Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chasm
She was pissed at me, only I didn’t know why. If it was because of how I reacted to the fucking doctor during her appointment, fine, I’d accept that. I was an asshole. If we could go back, I wouldn’t change a fucking thing. I felt I was pretty fucking mild, given where his fucking hands were.
I mean, I didn’t hit the guy.
We pulled up in front of the clubhouse, and she didn’t wait for me to open her door. She jumped out and rushed inside.
I lay my head against the steering wheel and blew out a breath. How could I do this? How could I make her love me again when I couldn’t even get her to stay in the same fucking room?
I stared at my phone.
Would he answer if I called?
Would he help me win her back?
There was only one way to find out.
I dialed the number and waited for the asshole to answer.
“What?”
I closed my eyes, and the urge to hang up was so fucking strong. But unless I had him at my back, she’d never give me a chance.
“I need your help.”
“With what?”
“Getting my wife back.”
The line was quiet except for his labored breath. I knew he was trying to control that Irish temper—the one that had gotten him in trouble more times than I could count.
“Why the fuck should I help you?”
“Because I need her and my child in my life.”
“What fucking child?”
Shit!
“She didn’t tell you?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“No.”
A thought occurred to me. “Did she tell you she was here?”
“SON OF A BITCH!” he yelled. “Where is she?”
“Inside. We just got back from the doctor’s appointment.”
He was quiet again, and this time I looked at the phone thinking he had hung up on me.
“Dr. Adams?” he asked.
“Yes,” I ground out, unreasonably angry he remembered the doctor’s name.
“Did she tell you everything?”
“Yes.”
“Including why she didn’t go to the funeral?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“That was a shitty thing to do.”
“How do you know?” I leaned back in my seat. I saw the prospect at the gate watching me. His name was Mason, or Nathan, something like that.
“I had her watched. Cash, Gunner, Rome, and Ace all took turns with me watching out for her. Someone had to.”
“Fuck you, King. You don’t know shit about what I went through.”
“Because you fucked off.”
“Because I couldn’t fucking trust my brothers!” I shouted. “Look, she’s here. She’s having my baby, and I don’t want her to leave. I need her with me, King.”
“Tell her the truth. Tell her everything.”
“I can’t.”
“No, you won’t. Because you don’t fucking trust her either. You don’t deserve her.”
“You think I don’t fucking know that? I never did.”
Morgan was so fucking far out of my league, and I knew it the first time I saw her. I should have kept walking, but she called to me like a damn siren.
“I can’t help you, Jude. She’s my sister, and frankly, she can do a hell of a lot better than you.”
I heard a rustle, and King yelled, “Hey!”
“Chasm? This is Grace. Don’t listen to him.
Don’t let her go. Morgan loves you, but she’s hurt.
You need to grovel like you’ve never groveled in your life.
And King is right; you need to tell her the truth.
She needs to know what she’s getting into.
You didn’t do that the first time, and she lost everything.
A relationship can’t survive without honesty and transparency. ”
“She’ll never forgive me.”
“Love can forgive anything,” she insisted. “Ask me how I know.”
“Jude?” King came back on the line. “You better tell her everything and get her back on your side before the old man finds out she’s pregnant.”
I ran a hand over my face. I hadn’t even thought about how O’Malley would react.
“A word of warning, brother. If you hurt her again, nothing I say will keep Sal from killing you.”
He cut the call, and I stared at the clubhouse. Could I tell her everything? Could I put that burden on her? Did she love me enough to forgive me for what I put her through?
I wasn’t sure she’d ever loved me that much. But Grace was right; honesty was the only shot we had of ever getting back to where we were before the world went to shit.
I made my way inside the clubhouse and looked for Morgan.
“She’s in her workroom downstairs.”
I turned toward Benny’s voice. She was sitting at the bar with Smokey, and the way he was looking at her made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I narrowed my eyes at the man and he grinned, before picking up his beer and taking a drink.
“Hey, Prez?”
Turning away from Smokey, I looked at Omen. “What’s up?”
He hitched his head toward church and I groaned inside. I wanted to go downstairs and talk to Morgan, not deal with whatever this bullshit was.
I followed Omen into church and the look on his face told me I wouldn’t be going after Morgan any time soon.
“What’s up?”
“I’ve been digging into those names.”
His eyes dropped to the floor, and I waited a beat before I finally asked, “And?”
“I found some information about one of them.”
He was stalling, and it was pissing me off.
“Just fucking say it, Omen. What did you find?”
“I dug into all the names, including Morgan’s.” His eyes snapped up when I growled. “I had to go at this from the perspective Steele would have. I did a cursory look to see what information was on the surface.”
“What did you find?”
“There is no connection between the women. Not one I’ve found yet. They range in age from sixteen to fifty-two.”
“Jesus Christ. There has to be a connection between them.”
“Well, I think I might have found something, but I’m not sure yet.” Omen pulled out five images. One of them was Morgan. One of them was a baby.
“What the fuck is this? You said sixteen was the youngest.”
“Those are pictures I found of the women. Three of them are connected to the Silver Shadows.”
My head snapped up. “What?”
“Anyone doing a cursory search could find out that Morgan was the daughter of Braesal O’Malley. They just had to know to look into her.”
“Steele didn’t know about Morgan.”
“Not before you died, no, but King did. If Steele was watching him, he would have seen him meet with her. And being seen with King...”
