12. TIFFANY
“They hate me.”
I snorted. “It isn’t about you.”
Lily winced. “I mean, I know it isn’t.”
“Then what’s the problem?” I shrugged. “They don’t have to like us for us to help them.
“In fact, it’s better if they hate us. At least that’s them reacting. Them choosing to do something, rather than being passive.”
Lily frowned at me, but I got that. She wasn’t used to being disliked, and the women in the bunkhouse were definitely not fans of her.
She sniffed. “Why aren’t you upset?”
“Do you want me to be?” Then, before she could get snippy with me, I laughed. “Babe, you can afford a far better therapist than me, so if you need to be liked, go and discuss it with them.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Bitch.”
I grinned, finding this funny, even though it really wasn’t. “But you wuv me anyway.”
She wrinkled her nose as she sank back onto the sofa. “Sadly, that’s true.”
“Sadly, I wouldn’t sit on that sofa.”
That was pretty much where my story had begun with Sin.
Me, sitting there, feeling totally out of place, feeling like a frickin’ Martian amid Earthlings, while a dude I now knew was the VP got slurped down like a popsicle by a club slut.
Somehow, this was our world now.
She pulled a face and darted off the sofa like it had cooties.
Hell, it probably did.
I hid a grin, because she wouldn’t appreciate it, then suggested, “We need to take over a room or something.”
“Giulia claimed the kitchen.”
“That has to be clean, right?”
“I’d hope so.”
Making a gagging noise, I let her tug me down the hall.
I’d only been at the clubhouse for parties before now, and had never gone wandering around the place to figure out the lay of the land because, well, did I look stupid?
Only Christ knew what actually went down in this building, and I really didn’t want to find something out that would necessitate a hole in the head being my next go-to style.
I mean, I didn’t think they’d kill me, not now that I was carrying Sin’s kid, but back then? Who knew?
When we bypassed the bar with its whole sex den vibe—even though it looked pretty innocuous, like a biker version of Cheers, apart from all the extra DNA splashed everywhere—and headed into an industrial-looking kitchen, I almost sighed with relief when it was not only empty, but scented of lemons.
“Parallel universe,” I muttered under my breath.
Lily laughed. “Yeah. Pretty much.”
“Can you believe this is our world now?” I asked, verbalizing my thoughts as I stared around the place, looking down the hall to where other rooms were filled with rowdy bikers and women whose purpose was to fuck the men and do their laundry.
“I don’t know, I guess it’s weird, but I don’t associate Link with it somehow.”
“How can’t you? He’s on the council, isn’t he?”
Christ, I knew what these words meant now.
Sin never went into details about the club, but I knew the vocab. Knew he wore a cut, that the council watched over the MC as a whole, and the brothers could vote for stuff in church.
Lord above.
“Yeah, but he’s Link.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Another shrug was my answer, but when I frowned at her, she explained, “What he does here, what he does with me, two separate things entirely.”
“You know they do illegal stuff, don’t you?” I questioned warily,.
It wasn’t that I wanted to rupture the shiny, happy picture she had going on there, but hell, she needed a dose of reality if she hadn’t figured that out by now.
She rolled her eyes at my question, which actually filled me with relief. “Tiff, I managed to figure that out on my own. I’m a big girl now, you know?”
I grinned at her. “Smartass.”
She dropped a curtsey—and you just knew that shit was authentic, because she’d gone to Switzerland to finishing school and everything. “I try.”
“I’ll just bet you do.”
Her nose crinkled, and something about it had me tipping my head to the side.
When she started to move toward the fridge, I grabbed her hand and said, “Hey. You okay?”
She bit her lip, which was an instant giveaway that she wasn’t, then she stared down at the counter rather than at me as she traced her fingers over the veins in the marble.
“Me and Link haven’t, you know…”
I blinked, because no, I didn’t know. And from her bashfulness, I figured we had to be talking about the one thing that made no sense.
I knew what the bikers were like. I’d seen Link in action unfortunately.
Of course, that was before Lily was even a twinkle in the guy’s eye, so I wasn’t going to hold it against him forever, but still…
He was no angel. Certainly no virgin.
