A Love So Hard (Aces High MC - Charleston Book 2)

by Christine Michelle

  “I’ve seen her outside of our house whenever he’s been around the past few weeks. At first, I thought I was seeing things too. But she was just there earlier this week. I didn’t even know Toby was home, but I saw her outside of my bedroom window, and then when she realized someone had caught her there, she ran off,” Lucy informed him. “What I need to know is what happened today.”

  The man took a deep breathe, glanced around at everyone in the room, and then explained what witnesses had told the police. “Seneca Davis was seen standing on the corner near the accident site talking to herself. A woman who had been waiting on a friend to come out of a shop overheard her saying something about how ‘He is mine. He has always been mine. We’ll be together again. This is the only way.’ It was about that time that Mr. Brother’s motorcycle came riding down the street. Seneca took the bottle she’d been drinking out of and tossed it at just the right moment. Toby lost control and they went down, slid for a bit. Ms. Tierny was able to get free of the wreckage, but Toby’s leg was pinned under the bike.”

  “She had a pipe or something in her hands,” Gretchen broke in. “She was going to use it on me,” her words were a broken whisper as she spoke them. “He yelled at her. Got her attention on him instead of me. He started telling her that she was fucking crazy and he’d never be with someone like her. He was pissing her off. He did it on purpose to keep her from hurting me. I took my eyes off of him for a just a minute. There was a hot rush between my legs,” she got out before the sobs started again. Ever ran her hands up and down Gretchen’s arms as the detective took over from there.

  “According to witnesses, the woman lost her shit, ran at Toby with that pipe she had picked up from somewhere. It wasn’t part of the wreck. She,” he glanced around the room nervously. “She impaled him with it. He was brought here with it still intact in his abdomen.”

  “No!” Lucy called out, and for the first time that day I watched as my woman lost her composure. Laying down his bike, and possibly having a crushed leg was one thing. A pipe through his stomach was something else. I had never, in all of our time together, seen true rage in my woman’s eyes. It was there, in that moment, as she took in every man in the room wearing a kutte. “I warned you. I told you to get rid of the whores. You promised me! Did you even try?”

  “We were going to bring it to the table at church this week,” Merc explained in a calm voice as if he were talking someone off the ledge.

  “You were too late,” Lucy hissed. She turned as the woman she was there to comfort started running her hand up and down my woman’s arm now, offering the same comfort to her that she had been receiving all this time from my girls.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucy apologized for her outburst.

  “I think I have everything,” the detective started to say as he stood. Then the curtain off to the side was pulled over a bit and the doctor who had been here earlier stood there with another and a couple more people at their back.

  “We’re going to move you all to a room of your own.” He turned to Lucy then. “They got it ready for you earlier.”

  “We’re not leaving her,” my wife spoke of Gretchen as she grabbed the woman’s uninjured hand in her own.

  “You don’t have to. We’re going to wheel Ms. Tierny down there too.”

  There was something else going on. I could feel it in the air. “What about Toby?” I asked.

  “We’ll check on him once we get all of you moved,” was the response. I didn’t miss the way the tension ramped up amongst the staff. This was not good. I didn’t think they needed to check on my son. I was pretty sure they already knew his status. My gut clenched hard as I turned to Lucy. There was a flash of something in her eyes that made me believe she had felt it too and understood what I did. We were about to get news that would devastate everyone and they wanted us in a more controlled space before that happened.

  We followed along as we were moved to a separate room far from all the other ER patients, waiting families, and with each step the dread I was feeling bred iron butterflies in my stomach that were tearing me apart from the inside. I walked with Lucy in my arms so I knew she was feeling it too, because her legs weren’t exactly keeping her upright. The girls hadn’t caught on yet, thankfully. I knew Merc had though, because was at my back with Anna tucked up under his arm instead of where’d she’d been with J-Bird as we’d all listened to what had gone down.

