I swallowed hard and reached into my pocket for my phone. There were already nine missed calls.
Three from Regan.
Four from Edge.
One from Tarak.
One from Bullet, which meant Edge had gone from worried father to full-club problem in record time.
A text from Regan sat at the top.
Destiny Rourke, answer this phone before your father chews through concrete.
Another came in while I stared.
Baby girl. Whatever you’re doing, stop long enough to tell me you’re breathing.
That one almost got me.
Almost.
Because Regan didn’t deserve this. None of them did. For all their suffocating, all their watching, all their locked gates and silent shadows and men posted where they thought I wouldn’t notice, they loved me. They loved me in the only ways they knew how, which meant badly sometimes, loudly often, and with enough fear to make a prison look like protection.
They had every reason to hate me.
That was the truth I never said out loud.
Not because of me, maybe. Not because of anything I’d done. But because my mother had been a storm that tore through their lives and left wreckage with my face. Mandy had broken Tarak. She had haunted Edge. She had lit fires in places people were still afraid to rebuild. She had made Regan’s family history into something twisted and raw.
And still, they didn’t pass her sins down to me.
Regan had looked me in the eye and packed my bags.
Edge had claimed me like I was a miracle instead of proof of an old betrayal.
Tarak had swallowed grief every time he saw me and still called me family.
The club had protected me, watched me, fed me, smothered me, loved me.
And I had hidden all of it from them.
Every whisper.
Every screenshot.
Every joke about my mother spreading her legs between clubs. Every boy asking if I needed help figuring out which biker was my daddy. Every girl calling Destiny a stripper name. Everyfake dollar bill. Every printed article. Every old picture of Mandy circled in red like she was a crime scene and I was the evidence.
I hid it because I knew what they would do.
Edge would storm the school.
Regan would destroy the mothers first, then the daughters.
Tarak would get quiet in that scary way that made men cross themselves even if they weren’t Catholic.
And then everyone would know.
Everyone would say, See? Biker trash. Violent. Dangerous. Exactly like her mother.
