"Oh, hey, good. Which pair do you think she'd like better?"
"She being Ferryn?" I asked.
"Yeah. Summer asked me to pick up something for her to wear."
"Are those pussy flowers on the pink pair?" I asked, raising a brow.
"I know. She'd probably like the cock ones better, but they were sold out."
"I think Ferryn would prefer pants without genitalia on them."
"Really?" she asked, brows pinched like this information made no sense. "Alright. I guess the black and white plaid will have to do."
"Much more her style," I agreed, nodding.
"Not allowed in the kitchen, huh?"
"Not after the baby shower thing," she agreed, nodding.
The Baby Shower Thing was when the others put her in charge of cake decorating since she tended to have a good hand with it. And then she went ahead and did an anatomically accurate close-up depiction of a baby coming out of a woman.
The children were scarred for life.
I was scarred for life.
"Well, Ferryn is in Finn's room. She might still be sleeping. I think she was up late."
"I heard she looks like some badass GI Jane type person."
"She does," I agree. "Really works on her."
"You've been looking, huh?"
"She's an old friend."
"Mmm-hmm," she agreed, sending me a knowing look as she let herself right into Ferryn's room without knocking.
Christ.
Was I being that obvious, or were all the women just basing this off of Ferryn's old crush on me back in the day?
Pretty soon, there were too many voices in the space—those who had known Ferryn and those who had joined the ranks after her departure alike. Even if I had any of my own thoughts, they would have been drowned out by all of those voices around us.
For the most part, Ferryn seemed to relax after the first hour, though a case could be made for the very liberally poured mimosas for her level of calm.
Brunch turned into lunch which turned into dinner before everyone seemed to get their fill. Or simply needed to get home to get their kids to bed.
Everyone filed out.
And after a long day of cooking and cleaning, Summer headed to bed.
Which left me, Ferryn, West, and Reign in the living room.
I wondered if Ferryn sensed it before it came. I sure as fuck did. But I had been around Reign a lot more over the past few years than she had. Maybe tapping into his very subtle mood shifts was not something she knew how to do anymore.
She seemed comfortable enough with the company, switching to the whiskey West supplied her with, after tossing the first one back at him because she knew he had fucked with it, trying to get back at her for her fools' errand the night before.
Reign, though—Reign was ticking.
I wasn't sure what he was waiting for until he finally turned to his daughter and started speaking.
"Didn't want to do this in front of your mother, kid, so had to wait for her to pass out."
I couldn't help but wonder if he had some sixth sense about her being asleep already or if he simply knew she'd had an exciting few days and likely was drained from it all.
"Get into what?" Ferryn said, jaw suddenly tight, a trait she inherited from her father, making it clear she had missed his tension before.
"I know your mom doesn't want me to start any shit or rock any boats. She's happy for you to be home and she doesn't want me fucking with that."
"Okay..."
"For the record, I'm happy you're home too. But I think we both know I am not someone to let shit pass."
"You let a lot of shit pass that mom wouldn't have let pass," Ferryn reminded him, trying to lighten the mood, sending him a little smirk, making me wonder what she had gotten away with that I didn't know about.
"Yeah, stupid teenage rebellion shit. This, kid, this is not some shit I am going to let slide."
"I'm not a kid anymore, Dad," she reminded him.
"I know that."
"I don't have to answer to anyone."
"See, now, that is where you're wrong," he informed her, leaning forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. Somehow, it was more intimidating than if he rose to full height. Menacing, that was the best way I could think to describe it. "You come back into my house, you upset my family, that is when you fucking answer to me."
One glance at Ferryn let me know something very interesting.
While she had dealt with Reign, the father her whole life, she had clearly never dealt with Reign, the outlaw biker president.
"I'm not back in your house."
"This is my house," he declared, waving an arm out.
"And I didn't upset your family. And, for the record, they're my family too."
"Yeah?" he asked, giving her eye-contact that made me fucking squirm in my seat and it wasn't even directed at me. "I don't know what the fuck kind of warped ideas you got in your head about family, Ferryn. But family doesn't run away and leave everyone else behind. Family doesn't make everyone else worry. Family doesn't waltz back in here and expect for everything to be okay without giving so much as a simple explanation for where they've been and what they've been doing. That's not what family does."
Really, she had no comeback to that.
There was no comeback to that.
"You don't want an explanation."
"I'm sitting here, aren't I?"
"You don't want to know what I've been doing, what I've become."
"Look, kid, I get you wanting to protect your mom from ugly realities. I even appreciate that. But this is me. You don't have to protect me from shit. I doubt you've done shit that I haven't done in my life."
That was true enough.
I hadn't been around in his early days or during the street wars that shook the club and decimated its numbers a long while ago, but I had heard the stories. I knew how much blood was on Reign's hands.
"You haven't been chained up in a basement wondering if it was going to be you who was raped next, Dad," she told him, giving him the same eye-contact he'd given her.
Reign shocked back at that a little, maybe not expecting quite so much bluntness from her. "No, that I haven't."
