I woke up crying.
There was no gap between unconsciousness and waking.
I knew the second I opened my eyes that Mute wouldn’t be there because Mute was dead.
I couldn’t remember any other details of that night, which the doctors would later inform me was normal after a traumatic event, but I remembered immediately and brutally that Mute was dead.
The tears fell hotly down my face, burning so badly I thought they’d leave scars. A part of me wanted them to. I felt mutilated by the pain of his loss.
It took me a few minutes of deep, thready breathing to open my eyes and take in the hospital room around me.
Everyone was there.
My entire family.
Harleigh Rose was curled up on a sofa with her bandaged calf in King’s lap and her head in Cressida’s.
Bea sat in the cradle of Nova’s arms against the wall in a long line of bikers—Cy, Lab-Rat, Curtains, Bat, Priest and Boner—that extended out the open door and into the corridor.
Ruby lay on the ground beside my bed wrapped in a thin hospital blanket with Lila curled up behind her for warmth and comfort. Maja was curled up in Buck’s lap in a huge chair someone had dragged in from another room, and Hannah, Cleo and Tayline lay curled up liked kittens against the sofa at King’s feet.
They were all asleep.
Even my guardian monster.
He sat in chair that was too small for his enormous frame, the upper half of his torso collapsed on the bed at my side with one of his big hands curled around my thigh and the other tangled tightly with one of my own.
Even in sleep, his handsome face was tense with worry. I pressed my fingers to the crease between his thick brows and over the fan of wrinkles beside his eyes but he didn’t wake up.
I wondered how long they’d been there.
“You’ve been out for days, honey,” a familiar voice said from the doorway.
I couldn’t have been more shocked to see my mother standing there, not only because she was there but because she wasn’t wearing makeup—something I couldn’t ever remember happening—and she was wearing a tracksuit. It was a designer one but still, my mother didn’t wear anything more casual than slacks on her worst day.
“Mum?” I croaked through a painfully dry throat.
She rushed as quickly as she could pick her way through the sleeping bodies on the ground to my side to pour me a cup of water from the pitcher on the bedside table.
“Here you go, sweetie,” she said as she tipped it up to my lips for me.
I had a déjà vu moment, remembering her doing the same thing for me when I was first diagnosed with cancer as a kid.
When I was finished, I turned my face away and asked, “What are you doing here?”
Pain slashed across her features like a blade but she recovered admirably. Her hand shook slightly as she put the cup on the table and perched on the side of my bed without the mammoth man half on it.
“It kills me that my daughter has to ask why I would visit her in the hospital,” she admitted.
“It’s not something you’ve done much of before,” I reminded her. “And you recently told me that you’d never talk to me again.”
Her lips rolled under her teeth, a habit I realized with surprise, that we shared.
“I’m so sorry. I…The truth is I never knew what to do with you. You were born this beautiful, vibrant little girl with a personality that developed very quickly and it was one I didn’t understand. Then you got cancer and…” She brought her hand to her mouth and pressed at it as if that would stop the tears that coated her words. “I didn’t know what to do with a little girl with cancer. I was afraid to get close to you because you were so close to dying and then what would I do?”
I tried to remain unmoved by her speech and mostly it was easy because my heart was preoccupied with mourning Mute, but I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt because honestly, I didn’t really want to lose another person close to me.
“You’re supposed to love them anyway.”
She nodded empathetically. “I know, I know, and there’s no excuse but you can’t understand what it’s like to have a daughter who’s so sick. It feels like your fault. Maybe if I hadn’t eaten starch when I was pregnant with you or if I hadn’t let you get so close to the microwave when we cooked together or—”
I interrupted her with a snort. “We never cooked together, Phillipa.”
She flinched again at my use of her first name instead of “Mum”. “We did, sweetheart, and I’m so sorry you were too young to remember because I do and they were some of my favourite times. You always wanted to put candy in everything, gummies in the cookies and sour cherries in cakes. They were truly awful, but you loved them, so we made them.”
Something flickered at the back of my mind but I clamped down on it. “When did they stop?”
She knew that I knew the answer. “When you were seven, after you got shot in the horrible accident.”
I pulled Zeus’s hand closer onto my belly and stared at it, loving the coarse brown hairs on his arm and the way the feathers merged with his skin like they were part of him. My big, bad fallen angel had saved me back then and he’d saved me every day since just by existing.
“I don’t want to hear this, Mum. I want to wake up Zeus and the rest of my family and mourn my fallen friend with them,” I told her honestly.
