27. Vani
CHAPTER 27
Vani
The coffee with Faith is just what I need.
She looks particularly pretty today with her natural hair held back with a patterned headband and her full lips shining with gloss. She’s a lot more open and at ease than she is when she’s with the others. It’s as if when she’s with Angelica and Jarena, she has a self-protection mechanism in place. A wall comes up, and you don’t quite get to see the real her.
She’s telling me about her mother, who is an interesting sounding lady. Her mom might have married a man deep in the crime world, but she was a doctor who, before she had Faith, was saving lives in various war zones.
“She gave all that up … to marry into our world?” I ask.
It’s a bit of a rude question, but it seems like a huge decision to me.
Faith shrugs. “She loves my dad, and unlike some of the marriages in the circles we all move in, where the wives are treated badly, he loves her. It makes me want more, too, you know? I don’t want to end up the way Jarena is. Being married off to someone with no say in it. I want love.”
I nod. “Of course you do. It’s a basic right.”
She laughs softly. “Not so much in our world. It’s a bit different for you. MCs aren’t as strict about these things as some of the families in the organized crime world are, I imagine.”
I roll my eyes, thinking of the club and the way they treat women. “Trust me, in some ways, they might be worse.”
“So … you and the Vipers.” She smiles at me, and my heart misses a beat.
Can I trust her? I’m so close to telling her something, not all of it, but something, because damn, I need someone to confide in, but behind her, striding toward us with purpose, is Angelica, and I clamp my mouth shut.
Crap, there goes our friendly conversation.
“Hey, there you are,” Angelica says.
I assume she’s talking to Faith, but I realize she’s staring straight at me. “Me?”
“Yes, you. I’ve been looking for you. I’ve got someone here who wants to speak with you. Can we grab a table in a corner of the bar—it’s almost empty at this time of day—and have a talk?”
“Who is it?” I ask.
“It’s a surprise,” she says. “A good one.” She steps from foot to foot like an overexcited kid on Christmas day. “Come on.”
I glance at Faith, and she shrugs to indicate she doesn’t mind. We’re almost finished our coffees, anyway.
“Go see what the surprise is,” she says.
Angelica turns her attention to Faith. “See you for study later?”
“Sure, see you later.” Faith dips her head back to her drink as I leave her sitting alone and follow Angelica out of the cafeteria, nerves eating me up.
When we reach the student bar, I see Angelica is right. It’s almost empty. Then again, it’s early on Sunday and most students will be hungover from the previous two nights’ partying.
“It’s always quiet at this time,” Angelica explains. “I sometimes come here alone just to sit and have a coffee in complete peace.”
“You do?” I can’t imagine Angelica seeking out a quiet spot that way.
“Yes, I don’t always want to be the center of attention.” She tugs at my sleeve. “Over here.” She pulls me into a dark recess, and I blink, trying to make out the features of the man sitting there.
As we grow close, he stands. He’s broad, tall, with sharp bone structure and a striking but cold face. He reminds me of the jagged planes of a mountain covered in snow, forbidding and remote. He stares at me, a range of emotions crossing his features.
Then he glances at Angelica. “Are you sure about this?”
She nods. “Yes. I know they don’t look alike, but this is Reagan’s sister.”
A chill creeps over my skin. Who the hell is this? What’s going on?
“Vani, meet Jarl Olsen,” Angelica says, and my stomach drops over a cliff.
What the hell? I glare at her, trying to convey how bad it is that she brought me here, and that she could be putting me in danger.
“Please, Vani, sit.” Jarl gestures for me to take the seat opposite him. “Don’t look so worried. I only want to talk.”
I do so warily. There’s hardly anyone here, and no one but Faith knows I came with Angelica. This man could literally kidnap me and whisk me away.
“What are you doing here?” I blurt. I glance between him and Angelica. “Do you two know each other?”
He shakes his head. “No.”
“I called him,” Angelica says. “I was worried about those Vipers getting their hooks into another girl, and thought he should know you were here. Also, I thought he should know just how bad the Vipers are.”
I frown, confused as hell, and address my question to Jarl. “But … you agreed to leave what happened to Reagan well alone, didn’t you?” I’m terrified of Jarl, but I have to speak my mind because this is weird. He narrows those icy eyes of his as I speak. “I mean, I was told you’d walked away, with all due respect. So, why are you here now?”
“I was given money to keep quiet,” he says. “I took that money, but I’ve regretted it ever since. Nothing can compensate for the loss of a child.”
