Chapter 3
Ami
“Oh no. Hell fucking no. A thousand times, no.”
I roll my eyes as I brush past my sister and her protesting husband, my duffel bag slung over my shoulder. “Nice to see you too, Wraith,” I mutter, as I push into their house.
“Wraith,” Leena mutters, putting her hand on his arm. “It’s alright. I told her she could sleep on the couch for a few nights, just until she gets what she came for.”
“Which is?” Wraith demands as he follows behind me like an annoying lost puppy.
The living room isn’t hard to spot, since their house is so small.
The couch looks uncomfortable, but at the moment, I’m not going to be choosy.
I know I should go back to Tampa and go to my lawyer’s office and get another set of papers instead of asking her to fax them down here to Helena, but I can’t help it.
Going back would be like running with my tail tucked between my legs and I have too much pride for that.
Maybe if he hadn’t pissed all over them. Pissed all over me in the process. He might as well have laughed in my face and told me to go fuck myself.
Challenge fucking accepted.
Because, for once in my life, I’m going to fight this. I’m going to stand up for myself. This battle for freedom wasn’t a year long. It’s been a decade, and I want my life back. I want my soul back.
“She needs Gage to sign the divorce papers,” Leena fills her husband in. “It should only take a couple of days, right?”
The hope in her eyes kills me. Clearly, Leena doesn’t like the idea of having me there any better than her husband does, but since I’m family, her half-sister, she’s not going to turn me away. She always had a soft heart.
Wraith wraps his arm around his wife’s waist and hauls her into his side like she needs protecting from me.
It’s just more of that sappy love shit that I’m so entirely over.
I didn’t realize that coming back to Helena would be like butting in on everyone’s fucking honeymoons.
What is wrong with The Riders and their women that they can’t just act normal and hate each other like everyone else I know?
“Maybe you could talk to him?” Leena suggests as she leans into Wraith’s side. She looks up at him, imploring him with her big hazel eyes.
Yuk. Gag me.
“Hell no.” Wraith shakes his head emphatically. “Gage isn’t gonna listen to reason. There’s enough bad blood between them to fill up a bathtub.”
“Thanks for the disgusting mental picture,” I say dryly before I hoist my duffel off my shoulder and set it on the couch. “Do you guys have some extra sheets?”
Leena sets a restraining hand on Wraith’s chest when he growls. The guy reminds me of her own personal attack dog. It’s slightly endearing, though it kills me to admit it.
“I’ll get them.”
After she scurries from the room, Wraith looks at me like I’m some kind of virus come to invade his cutesy little house.
The damn thing is yellow with a red door.
The inside has been completely redone. It’s very cottagey looking with whitewashed walls and hardwood floors.
Too bad the leather couch doesn’t look nearly as homey as the rest of the place.
Neither does Wraith’s face.
“How long do you think you’ll be here?” He manages to sound civil, but I’m not fooled.
“I don’t know. It should only take me a couple days to get my lawyer to fax me another set of papers.”
Wraith stares at me blandly. “What happened to the last set?”
He’s tall but athletically built. Streamlined muscle with dark hair and eyes. His stature, even when he crosses his arms, makes me realize just how much bigger and more intimidating Gage really is.
“They were drowned in piss,” I spit, suddenly making a production of studying the floor so I don’t have to see the mocking gleam in Wraith’s eyes.
“Piss?”
Oh yeah. His voice is definitely dripping with humor. I shrug. “That’s right. Piss.”
“As in, Gage pissed on them?”
“As in Gage pissed on them.”
“He did what?” Leena scurries back into the room, a bundle of bedding in her arms. She eyes me funny, like there’s an impossibility to what I just said.
“He threw them onto the ground and pissed on them.”
Wraith snorts. “Can you blame the guy? You literally told the entire club that he beat you then you left. One year later you show up out of nowhere and ask for a divorce at Ethan’s christening? I’ll hand it to you, Ami, you have balls bigger than any of us.”
“Wraith,” Leena warns, even though there’s a smile plastered across her pretty face. “Isn’t it time for Abby’s walk?”
A few minutes of uncomfortable, oppressive silence ring through the house. Leena looks at Wraith. He stares back. She blinks. He blinks back.
“Yeah,” he finally says, and shuffles out of the room.