She sucked in a breath but nodded. “I know. I’m so sorry, honey. He was… a sweet boy and I’m sorry I couldn’t move past my own worries to see that and get to know him better.”
Sorrow slammed into my throat and brought tears rushing to my eyes. They spilled over as I stared at her and shook my head. “I don’t get what you’re doing here. I’m sorry but I don’t have it in me to comfort you or make you one of your martinis.”
“I deserve that.” She nodded even though her voice was bruised from my words. “I just wanted to see you well and whole with my own eyes. They wouldn’t let me in at first but I’m your mother so I just waited in the main reception until it was late enough they were all asleep each night. Only a few of them have come and gone, honey. Most of them have been living here the eight days you’ve been unconscious.”
Her words were filled with wonder as she stared around the room at the scattered bikers, their rough faces and scraggly beards, their cuts and the weapons visible if you looked hard enough at the opening of their boots and the backs of their pockets.
She saw disgusting outlaws.
I saw brave knights in rebel colours.
“I just wanted to tell you that I love you,” my mum tried again and when I looked back at her face, I saw it was damp and crumpled like a used napkin. “I just wanted to say it with a small hope that you’d see I was being honest. I just wanted to tell you that if you’re willing, I’d like to be in your life again.”
“I don’t think so,” I said immediately and then regretted it.
She looked down at my hand where it rested on the bed and gently reached out to run the back of her pinky on the needle scars there. “So beautiful and so brave. I never deserved a daughter like you.”
My throat burned but I didn’t say anything as she stood up and hesitated.
“Even if you don’t want to have a relationship with me moving forward, I need you to know that there’s something… Very wrong with your father. I thought maybe I could talk to your, er, gentleman friend about it.”
My heart clenched. “You know something?”
She bit her lip. “He left some files on his desk when he left after I told him you’d been injured in a shooting again. I haven’t seen him since but I was curious so I read the papers.”
“Bring them here,” I told her instantly, struggling to sit up further so I could properly relay my intensity. “Go home and come straight back with them.”
“Okay,” she said with wide eyes. “Take care of your sister while I’m gone.”
“I always do,” I snapped and winced when my mum ducked her head and scurried out of the room.
I tipped my head back into the pillow and tried to take deep breaths.
Mute was dead.
Mum wanted reconciliation.
The world had gone fucked.
Zeus stirred beside me, his hand flexing in mine as he rolled out of his bend and into awareness. The second he hit upright, he opened his eyes and found mine staring at him.
“Loulou,” he rasped, and there was so much emotion in that one word that I’d thought I’d die from it.
Just my chosen name on the lips of the man fate had chosen for me at seven years old. It was the most beautiful and poignant thing I’d ever heard.
“Zeus,” I breathed back.
We stared at each other, his eyes devoting every inch of my face to memory. There was a panic to the way he searched me as if he couldn’t believe I was whole and real before him. It made my heart ache to think of what he must have gone through when he thought I might not wake up.
I was staring into his silver eyes, counting the rings of deeper grey radiating through the iris like rings in a tree so I watched as they went shiny then wet then as one tear welled up in the wedge of his lower lashes and spilled down his cheek into his beard.
He was crying.
“Lou,” he croaked, tears falling. “Fuck me, I thought you were gonna leave me. I really fuckin’ did.”
“I’d never leave you,” I promised turning our hands so I could link our pinkies and shake my thumb with his. “Fucking swear it.”
He smiled through his tears and leaned into my hands when I touched my fingertips to the wetness on his cheeks.
“Come here,” I told him. “Get on this bed and hug me.”
He laughed and it sounded like a sob. “Not yet. You’re awake and I’m fuckin’ doin’ this ’fore anythin’ gets in our way.”
“Doin’ what?” I asked, absorbed with the sight of those tears on my badass biker’s face.
Zeus Garro, big bad Prez of a notorious outlaw motorcycle club, was crying for me.
I watched as he pushed his chair back with a loud screech that had most of the sleepers in the room jerking awake and then dropped to his knees with a hard thud. He was so tall, even kneeling beside the bed, his face was nearly at the level of mine.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
One of his big hands pushed back the hair on my head and cupped my face. “Couldn’t see you for five fuckin’ hours when I first got ’ere, Lou.”
“God,” I said as my heart bled for him.
I couldn’t imagine not being able to see him when he was injured.
He nodded, anger a brief flare in his eyes. “Fuckin’ right. And that’s never happenin’ again. I will not be parted from you, ya get me? I’m your guardian monster, your fuckin’ lover and your fuckin’ man. That’s not ever gonna change.”
“Fuck no,” I agreed.