"And you didn't have to worry that those same men who trapped you in that basement would use another girl's rape against you either."
Chris.
She was talking about Chris.
The other girl in the basement. The one who hadn't been able to escape predatory hands. The one who she managed to save. The one who was adopted by her Aunt Lo and Uncle Cash when they brought her back to Navesink Bank to heal.
"No," he agreed.
"You don't know how that fucks with your head, Dad. Like I know you think you can imagine, but trust me, you can't imagine."
"You're right. But I know you got out. You were free."
To that, there was a small scoff.
"I wasn't free. There's no way to be free of that. It's a part of you. It fucks with your head."
"And that is what getting help is for."
"I didn't want help. I wanted to make it stop."
"Make it stop?" he repeated.
"I wanted to make sure that bastards like the ones who had me would never be able to sleep soundly again. I wanted them to sit up at night worrying about people like me coming for them."
"That's what you've been doing then?" he asked. "You've been hunting them down."
"I've been taking them out," she corrected.
And suddenly, oh, suddenly it all made sense, didn't it?
The coldness. The distance. That reaction to me grabbing her arm once. The random disappearance right after she'd just arrived.
She'd been dealing with the scum of the Earth since she left. No wonder she thought any softness was a weakness. In a world like that, it was.
"Taking them out," Reign repeated, rolling the words around, likely trying to imagine the little girl she'd once been doing anything even related to murder.
<
br /> "Yes."
"How?"
"Are you asking how I tracked them down, what skills I acquired, or what method of murder I utilized?"
"Yes," Reign answered, sitting back.
"Working at Hailstorm, I got to know some of the case files, some of the people Aunt Lo couldn't get to join her ranks. I tracked one down."
"And he was willing to train you?"
"Yes. He believed in my mission. I tracked the traffickers down on the dark web." Like several of her aunts knew how to do. "And I couldn't use guns because the cops couldn't be alerted."
"Up close and personal," Reign murmured, clearly mentally tallying the repercussions such acts could inflict on a person mentally, emotionally.
"Yes."
"Someone almost cut your throat," he added, voice a little rougher than usual, betraying a bit of his fatherly concern for the first time.
"Yes."
"You go to the hospital?"
"Not for that one. Not for most of them. Just two."
"Which two?" That one came from me. Me, who had personal knowledge of all of them. Me, who maybe just exposed that he had personal knowledge of all of them.
"Had a through-and-through above my knee that needed to be looked at. And a punctured lung."
"Broken rib?" West asked, regarding her with an oddly blank look.
"Yeah. That one was... close," she admitted, giving her father a careful look.
"Choking on your blood sucks balls," he added, making her lips curve up ever so slightly.
"Yeah."
"If we stuck you in an X-ray, how many breaks would we find?" West demanded.
"More than you could count."
"How many of them healed clean?"
"Not many," she snorted. "I am going to be a wreck when I'm fifty."
"You two done commiserating about your reckless pasts?" Reign demanded, shooting West a look that said he better drop it.
"It's not my past," Ferryn told him, voice just a tad softer than was normal. Tentative. Like she didn't want to break what she thought of as bad news to her father.
"Say that again?"
"I'm not done."
"Yeah, you fucking are."
"No, I'm fucking not," she countered. And if I wasn't mistaken, Reign's lips twitched just the slightest. In the past, they always did when she got smart or pushed some boundary. You had to figure that a man who ran an arms dealing MC did appreciate a little bad behavior now and again.
"You gave it nearly nine years. That's enough."
"It's not enough."
"When will it be enough, then?"
"When there are no more bastards selling women against their will for sex."
"You and I both know that's never going to happen."
"Then you understand why I can never stop."
"There are other people who do this sort of thing."
"You're not seriously trying to tell me to leave it to the cops, are you? You, of all people?"
Oh, I couldn't imagine it felt great to be called a hypocrite by your own child.
"They have task forces and means."
"They have red tape and you know it. They answer for every bullet that leaves that gun. Even if they were putting down animals like these traffickers. You know as well as..." she trailed off as her phone dinged in her pocket.
I felt myself shift straighter in my seat. Because as far as I could tell, only two people had that phone number. Me. And whoever messaged her about a job. Otherwise, it was completely, unusually silent.
Judging by the tension in her jaw, I was right about it.
Her hand moved into her pocket, pulling out the phone, scrolling through.
I knew she was gone the second she shifted her legs off the arm of the chair and placed them on the floor, her body still curled over her phone, finger moving up then down again. Like she was trying to confirm that she read what she thought she'd read.
"We're not done here," Reign declared. And it was the most fatherly thing I think I had ever heard from him.
"We seemed to cover it all, I think," she objected, tucking her phone into her pocket. "My mind got fucked up in that basement. I decided I have a mission in life. I trained for it. I paid my dues. And now I take down human traffickers. I might be back, but I am not retiring. That, I think, covers it."
"How the fuck am I supposed to let you just run off when I know you're almost getting your throat slit and collapsing a lung when you go?"
