“This hipster glasses that you sometimes wear…” He laughed before she could even finish. “Do you have to wear them or are they a fashion statement?”
“I’m one of those lucky fuckers that has 20/20 vision. I just wear them to piss Tyler off. He calls me a hipster too.”
She wished she knew all these people in his life and, in turn, in Jagger’s life. That was the one she missed, the closeness that she had once had with her brother. She wanted that back, but it would mean being honest with him and telling him the hell that she had been through. She hadn’t even been able to tell Travis everything that had gone on.
“You okay?”
Christy nodded. “I just know that I’m going to have to see Jagger, face him, and tell him everything, and I know it’s going to have to be soon. Probably tomorrow.”
He knew that too. With Rooster breathing down their backs, there was no way they could keep this quiet much longer. It wasn’t fair to continue to keep this to themselves, not when she was going to be staying at the dorm, and especially not when they were going to be right under Jagger’s nose for the most part. It wasn’t fair to any of them involved. “You’re right. We should tell them tomorrow. The quicker we do it, the quicker we can figure out what these sheriffs want with you, and we can defuse the situation with Roni, Rooster, and Liam.”
“This is going to cause major problems, isn’t it?”
Travis wanted to lie and tell her that it wouldn’t, that they were all adults and they should be able to behave that way, but he couldn’t. Jagger could be a hot head, and truth be told, so could he. He wasn’t sure how this was going to play out, but he couldn’t lie to her. “I don’t know. I hope not, but I can’t promise anything. None of us are known for our level-headedness. Except for maybe Tyler. He can be level-headed unless it deals with Mer. If it deals with her, then all bets are off.”
“I don’t want to make this difficult for you.” She reached up and put her hand on his cheek, running it along the stubble that grew there. “That was never my intention.”
“Believe it or not, I know that. I’m the one who chased after you. If it hadn’t been for your car breaking down on the side of the road that day, then I would never have found you.”
She remembered that day and then the subsequent days after that, when she had been scared of her own shadow but still stripping because she had needed money. She’d worried every time she saw him at Wet Wanda’s that he had told Jagger. Then weeks later, he’d come to her with another job, one where she wouldn’t have to take her clothes off, and she’d questioned everything about him again. No one had ever been that nice to her. Every time someone gave her something, it was because they wanted something in return. Even when he had put her up in the house to get her out of the CRISIS center, she still hadn’t believed he was doing it because he cared for her. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she always wondered when the shoe was going to drop, when he was going to tell her that he was done playing games and they were adults, and that he wanted payment for his services. Those days and words, though, they never came. He never once asked for anything.
“I’m glad you did find me, but I feel like I’ve been taking advantage of you.” She took a deep breath. “Which is why I want to be the one to tell Jagger.”
He knew immediately that wasn’t a good idea—at all. “No, we need to do it together.”
She knew her brother, but it occurred to her that she knew the brother that he had been then and not the man that he was now. It had been a very long time. “I think I’ll be fine, and I feel like I owe it to all of us to be the one to do this. I keep putting you out, and I don’t want to be that girl.”
“You aren’t that girl,” he argued. “Anything I’ve done, I’ve done because I wanted to.”
“But at the same time, I’ve let you. Now it’s time for me to stand on my own two feet.”
“If this is what you want to do, then that’s fine, but I want to be there. I need to be there. If he gets out of hand, then I will handle him. I’m not throwing you to the wolves on your first day.” He shook his head at her. “I wouldn’t do that to my worst enemy, and I like you way more than I’ve ever liked anyone else.”
Those words warmed a spot in her heart that had long been cold, and she held them close. “Then it’s agreed? You let me tell him, but you can be there.”
“I’ll let you tell him, but I promise you, when he starts swingin’—which he will do—it will be at me.”
Christine didn’t want any more violence, and she hoped against it all that Travis was wrong about that.
Chapter Sixteen
Every grand plan the two of them had about how to tell Jagger was destroyed the very next morning. He wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near the clubhouse, Travis had been absolutely sure of that. He was supposed to be at the shop, fixing Cash’s car. Travis had verified that with more than one person. So to say he was surprised when Jagger walked in, his arm around B, as Travis was telling Christine where they kept breakfast stuff was an understatement.
The silence in the room was deafening. Travis had never understood the meaning of that phrase before, but as Jagger’s eyes went back and forth between him and Christine, the silence thundered in his ears. He could see the minute that Jagger put two and two together—it clicked in his eyes. The girls always talking about Travis having a woman, her being there this morning. He didn’t say one word as Jagger growled and came at him. He side-stepped him, and grabbed Jagger by the wrist.
“How long have you known?” Jagger didn’t even recognize his own voice coming out of his mouth. The words were garbled, the pain was fresh. He swung with his other arm.
“C’mon man,” Travis told him, pulling him by the arm out the back door. “Let’s not do this here, let’s take it outside.”
Jagger, however, was a solid guy and he was not budging. He stood his ground, yanking against the hold that Travis had on him. He got loose, and Tyler grabbed him by the shirt. “I asked you how long you’ve known,” he yelled, pointing his finger at Travis.
