Page 26 of Gonzo’s Grudge (Saint’s Outlaws MC: Dreadnought, NC #1)
“Devyn gets the files,” I wanted to confirm, because I needed to be sure I heard right inside. “Tonight. That will give your son his freedom?”
“Tonight, yes, the files will go to GJ’s attorney who will do an emergency filing to have GJ released immediately.
Don’t know if that will be tomorrow or the next day, but it will get him released.
” He shared with his eyes locked to mine.
“Your father knows if he doesn’t, this ends with a different kind of truth. ”
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” he stated carefully, “that the law gets the first swing. After that, if I don’t like the outcome, then I take matters into my world.
I won’t let men sleep easy when they lock up my boy on a lie.
In my life, we know the lines and if we do the time, we do it, but it will never be because of a setup. ”
I breathed out through my nose and nodded because the world I grew up in did not have room for sentences like that and the world I live in now does, and I am the one who moved from one into the other.
“You hurt me,” I muttered, surprising myself with how simple it came.
“Not like she said you would. Not with other women. With silence. With letting someone else talk to me first. With showing up with empty warnings that lacked real context. All you had to do was tell me things started wrong, but changed. I can accept change, Gabriel. I can’t take being blindsided. ”
He flinched. He didn’t defend himself. “I’ll do better,” he said.
My throat burned. “I’m not ready to forgive you.”
“I didn’t ask you to,” he shrugged. “I asked you to hear the truth. I don’t need your forgiveness, IvaLeigh. I need to know you understand my world and the way things work.”
He leaned his hip against the rail, keeping that distance like it mattered. I realized he was waiting for me to tell him to come closer or to leave, and in that moment the power of it hurt more than anything Hampton Stanley had said in my apartment.
“I can see you need some time to process. I need to make sure the files get to Devyn. Do you want to see me tomorrow?” he asked, and somehow the question was laced with something deeper.
I looked at his mouth. At his hands. At the leather hanging on his shoulders. I looked at the window where I could see my mother’s shadow and my father’s shoulders sagging beneath the weight of what he had done.
“I want you to keep telling me the truth, the whole truth, not the parts you want me to know,” I explained. “Even if it makes me hate you, I want to know all of the pieces moving around us.”
“I can do that,” he agreed, like a man saying he can breathe air.
“And I want you to send Devyn everything and then some. I want you to get GJ out clean. I want you to destroy Hampton Stanley with the law and not the outlaw because GJ deserves to have his freedom be truly free from any of these men.”
His mouth tilted, not quite a smile. “Yes, ma’am.”
“And after that,” I stated, swallowing, “when I’m ready, I’ll call you. And then I’ll want a ride.”
He huffed a laugh that sounded more like relief than humor. “That I can do.”
We didn’t touch. Not then. He gave me a chin lift that felt like a contract between people who knew what it cost to write their names in a deal.
He went back inside and collected the papers without looking at my father and told my mother her pie looked good even though no one had cut it.
Then he left through the front door like a man who knew he can find his way back without being led.
“Tomorrow, IvaLeigh,” he promised before climbing on his bike and riding away.
I stayed on the porch until the lamp buzzed itself tired. Mom came out and leaned beside me and didn’t ask me what I planned to do with my life, for once. We stood there like the house needed us to hold it up.
“Do you hate me?” she asked finally, voice small. “For not knowing what he was doing. For trusting him even when my gut told me something was wrong.”
“No,” I shared. “I hate him.”
She nodded. “Me too.”
We went back inside. Dad was in the study with the door open, phone to his ear, saying words I never thought I’d hear him say—“disclose,” “recuse,” “immediate resignation”—and the sound of it felt like a man taking nails out of his own coffin.
I lay down on the quilt and stared at the ceiling until the cracks looked like roads. Somewhere, a motorcycle’s hum drifted thin through the night and away again. I didn’t know if it was his. I didn’t need to.
The truth had been put on the table tonight. It made a mess. It also made a map.
I wasn’t a pawn in a game I didn’t know about. I wasn’t someone to throw in my father’s face anymore. I was a woman who knew the cost of staying and the cost of walking away.
Tomorrow, I’d see Devyn’s name in my father’s call log and know whether he meant the words he said.
Tomorrow, maybe a letter would land in our mailbox, and I’d read a thing I didn’t know how to believe yet but wanted to anyway.
Tomorrow, I might climb on the back of a bike and hold on to a man who was danger cloaked in brutal honesty in equal measure.
Tonight, I slept in my old bed in a house where everything had shifted half an inch, and for the first time since Hampton Stanley sat in my apartment and smiled like a snake, I didn’t feel like a fool.
I felt braced.
And when morning came, I planned to be ready for whatever came next.