His smile split his face in two. “Fuck no.” He reached into his back pocket, palmed something then reached for my hand as he said, “Left your side three times in ten days. First, to talk to the fuckin’ pigs and identify Mute’s body, then for his funeral—which was epic, little warrior, don’t you worry and I’m sorry you missed it—then to get this.”
He slid something cool onto my finger, but I was so fascinated by the expression on his face, the ferocity of his passion and determination like war paint on his features, that I didn’t notice.
“It’s you and me, Lou. Has been since you were seven years old, so even though you’re young, I figure it was gonna happen sooner rather than later and I decided that it better happen right fuckin’ now.”
I frowned at him, slipping my hand out of his to cup his face. “You aren’t making sense, Z.”
There were a few teary giggles and deep chuckles from our sleepy audience but it was Zeus who laughed from his belly.
“We’re gettin’ married.”
My ruined lungs seized and then seemed to collapse because I couldn’t breathe properly. I stared at him, wondering if I was hallucinating or still asleep but as I stared I noticed the twinkle of something big and shiny on his face, on my hand on his face.
A ring.
It was big; one huge round black diamond surrounded in a halo of small green stones on a band of white gold.
The Fallen MC colours on my hand.
And their President, my guardian angel, my childhood dream man had put it on my finger.
“You’re fucking me,” I breathed.
He laughed uproariously again, manic with relief that I was alive and sassing him. “Not yet,” he said like he had the night he’d first touched me at The Lotus, “but I fuckin’ well plan to. For the rest of our fuckin’ lives.”
As far as proposals went, it wasn’t the most flowery or the most well-thought out.
It was simple and honest.
So true to us, I felt like I was living in a fairy tale. One of the horrible ones, Grimm brothers fairy tales where the wrong people die and the good guys don’t always win, but a fairy tale nonetheless.
I burst into tears as I shouted, “Fuck yes.”
Zeus laughed with me and finally, fucking finally wrapped me up in his arms and hugged me. Our audience erupted, the men into shouting revelry and the women into sobbing congratulations.
“Now,” Zeus said. “Was serious, Loulou. We’re doin’ it right fuckin’ now.”
I pulled away slightly and looked down at my white-and-blue polka dot hospital gown, knowing I looked like shit and, honestly, still felt like it too.
He laughed at my expression and pressed his forehead to mine. “You want a big party, we’ll have one when you get better but for now, let’s get this thing tied up tight, yeah?”
“Okay,” I agreed, not daunted by the idea of getting married in a hospital room without a pretty dress or flowers. I’d given up that version of my future a long time ago anyways. “But um, I’m seventeen so I don’t think I can even legally marry you.”
“Can’t,” Z said with a strange, twisted smile.
“I told him I’d sign off on it for you,” my mum said from where she stood in the doorway, dwarfed by Axe-Man and Boner on either side of her.
My mouth fell open. “Seriously?”
“I, um, I went to Ben’s office to get special dispensation for a license when Zeus asked me about it and, well, your grandfather is waiting outside to see you and, if you want, perform the ceremony.”
I blinked at her. “What? Grandfather approves?”
“He said something about God having different paths for everyone and then something about some princesses needing dragons to protect them instead of Prince Charmings to save them.”
Despite my shock, I laughed because that was totally something my grandpa would say.
Phillipa smiled shakily. “I don’t fully understand how you ended up this way or why this lifestyle appeals to you so much but it would be clear to a deaf, dumb and blind person that that man loves you more than anything so, if you really want to, I’ll sign off on it. He’s been a better guardian to you than I’ve been anyways,” she admitted with a self-deprecating smile.
“Damn straight,” Harleigh Rose muttered.
King elbowed her in the gut. “Shut up.”
“Hey, I got shot too, you know? You should be nicer to me,” she told him, fisting her hands on her hips and tossing her hair.
“Shot in the fuckin’ calf, H.R., and it was barely a nick. Stop milkin’ it.”
She glared at him. “Thanks for the sympathy, bro.”
“Children,” Cress chided on a wary sigh. “You’re ruining a perfectly romantic scene with your bickering.”
King laughed and slung an arm around his woman. “Right, sorry, Dad keep goin’, you’re on a real roll ’ere.”
“Glad you approve,” Zeus said dryly over his shoulder before he turned back to me and said, “Well, you ready to commit yourself to the dark side?”
I stared at the man that had been mine in one way or another for over a decade. The man that had raised me more than my parents had, who was my father and my best friend and my lover all tied into one complicated but beautiful knot.
I beamed at him. “Bring it on.”
