Page 4

Four

The year I was born is getting a little far on that scrolly thing.

— Chevy’s secret thoughts

CHEVY

The last thing I wanted to do was go to a club meeting.

Nothing against my Truth Teller club brothers, but I needed to talk to my own brother.

And that wouldn’t happen if we were both at a club meeting.

Which was why I was here early.

I needed to talk to him, and I knew that he’d be here.

When we were young, both Copper and I had worked in a shop that was owned by the Truth Tellers MC.

That’s where we fell in love with club life.

Club life wasn’t for everyone.

But for Copper and me, we’d both been enraptured.

Having a whole crew of men always at your back, no matter what?

That was an intoxicating feeling, especially when you had a father like we did.

“Hey, brother,” Cutter drawled as he watched me pull up.

I was one of four bikes parked behind the barndo that we’d made into a clubhouse.

One of the bikes was Cutter, another Copper, who was nowhere in sight, and the last belonging to our club president, Webber.

Webber was on the phone in the middle of the backyard, throwing his one free hand in the air in anger.

“What’s that about?” I asked.

“His ex-wife being a bitch, like always,” Cutter said. “What’s going on with Copper and you? Keely called.”

Keely was my baby sister, and the one good thing that was always constant in my life.

I loved her with my whole heart, but I was glad she wasn’t here right now.

I didn’t want to yell at her.

“I’ll tell you and Copper at the same time,” I responded. “Come on.”

I found Copper at the bar in the middle of the room as we made our way inside, and he narrowed his eyes at me the moment he saw me.

“I’m not sleeping with her and have never slept with her,” I promised him.

His eyes narrowed. “Sure, because that’s what it looked like.”

I scrubbed at my eyes. “I swear to you, I haven’t had anything to do with her in an intimate way, ever. I only ever helped take care of her since you told me to.”

He frowned. “What?”

“What what?” I asked, confused now right along with him.

“I never told you to take care of her,” he explained. “So what do you mean, like I told you to?”

“You specifically said, right when you went to prison that first day before you left the courtroom, to take care of her,” I countered.

“I didn’t.” He was shaking his head. “What I was likely trying to do was warn you to watch out for her. Not take care of her.”

“Those are the same thing, bro,” Cutter cut in, agreeing with me. “I kind of got the same vibe, too, when you said it. Though my mind was on you leaving, and not what you were asking him.”

“No,” Copper disagreed, looking slightly amused. “They’re not.”

“How about you explain what you meant, then?” I suggested. “Because that’s not what I got out of your words.”

“You didn’t fuck her?” he asked.

Was that hope in his voice?

“No,” I replied. “Never even wanted to. In all honesty…”

“You can’t stand her,” Cutter cut in.

Well, I didn’t exactly like her.

Sometimes I felt like she was a leech, but Copper had asked me to take care of her, so I had.

“I was warning you,” Copper explained. “Reign is a good girl but…”

“But…” I pushed.

“But I swear to Christ, she makes up all sorts of illnesses and is convinced that she has them.” He shook his head. “I didn’t want you to fall for her sob story. I didn’t want either one of you dealing with her shit when you didn’t need to. I love her to death, but she’s fucking exhausting. I’ve been gone all these years, yet I still remember this feeling, and it’s not good.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose.

“Like Munchausen?”

That was a new voice.

Webber.

“What?” we all asked at once.

“Munchausen,” Webber repeated. “Had a guy have it where I was growing up. His mother took him to the emergency room for everything. One time, he sneezed, and she freaked out and left me there at their house. He came home hours later and said that he had brain cancer or something, and he wouldn’t be able to play with me anymore. A year later, he was miraculously cured by something that his mom gave him out of her garden. But it was a continuous pattern. He had brain cancer, then some super rare form of osteoporosis. I remember at eighteen, he left town and didn’t look back. I ran into him in Florida years later. He was happy with kids. He told me his mom had that.”

“Brain cancer,” I mused as I went back to my psych days in med school and started to pair symptoms of that disorder to Reign. “Let me…”

I pulled out my phone and placed a call, hoping that Val was still at the hospital.

