18. LODESTAR
“Katina, if you ask me one more time, I might scream.”
She snickered. “Are we there yet?”
When I let out a holler that turned into a wail a banshee would be proud of, she started pissing herself.
Not literally.
Thank fuck she was past that phase.
There’d been a few times, right at the start when I’d fostered her, that she’d been a bed-wetter, but I was proud we were past those days. Phew. They’d been kinda gross.
Okay, more than that, they’d been a lot gross.
I wasn’t sure what she’d expected though, way back then, but I thought someone might have hit her for pissing the bed. She’d been shaking when she’d woken me up to tell me, and that we’d gone from that to this?
Her laughing as I screamed in the car?
No lie, I thought I’d done a really fucking great job.
When she started slapping her knee, I stopped screaming and grinned at her when she let out a final hoot.
When she asked, “But, really, Star, when are we gonna get there?” I rolled my eyes, and she saw that plain as day because she was staring at me in the rearview mirror.
“I told you it was a long drive.”
“Yeah, you did.” She grimaced, then something had her perking up. “Can we really go to New York?”
“Yeah, not right away.” As in, not this year, not with the fucking Irish Mob breathing down my neck, but she didn’t need to know that—both the time or the reason why. I’d only just figured that shit out too. aCooooig for a username? The Acuig Corporation. Five Points… I’d bitten off more than I could chew for once. “We need to set up a base here first,” I muttered, after I cleared my throat.
She squinted at me. “Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“Why do you say that?”
It was really hard not tugging at my shirt collar, because Christ, kids were better investigators than the cops.
They really got into the nitty gritty of shit, and when they scented blood, they never fucking let go.
I huffed out a sigh. “How can I be in trouble? I’m a virtual assistant.”
She snickered. “Yeah, you keep on telling yourself that.”
“Have you been snooping?”
“It’s not snooping if you leave the computer on, is it?”
“I never do that, so you must have been snooping.”
“Well, it was a bunch of letters and numbers and stuff.” And stuff.
Malboge.
Ha.
She could be a better bloodhound than the FBI, but she couldn’t read that level of coding.
Not yet, at any rate.
I peered at the odometer, the gas gauge, then the GPS, and told her, “We’ll be there soon.”
“Now you’re answering?”
“Yeah, because we’ll be there soon. Plus, we need to be there soon, because I can’t afford to keep you with snacks on this trip.”
She sniffed. “I haven’t eaten that much.”
“You’ve eaten me out of house and home.”
“You can afford a Porsche, so I figure you can afford a few quesadillas here and there.”
I grinned at her, loving that she never took any of my shit. “You’re going to like it where we’re going. They’re your kind of people.”
“They are? Who are my kind of people?” she inquired, frowning at me.
She was a pretty kid. All blonde hair, long arms, and short legs. I mean, she looked like an alien, kind of, but I figured when she grew into her limbs, she’d be cute.
As it stood, her face was doll-like, and I knew if I took her to Manhattan, some fucking model agency would pick her up and put her on their books.
She was that level of weird that designers liked on their catwalks.
I stared into her clear blue eyes and told her the truth. “They’re good people. But they might have a few scars here and there, might utter one too many swear words, but they’re friendly if you let them be.”
That was a bit of a reach. But hell, the bikers were good with kids. I knew because they were a family, even if that family usually had parties that would make a Roman orgy look tame from time to time.
I mean, it wasn’t like the kids were frickin’ invited to those fuckfests.
Jeez.
“They might not like me,” she mumbled.
“Of course they will. Just, ya know, don’t be too honest with them.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve already told you. You can’t tell people if they have a zit. I mean, they have to know. It’s their face, right?”
She sniffed. “If there’s a big fat zit on someone’s nose, I’m telling them. I think it’d be mean not to.”
“Is it kind to make them feel embarrassed?”
“No, I guess not, but I’m trying to save them from embarrassment in the long run.”
I sighed, because fuck, we’d had this conversation so many times. The kid wondered why she found it hard to make friends when she was so honest—it was painful to behold.
Like the other day, before the shit had hit the fan and we’d had to go AWOL, I’d worn a really nice pair of shorts and a great tee to take her out to the movie theater.
I went downstairs, headed for my bag, and she said the forbidden words: “Your butt looks big in those shorts.”
Even now, I cringed at the memory.
I was used to her, though, so I hadn’t been offended, and I’d told her, “My butt doesn’t look big, it looks thick. Yes, there’s a difference.”
Shaking my head at the memory, I grinned when the GPS told me we were almost there.
For someone who was relatively smart, and a veritable genius with computers, I found it incredibly difficult to navigate. As in, I was terrible at it.
