Chapter Fifteen #2
His lips twitch, but that’s the only reaction he gives to my perfectly reasonable behavior.
"Floor's yours, brother," Pope says.
"Marigold is my stalker."
Tomcat drops the bomb with zero preamble. The room tenses. Every eye in the room drops to me, a chaotic cocktail of surprise, betrayal, suspicion, and raw curiosity.
“Explain,” Pope barks. It’s a voice so deadly, so devoid of the "family" warmth from five minutes ago, that the hair on my arms stands straight up.
The distance is immediate. I can feel the brothers building a wall, brick by cold brick, shutting me out until I can prove I’m not a threat.
On the bright side, nobody's killed me yet.
Silver linings, and all that.
Just as I’m opening my mouth to try and explain my logic, there’s a sharp knock on the door. Blackjack pokes his head in, and at Pope’s command, he enters with a small, unassuming box.
“Package for Goldie,” he says, sliding the box across the polished wood of the chapel table until it stops right in front of me.
I clap my hands and bounce in my seat. As I’m about to reach for it, Tomcat’s hand snaps out like a viper, dragging the box away from me.
“Who gave this to her?” he demands, his voice a low growl aimed at Blackjack.
Blackjack shrugs, looking uneasy. “Courier dropped it at the front gate. Said it was urgent.”
“Oh,” I whisper.
The bounce in my seat dies a sudden, violent death. That isn’t good. Not good at all.
Tomcat lifts the box, tilting it one way and then the other, bringing it to his ear with a focused, lethal intensity. He places it back on the table and flicks open his knife. “Nothing to indicate a detonator. Writing is generic block lettering. No postage.”
“I’ll track the courier,” Cypher says, already hunched over his phone, fingers flying across the screen.
“Wait. It’s not from any of you?” I ask, my hands starting a slow, uncontrollable shake.
Someone snorts, as if the idea is preposterous, but I’m so busy staring at the present that I don’t know who made it. It’s a sound that says, why would any of us do that?
They wouldn’t. I look at Tomcat, searching for any sign of a surprise, but the suspicion etched into his face tells me everything.
Oh, no.
Tomcat slices through the tape with surgical precision and lifts the lid. Inside, nestled in a bed of white tissue paper that looks like a shroud, is a single marigold. The stem is bent, a cruel, intentional curve, but it’s not broken like the ones left on my porch.
He pulls out a torn scrap of paper. He reads it once, his jaw tightening so hard I think his teeth might crack, before he hands it to me.
You are only beautiful when you are broken.
I scoff, flicking the note into the center of the table as if it’s a piece of trash. “Liar. I’m beautiful always, thank you very much.”
“Someone want to explain?” Pope asks.
“It’s obvious. My stalker left me a gift.”
Pope folds his arms over his chest, leaning back in his chair with a heavy creak of leather. “Right. So, we’re just supposed to believe that you admit to stalking my brother, and sneaking through my club, at the same time you conveniently receive a gift from your own stalker?”
Ouch. The benefit of the doubt was a nice dream while it lasted. I can feel the brothers pulling back, their loyalty to Tomcat clashing with their instinct to protect the club from an unknown variable. Lock it down, Mari. Don't let them see the cracks.
“Why the fuck would she do that?” Tomcat growls, his protective instinct flaring like a localized storm.
Pope shrugs, his eyes cold. “Same reason she stalked you instead of being upfront. For attention.”
I press my fingers against my sternum and rub slowly.
I let my eyes move around the table to the others and what I find looking back at me is almost worse than I imagined.
Not warmth. Not the faces I know. Varying degrees of suspicion and distance, harder now than when Tomcat first dropped the news, and widening by the second.
Tomcat made me a promise, but there was one fatal flaw in his logic. You can’t control other people and how they act. I love him for thinking he could, but I know better.
"You fucking serious right now?" Tomcat barks.
I reach over, placing my hand on his arm. I feel the muscles bunch under my palm, a coiled spring ready to snap, before they slowly uncoil under my touch. “It’s okay,” I whisper.
“No, the fuck it’s not,” he growls.
I give him a small, empty smile. “You’re right. It’s not. But you brought me here to help them shore up the blind spots. So let’s do that, then we’ll deal with the rest.”
Losing people is a story I know by heart. The pain is there, pulsing under my skin like a dull itch, but I’ve survived a much more vicious version of this before. I’ll survive this one, too.
I turn to Cypher, my expression a blank mask of professional detachment.