My luck held and she was transferred onto the line in moments.

“Chevy, what’s up?” she asked, sounding concerned.

I’d never called her before, so it had to be confusing and concerning.

“Hey,” I said. “You remember that friend I told you about this morning?”

“Yeah,” she said.

The back door slammed and Doc came in looking haggard.

Cutter, Copper, Webber and I just gave him quick nods and went back to waiting for me to finish my phone call.

“Would you look up her patient file on the computer for me?” I requested.

“Sure,” she said. “What’s her full name?”

I gave it and waited.

“What am I looking for?” she wondered.

“In her file, does it have anything about cancer or seizures?” I asked.

“No.” She sounded slightly hesitant. “Um…”

“Just tell me.” I put it on speaker and placed the phone in the middle of the bar.

“It says nothing about any illnesses that she actually has,” she said. “But it does flag her as a narcotics seeker.”

I sighed.

“It also has her in and out of this hospital about two hundred times in the last two years. It does show that at her last treatment, she was referred to a psychiatrist for suspected self-harm,” she read.

“Thanks,” I sighed again. “How are those patients?”

“Both are surviving, but only long enough that decisions can be made,” she explained.

My stomach sank. “Thank you, Val. I’ll see you next week.”

“Anytime, Chevy.” She hung up, and I looked at Copper.

“I’ve spent years dealing with her, and trying to help her because she’s so sick, and all of it was a lie,” I grumbled.

“Sorry.” Copper shrugged.

I knew he was, but still.

“What was that about?” Doc asked.

Doc was known as ‘Doc’ not because he was a doctor, or even in the medical field, but because he was a smart guy. He knew everything there was to know, from the radius of a standard size marble to how far Earth was away from the moon.

And in case you’re wondering, because I’d joked last week that I didn’t know and asked Doc, it’s 238, 900 miles.

Copper gave a quick rundown and ended with, “I noticed it when she was a child. Always saying that she had a cold or a broken bone when she didn’t. I think it got worse as we aged, but by that point she was a good friend and I wouldn’t let her go despite her crazy theories on why she was sick.”

“Then why did you react that way when you saw them together in the bed this morning?” Cutter asked.

There was silence from Doc and Webber for a long moment as they processed those words.

“You had a girl in your bed?” Doc asked. “And you were actually nice to her?”

Okay, so I wasn’t the nicest person in the world.

I just didn’t see the point.

But I was nice to her and one other woman…

Thinking of Aella had me smiling slightly, which of course gave my club brothers the wrong idea.

Copper didn’t notice the look, luckily, and explained his earlier reaction.

“I once thought I was in love with her,” he explained. “For a few years, I contemplated it, but then I realized that I was clinging to a past life that wasn’t available to me anymore. This morning I just…overreacted.”

Doc burst out laughing. “You don’t overreact.”

“Reign is beautiful,” I said. “He hadn’t seen her in years, but she’s even more beautiful now than she was when they were teens. I lost sight of her for a few years, and when I saw her again, my heart nearly stopped in my chest at the sight of her. But she’s a lot, and there’s only so much a pretty face can sustain you.”

“Speaking of pretty faces…”

We all looked over to Apollo who’d snuck in at some point without our knowledge.

He was all sneaky like that.

“What?” I asked.

“There’s this girl at our gate,” he said.

“What?” most of us echoed.

“A woman,” he said. “She’s sizing up our gate and getting ready to climb it.”

“There’s razor wire on top of it,” Cutter pointed out.

There was a reason this place was more like a fortress than a motorcycle clubhouse.

When Truth Tellers MC had first formed, it’d been with a purpose: to fix the mistakes that law enforcement makes.

Sometimes that was to get felons out of jail for a crime they didn’t commit.

Other times it was to get rid of a dirty politician that would never see the inside of a jail cell despite their laundry list of crimes they’d committed.

Which, for instance, had just happened not too long ago.

Though, it wasn’t us that’d fixed that particular problem.

It’d been our baby sister, Keely’s, man that’d done it.