As in, I could get lost in a fucking supermarket.
So that the GPS was bleating at me to get off at this turn? I was a very happy bunny.
We’d taken three days to do the nine-hour journey because she kept getting car sick, and I was so tired of being on the move.
The trouble was, if she sat in the front seat, she didn’t get sick. If she sat in the back, she did.
The last thing I needed was for us to get stopped by the cops considering, she was, ya know, technically kidnapped.
I mean, she didn’t know that, but we weren’t supposed to cross state lines without approval from her social worker, and I’d done more than cross the damn line, I’d gone over to the East Coast.
I figured there’d be all kinds of alerts on me by now, so I’d been taking back roads.
Worth it.
We were there, nearly home free. I’d had to burn another identity, but I wasn’t about to let her go back into the system, not when it had fucked her around already.
When we made it down the road to the clubhouse, I saw the Prospect on the gate, and climbed out of the car when I pulled off to the side of the road.
“Stay here, this might take a while.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so?”
“Yeah, that never works.”
I turned around to look at her for real, instead of just in the rearview mirror, and muttered, “I need to speak with one of the guys.”
“I can’t believe we’re going to a biker’s clubhouse. This is so cool.”
Yeah.
Cool.
I pulled a face. “You didn’t tell anyone, did you?”
“What? That we crossed a gazillion state lines?” She was too smart for my good, and her smile told me that. “Yeah, I didn’t tell anyone. Not that I have anyone to tell,” she muttered.
“Well, we’re going to work on that for the future, aren’t we?”
She huffed. “I guess I can try.”
“You’d better try. These guys are nice, doll, but they’re not that nice where you can talk mean to them and tell them they look fat in their jeans.”
She grinned, but when I just stared her down, she ducked her head. “Okay, I won’t.”
“Good. Even if you think it’s going to hurt their self-esteem if someone else picks up on it before you, or teases them about it, you don’t say anything, okay?”
Not until I could get her into some martial art classes or something where she could stop anyone from bitch slapping her.
“Okay,” she muttered.
“What are you going to do now?” I questioned.
“Stay here and not get out of the car?”
“That’s right.”
Thinking I’d pinned her down, I walked off. When I strode over to the gate that was a boring, unpainted steel with straight up and down bars, I saw the Prospect wander over to the middle, his eyes on my legs, which were as thick as my butt.
He didn’t care that they were, from the looks of the grin he shot my way.
I grinned back, then greeted, “Hey!”
“Hey,” he rumbled, and I’d admit, he was a cutie pie, and I’d totally have boned him if I was his age.
But that ship had long since sailed. He looked to be about twenty-three, and while he’d be a nice sojourn, I didn’t intend to fuck up the sanctuary I was bringing Katina and me to by fucking some dude and making shit awkward.
I had a kid to think of now.
I was a momma. Sort of.
I mean, I didn’t tell her to drink milk and shit, but I did tell her to do her homework, so I figured that had to count.
Right?
“I’m looking for someone.”
His brow arched. “Me? I’ve been waiting all my life for you.”
I grinned. “Does that ever work?”
His wink told me that it didn’t. “Sometimes.”
“Wellll, in this case, no, not you. Maverick? He’s on the council. I need to speak with him. He agreed to let me stay here a while.”
His brows rose at that, and I knew I’d told him a lot of information that very few would know.
Maverick was a ghost too. Had been ever since he’d returned from overseas. Most people weren’t even sure if he’d survived the blast that had stuck him in a wheelchair, and truth be told, I was one of the people who’d worked hard to bury his identity, because I was a good friend like that.
He pulled out a cell phone and told me, even though he couched it as a question, “Just give me a second?”
“Of course.”
I watched as he wandered up the driveway, talking on his phone as I checked out his ass.
“He’s cute.”
“Thought I told you to stay in the car. How do you even know what cute is anyway?” She was eight, for God’s sake.
“I know what cute is because I have eyes.” She tutted. “And he went away, so I can come and talk to you.”
“The theory being that you’ll dash away the second he comes back?” I snorted—like that was going to happen. “You think I was born yesterday?”
She beamed up at me. “Yes, because you’re soooo beautiful.”
“And I look that young, huh?”
“You totally do.”
I curved an arm around her shoulders. “You’re precocious, you know that, right?”
She hummed. “I prefer the term ‘blunt.’”
“Precocious,” I repeated.
When the Prospect, who I recognized as such because he was wearing a cut with a Prospect patch on it—I was a smart bitch sometimes—turned back around and saw me with her, he froze. But when he came back to life again, he moved over to the gate and opened it up for me.
