Chapter One
Atone
Rosalie
I stood staring at myself in my mother’s
bathroom mirror.
I was going to have scars. Three of them.
Men with scars on their face were considered interesting,
like they lived adventurous lives or were tough guys.
Women with them were looked on as pathetic, like some
traumatic life event happened to them that they didn’t survive without being
marked and because of that were objects of sympathy.
Another discrepancy between the sexes which was absolutely
not fair.
Like the difference in physical strength.
I was top heavy. Slender, long
legs, slim hips, thin arms, but I had big boobs in a way they looked fake.
They weren’t.
My mother had given me a number of good things, including
her thick dark hair.
And her big tits.
My father had lamented this.
“Already hard enough to keep the men off you, gorgeous,”
he’d say to my mom. “And you got my ring on your finger and it’s sat there for
years. Now I got my baby girl to worry about.”
Man.
I missed my dad.
I stopped thinking about my dad and stared at my torso in
the mirror.
I’d learned over the span of my twenty-eight years of life
that large breasts had awesome powers.
Helping you handle yourself when eight men were intent to
beat the snot out of you was not part of those awesome powers.
I lifted my gaze and studied my face in the mirror.
They’d kept me in the hospital for two days, considering I’d
taken a number of blows to the head, and thus had a serious concussion, and
they tried to be cool about it, but I could tell they were concerned about the
number of times I’d blacked out.
Now I’d been out of the hospital for two days, as,
apparently (and thankfully) all systems were a go.
The swelling had decreased significantly but only that
morning did I note that the bruising was starting to recede, some of the edges
of the purple going yellow.
My broken nose was still taped and would be for some time.
I’d had a total of twenty-nine stitches sewn into my face.
My eyebrow would never be the same. The jaw scar wouldn’t be easily seen. But
the gash on my nose would stand out.
I had been pretty, not beautiful, but definitely pretty. And
I knew it.
This was not vanity. This was being real. I could see myself
in the mirror and I’d had a mom and dad who adored me and told me how proud of
me they were for a lot of reasons, and they’d done this all my life. My looks
just were what they were and I was grateful for them.
I also used them.
I used them to get guys I was attracted to.
I used them to get good tips at Colombo’s.
I used them to jump the line at clubs I wanted to get into.
And I used them to get out of that speeding ticket that time
that cop pulled me over.
Mom had taught me, if God gave you something good, you
didn’t waste it. You used it (for good, obviously—I mean, it was God
bestowing these gifts).
So I’d used them.
But as I stood there, looking in the mirror, I knew that
Beck and his brothers had concentrated on my face, thinking that they were
taking the most important thing I had away from me.
Men were so stinking stupid.
In the last few days, when there wasn’t a lot to feel good
about, I felt good about the fact that they hadn’t raped me.
That was my silver lining.
My boyfriend kidnapped me, delivered me to his buds, they
beat the heck out of me, but they didn’t rape me.
If they’d done that to me, it would have taken away
something that meant something.
But they hadn’t.
Yeah.
Awesome silver lining.
Still, for sure it was one.
But, to my way of thinking, they didn’t do any lasting
damage. They didn’t break anything but nine ribs (since I had twenty-four, that
could have been worse) and my nose. When Muzzle’s fist connected with my
schnoz, I felt the cartilage give, and that hadn’t been fun, but it would heal.
Eightball had sprained my wrist, but he didn’t snap it, and it had been tender
but it was already feeling better.
I’d recover.
I could walk, talk, eat, breathe. I could definitely still
deliver pizzas to diners’ tables (or would be able to in a week or two, after
the bruising and swelling were gone and I had less pain due to the broken
ribs).
I might even be able to learn to live with the fact that a
man I trusted and thought I loved had not only brought me to that hell, he’d
also delivered his share of it.
Sure, I’d broken his trust. I’d informed on him and his
brothers’ activities to Chaos, setting them up to be taken down by the cops.
But let us not forget, they were able to be set up to be
taken down by the cops. This meant they were doing felonious crap. That
felonious crap being providing transport for illegal substances and firearms,
offering this service to really bad guys.
So sure, I could see, if he found out, Beck being really
freaking pissed at me. Yelling at me. Breaking it off with me. That was, if he
didn’t give me the chance to explain why I’d done it in the first
place, that being for him.
Well, not so much for him, I’d realized.
But I couldn’t think about that right then.
I had to think about the fact I survived. I was alive.
