It wasn’t long, though, before I was being led outside to see Morgaine’s flock of chickens. All of whom had names and personalities I was told all about. I also learned that Morgaine’sclaim to fame was being a poison expert who used to punish bad men with her little concoctions.
Then there was Rook’s woman, Tessa. Who had been a victim of one of the many terrible biker clubs that treated women like holes to be plugged and faces to be smacked around when they were in a bad mood. We’d connected over what it was like to grow up in and around those kinds of toxic clubs.
The one thing all the women had to say, though, was how differentthisclub was from others. About how allthesemen were good.
I was a little dubious about that, even if all the men had been pretty decent to me so far.
I mean, Detroit had been careful to point out every ingredient in dinner to me so I knew exactly how much insulin I would need to compensate for the carb content.
And Raff had entertained us all through dinner with stories about his adventures traveling from California to Florida and back. While it was clear he definitely enjoyed women along the way, how he spoke of them was always with genuine affection.
I just sat back and listened, observing all of them and how they interacted.
Like how Saint and Syn didn’t have the typical teasing brother kind of relationship. It was a deep bond. And there seemed to be something, I don’t know, fragile about it. But I didn’t know enough about them to understand it.
It had been an interesting night.
It almost felt a bit like being in my club. Just with some more dudes. But it was there. That thing I’d loved so much. The connection. The togetherness. The ‘we’re in this together’ mindset.
It made my heart warm.
But that feeling was quickly replaced by nostalgia.
Then grief.
Because no matter what, even if everything went exactly to plan, even if all my girls got into recovery and came back to me, it would be different.Wewere all too different.
That was a reality I’d been trying not to think about once I knew how bad things had gotten.
There was no tamping it back down now, though. It was the pit in my stomach. It was the heaviness of my limbs as I walked down the driveway with Sugar on one side and Colter on the other.
“And yet, I’m still going to walk you,” Colter said, shrugging it off. “She seems slower than last night.” He nodded at Sugar, who was half-heartedly sniffing at the grass as she passed.
“She’s beat. That Betty had already run her ragged. Then the two shepherds sapped everything she had left.
“We could turn back and take a car,” he offered.
“Nah. It’s good for dogs to get really worn out now and again. They’re not meant to be sedentary. She will sleep like the dead now.”
“Is she allowed on the bed?”
“She’s allowed to take out a loan in my name if she wants.”
That got a huff of a laugh out of him.
“I bet she helped you not feel so alone after the whole… hostile takeover thing.”
“Yeah. I mean, I think she’s helped a lot with the anxiety around the diabetes too.”
“Been a hard adjustment, huh?”
“It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it. And I say that as someone who absolutely would not have understood a year ago. It was like one day all the rules changed… but no one gave me the rules book.”
“It sounds destabilizing.”
“Yeah. Before, my body was kind of just background noise. Now it’s a dashboard full of flashing warning lights I have towatch all the time. And there is no option to ignore it, to say ‘I’ll deal with this later.’ It’s… a lot.”
“Were there no signs before you were diagnosed?” he asked.