“You mean, you haven’t gone on a date?”
Because that, I could dig. It made sense.
Bikers didn’t do dates—Sin had told me that, but I’d been intent on keeping things awkward for him.
Hey, you had to keep a guy like him on his toes!
“No, nothing like that. I mean, we haven’t had sex yet.”
“You haven’t?” I squeaked.
My eyes even bugged out, because if she’d told me the Virgin Mary had visited her dreams last night, I’d have found that easier to believe than what she was telling me right now.
“No. We’ve done stuff, but not that.”
Well, that was good to know.
Usually, we talked about everything, but I hadn’t told her about Sin, and she hadn’t told me about Link, not until later on.
It figured that we could both be secretive where we chose, but still, this felt different.
This felt…
Like she was using me as a therapist and not just a friend.
Or a complex mixture of the two, maybe?
I dragged her over to the nearest stool, pushed her onto it, then propped myself up. “You sure you want to talk about this here? The walls have ears.”
She laughed. “Everyone’s asleep, and you know it.”
“True.” It was only ten AM, and that meant everyone was still sleeping off last night’s revelry in the bar.
I’d only happened to see that because Lily had been late in picking me up from here, and when I’d wandered in and seen a ménage going down on the pool table, I’d gotten a little waylaid watching.
Hell, it was better than tuning into a porn flick!
The memory didn’t really turn me on that much because I wasn’t into sharing. No way in fucking hell would I share Sin.
Maybe he’d be down for it, what with the way they all shared their bitches and shit, but I damn well wouldn’t.
With another guy, I might have been down to experiment, but with Sin, I knew I had to lock him down tight if I wanted something serious with him.
And I actually did.
I wanted this kid to be raised with his daddy in the house, not living two streets over because his momma had caught said daddy with a clubwhore.
The image wasn’t one I’d thought to ever picture in my head, but that was how it worked. Not just in this world either. Mine too.
Cheating happened everywhere. I mean, I knew my parents loved one another, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if Mom was banging the pool boy and Daddy was fucking his secretary.
Was I happy about it?
Nope.
The prospect upset me, but I knew that loyalty and faithfulness weren’t two things that went hand in hand. Not all the time, at any rate.
I mean, they should, but this was the real world.
They didn’t.
And I wanted them to with Sin. But what Lily was telling me kind of blew me away, because it was the opposite of what I was thinking.
Link, who was a horn dog, hadn’t had sex with his woman yet.
She was branded, for God’s sake.
In the eyes of the club, she was his Old Lady.
I mean, it didn’t take a marathon of Sons of Anarchy to figure out what that meant.
“What’s going on, Lily?” I asked warily, confused and taken aback all at the same time.
“I find it hard to talk about.”
“I’ll just bet you do,” I muttered. “Because how you haven’t hopped onto Link and ridden him like he was his Harley, I’ll never know.”
Her nose crinkled again. “Hey, he’s mine. Have lascivious thoughts about your own biker.”
I grinned at her, happy she was good with me teasing her. “Oh, trust me, I do. Alllll the time.”
She huffed. “I can’t believe you kept him from me.”
“You kept Link from me too.”
“Only because I didn’t think you’d approve.”
I arched a brow at her. “Exactly.”
“Oh. Yeah, you’re right. This world is different than ours, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” I replied earnestly, because although it was weird, it wasn’t technically bad. “Ours isn’t all that great. At least here, if you want to shoot someone, you can.”
“We’d prefer no blood on the floor.”
The squeaking of wheels should have given away Maverick’s presence, but if anything, he whispered into the room like he had wings.
The pair of us jolted, turning around to see who’d joined us, and when I saw it was Maverick, my tension lessened some.
I’d prefer to come face-to-face with a brother than a clubwhore.
Especially that bitch who I knew had a thing for Sin. It was the same slut I’d seen him fingerbang that first night, so I wasn’t predisposed to like her anyway.
Daisy, I thought her name was.
Or Dinky?
Who the fuck knew?
They all had stupid ass names, that was for damn sure.
“Even if we clean it up really well?” I joked, because Maverick was a brother I understood.
He was damaged, and he wasn’t ashamed about that.
