Chapter 17
Vienna
Now
By the time the compound had settled into something resembling silence, the earlier laughter in the bar felt like it had belonged to a different lifetime.
The tables had been wiped down, the stools pushed back beneath the counter, and the low golden glow from the lamps cast long shadows across the room, softening the edges of everything but not quite touching the heaviness hanging in the air.
Dante sat at one end of the couch with his elbows resting on his knees, a bottle of beer hanging loose between his hands, whilst Rachel curled into the opposite corner with Trex asleep against her chest, his little body tucked into the curve of her as though he had simply found the nearest warm place and burrowed in without question.
There was something about the sight that tugged at memories long since buried, and I found myself looking away before I’d fully understood why.
I dropped into the armchair opposite them, stretching my legs out in front of me, the remains of my hangover still lingering behind my eyes, though the edge had long since been dulled by the conversation in the office and everything that had followed.
Trex stirred slightly in Rachel’s arms, making a small sleepy sound before settling again, his fist clutching the front of her top in a way that suggested this had become familiar to him far too quickly.
Rachel lowered her gaze to him instinctively, brushing the hair back from his forehead with a tenderness that made the whole scene ache.
She looked exhausted, though she would never admit it, and there was a tension around her mouth that hadn’t eased all evening.
Dante saw it too. Dante saw everything, even when he pretended not to, but for once he didn’t try to smooth the moment over with a joke or brush it aside as something to be handled later.
We had all already learnt that grief had no respect for timing. It came when it pleased, sat where it wanted, and made itself at home whether you invited it in or not.
“How is she?” I asked eventually, my voice sounding too loud in the quiet, even though I’d pitched it low.
Rachel’s fingers stilled briefly against Trex’s hair before she resumed the soft, repetitive movement. “Still asleep,” she said. “Or passed out. Depends how generous we’re feeling.”
“She seemed okay tonight.”
“She always seems okay. But buried beneath that tough exterior is a woman whose life has been shattered. She found her way into the garage stash this evening,” she sighed, glancing at Trex to make sure he was still sleeping, though he was too young to understand what this all meant.
“Shit,” I breathed, sitting back in the chair and running my hand through my beard. “Who left it there?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Rachel shrugged. “What matters is Jenna found it, and now she’s… well, she’s sleeping it off.”
Dante let out a slow breath through his nose, staring at the bottle in his hands. “Doc says she needs rest.”
“Doc says a lot of things,” Rachel replied, and there was no real bite in her voice, only tiredness. “What he means is she’s sedated enough not to scream the place down tonight.”
No one said anything to that. There wasn’t much to say.
Shark had been gone for a while now, but time hadn’t softened the edges of it for Jenna. If anything, it had made them worse. The first few days after his death had been all shock and raw horror, the kind of grief that arrived hot and loud and left devastation in its wake.
But this… this was colder. It was more dangerous because it lingered, infecting every aspect of your life.
It hollowed her out from the inside and left her moving through the days like a ghost in her own life.
Or not moving through them at all. Trex had become passed from arm to arm more times than was fair for a child his age, and nobody complained because there was no blame to place where grief was concerned, not really.
But that didn’t make the sight of him easier to stomach.
Rachel adjusted him carefully, tucking the little blanket higher over his back before looking up at us both, and when she spoke, her voice was softer than before, but somehow that made it hit harder.
“She’s not coping. And it’s time we all addressed that.
Or else we risk history repeating itself, and Jenna going the same way as Kitty. ”
“She’ll get through it with the support of her family,” Dante answered. “Jenna doesn’t want to speak to a doctor—”
“And neither did Kitty. Look where that got her,” Rachel sighed. “Jenna… She’s… Two of them died that night. But only one of them stopped breathing.”
The words settled over the room and stayed there, too heavy to push away. Dante looked up at her then, really looked, and I saw the grief in his face too, the old familiar guilt that men like us carried whether it belonged to us or not.
Shark had been one of ours.
And though Dante had painted the streets with the blood of the men responsible, though every Rider involved in that attack had met a violent end, none of it had brought Shark back, and none of it had dragged Jenna out of the hole she’d fallen into after he was gone.
Revenge had done what revenge always did—it satisfied the beast for a moment, and then left the silence behind for the living to choke on.
“She’ll come back,” Dante said eventually, though he sounded like a man speaking because silence had gone on too long rather than because he fully believed it.
Rachel’s smile was a sad, fleeting thing. “Maybe,” she said. “But he doesn’t get to stop needing her whilst she figures that out.”
My gaze dropped back to Trex then, to the way his cheek was pressed against Rachel’s chest, to the trust in it, the quiet certainty that whoever held him would keep him safe for the night. He looked too small. Too unaware. Too used to it already. And that was the part that got me.
It was the way he had accepted comfort where he could find it and made no fuss about where it came from.
There was no confusion in his sleeping face, no fear, no tension.