Walking, talking, eating, breathing, and someday soon I’d again be laying pizza
pies on tables for tips.
What I would not be doing was getting involved with a man,
maybe ever again.
Seriously.
That might seem dramatic, but the first man I fell for, Shy
Cage of the Chaos Motorcycle Club, had shown me a window to a world I wanted
and the doorway I wanted to use to get to that was Shy because Shy was Shy. He
was beautiful to look at and fantastic in bed, but he was also funny and sweet
and protective and affectionate.
He was my dad (not that I knew about the “fantastic in bed”
part with my dad, but from the time I understood the concept of sex, mom’s
dreamy looks and dad’s cat-got-his-cream moods were not lost on me—gross, but
not lost on me).
So Shy was all that…including having all of it on a bike.
But he dropped me like a hot brick the minute Tabitha Allen
gave him indication that her doorway was open. He slammed the one on me and
waltzed right through hers without a second thought.
Looking back, I knew as I fell deeper and deeper for him
that he wasn’t doing the same.
That didn’t make it any better.
Now, also looking back, I knew as I got deeper and deeper
into things with Beck that I was trying to find what I’d hoped to get with Shy.
They both belonged to motorcycle clubs, for one.
And Beck looked a lot like Shy for another (which, not so by
the by, was a lot like my dad looked). Beefier, maybe. A bit rougher around the
edges. But I definitely had a type.
And then came Snapper.
God, Snapper.
Nope.
No.
No more men for me.
Seriously.
Shy.
Then Beck? (Enough said there.)
And then there was Snap.
I closed my eyes and shook my head just as I heard a knock
on the bathroom door.
“Sweetie,” Mom called through the door. “You been in there a
long time. You okay?”
She was worried about me.
She would be. She was a mom. An awesome one. And when your
daughter gets hospitalized due to her boyfriend and his motorcycle club
stomping the crap out of her, that was definitely something that made moms
worry.
But she’d been worried before that. She was part of the
reason I’d made the deal with Chaos in the first place.
My dad had been a biker. He was a nomad when it came to that
kind of thing (or, really, any kind of thing). He accepted being tied down by
his woman and his daughter only, not anything else. Not a job. Not a mortgage.
Not a membership to a club. He hung with a lot of them, including Chaos (in
fact, Hammer, sadly now deceased, but one of the founding members of Chaos, had
been my father’s best friend).
But he’d never hung with Bounty.
“Don’t like the feel of them,” I’d heard him mutter years
ago. “If you’re an outlaw, own the outlaw. If you’re not, own that. You can’t wanna be a Gypsy Joker. You either are or you aren’t. They wanna be. But they aren’t. That shit just ain’t right and it could get dangerous.”
He’d been right.
It got dangerous.
I should have known.
I should have followed my dad.
Mom and me had done it all our lives, job to job, house to
house, city to city.
Why I stopped…
Damn.
I knew why I’d stopped.
I’d wanted Shy, Shy, who reminded me of Dad.
And when I couldn’t have him, I’d gone looking.
I’d wanted what my mom had.
I’d wanted that sweetness. That love.
That devotion.
I’d wanted the stability that just seeped down deep into
your bones from all that no matter the job changing, the scenery changing, the
amount of times you boxed up a house.
Stability had nothing to do with income and locale.
Stability was all in the heart.
“Rosalie, honeypot, you okay?” Mom called.
“Yeah,” I called back. “Out in a sec.”
“There are some…uh, people here for you,” she told me.
I focused on my battered face in the mirror.
People?
“Who?” I asked.
“Well, uh…”
I didn’t like that she didn’t answer immediately.
I went to the door and opened it.
And there I was, standing before me, just a little older.
Dark hair, but she was letting the thick silver settle in.
It looked gorgeous on her.
Hazel eyes that could change to more green or more light
brown depending on what color she (or I) wore.
Tallish. We were both five six. We seemed taller
because our length was in our legs and we were slender.
We also tanned easily. Laughed easily. But were mostly
quiet, sometimes shy but not withdrawn, just not loud and feisty.
“Christ, God loves me,” my dad had said. “Gave me the
perfect woman and then gave me her carbon copy so I get double the goodness.”
I remembered him saying that. We were living outside San
Francisco then in a little two-bedroom house where we could smell the sea and
Mom had a big garden. I remembered how happy he was.
Always happy.
Always right where he wanted to be.
With his girls, his bike close, the world at his feet…or in
Dad’s case, his wheels.
I remembered those words he’d said nearly every time I