One night, when we were in bed together, Sin had told me he’d served overseas. That had come as a surprise, because I’d never have pegged him as a veteran, but he’d said that some men came back all right, and others came back like Maverick.
At the time, I’d wanted to ask him what his definition of ‘all right’ was, but coming across Maverick, learning about him and his ways, it was easy to see how someone like Sin would be uneasy comparing himself, and his state of mental and physical health, to a man like Maverick, who was injured in more ways than were actually visible.
According to Sin, Maverick hadn’t left the clubhouse in years except for once—to marry one of the ‘women’ and to take her to the cops to rat out Donavan Lancaster.
That was it.
And that he’d done that? Hell, it told me quite clearly what he felt for the woman they called Ghost.
I’d met all the captives yesterday, but only briefly because one of them had been having a tantrum like she was two.
I wasn’t all that surprised.
No, I wasn’t totally trained as a therapist, but I’d seen a lot, heard a lot, read a lot.
Back in college, I even had a mentor who’d shared some of the dubious experiences he’d had when he was first starting out and had been assigned to a prison where he’d helped the prisoners come to terms with all kinds of stuff.
That Tatána was acting out, as well as the fact that she kept trying to off herself, she definitely wanted attention.
She’d get it too.
From me.
In spades.
But the truth was, I could only help them if they let me in, and thus far, no dice.
They’d barricaded us out today, in fact. I’d heard some arguments going down in the bunkhouse though, in a nasty, Baltic language that made it sound like they were verbally stabbing each other?—
“They’ll let you in now, by the way,” Maverick muttered, when he rolled over to the fridge.
“Huh?”
“I said they’ll let you in now. It took me and Ghost to calm Tatána down.
“She pushed her bed in front of the door and wouldn’t even let me in, but we managed to talk her into opening it up.”
“How did you do that?” Lily asked curiously.
“With a lot of persuasion,” he said drolly, then he picked up a bottle of juice, opened it, and drank straight from the container.
When he was done, he stuck the bottle on his lap and turned to us with a neat move that made it look like the wheelchair was on a motor, but it actually wasn’t.
There wasn’t even a squeak either.
It made me wonder how he’d learned to be so sneaky, and what he picked up on by being that way…
“I’ll come over with you, introduce you better. Giulia didn’t do that good of a job yesterday. She shouldn’t have said shit.”
“I don’t like lying to people,” I told him candidly.
“No?” He grinned. “Then you must get screamed at a lot.”
“You’d be surprised how little it happens.”
His lips twitched again. “Come on, let’s get this over with. The sooner they know it’s happening and come to terms with it, the better.”
I shot Lily a concerned look, because I knew she wanted to talk to me about her and Link not having had sex yet, but she turned away and started toward Maverick.
I guessed that was the end of that conversation, but we’d be talking about it later. That was for damn sure.
I mean…she’d just turned my entire belief system on its head, and I was glad about that.
So fucking glad, in fact, because hell, I didn’t want to think that if you didn’t put out one night, your boyfriend-slash-partner would go and find it with someone else.
And here?
They had so many other someone elses who’d all drop to their knees or spread their legs the instant these guys snapped their fucking fingers.
My brow puckered at the thought, though, because while most men didn’t have access to easy pussy like the bikers here did, wasn’t there always someone out there who’d fuck your man when you weren’t looking if they were out there trawling for sex?
My brain was whirling as I stepped out of the clubhouse and back into the yard.
Sin had wanted me to become a part of the club, a part of his family, he wanted me to be in his world, and I got the feeling that when he made it back home, whenever that would be, he’d make me his Old Lady.
I thought about the brand I’d seen on Lily’s wrist.
It was a big step getting someone’s name inked on your skin, but hell, wasn’t it a big step having someone’s kid too?
Just as permanent.
I was grateful when we made it to the bunkhouse and found the door open.
I really needed to stop thinking so much. I was all up in my head, and to be fair to Sin, I was probably getting things wrong.
It wasn’t his fault I came with preconceptions about men—not bikers, just men in particular.
Lily had, strangely enough, helped.
She’d not only fired up my curiosity, but she’d given me some hope too.
