Chapter 13
DAISY
“ Hey there, beautiful, is your man around?” Cobra swaggers into the office, his bright blue eyes as brilliant and as light as Joker’s are dark. The men are polar opposites in looks, but both are sexy and handsome in their own way.
“Yeah, don’t you know you could do way better than Joker’s grumpy ass?” Python follows Cobra in, and I immediately know if both the prez and the sergeant-at-arms are together, then something is going down with the Serpents, and they want to weigh in with their VP.
I nod toward the garage. “Probably got his head under a car or tricking out a bike.”
“As long as he doesn’t lose his head in the process. Crazy fuckin’ accident the other day.”
I turn from the monitor. “You mean when he fell down the stairs?”
“Yeah, that too, but I meant here in the garage with the lift.”
Cobra and Python exchange a look, and Python shrugs. “No big deal, right? ”
“No big deal about what?” I’m totally confused and need way more information.
Cobra mashes his lips together. “Shit, you have no idea what we’re talking about, huh?”
“Absolutely none, so why don’t you tell me what happened?”
Cobra and Python exchange another look, and Cobra backs toward the garage. “Not my story to tell, sweetheart.”
At the same time, Joker appears through the door from the garage. “Hey, brothers.” His gaze flits between me, Cobra, and Python. “What’s goin’ on?”
I push away from the desk and anchor my hands on my now ample hips. “You didn’t tell me you had an accident in the garage.” I never believe in beating around the bush, and usually Joker admires that quality—until now.
Joker narrows his eyes. “That’s ‘cause I didn’t.”
I nod at Cobra. “He said you did.”
Joker glares at Cobra. “Well, he was mistaken.”
“I don’t think so.” I move around the desk. “Tell me what happened.”
Python steps to me and wraps his huge muscled arm around my shoulder. “Simple misunderstanding, babe.”
“Nice try, but no.” I shrug off Python’s arm.
“It was nothing.” Joker rolls his eyes. “There was a leak with the hydraulic fluid in the lift, no big deal.”
“Holy fuck!” Python bellows. “That could’ve been a huge mess.”
“Thanks, brother.” Joker levels Python with a deadly expression.
“And when the fluid leaks, the lift crashes down, right?” I knew enough about the workings of the garage to guess the consequences.
Joker shifts his feet like a kid with a bad report card. “Something like that. ”
Gus enters the office and grabs a bottle of water out of the mini fridge.
“How close were you to getting plastered under it?” I ask Joker, but instead Gus chimes in.
“Pretty damn close,” Gus adds. “If it wasn’t for me yanking him back, your man would’ve been hamburger meat on the concrete floor.”
I suck in a deep breath, and Joker glares at Gus. “Thanks, old man. I’ll remember this when raise time comes around.”
“Shit, nothing I’m sayin’ ain’t true.” Gus uncaps his water and settles in for the show.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask Joker.
“‘Cause I wanted to avoid this.” He motions between us. “But thanks to my brothers and my foreman’s big mouth, now you know.”
I shake my head. “What else are you keeping from me?”
“Nothing.” Joker comes around the desk. “Stop worrying.” He kisses me on the forehead, throws Gus an evil eye, then hustles Cobra and Python outside.
I stare after them, but I know my husband.
Although he’s never outright lied to me, there are things he doesn’t tell me.
Like club business, or anything he thinks will worry me, and me being pregnant makes him extra vigilant to keep me calm, which ultimately makes me worry more. Mission unaccomplished.
On the one hand, I get it. After the trauma with Deana’s birth, it took me months to recover mentally, but Joker was by my side every minute. He refused to give up on me even when I wanted to give up on myself.
I didn’t know how to fix myself.
I’d jolt awake in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, heart beating out of my ribcage, and sometimes even shaking. I’d creep out of bed so as not to wake Joker for fear he’d think I was losing my mind .
Every day, I felt more and more detached, more disconnected, further away.
My logical mind told me I was so lucky to have our healthy baby girl, but the demon of anxiety wouldn’t let me rest. Wouldn’t let me be grateful for my beautiful baby girl, my caring stepson, or my loving, devoted husband.
Then it all came undone one afternoon when Joker forced me to examine my feelings. Of course, at the time, the big, tough biker guy didn’t know what he was doing, but in his own way, he forced me to start living again.
“ Look, babe, we need to talk about what’s going on with you.”
“ I don ’ t want to talk about this.” I fold the baby blanket on my lap.
“ That ’ s too bad ’ cause I want you to tell me what ’ s bugging you?”
“ Right now, you ’ re bugging me.” I brush past him, but he catches up to me and whirls me around by the waist.
“Not gonna work.” He tightens his grip on me. “ I can’t imagine how scared you were.”
“ When the contractions started, I told myself I had to handle it, but”—my voice cracks—“I was so scared, so alone.”
“ I know, baby,” he whispers into my hair. “ I know you were alone, but I swear on my life, you will never be alone again.”
“ I’ve been so afraid to break in front of you. So scared if I start to cry, I’ll never stop.”
“ Gonna take more than some crying to scare me.” Joker turns me toward him, catches the single tear sliding down my cheek, then hugs me.
