Chapter 7
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in twenty-three years of being raised in and around the Deathstalkers clubhouse, it’s this: Pregnant old ladies are more dangerous than patched men.
It’s not even close.
A patched man might threaten to break your jaw, drag you into church, or bury you in the woods if you cross a line. A pregnant old lady will ruin your life in front of God and everybody over the wrong dipping sauce, and she’ll do it while wearing slippers and holding a half-empty bottle of water.
Right now, the clubhouse is full of exactly that kind of danger.
The weather is finally warm enough that the front and back doors have been propped open to let in the spring air, but there’s still a steady breeze cutting through the common room and drifting over the smell of grilled burgers, fresh-cut fruit, and whatever sugary monstrosity Aunt Lucy and Aunt Jaz brought in earlier “just in case anyone wanted dessert.” Music is playing low from the speaker in the corner, country with too much bass and not enough subtlety, and the entire downstairs feels lived in and loud in the best way.
Kids’ toys are scattered under the coffee table.
A stack of baby boxes sits by the wall waiting to be broken down.
The giant sectional has been overtaken by blankets, throw pillows, and women who have fully decided standing is optional now.
And in the middle of it all, three grown men who could kill someone with their bare hands are being absolutely terrorized by their pregnant women.
I shift the tray of drinks on my hip and stop in the kitchen doorway, just watching the chaos for a second because it is genuinely one of the funniest things I’ve seen all week.
Mac is sitting on the far end of the sectional in black leggings and one of Logan’s T-shirts, her dark hair up in a claw clip and her expression flat enough to warn everyone in a five-mile radius not to test her.
She has one hand resting low on the small but visible swell of her stomach and the other curled around the arm of the couch like she’s restraining herself from homicide.
Logan is standing directly in front of her holding out a glass of iced tea like it’s a peace treaty.
“Baby,” he says carefully, “just take the drink.”
Mac stares at him like she’s deciding whether prison would really be that bad.
“I was carrying my own drink,” she says in a tone so dry it could start a brush fire. “And then you took it out of my hand like I’m ninety.”
Logan shifts his weight. “I was helping.”
“You were being annoying.”
“I was making sure you didn’t spill it.”
Mac arches one dark brow. “Logan, if you don’t move that tea away from my face in the next three seconds, I’m going to throw it at you and then ask why you didn’t protect the baby from the splash zone.”
From the recliner across the room, Brooke bursts out laughing and immediately starts tearing up because she’s still holding a Chick-fil-A bag in her lap like it personally betrayed her.
“That isn’t funny,” she says, even though she’s very clearly trying not to laugh harder.
“It’s a little funny,” I tell her as I step into the room.
Brooke turns those watery blue eyes on me like I’m supposed to be on her side. “He brought me waffle fries.”
I blink. “Okay.”
“I asked for curly fries.”
“From Chick-fil-A?” I ask slowly.
“Yes.”
I pause.
Then I look at Carter, who’s standing beside her with the shell-shocked expression of a man who has been fighting for his life for at least forty-five minutes.
He lifts both hands. “In my defense, I didn’t realize that until I was already in the drive-thru. Also I would have had to make another stop because they don’t make curly fires.”
Brooke’s face crumples in fresh offense. “So you just…accepted it?”
Carter looks like he wants to throw himself down the stairs.
I bite the inside of my cheek so I don’t laugh.
On the loveseat by the window, Kya is sprawled out with one hand on her stomach and the other pointing accusingly at Dom like she’s building a legal case that will put him away for life.
“You knew,” she says, voice full of righteous fury. “You knew I wanted the strawberry cheesecake ice cream.”
Dom, who is one of the smartest men I know and somehow still keeps saying the wrong thing, drags a hand down his face. “Baby, I didn’t know it was yours.”
Kya leans forward like she’s about to launch herself across the room despite being six months pregnant. “It was in my side of the freezer.”
“There are sides to the freezer now?”
“Yes.”
He blinks. “Since when?”
“Since I got pregnant and apparently now I need emotional support dairy products to survive!”
That’s it. I lose it.
A laugh slips out before I can stop it, and Kya whips her head in my direction with enough speed to make me think I should probably run.
I hold up the tray of drinks like a peace offering. “I brought reinforcements.”
Her glare softens by half an inch. “If one of those is lemonade, I’ll let you live.”