The sick bitch that Dima had taken out had been dead set on passing a bill that would give the government the power to waive people’s rights as American citizens suspected of organized crime. While he was there to spy on her, he’d spotted her abusing a young boy during a dinner party to celebrate her newly appointed government position. She’d say she needed a bathroom break, then come down off her rooftop where the party was being held and beat the ever loving shit out of a child in her bedroom. A child that’d shown signs of being abused for months from what Dima had been able to see.

Dima had reacted as we would have and taken her out at her own appointment party.

The aftermath had given the police the power to search her home, and in the process had found Tavi.

Not that we’d known it was Tavi at the time.

We’d heard the story on the news, of course, and that was it.

Until one day Apollo had gotten a call about his missing son.

Apollo’s son had been missing for two years. His mother had been suspected of taking him out of the country to contest a divorce and shared custody, but she’d just disappeared.

Even Apollo’s skills as a hacker hadn’t been able to help him find his son.

It was later revealed through the police’s gathering of evidence that Apollo’s wife was out of the country, and that she’d given her son to her mother as she was leaving town and told her to take care of him.

A mother that Apollo hadn’t been aware that she had, because there were no documents linking the two.

“Definitely scaling the razor wire now.” Apollo hit a couple of buttons on his phone, and then the one-hundred-inch television in the corner of the room lit up, revealing a woman that was climbing the fence.

In Crocs and scrubs.

I narrowed my eyes on those Crocs, something about them screaming familiarity to me.

Also, that ass as she maneuvered herself over the razor wire like she’d done it before…

The woman turned around, and my breath hitched.

“I’ll go,” I said as a pulse of anger started to slide through me.

What the fuck was she doing here?

And why the fuck was she climbing into unknown situations, risking life and limb?

I knew she had no clue what she was climbing the fence into.

Had she, she wouldn’t have come.

“The cleaning lady is running late today,” Apollo said. “As are some of the guys, which works out. She’s in the office right now finishing up.”

I ignored the rest of the conversation and went around the back, knowing if I went out the front she’d probably try to run.

I rounded the back of the building just as she came darting into the shadows.

Truthfully, she was actually very good at being stealthy.

If we hadn’t had such high-tech cameras, she might’ve been able to sneak in here undetected.

She wouldn’t have been able to get inside undetected, but she could certainly get a good look at the building and existing structures on the twenty acres of land that we had.

Opening my arms, I captured the woman to me.

I’d been longing to do this for so long that the feel of her intoxicated me for a long moment in time before I realized that she was freaking the fuck out.

“Chill,” I barked.

She stilled, her body going completely limp.

Then, “Chevy?”

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

There was a hitch in her breath before she said, “Um…”

I tossed her over my shoulder and took her inside.

Though I wanted the woman like I wanted to take my next breath, there was no way that I was going to let her off the hook.

She’d just broken into our compound, and I needed to know the reason why.

“Chevy!” she cried out against my back. “Let me down!”

I didn’t let her down.

In fact, I carried her right inside, then placed her on the stool in the middle of the few club members that were here and backed up.

She righted the auburn hair out of her eyes and stared in shock at all the men surrounding her.

She licked her lips and said, “Uhhh…”

“Explain,” I growled.

“I, uh…” she started but stopped.

“Now,” Webber said, leaving no room for argument.

“I, um, I’m…” she stuttered, but her eyes narrowed when she saw something over my shoulder.

I looked back expecting to see another club member come into the room, but found the cleaning lady with her headphones in, pulling her cart of cleaning supplies behind her.

All of us were looking at the cleaning lady, so we didn’t see Aella launch herself off her stool and toward the lady before she did so.

One second the cleaning lady was on her feet, and the next she was on the ground with Aella’s hands around her throat.

“You took my rent money!” she screeched at the cleaning lady.

The cleaning lady’s face was terrified.

“It’s not enough that you stole our credit, and our ability to have a simple bank account, but now you’re sweet talking yourself into our apartments and stealing our money? You’re such a fucking bitch!” Aella reared back and let a punch loose on the cleaning lady. “Give it back!”