He betrays no emotion at all. He might as well be talking about the loss of his car keys.
Angelica throws her two cents in. “I thought Mr. Olsen needed to know how many girls the Vipers have messed with. Reagan wasn’t the only one.”
They have? How many? My head swims. Maybe I’m being incredibly na?ve in thinking they feel anything for me other than desire and contempt.
“And now they’re starting with you,” she whispers.
Jarl Olsen leans in. “I’d love to get to know you, Vani. You’re the closest thing to a living relative I have.”
“We’re not related at all,” I point out.
“Not by blood, but you are my daughter’s half-sister. I might have even been your stepfather, if things had been different, and she’d come back to me.”
The words on the edge of my tongue are far too incendiary to say. I want to scream at him that things might have been different if he hadn’t been a bastard who had raped my mother and then stole her baby.
Instead, I stay seated, rooted to the spot. I never wanted Jarl Olsen to know I even exist, but it’s too late now. The thing that worries me most is my dad finding out. My dad didn’t know anything about Mom’s past, and, if he finds out the truth, he’s going to be furious.
I wonder how much Jarl knows about me. Does he know my mom married Jack ‘The Blood’ McGrath, the leader of the Jackal Riders MC? If so, would he be here talking to me? After all, they’re one of the most feared biker gangs in the entire United States. Did he keep track of what my mom was doing, or, once he’d taken her baby, had he just washed his hands of her?
I’m livid with Angelica and unsure how to get myself out of this conversation. I could ask him all about Reagan, but I don’t think he ever loved her, not really. It would also feel like a complete betrayal of my mother to speak to him.
He folds his hands on the table. “Angelica told me, when we talked about those bastard Vipers, that you’re intrigued about Reagan, and want to know more about her. I brought photos and thought I could show you. Tell you a little about her.”
This is way too tempting. I want to walk away. I hate this man, even though I’ve never met him, for what he did to my mother, but he has something I desperately want. Information about my sister.
“Why would you share that with me?” I ask suspiciously.
“I want something from you in return.”
“What?”
The tiniest smile touches the corners of his lips. “Why don’t you look at the pictures first, and then we can talk about it?”
My fingers itch with my need to see more photographs of my half-sister, but if I agree to this without knowing what he wants, I could be tying myself into something terrible. Jarl Olsen is an incredibly intimidating man, but I’ve been around intimidating men my whole life.
“No,” I manage to say. “Tell me what you want first.”
He purses his lips, and I think he’s going to tell me to get lost, but then he sits back.
“Very well. I’m looking for something—a family heirloom which your mother stole from me.”
I’m immediately defensive at him calling my mother a thief. “She didn’t steal from you! You were the one who stole something from her. Or perhaps I should say someone .”
“If by someone you mean Reagan, you should know that your mother was in no state to be a parent. Drinking, drugs, whoring around. She neglected Reagan. I saved my daughter’s life by no longer giving her access to that woman, but your mother was the person who left us first.”
My mouth drops. The woman he’s describing is not my mother. She wasn’t like that at all, was she? I barely even saw her pick up an alcoholic drink. But he’s planted that seed of doubt. What if she had been, and I simply never saw it? Maybe she’d changed over the years. Or perhaps, when she fell pregnant with me, she hadn’t wanted history to repeat itself and had cleaned up her act.
After all, she went from one man who was a criminal to the leader of an MC. Is that really the kind of man an upstanding citizen is attracted to? It wouldn’t be a stretch to think of her as being a party girl back in the day.
The only person I can really ask about this, and trust that he’ll tell me the truth, is my dad. Problem is, if I ask him if Mom had issues with addiction before she had me, he’ll want to know how I found out. The whole story will come out then, and my dad will want to punish Jarl Olsen for how he treated Mom.
I can’t imagine Jarl would take a threat from an MC lying down. Then I’d have started a war, and if I lose my father, too, I’ll have no one.
“You’re lying!”
He remains calm in the force of my anger. “I don’t know what she told you, Ivani, but I’m telling you the truth. Now I simply want to find the heirloom she took with her when she deserted us. I assumed she would have sold it for drink or drugs almost as soon as she’d left, but finding out that you’re here gives me a final opportunity to find it. It’s a gold cross on a chain, almost an inch in size. It was passed down from generation to generation in the Olsen family, and she took it from us when she had no right to.” He pushes his phone over to me so I can see a picture of the necklace. “I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to find out if you’d seen it.”