“Thanks!” I called out, even as I returned to the car with Kat at my side.
When she hopped in the front seat—I didn’t tell her off because there was no point now—I slowly crawled up the driveway, being careful because it was tight and my Porsche was wide, and there were little white pebbles that lined the strip of asphalt.
The sight amused me, even if it was actually practical. I’d noticed this shit about a lot of MCs. The women tended to pretty up the compound without the men really even noticing, so it meant that there was really girly shit going down, and the guys didn’t say jack because it just floated over their head.
I’d learned a lot from the Old Ladies I’d come across in my time.
It was better to do than to ask, because if you asked, you could be refused. Mostly, whatever you were asking your man for wouldn’t even register in their minds, so what was the point in chancing a refusal in the first place?
There was an MC down in Texas where the Prez’s Old Lady wasn’t in charge—God forbid that in a ‘man’s’ world—but she definitely held sway. There were all kinds of pretty shit in the compound. A kind of gazebo thing, a firepit, lots of flowers and stuff.
It wasn’t to my taste, but it certainly made the grim buildings the compounds usually consisted of look less like a prison camp, and boy, did some of them need Queer Eye to make these places presentable.
When we rolled past the pebbles that had been painted white—by someone who deserved a medal, because that must have been boring as hell—I parked up in front of the building.
It wasn’t as ugly as most, but it sure as fuck wasn’t pretty. Looked like something Stephen King would write about, and because King would find it suitable, I liked how gritty it was.
I was, however, glad we wouldn’t be staying inside it. Mav had said as much on the phone yesterday when we’d texted one another, but I had confirmation because the man himself was outside the front door, waiting on us.
When we climbed out of the car, he arched a brow at the sight of the kid with me. I knew when I’d told him I was bringing a guest, the last thing he expected was for that guest to be a child.
My lips twitched as his jaw dropped before he started glaring at Kat like he fucking hated her or something.
For a second, I wasn’t sure what the hell was going on with him. Mav knew how to hide his expression, for fuck’s sake. And as far as I knew, he’d never had any problems with kids before.
Of course, that was before he’d almost had his dick blown off?—
“How can a kid be wanted?”
I tipped my chin up, guilt hitting me because I was bringing a lot of shit to their door if the cops came looking for her. “I took her out of a bad situation.”
His mouth narrowed, before, softly, he asked her, “Is your name Katina?”
It was my turn for me to gape. “How the fuck did you know that?” I scowled at him just as hard, just as mean, before I demanded, “Kat, get back in the car.” When, of course, the little shit didn’t obey, I moved so I was between her and my ex brother-in-arms, and snarled, “Have you been spying on me, you fucker?”
“No,” he stated grimly, “I’ve been looking for her too. So I know she’s in the foster system in fucking Ohio. What the hell have you done, Lodestar?”
I lurched back, prompting Kat to stumble and huff as she fought her way around me. “You’ve been looking for Kat? Why?” As far as I knew, she hadn’t even been lost…not until I took her away from Ohio, I mean.
“Her sister asked me to find her,” he said, and Kat whispered brokenly, “Star?”
When she huddled into me, her body turning as tiny as her voice, I glared at him harder.
Kat was vulnerable, delicate. Sure, she was getting stronger, and her attitude was twice her body weight, but fuck, this was not the way to go about shit.
“This is just cruel,” I snapped at him. “I’ve been on the hunt for Alessa ever since Kat came into my life.”
He blinked. “How did she?”
“You said it yourself—she was in the foster system.” I tipped my chin up. “I decided it was time to become a mom.”
His eyes flared wide at that, but not with amusement or surprise, just outright horror. “Star, if anyone wasn’t made to be a mom, it’s you. Do you remember to feed her and shit?”
“I’m not a dog,” Kat said with a sniff, sounding more like her ballsy self.
He wriggled his shoulders. “Christ, this is not going down how I thought it would.” He reached up, pinched the bridge of his nose, and muttered, “Katina? I’m sorry. I should have introduced myself better, but you look so much like Ghost, I mean, your sister Alessa, that it’s crazy.”
“Ghost?” I echoed with a frown.
“Yeah, it’s her nickname.”
“Some fucking nickname. Bet Link picked it.”
Mav chuckled. “You’d be right.”
“Always was a charmer.” I sucked in my cheeks. “Anyway, care to share?”
He raised his hand and stunned me by waggling his fingers, revealing a wedding band. A goddamn wedding band. “Ghost’s my wife.”
I gaped at him again. “Shut the front door.”
His grin was a combination of wicked and sheepish. “It’s true.”
