More than okay. Elated, really.
Everyone except one.
I zeroed in on Ripper, whose sun-kissed skin had gone an interesting shade of green.
Our gazes locked.
And for a moment . . . I thought I saw the man I loved.
Ripper stared at Danny. Stared at ZZ kneeling on the grass in front of her, asking her to marry him.
He was going to flip his shit.
These assholes all around him didn’t realize it, but they were about to get sprayed with blood, bone, and brain when his head decided to explode, which was in about five motherfucking seconds.
Five . . .
Four . . .
Three . . .
Two . . .
One . . .
Fuck him.
Married.
ZZ was asking Danny to marry him.
Ah, fuck. What was happening to him? Everything inside of him suddenly felt all fucked-up and wrong. His heart started beating faster and his skin began to tingle irritably. The air around him grew thick, stuffy, making it hard to breathe. He felt light-headed, his nose stung, and his stomach clenched painfully.
Before he began shredding his own body to pieces, just to make all these damn uncomfortable and unwanted feelings go away, he grabbed Anabeth and yanked her up against him. She responded immediately and curled seductively around his body.
Feeling like ten times an asshole, he kept his gaze on Danny as he groped Anabeth’s ass.
Danny’s beautiful blue eyes filled with pain and her gaze dropped back to ZZ.
He stopped breathing. She was going to say yes.
Say something, his brain screamed. STOP HER!
FUCKING STOP HER!
But he didn’t.
He never did.
Because he was a useless pussy, who would never fucking deserve her.
So he just stood there like an asshole, manhandling her friend, and watching in horrified fascination as her lips parted and—
FUCK THIS SHIT.
Fuck the club and the code, and fuck brotherhood.
He would give it all up for her. For his woman. Because she sure as shit was his, and he’d go to hell and back ten times over before he lost her forever.
He shoved Anabeth aside, his right foot moved, and . . .
“DANNY!” he bellowed. “BABY!”
Chapter 2
Three years earlier
Prom night. The culmination of thirteen years of school was ending with prom night.
All my preparing and primping, driving four towns over with Kami just to find the perfect pink dress and matching shoes, two hours at the salon getting my hair, nails, and makeup done and . . .
It all seemed so . . . anticlimactic.
But maybe that’s because I was on the outside looking in.
Because I could no longer relate to the laughing, dancing, happy people inside the gymnasium.
Whereas everything inside this building, my high school, had once seemed so important, my grades, my friends, homecoming, dance committees, cheerleading, and prom . . . had once been my entire world, they weren’t anymore. Hadn’t been since . . .
“He made me watch him rape her!” my father roared. “Do you fuckin’ get that? I was chained to a fuckin’ radiator, watchin’ my woman gettin’ slammed by a fuckin’ psychopath, and I couldn’t do shit about it!”
I squeezed my eyes shut, gritting my teeth through the ugly memory.
“How’d they take him down?” Tap asked.
“They didn’t,” the FBI agent said. “The woman did. Nearly severed his head clean off with a dagger. She came walking out of the room holding it, half naked and covered in blood.”
“She’s okay, Prez,” Mick said. “She’s alive.”
“She’s alive,” my father replied. “But I can tell you right fuckin’ now, she sure as shit ain’t okay.”
My father had been right; his woman wasn’t okay. Eva had seemed okay at first, she was quieter, she cried a lot, then they’d left for New York to bury Frankie. After that, she stopped talking altogether, stopped eating, showering. She spent most of her time in bed, catatonic, staring at nothing. My father wasn’t any better. Most days, he would sit on the floor next to the bed, his head in his hands, not talking, not doing much of anything aside from occasionally pacing the room, during which he did a lot of redecorating the walls with his fists.
Cage and I tried to keep the house running on our own, for Ivy’s sake. Not yet two years old, she didn’t understand what was happening, why Mommy wouldn’t get out of bed, why Daddy wasn’t playing with her.
And it only got worse.
Cage couldn’t do everything all of the time. My brother had jobs to do, runs to make, and there were times when he had to be at the club, if only to make sure things were running smoothly in our father’s absence. I was forced to drop out of all my extracurricular activities; my gymnastics instructor, after weeks of missing practice, took me off the roster. By spring, I’d missed so much school that my grades were suffering, which led to me getting kicked off the cheerleading team. I was lucky to be graduating, and ended up resenting my innocent little sister because of it.