  Once we were secure in the room the doctors left to have a quick word with the detective before he left. I knew. He was getting the news they were about to break to us. He would have to know because the charges against Seneca Davis were about to include murder. The door cracked open with an audible hiss and Lucy, even with her back to it, knew too. Her legs gave out from underneath of her and let it happen, going down with her and pulling her into my lap there on the floor as she cried against my shoulder. I glanced up in time to see Ever reacting to this and then glancing around wildly as if to pull answers out of the air the way my wife seemed to have done. That was when the doctor spoke.

  “I’m so sorry,” he started, and the rest was lost to me. The words no parent ever wants to hear come from someone’s lips tumbled free into the room loosing our grief. Our rage. Our sorrow. The whoosh of pain hit me and rumbled through my chest until it roared out of me. I held Lucy tightly to my body as it happened. A piece of me left on that God awful noise to join my son wherever he was now.

  “Daddy?” I heard my baby girl hiss, and then she was also in my arms, in her mother’s arms. They both expelled their grief right there in my lap on a cold hospital floor, and there wasn’t a single thing I could do to stop this. I couldn’t take it back. I couldn’t trade places with my son so he could be here in my stead. He had so much more to look forward to. He didn’t get his chance to be a father, and the injustice in that nearly killed me right there. He would have been so much better than me. He would have done it right. He would have done better. He would have protected his boy from a danger he knew all too well. He should be here holding our family together now, not me.

  Chapter 27

  (Lucy – age 43, Double-D – age 46)

  Gretchen didn’t show up. I stood there beside my son’s grave as everyone else was starting to leave, and she still hadn’t shown. I refused to leave until I saw her there. My son deserved a goodbye from her too. We had placed a smaller tombstone beside his with his baby’s information. Baby Brothers was etched in the stone, because we hadn’t known if it would have been a girl or a boy. Gretchen had only been three months along, and she refused to tell us even though we knew the medical team that took care of her had informed of her the gender.

  I traced the name, Brothers, over and over in mind remembering when we had legally changed Toby’s last name to CJ’s. They had both been so proud that day. It was just after I married CJ that we realized it was something that needed to be rectified. I’d taken my husband’s name, because I didn’t want the lie that mine represented any longer. It didn’t take much to change our son’s name, and he was so proud to have ‘married’ his mom and dad too. That’s what he thought had happened to get him a new name. The sweetness of that memory rolled over me like a wave, then just like the sea was wont to do, it all swept back out to be replaced by the pain and anger that had been bubbling up and waiting for a release.

  “Luce,” CJ called to me. I glanced up from where I’d been staring out at the horizon, watching. Waiting. “Come on, babe, we need to go.”

  “No,” I insisted. “I’m not leaving until she shows up.”

  “Luce.” His tone was demanding, almost harsh and people stopped to watch us instead of walking away as they had been. Off in the little paved parking lot of the church that stood vigil before the cemetery was a row of motorcycles that there hadn’t been room for. They were so deep they extended out and lined the street leading into the cemetery on both sides. The men from all the other chapters of Aces High and some of their allied clubs were there to see my son and his baby off into the
next world. The woman he had loved was nowhere to be seen though. Then I heard it. There was a rumble in the distance of another bike. The service was long over, but I watched as that bike rolled into the lot and parked behind others, blocking them in. There was a woman on the back on the bike.

  I knew instantly who it was. I also knew who was driving that bike so I understood there was nothing there for me to be pissed off about, and still I was angry on my son’s behalf. Putting her on the back of his bike had meant something. That she would show up on the back of another man’s bike to pay her last respects was a slap in the face. “It’s not what you’re thinking,” Ever said quietly.

  I turned my narrowed eyes on her. “I know they’re not together, and yet, she hopped on the back of his bike anyway.”

  “He doesn’t have anything else right now, and it was probably the only way he managed to get her here. She didn’t want to come while everyone else was here,” my daughter tried to explain.

  “We are her family,” I huffed out.