He didn’t want to do this in front of the rest of the group, the ladies, the children that had gathered around. This was private, this was between them, and he didn’t want the rest of them to see it—especially Christine. Especially after what they had shared the night before. This was too much for all of them. He had known this was the way it would go down, there was no other way it could. Jagger had no time to ease into this, he had no time to gauge his pain, it spewed forth now.
“A while, and I’m not discussing it any further with you until we take it outside.”
Jagger’s face twisted. He fought against Tyler’s hold. Tyler struggled to hang onto him, planting his feet on the floor and pulling back against gravity. “No, asshole, you don’t get to tell me what to do. I can’t believe you would hide this from me. That’s my sister!”
Bianca reached for him as he broke free of Tyler’s hands, but they all missed him, and it was then that Travis knew he was in trouble. He wouldn’t defend himself because he knew he deserved it. Jagger hit him around the middle like a ton of bricks, knocking him into the table that stood in the middle of the room. They went down hard, and Travis struggled to catch his breath as they crashed into the floor, his head hitting the table, and he screamed bloody murder.
“Jagger!” He could hear the women yelling at him, both Bianca and Christine, telling him to stop, but he couldn’t. He wanted Travis to know exactly how he felt. He had searched for his sister for years, had even gone back to their home and faced down his piece-of-shit father to find out what had happened to her. To find out she had been under his nose for months and he’d had no idea? That sucked, that hurt, and that was liable to make him rip Travis’ head clear off his shoulders.
Travis could feel the blows as they came, one by one, with each crack of Jagger’s knuckles, some of his guilt went away. All along he had known it was wrong, he knew that it would backfire and probably fizzle out, but he’d wanted this so badly. He refused to
defend himself—he deserved every bit of this.
“Stop!” Bianca and Christine both yelled at Jagger.
Travis had snapped out of it and was now trying to defend himself because his head hurt and his vision was blurry. “Dude,” he was telling Jagger. “Calm down, let’s go talk about this.”
“Talk? You fucking want me to talk to you? That’s my sister!” The words seemed to enrage him even further.
Christine watched as Jagger beat the ever-loving shit out of Travis. She had given up trying to make him stop. Every time he heard her voice, he seemed to hit harder, and she didn’t want that for Travis. This was all because of her, but she didn’t know how to put an end to it.
Looking over at the man they called Rooster, she touched his arm. “Please, make him stop.”
It was the way she looked at him, the way she made the appeal, that forced him to take a step forward and wrap his arms around Jagger’s waist, pulling the two of them apart. “I think he’s had enough.”
Rooster was worried that Jagger wasn’t done, so he stood behind him for a few more minutes, waiting for the other man to get his breath.
“He’s had enough,” Liam told Jagger. He had come running at the sound of screams, and he hadn’t been sure what he would see once he got there. It surprised him. He had figured they would have told Jagger by now. “He’s bleeding, you got his head good.”
They helped Travis to sit up, but he slumped to the side when the room spun. “Fuck, man, he did get you good,” Layne said as he lifted the hair on the back of Travis’ head to get a good look at where the blood was coming from.
Christine ran up to her brother, pulling him around by the arm. “You could have killed him!”
They two of them came face to face for the first time in years, and the entire room was quiet. The tension was thick as the two of them looked at each other. Finally Jagger spoke, his voice harder than she had ever heard. He seemed like an entirely different person when the words left his mouth. “He’s fuckin’ lucky I didn’t. I hoped you had gotten out, but in reality, I thought you were dead. Now I found out he’s known where you’ve been, and he still won’t tell me? For how long?” That was the one thing he needed to know. How long had this been going on?
“You left!” The minute the words were out of her mouth, she clamped her hand over her mouth, like she shouldn’t have spoken the truth.
“No.” Jagger shook his head, his eyes flashing. “Do not cover your mouth from speaking the truth. I might be a bastard, but I am nothing like him.”
Only they knew who Jagger spoke of—their father. If they said anything that showed him in an unsavory light, even if it was the truth, they both knew they would be paying for it for days. Both of them had learned to keep their mouths shut, to bury their true feelings down deep, so that no one would know what they really were.
“Then can I speak freely?” she asked, her voice soft against the harshness of Travis’ breath. Tyler and Layne were attending to him as she and Jagger were having their face-off.
“Please do.” He never wanted her to be scared of him the way she had their father—the same way he had been, and the feeling that he had just done more damage than good weighed heavily on him.
“Let’s go out here.” She pointed to the sliding glass door that led to the back porch.
“Don’t go out there with him by yourself,” Travis told her from where he sat, but his words were slurred, and she worried that Jagger had hurt him badly.
She glanced behind her at Jagger and held up one finger before walking over to Travis. “I need to do this,” she whispered when she had crouched down to his level.
“I don’t feel comfortable with it,” he argued, sounding more like himself.
She shook her head before she placed her hand on his shoulder. “All you’ve done since I met you is protect me and take care of me. This is something I want to do on my own, something I have to do on my own. This is between us and no one else.”