In silent thanks, I reached for her hand before we crossed the threshold and gave her fingers a squeeze.
She arched a brow at me in question, but squeezed back.
“Thank you for being you,” I told her softly.
Her eyes flared wide, but a softness came into them that made my heart turn into a puddle of goo.
“That’s a lovely thing to say,” she whispered.
“I mean it.” I curved my arm over her shoulders.
There was a reason Lily hadn’t had sex with Link yet. The guy was hot, and I’d seen him in action—he knew what to do with his dick.
I didn’t think the clubwhores were playing around with their orgasms either. They were loud and proud, and whenever Link had—well, ya know—they’d been more vocal than ever.
So, he was cute, had the skills, and fuck, he loved her.
He loved her so much, it was like looking at a Hallmark advertisement with a biker filter over it.
I mean, he wasn’t obvious about it.
It wasn’t like they were glued to the hip, but he was protective of her. Defended her. Made sure she was taken care of—Christ, his checklist before they’d gone on that long run yesterday had been crazy.
She’d had to promise to call him last night as she went around the house checking that all the windows were closed!
So whatever reason she had for not giving into him, for doing other stuff with him but not that? I knew it was bad.
And her dad and brother had held the women in front of me as hostages. Sex slaves.
Fuck.
Had they touched her too?
It seemed likely.
And she’d never told me. I’d never known.
What a shit friend I was.
Even as nausea made me feel sick to my stomach at the prospect, I came face-to-face with three women who looked at me with a variance of hatred and concern.
I knew they didn’t want to talk to me.
A lot of people didn’t want to talk to therapists.
They didn’t know I wasn’t a shrink for real. But I’d been one final away from graduating, and if I’d done them, I’d have been sailing into my masters.
Even if I was nowhere near fully trained, I was all they had.
We could get through this together. Learn together. Help them help themselves together.
“My name’s Tiffany,” I introduced myself, tilting my head to the side as I murmured, “I know you’re Amara, Ghost, and Tatána. I also know Ghost has to translate everything so this might take some time.”
Ghost had moved over to Maverick’s side, and the way she hovered close to his chair, not touching it, warmed my heart.
She saw him as a protector, that was clear, and I got the feeling it had been a long time since Mav had felt that way, had anyone see him that way, and I knew she’d be good for him.
The pair might even heal each other. Wouldn’t that be a miracle?
Unfortunately for me, Ghost had the kindest expression on her face, and even she looked dubious.
Tatána eyed me as though I was scum on her shoes, and Amara shot intermittent glares at me before she glowered down at her feet.
That was nothing compared to how they viewed Lily either.
But the truth was, after what she’d said? I kind of wanted Lily to stick around.
I wanted her here too.
Not necessarily to hear the details of what her family had put these women through, but for…
Hell.
Was she one of her brother’s victims too? Her father’s?
I needed to know as much as I didn’t want to know.
I’d always thought her dad was scary, and Luke had been that strong, silent type.
Until I hit eighteen and realized he was creepy too, I hadn’t figured out that he gave me vibes that were the opposite of what my Lelo vibrator gave me.
I plucked at my bottom lip as I pondered how to broach this particular topic, but before I could say a word, Lily cleared her throat.
“I know you hate me, I know you think I’m one of them. One of the Lancasters.”
She filled her voice with the loathing she felt for her family, and I reached over and pressed a hand to her arm, trying to imbue the touch with strength.
I wanted her to know I had her back.
Always.
No matter what.
“Well, I hated my family as much as you did.”
Though she’d been translating for the others, afterward, Ghost scowled at her. “You can say that now?—”
“No!” Lily barked, her tone sharper than I’d ever heard it. “You can think this is cajoling?—”
“Don’t think they even know what that means,” Mav said wryly.
Lily glared at him, but carried on, “You can think what you like about my reasons for telling you this, but I’m telling you, whatever hatred you have for him, them, I share. My father killed my mother.”
I froze. Whatever I’d expected her to say, it wasn’t that.
“What?” I whispered, and she shot me a tortured look.
“He did. He pushed her down the stairs.”
We’d all known her mom had a drinking problem…
“I know what you’re thinking. He pushed her down the stairs and just told everyone she was drunk. I saw him do it.”