  “No,” Ever told me. “We were going to be, but that was taken from her. It was taken from us too, but it was taken from her in such an ugly way. You lost a son. She lost a child and her love all at once. Remember that.”

  I wanted to lash out at my daughter for the first time since I met her. I wanted to scream, cuss, cry, and blame her for the words she’d just spoken. Didn’t matter that they were the truth. My anger couldn’t be sated. CJ’s hold on me grew tighter, obviously realizing what I was feeling.

  “We should go and give her a moment’s peace with them,” he whispered in my ear. “Please, don’t do this here,” he begged.

  I couldn’t hear it though.

  I didn’t want to feel his arms wrapped around me.

  I was angry with him too.

  I was so god damn angry. My son didn’t need to be lost to us. It was all so preventable.

  “He shouldn’t be dead,” I whispered.

  “I know,” he returned just as quietly.

  “He shouldn’t be dead!” Louder now, the words erupted from me.

  “They shouldn’t be dead!” I was shouting now and watched as Gretchen pulled up short half way to us. She stopped and stood there with Kane Youngblood at her back. He was glaring my way. She was swiping at tears as they fell. I turned in my old man’s arms and smacked him to get him away from me. “If you had done your fucking job they wouldn’t be dead!” The words were wrenched from deep within me, exploding out because I couldn’t hold them in any longer. I glanced around at everyone gathered.

  “You all killed my son!” I screamed at them.

  “Lucy!” My husband yelled at me, but I ignored him.

  “I was hidden away from my real father, because a woman posing as a whore in your clubhouse and a nurse at the hospital tried to steal me as a baby. That wasn’t enough of a price to pay though. Growing up with a lie and father who wasn’t really my father wasn’t enough for any of you. No,” I carried on, letting it all roll out.

  “No, because then you let the whores rape my man. You let him get drugged, let him meet death a couple times himself before he came back. You let the misunderstanding of what happened carry me away on legs too fast to catch the truth. You let us miss four years together. You took the birth of our son from his father. You took his first steps.” My words were strangled screams at the people I held responsible for my damaged soul.

  “You nearly let another whore take my daughter. The one good woman in all of this, and you shunned her the way you should have been doing to the whores that are a taint on your clubhouse. You treated her the way you should have treated them!” Someone grabbed hold of my arm by the elbow, and I violently shook them off.

  “Now, you let them take my son. My grandchild. They’re gone. Gone. I can’t get them back. You can’t get them back for me!” I was being picked up and carried away at that point, but I didn’t have the strength to fight the physical. That didn’t stop me from throwing more anger their way. “You all killed my son! I begged! I begged for you to get rid of them. The whores who have been slowly killing and taking from my family my entire life. Look what you’ve done! Look what you’ve fucking done!”

  I felt a pinch in the side of my arm and then a slight burn before I managed to look down and see that a club brother from the Dakota Chapter who had been introduced to me years ago as Doc, was pulling a needle back from my arm. “She’ll be out for a while. Take her home, and I’ll stop by to check in on her in a bit. I’ll get a prescription ready for her in case she needs it when she waked up.”

  “You,” I started to say as everything became a little fuzzy.

  “I gave you a sedative,” I heard, but then the rest of his words fell away, taken by the wind.

  Chapter 28

  (Lucy – age 43, Double-D – age 46)

  Lucy was out of it when Ever and Deck showed up. He had dropped Anna off at the clubhouse with Merc and J-Bird to watch over her. It was for the best. I was sitting at the kitchen table just staring off into space wondering where everything had gone so wrong. Just days over a week ago he’d had his whole family, everyone happy for the first time in a long time. The light and the levity had finally lifted the stones of regret from his body. They were back now, and heavier than ever.

  “Dad?” Ever’s voice caused me to look over to see her and her husband standing there.

  “She’s still knocked out,” I answered thinking that was the implied question. I should have known better. Ever and I had never been close, and while we had been working hard to change that I still didn’t know her well enough to anticipate things like that. Ever shook her head and moved over to me.

