Epilogue #4
I look at the kitchen. At the four chairs occupied and the two that are not.
At the height chart in glitter gold. At the patch in the shadow box on the living room wall that I can see through the doorway, my name stitched into leather that a club voted on in a Chapel one year ago.
At the grey wolf propped against the toaster with its one glass eye.
At Tyra on the step stool, spatula raised, defending the constitutional rights of a stuffed animal.
At Rafe in the doorway with spit-up on his flannel and coffee in his hand.
At Jude at the stove with steady hands. At Nick at the counter.
Silver at his temples. Jaw ticking because he lost the orange juice argument and he knows it and Tyra knows it and the wolf knows it.
At Sera on my chest. Feeding. Her fist in my collar. Her breathing even.
The last time I fed a baby, I was alone in a compound bathroom at three in the morning and the formula was cold because I could not heat it without waking Enrique and the walls were marble and the silence was the silence of a prison.
This kitchen has pine floors and a lopsided pancake on the griddle and four people arguing about orange juice and a baby with her fist in my shirt and a mountain outside the window that tried to kill us and failed.
Sera finishes. I lift her to my shoulder. Pat her back. She makes a small sound that is not a burp but is adjacent, the preparatory rumble of an infant who is working on it.
I stand. I carry her across the kitchen. I stop beside Tyra’s step stool.
“One orange juice,” I say. “For the wolf.”
Tyra nods. Professional. The grey wolf’s interests have been represented.
She turns back to the griddle. Surveys the pancake. Lifts her spatula. Then she stops.
She looks at me. At Sera on my shoulder.
At the three men in the kitchen. At the grey wolf on the toaster who has been with her since the compound.
Her dark eyes move across all of it with the slow, serious attention of a child who is deciding whether the world in front of her is real or whether it can be taken away in the night the way things used to be taken away.
She decides.
“Mama,” she says. The spatula is still in her hand. “We have a big family.”
Not a question. A declaration. The same way she declares pancake policy and wolf legislation and the fundamental rights of stuffed animals. She is five years old and she is stating a fact and the fact is that the kitchen is full and the people in it belong to her and she belongs to them.
Nick’s hand tightens on his mug. Rafe’s golden eyes close for one breath. The second time this morning. Jude turns away from the stove and does not turn back for a long time.
I look at my daughter. My first daughter.
The one I carried out of a compound with a USB drive in my bra and a grey wolf in her arms and nothing else.
The one who handed a knife-scarred man a stuffed animal and told him he was brave.
The one who made pancakes and declared Tuesdays and pointed a spatula at three armed men and called them her brothers and meant it.
She is safe. She is loud. She is standing on a step stool in a kitchen on a mountain in a house that four people built and she is telling me the only thing that matters.
“Yeah, baby,” I say. My voice does not shake. Costa women do not shake. But it is close. It is close. “We do.”
Tyra nods once. Satisfied. The matter is settled. She turns back to the griddle. The grey wolf watches from the toaster with its one glass eye.
Sera’s fist tightens on my collar. Her breathing slows.
She is falling asleep again, warm against my shoulder, her small weight the newest addition to a structure that started with a stolen USB drive and ends with a pine kitchen and a lopsided pancake and a five-year-old girl who is no longer counting the exits.
I press my lips to Sera’s head. I cross the kitchen toward the table. Toward the six chairs. Toward the morning and the mountain and the noise and the men and the wolf and the girl and the life I built with my bare hands from the ruins of the one I burned down.
I sit.
The kitchen moves around me. Rafe pours a second coffee. Nick checks his phone. Jude flips a pancake. Tyra narrates the wolf’s position on maple syrup viscosity. The mountain holds the house. The house holds the morning. The morning holds us.
I look at the three of them—my monsters, my protectors, my family. My pussy still aches with the beautiful weight of their collective claiming from this morning, their seed still a warm, heavy pulse inside me.
I’m no longer a Costa princess hiding in a gilded cage.
I’m a Broken Halo, claimed and bred by the three most dangerous men on the ridge.
And for the first time in my life, I am not running toward something or away from something.
I am already here.
The End
Dear precious reader, thank you so much for reading Guarded by the Bikers!
Lucia Costa was once a pawn in a deadly game, but she found her checkmate in the arms of three lethal protectors.
Feel the mountain air crackle with domestic heat as Nick, Rafe, and Jude celebrate their daughter’s first birthday—only for a mysterious gift from Chicago to remind them that while the war for the Costa empire still rages, Lucia is the only prize that ever truly mattered.
Dominic Costa is a ruthless monster who just watched his empire vanish in an instant, and now he's heading back to the city that bled him dry to take it all back.
Swipe to the next page for a sneak peek. ..