He had to respect that. She was right; he had done as much as he could for her, now it was time for her to stand on her own. He would be just like her dad, just like Clinton, if he didn’t let her do that. It was a small step, but a huge leap in what he was beginning to see was a recovery of sorts. “Alright.”
His reward for agreeing to let her be her own person was a soft kiss on the cheek. She stood up and let Jagger escort her out the back door. Once they got there, neither one knew what to say. The silence between them had never been so strained, had never been so awkward, even when they were kids. They’d always had a million and one things to talk about. Those things weren’t there anymore, and that made her heart hurt. For the first time, Christine realized she was going to have possibly live with the fact that she would no longer have a relationship with her brother.
Chapter Seventeen
Jagger finally broke the silence. His voice was low, the tone tortured. “Tell me. Just tell me everything that you went through. I need to hear it, and I don’t want you to hold anything back. We need to get it out in the open if we’re going to move past it.”
Christine couldn’t look at him when she spoke, so she turned, facing the backyard, focusing on the fence that surrounded the property. “The day you left, I knew that my life was over. I could tell in the way Dad looked at me, the things he said to me. He would get onto me if I ate what he deemed too much, if I didn’t exercise the way he thought I should. I had a feeling he was grooming me for something, but I didn’t know what. I waited, and waited, and the closer I got to eighteen the more nervous I got.”
Jagger let out a deep breath and his stomach clenched. He wasn’t going to like what she had to say, and he knew it, but he’d told her not to sugarcoat anything. If she had lived through it, he sure as hell could listen to it. He took a seat at the table and put his head in his hands.
“A week before my birthday, he told me to get ready. The day of my birthday, he told me to go upstairs and pack my stuff, that I was about to fulfill my duty as a woman.”
“Were you scared?” He had to know, how had she felt?
It seemed like forever until she spoke again. “For a long time, I dreamed that you would come find me, because you knew how Dad was, you knew what kind of hell we were living in. At eighteen you could take me and I could say that I was fine with that. But it changed, the longer I was there, the more sure I was that you were never going to find me. I had to take the fear I did feel and turn it into something else. I used that feeling to get me out of the situation.”
That tore Jagger’s heart apart. He had gone back to their childhood home to try and find her. He’d been run off by the police, and he’d not been allowed back. A few months ago, he’d gone back at night and the place was abandoned. “I did look for you. I went back, and me and the old man had it out. I was escorted off by police and told never to come back. I had nothing to go on, and looking back, I probably should have asked Steele to find you for me. I had this idea, though, that maybe you had a better life, that maybe you were happy. I was afraid I would ruin it, and I didn’t want to be the cause of that, especially after how we were raised up.”
“It wasn’t.” She turned around to face him, the tears swimming in her eyes. “My life absolutely sucked. I am still married to a man that’s almost 50 years old. I want to be divorced, but that means that I would have to tell him where I am. He’s going to make my life a living hell for the rest of my life. He’s already started, trying to use you against me with this information with the club. He wants me to come out of hiding.”
“You’re not going to,” Jagger told her, his tone hard.
“I have to. He’s not going to stop. Don’t you understand that?” Her hands shook. “He’s not going to stop until he gets me back. He’s obsessed with me.”
“Tell me, please. We can’t protect you until you tell us.”
“I’ve told Travis some.”
That pissed him off. If she was confiding in anyone, it should be him. He knew that it was s
tupid for him to feel that way, he hadn’t been a part of her life in years, but it still hurt. He had always been the one to protect her, and he wanted to be that person now. “But you haven’t told me.”
She shook her head, her face breaking. “It’s embarrassing and shameful. I don’t want you to think less of me.” Tears streamed down her face. “Travis saw me at my absolute worst and helped me out. He didn’t know me before, he’s only known the broken me.”
“That’s not fair,” he told her. “You haven’t given me a chance to know the ‘broken’ you. But I can guarantee you; I’ve felt much of what you have. It’s been a long journey for me to be with B. It took a lot of understanding and even therapy. If there’s any place you could have come to be healed from being broken—it’s here. Nobody in that room has had an easy life. Nobody. Not many people know what’s happened to Steele, but we just found out that he and Rooster are cousins, so it’s pretty obvious that he also has his own demons. We help each other here.”
She was quiet for so long that he thought he’d lost her, that she wasn’t going to open up to him. Just when he was about to give up, she started to speak. “I was his slave. Not in the housework sense of the word. I did that too, but I did it to keep from being bored. His brand of enslavement was sexual. He asked sexual favors of me and expected me to perform whenever he wanted me to.”
“Did he hurt you?”
Christine knew that she had to be honest. “Sometimes. There were a few times that I fought him and he beat me up or hurt me badly.”
“When did it start?”
“Our wedding night,” she smiled sadly. “There were other women too, but they disappeared the longer I was there.”
“Do you know what happened to them?”
“Not really.” She shrugged. “I know that I was his favorite, and I’m kind of afraid that he killed them,” she let that fact slip through quietly. It felt freeing to tell someone else.
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