Christ, did Ghost know what the fuck she was getting herself into?
Mav was into…
Well.
Okay, I didn’t know, exactly, but there’d always been rumors about him in our unit.
Fuck.
And Ghost had to be fragile too. Could a woman who’d been bought and sold like a piece of meat at a market be anything but?
Still, I knew the years had changed Mav. He’d not only matured, thanks to the passing of time, but as a person, being injured, going through his PTSD, and dealing with his agoraphobia, it had altered him.
I hoped for Ghost’s sake that it was for the better.
“This is surreal,” I muttered gruffly. “I don’t like coincidences.”
“Maybe it’s destiny,” Kat murmured, staring at Mav with wide eyes. I tensed at the word, and tensed even more when she whispered, “That’s why we came here, Star. Everything had to happen the exact way it did, or we wouldn’t be here.”
“Why did you come here?” Mav inquired, head tilted to the side as he rolled toward us.
The sneaky fucker—those goddamn wheels of his were quieter than soft soles.
I eyed him as he moved toward us like he was on a chariot or something, and muttered, “Need to lay low for a while.”
“You’ve put Kat in danger?”
I stiffened, but what could I say? His tone made me want to punch him in the fucking face, but also, he wasn’t wrong.
I had put us both in danger.
For myself, I could deal with that. I was used to living in hot water. My feet were pretty much made of asbestos now or something. I was so used to it, they could feel the flicker of a flame but never be burned.
I was even more used to being on the run.
But with a kid? Shit was different. I mean, she definitely cramped my style, but it was worth it.
I loved the little shit.
Sure, she gave me crap, but fuck, with her, I wasn’t lonely.
And Mav could go suck his own cock.
I was a good mom.
Not a very responsible one, but I was good.
She’d stopped pissing the bed, hadn’t she? That wasn’t because I’d waved a magic wand.
“I’ve been on the hunt for Alessa,” I told him. “Might have ruffled a few feathers along the way.”
He dipped his chin. “Makes sense.” Mav cut Kat a soft look. “Sorry if I scared you before, Kat, I didn’t mean to. It just came as a massive surprise.”
She ducked her head, and shyly whispered, “I bet.”
“Would you like to meet your sister?”
That had her peering over at him. “I haven’t spoken to her in years.”
Years.
Fuck.
That was how long Ghost had been locked away.
It still messed with my mind.
Apparently, it messed with Mav’s too, because his eyes nearly bugged out at that. “Years?”
She shrugged. “Yes. Do you think she’ll like me? I’ve changed a lot.”
Squeezing her arm, I told her, “She’s going to fucking love you, kid. You’re awesome. Just don’t tell her she’s got a zit or anything, and you’re good.”
I ignored Mav’s confused look, enjoying Kat’s little nervous giggle. I was used to soothing her though, and fuck…
Would she not need me now that she had her sister?
Christ, this was not going down how I thought it would.
This was all that fucker aCooooig’s fault.
I’d gotten us into the shit with the Five fucking Points to find Kat’s sister, but as much as I hunted her down, I felt like I’d never find her.
It was worse than a needle in a haystack—it was a goddamn nightmare. Especially as every folder I seemed to open revealed more home truths that would take years to dig through.
So, for all that to have been in vain, but to be here and to have found her? As easy as this?
Christ, maybe Kat wasn’t wrong. Maybe it was fate.
“C-Can I wash up first?” Kat requested timidly, sounding the exact opposite of her usual self. “I don’t want her to see me all messy from the drive.”
“Why not? That’s how you usually roll, kid,” I teased her.
She shoved me in the side, making me laugh. “I do not look messy all the time.”
“No, just most of it.” I stuck my tongue in my cheek when she huffed, and as I cast a glance at Mav, I could see him analyzing us both.
It pissed me off. Enough that I glared at him, which only had him smirking at me.
“Sure, but you know she’s going to be so happy to see you whether you’re messy or not, right?”
Well, that was a good answer, so I didn’t need to stick a whoopee cushion on his wheelchair seat the next time he got out of the damn thing.
Coyly, Kat smiled at him, so I got us moving. Moving back to the trunk of the SUV, I grabbed our bags—my one, her four, kids and all the shit they carried, man—and dumped one with her for her to pull. The other I tossed at Maverick, which he caught and stacked on his lap. The other two I rolled along as well when he started to wheel over to the bunkhouses.
This place didn’t get better for keeping, but Christ if I wasn’t glad things had turned out the way they had.
Everything happens for a reason…or so they said. I just didn’t want to think about what the next step was, because losing Kat?
Wasn’t just going to suck, it was going to hurt.
Really fucking badly.