My crying subsides and he scoops me up and takes me into our bedroom, then sits me on the bed facing him. “You’re my tough, sassy bitch who can handle anything, but you’re also human, and I tend to forget that sometimes.”
I cup his face with my palm. “ I love you.”
“ I love you too, babe, so much.”
After all that, Joker and I promised to always be honest with each other, but I couldn’t help thinking he was still keeping something from me. Aside from the near accident in the garage. Something big, that could possibly put us all in danger.
Joker grew up knowing, at an early age, the only one he could depend on was himself, and the same applied to me.
There weren’t too many second chances for the illegitimate child of a jailbird father and a mother who ran off leaving her seven children to fend for themselves in the hills of West Virginia.
Somehow, Joker and I fought hard to get to the other side, then formed a bond with each other through adversity and the knowledge that life sucked some times, but if you held on, sometimes there was a reward.
And if our little family unit of Derek, Deana, and our unborn baby held tight, we would survive all the bad.
And because of that, I was determined to find out what Joker was hiding. I refused to put our family in danger from lack of information.
JOKER
I hustle Cobra and Python outside into the lot then turn on them and glare. “What the fuck was that?”
“What?” they both say in unison.
“You guys trying to fuck up my life and make sure I never get my dick wet again.”
Python shrugs in his usual nonchalant way. “Nothing said wasn’t the truth, and if you really wanna get up somebody’s ass, it should be Cobra for starting the story and Gus for finishing it. As far as I can tell, I was outta it altogether. Just an innocent bystander.”
“Thanks, brother,” Cobra sneers, “for having my back. I’ll remember that the next time Virginia calls to see if you’ve left Ecstasy. Maybe I’ll tell her you’re ogling a new stripper on stage.”
“Whoa, whoa with that shit,” Python defends. “I only got eyes for my Virginia, but sometimes in my job managing the club’s strip joint, I gotta put in some extra hours overseeing the talent.”
“Yeah, okay.” Cobra and I both do an eye roll, ‘cause even though Python is true to Virginia, he does like to vet the new talent personally.
“And since when would you ever label yourself innocent?” I glare at Python, and the bastard smirks at me.
“As usual, we’re all getting way off topic,” Cobra adds.
“The bottom line is I didn’t tell Daisy about my near miss here the other day because I don’t want her worrying over nothing.”
“All right, but you never said you weren’t gonna tell her, so how were we to know?” Cobra makes a logical point I can’t argue with, so I drop it and move on.
“You gotta admit some of the shit that’s happened to me lately is unusual.”
“Unusual, but explainable,” Cobra says. “Your bike blew some spark plugs.”
“After Rattler swears he replaced them the day before.”
“You see some guy at the Halloween party in Indian regalia,” Python adds.
“Who looks exactly like the guy we offed.”
“Then you take a tumble down the stairs.” Cobra cocks his head. “All this shit is somewhat normal.”
“Except I didn’t take a tumble; I was fuckin’ pushed.”
Python puffs out his chest. “I didn’t push you.”
“I know that . . . It was some force. I can’t explain it, but it was like a?—”
“Ghost?” Cobra offers.
“Crazy shit, I know, but I’m telling you, before I fell, I heard this high-pitched whining, and the next thing I know, I’m flat on my back on the basement floor.”
“Gotta admit, we were fuckin’ scared. ”
I suck in a breath, weighing my next words. “Only I wasn’t really unconscious.”
Python crosses his arms over his chest. “Well, you sure the fuck weren’t awake.”
“That’s the thing: I was, only I wasn’t in 2025, I was in 1939.”
Python and Cobra stare at me but stay silent.
“It was as real as I’m standing here, and you guys were there too, only it was over eighty years ago.”
“You had a dream while you were unconscious, not that crazy,” Cobra reasons and Python nods his agreement.
“I don’t know if it was real or fake, but I do know it ended badly.”
“Badly, how?” Cobra asks.
I didn’t want to say the words out loud for fear of making them come true. “I wanna have another meet with the Nomads. Feel them out and see their attitude, ‘cause something is fucked up, and I’m not waiting around like the last time.”
Python and Cobra exchange a look.
“I get it,” Cobra says. “You gotta put your family first.”
“I’d be willing to put all this behind me, if it wasn’t for the pictures I got Halloween night and again this morning.” I swipe at my phone, pull up the pictures, and show them the screen.
“Shit!”
“Fuck!”
“Yeah, exactly. Whoever’s got pictures of me, Daisy, Derek, and even little Deana—they know where we go and what we do, and it’s freakin’ me the fuck out.”
Python takes my phone and examines the pictures closer. “Yeah, those are very clear pics with a wide-angle lens. Whoever took these knew what they were doing and why.”
Python came off as a wiseass, but when balls were to the wall, his analytical brain took over, and he weighed all odds evenly. Probably came from his knowledge of gambling as a degenerate hustler back in the day, but the guy has a knack for calling shit out.
Python passes the phone to Cobra, who looks briefly then turns his eyes to me. “This shit is whack, and whoever sent them to you is looking for trouble. Maybe we can make that trouble happen.”