“Are we really going to let this split us apart? Right when the fucking Bandits are getting stronger? Right when they threw a fucking grenade at us? You want everyone else to suffer because the two of you can’t come to grips with this?”
A suffocating silence followed. I stole a glance at everyone to see where they all stood, but there wasn’t a huge difference from when I first woke up. Steele, Zack, and Connor had their arms folded and their gazes down. Brock switched glares between the two of us. Cole had risen from his chair and stood behind it, overseeing the whole process.
And Mason looked like he genuinely couldn’t decide what to do.
Finally, he stood up, got behind his chair, and glared at me.
“Don’t ever let me fucking see you again.”
Without another word, Mason walked out in silence, the entire club remaining mute as the only sound that filled our ears was the door to the clubhouse opening and then closing, not with a slam but not gently either. We still remained quiet until Mason’s chopper had faded into the distance.
“Think he went back to the house?” Steele said.
“I don’t know,” Brock said before he turned his attention to me. “You’ve got to figure this one out, Garrett.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you,” he said. “For better or for worse, this is when you need to grow the fuck up.”
I chuckled at that, but the laughter died when no one else snickered or smiled.
“We all have to grow up if we want to defeat the Bandits for good,” he warned. “We’ve let the playboy partier image slide because, one, it was funny, and two, it helped bring girls, which helped bring recruits in. But there’s nothing about us that can be boys anymore.”
He sighed. He looked like he had more to say, but he stopped himself. Cole, however, interjected.
“I trust you to be a fucking man and be a father to this kid,” Cole said. “And I’m happy to help however you want. But at this point, if you all want to be initiated, it means being men. And in this case, that means you move past your fighting and make peace. And if that means you push past Mason’s rebuttals and rejections until you get a handshake from him, you fucking do it.”
“I get it,” I said.
But the problem was, it was all easier said than done. I would make my peace with Mason at some point. That much, I promised.
But for the immediate future—which who knew how long that went—I just wanted to make sure I wouldn’t die when I saw Mason.
And I had no idea how soon that would be.
Hannah
Four Months Later
By now, I looked every bit the part of a pregnant woman, and no amount of baggy clothes, hiding in my apartment, or standing at certain angles could hide that fact.
And because of that, the person who was the most stressed out was not me, but my brother, who had seemingly become a full-time father to me now that he’d distanced himself from the Black Reapers MC.
“You cannot be serious,” he said. “You want to stay in this town, with all the violence between Reapers and Bandits, and raise a child? Do you even know how many people have died living in this town?”
“You don’t think I don’t know that,” I said, too exhausted to add much venom to my words, too fatigued from pregnancy to come up with new points. “It’s time for you to lay off me. Why don’t you go pick on Garrett some more? Oh, right, because you’re a coward and you can’t make peace.”
Nothing pissed off Mason more than that reminder, precisely because of a threat I had made to him the day I saw him knock Garrett out cold.Don’t hurt him again. Or I will never speak to you again.
At the time, the idea was that the ominous threat would compel Mason to apologize to Garrett, for Garrett to apologize to Mason, and for the two to just co-exist with each other. Instead, it had caused Mason to avoid Garrett at all costs, often to the point of shirking his club duties, or only going in when he knew Garrett wasn’t there. It was petulant and unbecoming of a guy in his thirties, though I supposed having our parents die when they did had stunted some of his growth.
But that was no excuse. Teenagers could reconcile better than they were right now. It was fucking embarrassing to know my child’s father and uncle gave each other the cold shoulder like two middle schoolers.
“Don’t you dare invoke his name, Hannah,” Mason said. “You know full well—”
“I know what? That you two haven’t made any peace yet?”
Mason sighed.