"I'm good at what I do, Daddy. I know you don't like this. But I have to remind you that you were the one who demanded to know. If you couldn't handle the truth, you shouldn't have asked it of me."
With that, she moved away from us, heading toward the door.
"West," Reign demanded, a silent command that West had no problem hearing.
He hopped up, rushing across the room, getting to the door just a blink before Ferryn did.
"Move."
"Got orders."
"West, move," Ferryn demanded, voice damn near as authoritative as her father's.
"Can't do that, Prez..." he started, cutting off when Ferryn whipped a hand into and out of her pocket, holding a curved blade to his throat before he could even know what was happening, let alone react.
"I'm not scared of you, Sweeney Todd," he told her, smirking even as the blade cut in enough to make blood prickle up on his skin.
In another move almost too fast to even see the individual steps, her arm pushed, her leg kicked, and West was on the ground.
"You should be fucking scared of me."
With that and nothing else, not even a glance at her father, she was outside.
"Not trying to tell you how to parent, Daddy Reign," West said, getting off the floor, swiping the blood from his neck casually, not seeming the least bit fazed by the whole ordeal, "but I am pretty sure that girl should have her allowance docked for a week or two," he added, laughing as he got himself a shot, jabbing his finger into the liquid, then running it over the cut.
"You," Reign said, ignoring West, pinning me instead.
"Yeah?"
"You and my girl, you always got along well."
"Ah, yeah."
"And you've been keeping an eye on her since she showed up."
"Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and late night snacks," West declared, making it clear I did have to worry about him and what he might say.
Reign, thankfully, seemed too worried about his little girl to pay West any mind. "I think she's going off on a job."
"I think so too," I agreed.
"I don't want her to go alone," he told me. "And I got a feeling she isn't about to let me tag along."
He wanted me to follow her into the home or workplace of a human trafficker and help her murder people?
"You know, Prez," West cut in, either seeing my thoughts on my face, or simply thinking them himself since he knew me better than most, "think maybe that is more my forte than his."
"Yeah, 'cause that's what I want: two reckless kids on the same job."
I didn't bother to remind him that both West and I were the same age. "Besides, you barely know her. Vance cares about her. Got a history there. He'd be the one to make sure she got out without a scratch."
"He's not exactly had the kind of..." West tried again. Not because he wanted to show off, to get on Reign's good side. But because he genuinely didn't know if I had what it took to kill people in that sort of situation.
To be fair, I wasn't sure I did either.
But I did know one thing.
Reign was right.
I would do anything to keep Ferryn safe.
"I'll do it," I agreed, nodding, already getting to my feet.
"Yo," West called, reaching into his boot, coming back with a pretty deadly looking hunting knife. "She won't let you use a gun. You're going to have to settle for this."
"Thanks, man," I told him, clapping a hand on his shoulder, taking the knife, slipping it into my pocket.
"Take off the cut. And don't
take your eyes off my girl," Reign demanded.
I slipped off my cut, took a deep breath, and made my way outside.
I could certainly follow those instructions.
I didn't want to take my eyes off her anyway.
Eleven
Ferryn - Present Day
"No," I called, already hearing his footsteps behind me.
It could have been my father. Or West. But, somehow, I knew it was him.
"No, what?"
"No, you're not going to talk me out of it," I told him, reaching for my helmet.
"I'm not going to try to talk you out of it," he assured me, but there was something in his voice that told me I shouldn't trust him. But I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Especially because I had never known Vance to be anything other than trustworthy. He wasn't a liar. It wasn't his way. He always told you the truth. Even if it was ugly.
"Well... good," I said, watching as he moved two bikes over, reaching for his own helmet.
"Well, where are we headed?"
We?
"We aren't heading anywhere. I am heading somewhere. You are staying here."
"Afraid not, Ace," he told me, shaking his head.
"You're not coming with me."
"Actually, I kind of am."
"No, you're not. Go back inside. Are you out of your mind?"
"Well, see. I have to come."
"My father is making you, isn't he?" I asked, eyes getting small.
A part of me, the newer part of me, the part of me that felt like she could handle everything on her own and didn't need anybody or anything, wanted to be annoyed about it. The other part, though, the part that was raised by a loving and often lenient father who not only tolerated, but enjoyed my often rebellious ways, couldn't find any anger about it.
Of course he wanted me safe.
Especially now that he knew what I had been up to all these years.
I should have known it was coming. My mother may have been the sort to let things slide so as not to create conflict. My father, though, was not the same way. He wanted answers. And what he wanted, he got.
There was no way he was going to let it slide that I had been gone for nearly nine years, I was covered in scars, and I was colder and more guarded.
I guess I had a false sense of security because literally no one else asked. I wasn't sure if it was because they were happy to see me and wanted to fill me in on the goings-on in their lives, or if my mother had reached out to them and told them to mind their P's and Q's. But no one had asked, let alone demanded, my story.
The Rise of Ferryn Page 16