Just bone-deep exhaustion and trust. It was that trust that caught me off guard, because I knew it.
I knew exactly what it was to be too young to name the disaster unfolding around you, and to cling instead to the nearest source of warmth, softness, and stability.
I knew what it was to find more comfort in the arms of the president’s old lady than in your own home. I knew what it was to adapt before you even realised you were adapting.
Something cold and familiar slithered through me then, not pain exactly, but recognition, and all at once the room around me seemed to tilt slightly, the edges blurring with another memory laid over the top of it.
Rachel in the half-light with Trex in her arms became Kitty in my mind, all soft perfume and worn denim, crouching to my height with kind eyes and a patience my mother never seemed able to find for anything but her next high.
Dante, silent and grim and carrying more than he should, blurred with Crash, broad and immovable and somehow always there in the background of every bad memory I’d ever had, like some dark, steady pillar I could orient myself by.
Even Jenna, medicated into sleep down the hall, called to mind my own mother in a way that made my chest pull tight, because there was a sameness to the absence of them. A sameness to the way a woman could still be alive and yet feel irretrievably gone.
I swallowed hard and dragged a hand over my jaw, trying to shake off the image before it rooted itself too deeply, but it was no use. Once the past found a crack in the present, it had a habit of flooding straight through.
I could see my mum in fragments then, the blonde hair, the hollow cheeks, the distant eyes, the false brightness on the good days that was somehow worse than the bad ones because it fooled you into hoping.
I could see the women around her too, the ones who pitied me, the ones who avoided me, and the one who never did.
Kitty.
She had never made me feel like a burden, not once. She had simply opened her arms and let me crawl in when things at home were too loud or too empty or too unpredictable to bear.
She had fed me, soothed me, cleaned me up when I came in dirty, and made space for me beside her children as though I belonged there too.
Looking at Trex now, folded against Rachel, I could feel that old ache blooming low and slow in my chest—not just grief for my mother, but grief for the boy I had been, and for all the ways he had learnt too young not to ask for the things he needed.
Dante shifted in his seat, drawing me back to the room. “We’ll sort something with Jenna,” he said, though there was a roughness in his voice now that hadn’t been there before. “Whether she likes it or not, we’ll sort it.”
Rachel nodded, but she didn’t look reassured. “I know,” she said quietly. “I just… I don’t want him growing up thinking this is normal.”
My laugh came out before I could stop it, short and humourless, though there was no real amusement in it. “Bit late for that in this world, isn’t it?”
Both of them looked at me then, and I instantly regretted speaking. Not because I was wrong, but because I had heard the bitterness in my own voice and knew exactly where it had come from.
Rachel’s expression softened first. “That’s not what I mean.”
“I know,” I said, and I did. She meant she didn’t want Trex learning to accept absence as routine. Didn’t want him measuring love by how much pain came with it. Didn’t want him finding comfort in borrowed arms because his own mother had sunk too deep in grief to reach for him.
But that was exactly what I had done, wasn’t it?
Not with grief, perhaps, not entirely, but with loss all the same.
My mother had been slipping away from me long before she died.
By the time the overdose finally took her, there had already been a part of me prepared for it, which was its own kind of horror.
Maybe that was what I saw when I looked at Trex.
Not just a child in need of comfort, but a child standing at the beginning of a road I knew too well.
The silence that followed wasn’t uncomfortable, but it was full. Heavy with the kind of things none of us were particularly good at saying aloud.
Rachel kept stroking Trex’s hair. Dante twisted the bottle slowly between his hands. And once I started thinking about my mum, there was no stopping where my head went next.
Not to the chaos of her final days. Not to the overdose itself. No, my mind went to the funeral, because of course it did.
To black clothes that didn’t sit right on my skin and the smell of damp earth and lilies and stale cigarette smoke clinging to men who did not know how to mourn without looking angry.
To Kitty’s hand resting warm on the back of my neck, guiding me, steadying me.
To Crash standing like a monument in the distance.
And to the one person who had looked at me that day and seen not the clown, not the club stray, not the boy trying too hard to make everyone laugh, but something broken and bleeding quietly beneath the surface.
Gabriella.
I closed my eyes briefly, and in the darkness behind them I could already feel the memory turning toward me, slow and inevitable. It came not as the woman in the window, not as Nico’s old lady, not as the girl who had broken me by letting me go, but as something softer and far more dangerous.
The girl who had stayed. The girl who had seen me at my lowest and reached for me anyway.
When I opened my eyes again, Rachel was still there with Trex tucked close, Dante was still staring into the neck of his bottle like it might offer answers, and the room around me remained exactly as it had been.
But I was no longer fully in it. Some part of me had already slipped backwards, pulled under by the quiet, by the grief, by the familiarity of it all.
And as the weight of the present loosened just enough to let the past in, I knew with sudden, aching certainty that I wasn’t thinking about funerals at all.
I was thinking about her.