In the background, the Ukrainian translation a hum that was like white noise, I saw Ghost and Amara start to fidget.
Even Tatána’s hate-filled scowl had lessened some.
There was confusion now, like she was trying to judge whether or not Lily was lying.
“Why did he kill her?”
Amara. Well, Amara through Ghost.
Lily shot her a look. “He wanted her money. She was the rich one, and he wanted to control every aspect of her fortune.”
Amara frowned after Ghost explained the situation to her. “You very rich?”
“Yes. My mom was incredibly rich. Old money. My dad wasn’t. He came into it. We only just discovered how.” She tipped her chin up. “For a very long time, he raped me.” Her jaw worked, and I stared at her, taken aback by the confession, and even as everything inside me screamed for her, I saw Maverick’s surprise, Ghost’s and the other women’s too.
“When you child?” Tatána asked quietly in broken English, before she whispered something to Amara in Ukrainian.
“Yes,” she admitted. “And Luke used to do things in front of me too. He killed a maid once.” She gulped, but her eyes were clear of tears, her face free of expression. “I know you want to hate me. I know you want to lump me in with them, but I’m not like them. I’m not saying I’m like you. I’m not saying that you weren’t treated a thousand times worse, and I’m not even comparing my life with yours, because what they did to you was so heinous that I wish Giulia could kill Luke a thousand times over.
“And I wish like hell that the Sinners could get to my father, that they could set a thousand hungry dogs onto him and I could watch him be torn to pieces. I don’t even tell you this so that you can feel sorry for me.
“I just don’t want you to think I’m like them. I’m not. Please, don’t think I am.”
With that, with those torturous words uttered in a broken voice, she turned on her heel and started to walk out.
For a second, I was frozen, totally bewildered by what she’d said, then I was kickstarted into gear when she softly closed the door behind her.
Two thoughts hit me. One, I needed to go to her.
The second?
“She’s as much of a survivor as you are, and if you can’t see that, if you don’t think she deserves more than to be labeled a Lancaster like her horrendous brother and father, then—” I blew out a breath, speechless, but before I could get angry at their lack of reaction, forgetting that they probably didn’t understand a damn word I’d said, I jumped into action.
Pushing open the door, I rushed outside and found her leaning against the bunkhouse wall, the sobs she hadn’t allowed herself to set free were now coming in waves.
Her cries, her misery, her heartache, tore at my walls until I didn’t have any.
Until I vowed that we’d never have any secrets between us ever again.
Before she could say anything, argue or back off, I moved over to her, tipped her upright so she was no longer folded over, and forced her to let me hug her.
She was so tense, so taut, that it felt like she was brittle. Enough to shatter.
And suddenly, it all fit.
Why Link was so protective of her.
Why they hadn’t had sex.
Why, when we’d been at the funeral and she’d been out in the open, the bikers had surrounded her like she was a precious treasure.
Not only was she that to Link, but she was as much of a victim as these women here—just as much of a survivor—and for people such as they? They needed to know they were protected.
Shielded.
I knew, point blank, that no one would ever touch Lily again.
No one.
Link would make sure of it.
And I was so thankful for that.
So fucking happy that the tears that poured from me were both a mixture of relief at that thought and an outpouring of misery too.
Misery for her.
“You should have told me,” I whispered in her ear, and she sobbed even harder, clinging to me, her face damp against my throat, her body heaving against mine.
Everything inside me felt raw, cut open, because I wanted to heal her, but I knew I wasn’t good enough to do that.
Which meant I wasn’t good enough to heal the women in the bunkhouse either…
What fucking use was I?
Christ.
I squeezed her tighter, needing her to know she was loved. That she was my sister, that we were in this together, and then, something insane happened.
People pressed around us.
Slim bodies, with too bony arms slipping around our waists, huddling into our sides.
Tears that belonged to neither of us dampened our clothes as the three women from the bunkhouse stepped into the light and embraced one of their own.
Because Lily was precisely that.
One of them.
And suddenly, I knew what a killing rage was, because if Donavan didn’t die a miserable death, my soul would never be at peace again.