Page 12 of Sparrow

“Of course I followed you. You got a phone call and took off like the devil himself was after you,” he snaps back. “And now I find you in the middle of the forest acting like you’re some sort of action hero. What the fuck are you doing out here, Orion? Because if you’re planning on starting trouble with the Saints, I have thoughts.”

Of course he has thoughts.

Mars always has thoughts.

And he’s been very clear about the Saints themselves. The Oaks have been tousling with the new MC for months, and we have several fights under our belts, but Mars has forbidden us from starting trouble with them on purpose.

Still, I scoff.

“What the fuck do you think I’m doing, riding out here in the middle of the night so I can attack them? In the dark? By myself?”

He eyes me narrowly. “I wouldn’t put it past you if you thought you had a reason.”

Well, shit.

Even I’m not stupid enough to do that, and he knows it. But this leaves me with a conundrum. Because I didn’t come here to attack the Saints on my own, in the middle of the night.

But I don’t want to tell him the reason I did come out here. On my own. In the middle of the night.

Mars knows about my background, and that I was living in that junkyard when he found me. He knows I started living on the streets when I was twelve, but there are a lot of things he doesn’t know–like that I wasn’t actually orphaned. For all I know, my mom and dad are still alive.

But my dad had a very high opinion of himself, and very little was good enough for him. Not my mother, and not me. When I told him I didn’t want to be a lawyer, but wanted to do something different with my life, he decided to talk me out of it using his fists, and that went on from when I was about six to the day I turned twelve and decided I didn’t want to be stuck in that apartment with him anymore.

I left the next day, and I’ve never looked back.

Though the next three years of my life had been harrowing enough to make me think that a steady roof over my head might have been worth the monster who lived in the next room.

That’s the kind of thing I’ve never told Mars, though, because the thought of telling him what sort of kid I’d been, and the things I did when I was trying to make my own way in the world...

It’s too heavy to bear.

He can’t know that I was running from the syndicate when he found me, having saved a kid I was meant to pass to the smugglers. I was in trouble and in need of an ally, and suddenly there was Mars, a hero in real life and the big brother I’d never had. He’s been saving me for ten years, now, and the thought of telling him who I really was...

No.

I won’t do it.

So how the fuck am I going to explain how I happened to get out here in the middle of the night, and why I know there’s a girl in that little house in need of saving? My mind races through as much fiction as it can come up with, and hands me a quick and almost believable answer: I was riding through the night, trying to get my brain to calm down, when I happened to pass this compound.

Happened to see that the other MC was active.

And that there was a girl in the cabin. A girl who looked kidnapped.

Christ on a cracker, that’s not even a good story.

But then the man on the porch behind me shouts again, and Mars looks over my shoulder at him, then frowns. His eyes turn from the man to something to the side, and he cocks his head, the lines in his forehead growing even deeper. He grabs my arm and pulls me roughly toward the cabin and I stumble after him, trying to get my head around what’s going on.

There’s a man we don’t know on that porch shouting at a house, and Mars is just running right toward him?

He stops abruptly behind a tree and leans around it, his eyes intent on the cabin. I look toward the building, trying to figure out what he’s seeing, and see the girl in the window again, her eyes on the town behind us as she shoves something into her mouth.

Great. He’s seen the girl, and I don’t even have a good lie thought up yet.

But then he breathes one word, and I realize he’s stopped wondering what I’m doing, because he’s too engrossed with the girl in the window.

“Arden?” he mutters.

I freeze, trying to figure out what the fuck ‘arden’ means. Then I realize it’s a name.