“I know you so well,” I say, walking over to hand her the glass with the extra lemon wedges floating on top.
Kya takes it immediately and sighs like I just restored peace to the world. “You’re my favorite.”
Dom glares at me from where he’s leaning against the wall. “That’s rude.”
I grin. “I brought you nothing.”
“Cruel.”
“Earn it.”
He snorts and pushes off the wall just enough to snag the can of soda off my tray anyway before I can stop him.
Kya points at him without even looking away from her lemonade. “If that was mine, I’m divorcing you.”
“You’re not even married to me, yet.” Dom mutters.
“Then I’m divorcing you preemptively.”
That makes Brooke laugh again, which turns into a hiccup, which somehow makes her more emotional about the curly fry betrayal.
Carter kneels in front of her like a man before an angry queen. “I can go somewhere else.”
“You should’ve gone somewhere else the first time,” Brooke says with a sniff.
“I know.”
“You know I don’t even really like waffle fries.”
“I know.”
“And yet here we are.”
He nods solemnly like he’s being briefed before war. “And yet here we are.”
On the sectional, Mac takes the tea out of Logan’s hand with the slow, sigh of a woman forced to raise a very large and deeply irritating man. Logan looks so relieved you’d think he just diffused a bomb.
I move around the room passing out the rest of the drinks while trying not to laugh too hard at any one person’s suffering. It’s impossible, honestly. The men are all in different stages of panic, and the women are all absolutely impossible for very different reasons.
Mac is terrifying in a cool, controlled way, the kind of pregnant where she doesn’t raise her voice because she doesn’t have to. She just gives Logan one look and suddenly he’s carrying things he didn’t know needed moved and apologizing for crimes he hasn’t committed yet.
Kya is chaos on a good day, and pregnancy has somehow only sharpened every part of her. She can go from threatening Dom with bodily harm to crying over a dog food commercial in less than ten minutes, and none of us are brave enough to point that out.
Brooke is sweet and emotional and somehow the easiest and hardest one of the bunch all at once. She’ll smile at Carter like he hung the moon, then five minutes later tell him he’s breathing wrong and should go stand outside until she feels more generous.
And the men?
The men are pathetic.
Logan hovers over Mac like if she bends down too fast the earth itself might split open.
Carter looks like he hasn’t had a full night’s sleep in months because he’s too busy trying to keep up with Brooke’s cravings and mood swings.
Dom, for all his sarcasm and edge, folds for Kya in a way that would be embarrassing if it wasn’t also weirdly sweet.
I love all of them so much it hurts.
That’s the thing about this place. About this club.
It’s chaos and violence and cursing and leather and enough emotional dysfunction to fuel a therapist’s retirement plan, but underneath all of it, it’s still family.
It’s still all of us piled into the same rooms, stealing each other’s food, talking over each other, carrying babies and laundry baskets and grudges and history like they all weigh the same.
I grew up here.
Not just around it.
In it.
In the sound of bikes pulling into the gravel lot late at night and the smell of cigarettes on cuts hanging by the door.
In women laughing in the kitchen while they cook for twice as many people as they planned for.
In church being off-limits and old ladies taking over anyway once the brothers clear out.
In kids sleeping on couches under patchwork blankets while adults stay up too late around the fire pit outside.
This place is stitched into me so tightly I don’t know where it ends and I begin.
And right now, I’m standing in the middle of the common room trying not to choke on laughter while Kya threatens to stab Dom with a plastic fork because he sat in the seat she wanted.
“I wasn’t gonna sit there,” he says.
“You were thinking about it.”
He blinks. “I was not.”
“You looked at it.”
“I looked at the entire couch.”
“Exactly.”
Mac takes a long sip of her tea and says, without looking up, “Honestly, that one’s on you.”
Logan lets out a quiet laugh that immediately dies when Mac turns her head and pins him with a look.
He clears his throat. “I mean…yeah. Dom, man, what were you thinking?”
Dom flips him off.
Brooke giggles into her milkshake and immediately says, “This still isn’t what I wanted.”
Carter closes his eyes briefly like he’s seeking divine strength.
I hand him a bottle of beer out of pity. “For your suffering.”
He takes it and presses a hand to his chest. “You’re an angel.”
“I know.”
“Don’t let Jimmy hear you say that,” Kya says.
Every single part of me goes still.
I hate how immediate it is. How stupidly automatic.