Page 64 of Caution to the Wind

I sighed and kissed Cleo’s hair. There was still a faint trace of the same Vera Wang perfume she’d worn as a girl. “You’re not stupid. You’re the sweetest, kindest, loveliest person I’ve ever known. And that psychopath took advantage of you.”

“I just wanted someone of my own,” she admitted, words slurring as she fell rapidly into sleep. “I’m so stupid. I deserved to die.”

“Don’t ever say that,” I snapped again, a little too loudly, but Kodiak didn’t move this time. “Don’t ever say that about yourself. You did nothing to deserve this, okay?”

She didn’t respond because she was asleep.

Carefully, so I didn’t disturb her, I twisted to look at the huge biker folded into the small chair in the corner. He was bent over, forearms to thighs, hands hanging between his legs, head heavy on his shoulders, hair a dramatic curtain framing his shadowed face. When he sensed my gaze, he looked up at me with haunted eyes.

“Has she been talking like this a lot?” I asked him quietly.

He hesitated a moment, then nodded.

“Like she deserved what happened to her?”

Another nod. A hard swallow that he forced down with his entire body.

“Oh Glory,” I whispered, bending to kiss her brow. “My sweet girl.”

“How much do you know?” he whispered roughly after a long moment.

“Just what I read in the papers,” I admitted with a little shiver.

“It was worse than that.” Dead voice, dead eyes like black volcanic rock in his face. “So much worse than what they wrote.”

I recognized the haunted pitch of his voice because I’d carried it in my own since Kate died, and it had only worsened after that night at Turner Farm.

He’d been there, maybe, or done something or not enough of something to land Cleo in that place where she’d been found brutalized by a madman.

I pressed another kiss on Cleo’s head to the shorn hair beside her temple. She wiggled closer in her sleep, murmuring lowly before I stroked her cheek, and she settled once more.

“I don’t know who you are,” Kodiak surprised me by saying in that same low, cold voice. “But I haven’t seen her so animated since it happened. You’re gonna stay with her, right? She…fuck, she needs all the help she can get.”

I sucked in a deep breath so I didn’t sob, and then I nodded. “Yeah, I’m going to stay with her.”

Cleo startled with a harsh gasp, clasping at my hand so tightly I hissed. When I met her gaze, it was panicked, pupils blown wide.

“Don’t leave me,” she begged with the urgency of someone who had woken from a nightmare believing it was reality. Unfortunately, for Cleo, it was. “Please, Rocky, stay with me, okay?”

I was thrown back to that night so many years ago in the basement of the House of Horrors when Cleo’s mum looked at me with that same desperate urgency.

Take care of them, she’d begged.

I’d made an oath there that I’d failed to keep throughout the years, but I renewed it then as I looked into Cleo’s beloved and brutalized face.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I told her earnestly, carefully lying down on the edge of the bed so I could gather her gently into my arms. “I won’t leave you ever again so long as you want me.”

I didn’t care what it meant. I’d do anything to keep my word to my best friend, even if it meant facing Henning again for the first time in almost a decade. Even if it meant I compromised all the work I’d done over the past eight years to keep my first oath to Kate.

I held Cleo close to me, the scent of hospital in my nose, the memory of our dead mothers in my mind’s eye, and I knew I’d rather die than lose Cleo along with them.

AXE-MAN

Once, a psychologist came sniffin’around the clubhouse, wantin’ to interview some brothers for a paper she was writin’ about the outlaw complex. She was tryin’ to sort out how men became criminals. Why they were drawn to gangs and outfits like moths to flame.

I’d asked her,what’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?

And do you know what she fuckin’ said?