A few minutes later he returns, and a dog in a wheelchair—because it has to be a wheelchair given all the straps and the wheels and the way it’s fitted to the dog.
I’ve never seen anything like it, at least not in person—appears behind him.
Its eyes are filled with love, and if it could move its hind end, then that tail would be wagging like crazy.
My eyes flick to Leena’s face after Wraith and the dog go out.
She slowly sets the sheets down on the couch before she sinks down to join them.
She doesn’t invite me to sit. She doesn’t say anything reassuring or sisterly and I get it.
Wraith was right. I’ve been gone for a year.
I only bothered to contact Leena and Steph a few times, mostly when I wanted something.
Like Gage’s full name, so I could get my lawyer to do up the papers.
Sister of the year, right over here. I’ll put the trophy right next to my auntie of the year award from earlier.
“I didn’t know your dog was paralyzed,” I force out, but it sounds wrong. Strangled and strange. The words hover in the air, which is suddenly thick and oppressive between us. It’s almost easier to talk to Wraith, snarky sarcastic bastard that he is.
“Yeah.” Leena nods. She stares out the living room window which overlooks the street as if there was something to see, but there isn’t. The street is totally silent. “There’s a lot that you don’t know.”
I sink down beside her, the sheets between us like the barrier we seem to need. I don’t blame Leena for being pissed off at me. For a fuckton of reasons.
“What were you doing in Tampa, Ami? You never told us anything. I mean, not really. Other than texts here and there to let us know you were still alive.”
I find the courage to turn and look Leena in the face.
She doesn’t really look like Steph or me, but then again, we’re like polar opposites.
She’s somewhere in the middle. Average height.
Mahogany-hued hair that falls nearly to her waist. Big eyes, full lips, higher cheekbones—though not as sharp as Steph’s.
She’s not exactly curvy, but she somehow manages to look womanly enough in her tight-fitting jeans and her plain black tank top.
I expect to find anger in her eyes. Bitterness even.
Rage. Disgust. Distaste. Something. Not Leena, though.
She’s always been nice, like Steph. I’m not sure why, given that her mother dumped her off at our father’s house when she was twelve and she was raised primarily by him, a guy who didn’t give a shit about any of his daughters, simply because they weren’t sons.
Her eyes are soft and placid as she waits for my response. I haven’t been honest with anyone in a long time, and I figure that I owe her the truth.
“The Riders pay for my apartment.” I manage, somehow, not to wince when I say it.
“I work part time as a waitress and since I could afford it because my living costs were covered, I went to school. I took accounting, so that I can actually get a job. I’m actually just about finished.
I mean, I am. I’m waiting for my marks, but I know I passed.
Took a week off waitressing. I thought that now was as good a time as ever.
Now that I’m able to provide for myself with a better job. ”
“Really?” She actually does look surprised, and it makes me want to wince again.
“Yeah.”
“Accounting?”
“Yeah.”
“How did you manage that? It seems really boring and you were never…”
“That dedicated to anything?”
Leena flushes. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
I shrug, even though her words are pretty much a knife straight into the soft spot in my chest that I like to pretend doesn’t exist. If only she knew. Then again, she’ll never know. Just like the rest of my family. There’s a reason the term, personal hell, exists.
“It’s fine. I know what you mean. I was pretty wild in the past. It was one of the reasons our father decided to marry us off as a package.
I guess I dragged you and Steph down with me, since I was such a thorn in his side and he figured you guys would turn out the same, even though Steph was following a different path and you lived under his roof and weren’t allowed to have any fun at all. ”
“We survived. It was a good thing, in the end. Steph is ridiculously happy.”
“And you?”
That pretty flush is back, staining Leena’s cheeks a soft pink. Her eyes change, shining strangely, and that sickening love struck look that I noticed everyone else wearing at my nephew’s party is back.
Ugh.
“I’m happy,” she says softly, in that kind of voice that she probably usually reserves just for Wraith. “It hasn’t been easy, but what marriage is? We were strangers and we had a lot to learn about each other. It’s been good, though.”
“I can’t believe Steph is already a mom.”
“I can. She and Adam loved each other from the minute they saw each other. He’s a good man.
Very nice. He looks at her like she’s his entire world and she thinks the same of him.
It’s not really a surprise to me that they wanted a family right away.
