Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Brandy
Three weeks later...
I stared at the pregnancy test in my trembling hands, willing the lines to disappear, to fade, to reveal themselves as some cruel trick of the light.
But they didn’t. They stayed exactly where they were.
Two bright pink lines that might as well have been neon signs screaming that my life was officially fucked.
This couldn’t be happening.
I was on the pill. I took it every goddamn day at the same time, like clockwork. And I never, not once in five years, had sex without a condom. Never. It was the one rule I never broke. Protection wasn’t negotiable. Not for me. Not when being a club whore meant my body was community property.
Yet here I sat on the toilet in the Silver Shadows’ clubhouse bathroom, staring at undeniable proof that somewhere, somehow, something had failed.
My hands shook so badly the test rattled against my palm.
Pregnant.
I was pregnant.
The word felt foreign in my mind, like it belonged to someone else’s reality. Not mine. This wasn’t supposed to happen to me. I was careful. I was so fucking careful.
My stomach lurched, and for a moment I thought I might throw up, but I swallowed hard and forced the nausea down.
I had been doing that a lot lately, swallowing down the queasiness that hit me at random times throughout the day.
I chalked it up to stress, to the chaos of the past few months, to the lingering anxiety of being evacuated in the middle of the night while the Death Dogs closed in.
But it wasn’t stress.
It was this.
I pressed my free hand against my still-flat stomach, trying to wrap my mind around the fact that there was something growing inside me. A baby. A fucking baby.
Whose baby? The question slammed into me like a freight train, and my breath caught in my throat.
Oh God.
My mind raced backward, frantically cataloging the weeks before I had been evacuated from Diamond Creek.
There had been Torment, of course. That last night together, desperate and raw and so intense, it still made my chest ache when I thought about it.
But after that? The weeks after? After the attack?
I squeezed my eyes shut as the faint sting of tears burned behind my eyelids.
The fluorescent glare from the bathroom light felt harsh, spotlighting every flaw, every mistake.
I tried to dredge up memories, to sort through the tangled mess of days and nights that had spun out of control.
A timeline that felt impossible, like someone else’s story.
My hands trembled as I pressed them against the cool countertop, desperate for something solid as my mind drifted through fragments of faces, touches, voices.
After that last night with Torment, his heat, the way I clung to him as if he could shield me from everything, left me hollow, drifting.
The weeks that followed blurred together.
I remembered a brother from the Little Rock Chapter.
His accent was rough as gravel, his touch impatient, almost desperate.
Then there was one of the Bastards, whose name I never learned, whose presence barely registered except for the bruises he left.
A quick, forgettable encounter to fill the silence.
Next was a Gods of Mayhem brother whose cologne lingered on my sheets, but even his comfort was fleeting.
Each encounter bled into the next, and I kept moving, kept doing what I always did—offering myself as a distraction, as relief from the chaos that swallowed the club whole after the attack.
That was my place. Sometimes I wondered what my role was at all because lately, I felt like I was slipping, losing the sense of who I was beneath the weight of everyone else’s needs and expectations.
When I pressed my hand to my stomach, I could barely recognize myself.
It was like I was standing outside my own life, watching someone else make choices I couldn’t take back.
As the truth settled in, heavy and cold, I couldn’t say, not with any certainty, who fathered the child inside me.
The uncertainty gnawed at my insides. It filled me with shame, with terror, with a kind of grief that was hard to name.
What would this mean for me? For the club that gave me shelter, even if it never offered belonging?
For a child born into this confusion, whose future hung on questions I couldn’t answer?
I felt exposed, raw, as if everything I thought I knew about myself had been stripped away, replaced by fear and the bitter taste of regret.
The realization hit me like a punch to the gut, and I doubled over, the pregnancy test slipping from my fingers and clattering onto the tile floor. I buried my face in my hands, my breath coming in short, sharp gasps that bordered on hyperventilation.
King was going to kill me.
Not literally, maybe, but close enough. He made a place for me here in the club, protection, a roof over my head. And this was how I repaid him? By getting knocked up and not even being able to name the father?