I recognize it instantly because it’s been around my dad’s neck for as long as I can remember. Fuck.
I wonder if he has any idea where it came from.
Why the hell would my mother give that necklace to my dad? Didn’t it have bad connotations? It doesn’t make any sense. Why give my dad something that belonged to the bastard who stole her child? If her story is true, she hated Jarl Olsen. Wouldn’t it have reminded her of him and what he did to her every time she looked at it?
Unless it was someone else she wanted to remember—the daughter who was no longer with her. Reagan .
Did she give the necklace to my dad to remind her of the baby daughter she’d abandoned?
Or was it a sort of trophy and it gave her a kick to see a powerful, untouchable man wearing it? A giant ‘fuck you’ to Jarl? I have so many questions and no way to get the answers.
My stomach knots at the thought that my mother could have been lying to me, even on her deathbed. It makes me feel hot and cold and prickly all at the same time. But there’s still no way I’m getting that necklace back from my dad for Jarl Olsen.
I pray Jarl doesn’t see the truth in my face.
“I’m sorry, but I haven’t seen it. If what you’re saying about my mom is true, then she most likely did sell it. Why would she want to keep something that reminded her of you all these years? She hated you.”
I take satisfaction from those final words, but he seems unaffected, his pale blue eyes like glaciers.
He presses his lips into a thin line. “I see. That’s most unfortunate. Normally, if someone takes something of mine, and I’m unable to retrieve it, I’ll take something else in return.”
“Well, she’s dead,” I say with bitterness. “You’re too late.”
“Yes, so it seems.” His gaze drifts away as though he’s lost in thought, perhaps thinking about their time together.
I can’t help myself; I’m curious. “Why didn’t you find Mom back then and take it back yourself? Why did you just let her go?”
“I had no idea where she was. I didn’t even know if she was alive or dead. I certainly didn’t know she’d gone on to marry into an MC, but I guess that shouldn’t surprise me.”
“My mom wasn’t a bad person,” I say. “This woman you’ve described—drinking and taking drugs—that wasn’t the mother I knew.”
“Well, I’m glad she cleaned up her act. It was a shame she never managed to do that for Reagan. The poor girl had to grow up without a mother.”
Guilt twists inside me. Maybe my upbringing hadn’t been perfect, but I’d had a mom and a dad, and I’d never gone wanting. I’d believed Reagan had been raised by a monster, but perhaps my mom had been the monster all along.
Then I remember this man took a payoff from the college to not press for any further investigation into his daughter’s death. Who does that? Not the kind of man who loves his daughter and wants to fight for justice.
But these aren’t normal men, are they? They don’t go to the cops when there’s a problem; they sort it themselves. It makes me wonder if that’s what Jarl is doing here now.
“I kept my part of the deal,” I say. “Now, can I see the photos of Reagan?”
He scrolls on his cell to find some pictures and hands the phone over to me. “You can keep scrolling from there. Most of them are of Reagan. She was a very photogenic child.”
The first picture is her at about four years old. Her blonde hair is all fine, wispy curls, and her blue eyes—so similar to her father’s—seem too big for her face. She’s smiling in the picture, but even at that age, it’s as though something is holding her back. I keep scrolling, watching my half-sister grow up before my eyes. She really was nothing like me. By ten years old, she’s so waiflike, she looks as though she’d blow away in a light breeze. Then I see her as a teenager, appearing even more withdrawn, no longer making eye contact with the camera. She reminds me of something ethereal, mysterious and not quite of this world.
What would she have made of me?
I find myself having to speak past a strangled lump in my throat. “She was beautiful. Thank you for sharing these with me.”
“Of course.” He accepts his cell back. “Is there anything else you want to know about her?”
Everything, I want to say. Tell me everything. “What kind of person was she? What did she like?”
“She was quiet, reserved. She liked to dance.”
I smile. “She did?”
Maybe we’d have had that in common, though I have a feeling she was probably more into ballet than my version of dancing, which was jumping around a room to rock music.
“Yes, though she struggled with people watching her. She got terrible stage fright. She’d pushed herself to do a performance here, but I guess it had all been too much.”
“Was that why she…” I can’t bring myself to say the words.
Jarl glances over at Angelica. “I guess none of us will ever know the full truth about that.”
He’s referring to the Vipers again.
We all know it, but none of us says it. That doesn’t stop their name hanging between us all like a cloud of cigarette smoke.