  “I figured that. Doc told us what he gave her. I wanted to know how you were holding up after everything.”

  My eyes lifted and met hers, so like my own when I looked in the mirror. I don’t even know what it was I saw there, but it broke me. My shoulders began to shake with the effort of holding it in and I just couldn’t do it any longer. “I lost my boy,” I managed to get out. “She blames me for that. She blames the club.”

  “You know it wasn’t your fault,” my daughter argued.

  “It was,” I told her. “She begged me to get the club to change. She’s asked it of me for years, and I’ve brought it up but I never put any fight behind the request. I never made it a damn demand. Even last week, when I made Toby tell Merc and Sandman about what had been going on with Seneca. Aside from banning her, we put off the decision again for another time.”

  “You had to do that,” Deck informed me of what I already knew. “You need a full club vote for something like that. It was set. You did all that you could.”

  “Did I? My son’s dead. There was something else…” My voice trailed off as Ever came over and wrapped her arms around my shoulders, holding me to her as I wept openly for the son I couldn’t protect.

  “Dad, I know you think the blame should be placed on you, but that could have happened to anyone, anywhere. He could have met that girl somewhere else and her infatuation – which wasn’t in any way healthy or sane – could have developed. This wasn’t a club issue.”

  “He would never have met her if she wasn’t there available.”

  “Stop. Don’t let what mom had to say at the cemetery weigh you down like that. She was bleeding out her pain. She couldn’t take her anger out on the person truly responsible she went for everyone else. You have to know that.”

  “It doesn’t matter if what she said was actually true, Ever. It was true. First, I failed her, then you, and now my son and grandchild. I can’t take any of it back. She’s right though. I should have put my foot down solidly a long time ago. It never sat right that the whores were running around the clubhouse, most of the time unchecked, after what happened to me all those years ago. I couldn’t stand it. For the longest time just having one of them brush up against me in passing sent me straight to the nearest trash bin or bathroom to be sick.” I couldn’t believe I was telling them this.

&
nbsp; “Your club should have done something about that back then, for their brother. They didn’t. That is on them. You’re right, but it isn’t on you. You are one person. Please, don’t take this on yourself. Toby wouldn’t have wanted that. He called me the day you had him tell Merc and Sandman, you know?”

  “He did?”

  “Yeah,” my daughter smiled down at me then kissed my head and moved to take a seat in front of me. “He called me and told me how sweet is was to be at home and see how you and Momma-Luce were being all playful and teasing one another. He also told me how he wouldn’t be able to look her in the eye anytime soon because she was half naked, not realizing he was there.”

  I chuckled at that. “He’s lucky I hadn’t snatched her shirt off before she ran downstairs.”

  “Ew,” Ever agreed with a shiver. “Yeah, probably. The thing was, he also told me about you guys being able to sit down and have a talk. Dad, he was so happy about that day. It didn’t matter that you were talking about some crazy stalker he had. It was the first time he felt you guys had a man-to-man real conversation and it was the best feeling in the world for him. That you guys had that, and…”

  “And?”

  “And that it was where your relationship would be going in the future,” she admitted with tears in her eyes. I dropped my head to my arms as they rested across the table. My hands were swept up into Ever’s and she held on while I cried out my grief. I wouldn’t get that relationship that my son had hoped for. It was a point, I realized, that every man had with his dad eventually. It was that moment where his father no longer saw him as his boy, but as his own man. He was right too. It had been a turning point that I was looking forward to as well. You would think it would have happened when he patched into the club, but I still hadn’t seen him as a man then. The way he stepped up and went to bat for Ever with the tattoos had been the moment where things started to change and I began to see him differently. We just hadn’t had the chance to have that talk alone since because he was busy with his new girl, a stalker, and I was busy getting to know Ever, taking care of Anna, and relearning my Lucy now that we were in a new place in our lives.