, Harleigh Rose, I’m here to fuckin’ stay and I don’t care if it takes you two decades to be civil to me, nothing, not even you can take me away from Zeus.”
Uncertainty made her blink like a lost little girl for a moment and it was a moment my man took advantage of.
Zeus stepped forward and tagged his daughter around the hips to haul her into his chest and wrap his massive arms around her in a great, big bear hug. He even growled for effect as he rocked her back and forth.
“You fuckin’ suck sometimes H.R.,” he said as he bent down in a pseudo squat so they were at eye level. “But I’d do fuckin’ anythin’ for ya.”
“Yeah?” she asked hopefully, casting a sly look over her shoulder at me.
I laughed at her audacity, perilously close to liking her despite everything.
Zeus’s grin was a bright wedge of joy in his dark, close-cropped beard. “Fuck yeah. Just a warnin’ though, you ask me to stay away from my little warrior, she’d fight you and win. Even if she didn’t, there’s no way in heaven or hell my fallen angel would leave me in peace.”
“You know it,” I winked at him.
H.R. pouted but she did it in a cute way and she didn’t gripe when Z slid one arm around her shoulder and reached out to grab mine with his other hand.
“Fuckin’ starvin’, let’s get the feast fuckin’ started.”