“Would put her on Steele’s radar.”
Omen nodded. “My guess is he looked into her and found out she was O’Malley’s daughter, but he wouldn’t have known she was related to King—”
“Until it came out that he was O’Malley’s son.”
I rubbed the back of my neck as I stared at the picture of Morgan. She was sitting in the park, alone and sad. I knew it had been taken after she lost the baby.
Everything I’d done to keep her hidden all fell apart because I’d died.
“The other two?” I asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.
“This one,” he said, his finger on the picture of the baby, “is Kaitlyn Ward. Angel’s daughter.
We know from Angel that when Steele sold her to the Satan’s Angels, Kay was already pregnant.
I suspect that was the reason he did it.
He knew the baby wasn’t his. From what I can find, the baby was born healthy and given up for adoption. ”
“So she’s out there somewhere.”
“I’m still working on trying to figure out where, but it’s not easy getting through hospital and adoption records.”
“Have you told Angel?”
“Yeah, I sent a copy of the picture to both him and Banshee.”
“And the third one?”
“I’d like to talk about the other three first,” he said, pushing two pictures in my direction.
“Two of them, Meadow Elliot and Windsor Moore, are in their thirties. This one”—he pointed to an image of a beautiful woman with long red hair—“is Meadow Elliot. She just turned thirty this year. She’s a lawyer here in Arkansas.
Lives about an hour from here in a little town called Perryville.
“From what I can see, she’s not connected to anyone we know, but Steele had that file for a reason.”
“Okay, keep an eye on her for now. Maybe send one of the guys out every few days to check on her, make sure she’s alright. I’d like to avoid disrupting her life, if we can, but I want to make sure she’s safe.”
“This one is Lauren Hollis. She’s fifty-two.”
“What have you found about her?”
“Not much. She lives in New Mexico, in a town called Truth or Consequences.”
I glanced at Omen with a skeptical look.
“I swear the name of the town is actually Truth or Consequences. It was named after a radio game show back in the fifties.” He smiled. Omen loved random facts.
“Okay, what’s so special about her?”
“Absolutely nothing,” he said. His brow furrowed, and I knew something was bothering him.
“What?”
“I don’t know… there is something familiar about this woman. But I’ve never been to New Mexico. And Lauren Hollis has never left. She was born there in 1974, graduated from high school, and has worked at the local diner ever since. There is nothing remarkable about the woman.”
“She never married? Never had kids?” I asked.
“No, and no. Spent her life waiting tables. Lives in a small trailer at the edge of town and seems to be content.”
“We need to send someone out there to talk to the woman.”
“That could be a problem,” Omen said, shuffling his feet.
“Why?”
“The Dead Soldiers.”
“Fuck!” I cursed.
I’d heard the name, but no one had ever been able to get close enough to infiltrate the club. All we knew was that they were all prior military, some retired, some discharged.
And not all honorably.
“Okay, let me make a few calls, see if I can get someone in there under the radar to get some information.”
I thought through my contacts. It was a risk, but Tyrant might be the only option. She was a woman, but she was a chameleon. She had a way of turning into exactly what someone needed in order to get them to trust her enough to spill their secrets.
But she was also a hothead. She might not carry the Doherty blood, but her temper rivaled Reaper’s.
“And the third? There’s no picture?”
“Windsor Moore,” Omen said with a sigh.
“You can’t find anything about her?”
“Oh, I found information—lots of it actually. Problem is, it’s not real.”
“What do you mean, it’s not real?”
“I mean Windsor Moore didn’t exist until last year,” Omen announced. “Everything I found about her—her age, her job, her whereabouts—it’s all bullshit. Whoever’s hiding her did a damn good job, but there isn’t much I can’t find.”
The corners of my mouth hitched up. “You didn’t find me.”
“Because I wasn’t looking for you, asshole.” Omen’s eyes gleamed when he said, “I found Amber.”
“What?”
“We got attacked back in March. Jane Craven set us up, though now I’m wondering if Steele was in on it.
Anyway, she was looking for a woman named Bethany.
Said she knew she was with the Silver Shadows, so Steele called King.
Of course, King denied knowing anyone named Bethany.
I dug into it and found out Bethany was Amber Marks. ”
“Okay, then who is Windsor Moore?” I asked the smug son of a bitch.
“I don’t know. Yet,” he said, pointing a finger at me. “But I will find her.”
“Okay, that brings us to the last name. The third one connected to a Silver Shadow. Who is she and who is she connected to?”
“Sullivan Prescott is sixteen years old. She was born in 2009. Her mother died during childbirth and her father didn’t want her I guess, because she was put up for adoption.”
I crossed my arms and waited for Omen to get to the point.
“Miss Prescott decided she wanted to find out who her real parents were and did one of those online DNA tests. It matched someone in a rather large registry that I may or may not have hacked into.”
“What the fuck did you do, Omen?”
“I hacked into the Soulless Sinners.”
“Motherfucker!” I shouted, slamming my fist on the table.
“Only the DNA registry, not the servers.”
“That doesn’t make it better!” I growled. “Wait, why would they have the DNA of one of the Silver Shadows?”
“They don’t. They have your brother’s DNA.”
“Justin?”
Omen nodded. “Sullivan Prescott is your little sister. Her parents were Samuel Peterson and Margaret Nichols.”