She’s already talking about giving Ethan a sibling soon, so I’m sure she’ll tell us all in a few months that they’re expecting again. ”
“That’s crazy. I can’t believe it. I mean, it’s good for her, I just…”
“You haven’t been here.” It’s more of a statement than a judgment. “It would seem strange to you, since you weren’t here when she was pregnant. Dad’s been different too.”
I let out a hard gasp of disbelief that I wish I could have kept inside. “Dad? You’re calling him dad now?”
Leena’s face reddens, but this time, for a completely different reason.
“He’s been softer, ever since Leena and I…
well, Tracker…” She shakes her head hard, like she doesn’t want to talk about it, and I get it.
That bastard nearly ruined all of our lives with his vendetta against Steel Riders and my father.
“He told me that he didn’t try and pawn us off to solidify things with The Riders.
He wanted us to be happy. He didn’t want us to have to endure men like him.
He wanted us safe and looked after. Cherished.
He asked Steel to pick us good men. Men who needed us as badly as we needed them, even if none of us knew it at the time.
He was genuinely sorry about the things he did in the past.”
I tuck that away to save it for later. I’m not going to analyze my father’s apparent change of heart and that new information at the moment. It would take weeks, maybe months, to process that properly. Leena’s statement is so incongruous with the man I knew a year ago.
“You mean, having like a million kids, all with different women, then discarding them like trash?”
“Yeah.” There isn’t any point in denying the truth, and Leena admits it readily. “Anyway, he’s been softer. Kinder. Nicer. He actually cried when he held Ethan for the first time. He’s his first grandkid.”
“Jesus. I didn’t think the bastard was capable of crying.”
Leena looks at me like she knows I’m intentionally being crass, but she bites down hard on her bottom lip and doesn’t say anything.
I almost feel guilty for the silence that wraps around us after.
Finally, she clears her throat and looks at me strangely, like she’s apologizing silently for what she’s about to say before she even says it.
“Don’t blame Gage for his bad behavior. He hasn’t had any easy time of it this past year.
It’s hard on a person to be accused of doing something and to take such a brutal punishment for it.
Even though everyone knew it was Tracker who had actually laid his hands on you, not Gage, he’s still lived with the shame of it, I think.
Or at least, you never came back. You never tried to make amends with him.
I think that’s been hardest for him of all.
He thinks you blame him for something he didn’t do.
Or that you hate him. I don’t know. At any rate, Wraith says he’s been quiet.
He was never quiet before. He works really hard and goes to The Riders gatherings and stuff, but he never goes out to The Canteen anymore or anything else that really isn’t compulsory. ”
“Yet he was at Ethan’s party.”
“That’s different. Everyone likes to feel like they belong to something and The Riders love their families. It’s a brotherhood. He wants to be part of something bigger than himself, just like Wraith. Just like Adam. Just like Steel and Edge and the rest of the club.”
“He must hate me. I guess I get why he pissed on my papers. He wanted a show. He wanted me to get just how shitty I am. It must have been fun for him, but that’s over. I’m getting another set and I’m going to serve them to him and he’s going to sign them. End of story.”
Leena blinks hard. Her gaze strays away, back to the window, even though there isn’t anything out there. Her hands twist uselessly in her lap, plucking at her jeans before she realizes what she’s doing and jams them together.
“What if…” she still won’t look at me, and she can’t quite hide the tremor in her voice. “What if he won’t sign the papers?”
“He will.” I might not be certain about anything, but that at least, I know for a fact.
“Why wouldn’t he? What would be the point in staying married, when we haven’t even spent so much as one night together?
We were both forced into it. This would set us free and we could just go on with our lives like it never happened. ”
Leena finally rips her eyes back to me and I don’t like the shadows I see in their depths. “And what if he won’t because not doing it, now that he knows you want it, is the best kind of revenge?”
What if? I never considered that Gage wouldn’t want to sign the papers. Or that he’d hold out, just to be an asshole. I thought that after all this time, he’d be as eager to be rid of me, to erase the stain of our marriage out of his past, as I was to be rid of him. That he’d want to move on.
Leena’s words fuck me into a strained silence.
Revenge. The one thing that I didn’t factor in. Correction. Revenge and pride.
A deadly combination that I just hope I can wear down or outsmart. Gage might think he’s tough, but I can promise him, I’m a thousand times tougher in my own right.
This is one battle that he is not going to win.