“It’s easy to find the blind spots in your cameras if you watch them long enough.
I’ve been hiding in shadows for six years.
Finding yours was child's play. Do you have your laptop? I can show you from there or walk you through the perimeter. Doesn’t matter to me. ”
I lean back, twiddling my thumbs and letting a soft, rhythmic hum fill the tense silence.
"Is she actually…" Joker stares at me incredulously "…is that the Jeopardy theme?"
Tomcat is arguing with... someone. It doesn't matter. I’m staring at the wall, focusing on the grid in my head so I don't have to feel the weight of their judgment.
Cypher finally pulls a laptop from a bag.
Butcher pulls a screen down from the ceiling, and the security feeds fill the room in a grid of flickering gray and green.
I stand up, moving to the screen with mechanical precision.
For the next thirty minutes, I am the teacher and they are the students.
I point out every vulnerability. I show them the pockets of shadows I made into a home inside and outside their perimeter.
I show them how their impenetrable fortress has doors I’ve been walking through for weeks.
I turn to Pope, letting my gaze shift between him and Tomcat before I point to the most critical section of the feed. “You really need to do something about this area here,” I say, my voice steady. “Because the other night, I wasn't the only stalker Tomcat had.”
Boom.
I skip back to my seat, the If You’re Happy and You Know It melody dancing off my lips.
“Why the hell are you just now informing us?” Pope asks, his voice cracking like a whip.
I tilt my head, one corner of my mouth twitching up in a hollow imitation of a grin. “Would you believe me without proof?”
Please say yes. Please tell me I’m still one of you.
“Yes.”
If it weren’t for the slight, jagged hesitation before Pope said it, I might have actually believed him. I raise a brow, my expression a mask of mocking skepticism. “Really? Just trusted me without hesitation? No questions asked?”
Pope holds my gaze, but he doesn't say another word. His silence says everything.
That’s… just unfortunate.
”Don’t worry. I have proof. The picture is at home.
Tomcat can bring it to you.” My fingers drum an unsteady, frantic rhythm against the polished wood of the chapel table.
I scan the faces sitting around me. These are men I’ve joked with, fed, and considered my big brothers.
“You know, if I really were just seeking attention, there are much easier ways to get it. I thought you all were smarter than that. I thought you knew me.” I stand up, my hands hitting my hips.
My mask slips, replaced by cold, sharp-edged disappointment.
“If you’d have let me tell my truth before painting me in such an ugly light, you might have had a chance to show me your intelligence was bigger than your dick size.
” I heave a dramatic sigh and shake my head.
“Alas, you’re leaving a woman disappointed again. ”
A few of the men start to protest, their voices rising in a rumble of defensive anger, but I wag my finger at them like they’re misbehaving toddlers. “Bad boys. It’s rude to interrupt a lady when she’s speaking.”
Unable to sit still, I pace the perimeter of the room, the walls of the chapel feeling like they’re closing in.
I close my eyes for a second, finding that thin, silver line in my mind that separates my current consciousness from the vault of my memories.
It’ll be easier to get through this if I just pretend I’m telling a story.
Because that’s what it is, right? Just a story.
A story of a woman who survived hell.
Granted, that woman has some damage that can’t be seen. She’s probably a little… broken in the head. But she’s alive. She’s here.
And she’s just me. Goldie to some. Sunshine to others. Little shadow to Tomcat.
My voice sounds distant to my own ears, hollow and empty, like a recording played in an abandoned house.
If I can hear the vacancy in my words, I know they don't miss it. I see the shift in their eyes as the story unfolds. The suspicion starts to melt, replaced by a heavy, leaden regret. They’re finally seeing the monster I’ve been running from.
My shoulders fall as I reach the final, bloody chapter.
The room is so quiet I can hear the hum of the laptop fan.
Stopping behind Tomcat’s chair, I lean down to press a soft kiss to his cheek. He’s tense, a coiled spring of protective fury, but I can feel his heart breaking right along with mine.
“I love you for wanting to keep your promise, Tomcat,” I whisper, my voice barely a ghost of a sound. “But we both have to be realistic. You can’t control what someone else does. This club… it’s your family. They’ve just proven it’s not mine.”
I don't wait for Pope to apologize or for the brothers to beg me to stay. I turn on my heel and walk out of the chapel, my chin held high and my spine straight.
I keep that posture all the way through the clubhouse, even as it feels like my chest is caving in, the vacuum of losing my family all over again threatening to swallow me whole.