And Grace. Jesus Christ, Grace.
King’s old lady had never been warm to me, not really.
I was a club whore, which meant I existed in a different tier of the hierarchy.
I served a purpose, but I wasn’t one of them.
One of the old ladies. I never would be.
Grace barely tolerated me because the club brothers needed me, but there was no love lost between us.
What would she say when she found out? What would she think?
I could already hear her questions, see the judgment in her eyes.
Who’s the father, Brandy?
Are you sure?
How could you be so careless?
What are you going to do?
I didn’t have answers. Not a single fucking one.
My chest tightened as panic clawed its way up my throat. I couldn’t breathe. The bathroom walls felt like they were closing in, the air too thick, too heavy. I needed to get out of here. I needed to run.
The door opened.
I didn’t hear it at first, too lost in the spiral of my own thoughts, too consumed by the terror flooding my system.
But then I felt it. A shift in the air, a presence.
I looked up as my vision blurred with unshed tears and saw Grace standing in the doorway.
For a moment, we just stared at each other.
Her gaze dropped to the pregnancy test on the floor, then back to my face, and I saw understanding dawn in her eyes.
She knew.
Of course she knew. Grace wasn’t stupid. She probably suspected something was off before I even pissed on the stick. I waited for her judgment, her condemnation, her cold dismissal I was sure would come.
But it didn’t.
Instead, Grace stepped into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. She moved slowly, deliberately, like she was approaching a wounded animal. And maybe that was what I was, a cornered, terrified animal ready to bolt.
She crossed the small space and kneeled in front of me, her knees hitting the tile with a soft thud. Then she reached out and placed her hands over mine, her touch warm and steady and so unexpectedly gentle that it shattered the last of my composure.
I looked up at her, really looked at her, and saw something in her expression I had never seen before.
Compassion... and that was all it took.
The dam broke as I burst into tears.
Great, heaving sobs tore from my chest, ugly and raw and completely beyond my control. I couldn’t stop them, couldn’t hold them back, couldn’t do anything but cry as almost two months of fear and loneliness and grief came pouring out of me all at once.
Grace didn’t say anything. She didn’t ask questions or demand explanations. She just stayed there, kneeling on the cold bathroom floor, her hands covering mine, anchoring me while I fell apart.
And for the first time since this stupid war started, since I had been torn away from Torment and everything I had known, I didn’t feel so completely alone.
Since King claimed Grace, I hadn’t set foot in the private quarters they shared. I was a club whore and knew my place. I had my own space. A small room, shared bathrooms, and communal areas where I existed on the periphery of club life.
Grace guided me up the backstairs after I finally stopped crying, her arm steady around my waist. Each step creaked beneath us in the dim hush, her body a warm shield against the chill that seeped through the old walls.
We avoided the main clubhouse, the sight of its ruined beams and patched walls a reminder of the recent attack, when bullets and blood left everything uncertain.
Now the main hall felt haunted by what we all had lost. The laughter and music were replaced by anxious whispers and a sense of something fragile, like me, that might shatter with a single wrong move.
Now perched on the edge of Grace and King’s shared bed, the faded comforter felt soft beneath my thighs as I clutched a glass of water that felt icy against my palm, condensation slicking my fingers.
It was heavy, grounding me, the only cool anchor in a room that felt stifling and cold at the same time.
Grace pulled a chair close enough that I could hear the gentle scrape of its legs on the wooden floor, but she left a careful space.
A pocket of air for me to breathe, not crowding, just present.
“How far along?” she asked quietly, her voice barely above a whisper, each word delicate as if afraid to break me.
I swallowed hard, my throat tight and scratchy. “I don’t know. Maybe eight weeks? Ten? I haven’t been to a doctor yet.” My voice trembled, lost in the quiet between us.
She nodded, lips pressed together in thought. “You need to. Soon.” The way she said it, gentle, not pressing, let me know it came from worry, not judgment.
“I know.” I stared at the water, watching the ripples from my unsteady grip.
“And the father?” Her voice softened even more, but the question landed sharp and cold in my chest. A knife I had been bracing for.