“Why wouldn’t I want you to stop beating yourself up over things that happened in the past?” When I tutted, he shot me a weak smile. “Do you see her mother anymore?”
“Evangeline’s? No. Alina… Luc gave her enough money to build a restaurant. She doesn’t really want anything to do with us. I don’t think she blames me?—”
“I should hope not, seeing as it’s not your fault her daughter was sick!”
“—it’s more like she wants to cauterize the wound and cutting us out is a part of that.”
My scowl spoke of my disapproval, but he didn’t comment on it. “When did you last visit her grave?”
“I… Never.”
“Why not?”
“Because I didn’t deserve to.”
I stroked a finger along his jaw. “You know you do, right?”
“Maybe now.”
“Will you take me there?” Using my hold on him, I turned his chin so that I could stare into his eyes. “Would you take me to your friend’s grave?”
He chewed on the inside of his cheek. “Will you take me to your brother’s?”
“Of course.”
Luigi, who’d traveled with us in the jet along with the rest of his crew, or what he calledStidda, dropped the privacy screen. “Almost there, boss.”
He turned to watch the roads pass, and I let him because that’d been an unexpectedly heavy conversation, but one I figured we’d needed to have.
Life was too short to begrudge the love that someone had found in their past. Maybe my own past meant that I upheld that love because I knew how precious it was and how devastating its loss could be.
Whatever reason lay behind my easy acceptance of his feelings for Evangeline, I wouldn’t let the idea of us visiting the graves of our loved ones drop.
In that direction, I hoped, lay a chance for his grief to scab over.
Closure sucked but it mattered.
The car rocking over a large pothole jolted me from my thoughts. I glanced out of the window, too, and noticed we were driving down a narrow lane toward a surprisingly pleasant clubhouse.
Having visited this and the Hell’s Rebels’ in the past couple months, I supposed I had a metric—this one was better.
When we pulled up outside the closed gates, a man waited for us in front of them.
He had long hair that flowed down his back, black as pitch aside from a streak of lightning at the front.
He wore a leather cut, jeans, and a Henley—standard biker fare, I’d also come to learn.
The patch on the flap of his cut read ‘Prez.’
This welcome was night and day to the Hell’s Rebels.
The guns might have stayed hidden, but I’d felt the building pressure like a finger on a nebulous trigger for every hour we’d stayed in Rutherford.
This man, I sensed, scanning his relaxed but watchful posture, wasn’t as trigger happy.
“Stay here,” Stan ordered.
I wasn’t worried about him because I knew he’d never have brought me along if he expected trouble, but I still shuffled closer to the window to listen in on their conversation.
