Chapter Forty-One
Bane
I still couldn’t believe that after all these years, I was sitting next to my bed, holding her hand while she slept.
I worried this was a dream, and if it was, I never wanted to wake.
I still didn’t know how I was going to explain everything.
All I prayed for was that when I was finished, she forgave me.
“So where have you been all this time?” Torment asked Shame as he leaned against the desk in my room. Looking over at my former intern, I no longer saw a young man, but a weathered one, his face etched with years of hidden secrets and choices that haunted him.
Standing against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, his face void of emotion, Shame slowly turned his head toward Torment and said, “I’ve been around.”
“That’s it? Around?” Torment scoffed. “We thought you were dead, man. We buried you.”
Shame smirked at that.
Torment shook his head, clearly dissatisfied with his lack of answer, but Shame offered no further explanation. The silence between them stretched, weighted with things left unsaid.
“He’s been looking for my wife,” I admitted, trying to ease the tension. “It wasn’t Shame’s fault. None of this was. It was all mine. If anyone has a problem, they need to direct their anger toward me. He only did as I asked, Torment.”
“Bullshit,” Torment snapped. “This has Montana written all over it. You can’t sit there and tell me that for the last year and a half, Shame’s been looking for Diana.”
“Twenty years.” I admitted.
“What?”
Sighing, I turned and looked at my brother. “Shame’s been looking for Diana for close to twenty years, Torment. That’s how long she’s been missing. It’s a long story, brother. One I’m more than happy to tell when everyone is back.”
Torment shook his head, pulling the chair out from under the desk and sitting. “Lies upon lies. If it’s not this club, it’s the Golden Skulls, and now others.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Shame asked.
“I’m talking about everything, Shame. All this,” Torment said, waving his arm about.
“Everything. I’m looking at a man who should be dead.
I got brothers showing up out of the blue.
Bane is married. Has been for twenty-fucking years.
People who were supposed to be allies are enemies, and enemies are allies.
And caught in the middle are innocent people with no idea whom to trust. God, this is going to kill Kytten when she learns the truth. ”
“Who the hell is Kytten?”
Torment looked at Shame and frowned. “Your daughter.”
Shame smirked at that. “Now, that shit is funny. I don’t have a daughter.”
“Yes, you do,” Torment continued. “A son as well. Mimic and Kytten. They are with the Silver Shadows in Nebraska.”
Confused, Shame looked from Torment to me and then asked, “Do you know what the hell he’s talking about?”
“I’m talking about your kids.” Torment groaned, and I shrugged my shoulders, looking at Diana, wondering what had happened to our own child. He would be about the same age as Mimic and Kytten now. I wondered where he was, what he was doing, and if he was safe.
“I don’t have kids.”
Torment frowned. “Yes, you do.”
Shame scoffed. “I think I’d know if I did.”
“Mimic and Kytten,” Torment stated, leaning forward in the chair. “Just turned twenty-one?”
I looked at Shame, who clearly had no clue what Torment was talking about.
“Jesus Christ,” the club’s therapist groaned. “Their birth certificates name you as the father. Unless there is another Justin Peterson running around.”
Shame shrugged. “Don’t know what to tell you, brother, but whoever this Mimic and Kytten are, they are not mine.”
Getting to his feet, Torment growled. “Thorne and Rosebud Peterson. Born April 4, 2004, in Las Vegas, Nevada, to a Vivian Greenbush. Thorne, also known as Mimic, is a brother in the Silver Shadows MC. His twin sister, Rosebud, is also known as Kytten. She’s a sister in the Nyght Nymphs MC.”
Shame’s eyes narrowed, his jaw working as if he were grinding down the implication itself.
The silence in the room was thick, broken only by the distant hum of a motorcycle engine outside, reminding us of the world still spinning beyond these walls.
I watched him, a storm brewing in his expression—equal parts doubt, confusion, and the first flicker of something like fear.
Torment didn’t back down, his voice steady and resolute.
“They’re yours, whether you remember them or not,” he said clearly before adding, “Nav has a copy of their birth certificates. It clearly names you as the father and Vivian Greenbush as their mother. He got the medical records of their stay in the hospital.” The club’s therapist folded his arms, waiting for Shame to react, when I felt Diana’s hand tighten around mine.
Looking down at her, I saw that her eyes were open and filled with tears as she whispered, “I wanted to be the one to tell you.”
“Tell me what, baby?” I soothed, brushing her hair away from her face.
“I wanted them to have something from you. So I gave them your tattoo.”
Confused, I looked at Torment, who was standing on the other side of her bed, checking her vitals.
“My tattoo?”
“It’s the medication, Bane,” Torment stated, stepping back. “It’s going to make her groggy for a while.”
“You still have it,” she whispered, her fingers playing with the leather bracelet she gave me all those years ago.
Smiling down at her, I gently kissed her forehead and whispered, “I never took it off. Sleep, baby. You’re safe now.”
“August, we need you downstairs,” I heard Montana say sometime later. “Largo has offered to sit with her.”
“Hey, Bane.” Mercy’s wife walked into my room, smiling as she walked over to the chair on the other side of the bed. Taking a seat, she reached for Diana’s hand, then looked at me. “I’ll come get you the second she wakes up. I promise.”
Nodding, I leaned over and kissed Diana’s head, leaving her with Largo. Out in the hallway, Montana quietly closed my door and then sighed. “Sinclair’s alive. Barely. That bitch did a fucking number on him. You should know that Dante is downstairs. He’s pissed.”
Saying nothing, I followed Montana downstairs to find my son pacing the gathering room. Brothers watched him as he muttered to himself, while Shame and Sypher sat at a table quietly talking to each other as they both typed on their computers.
Not seeing Malice, I asked, “Where is Gideon?”
“At the hospital. Until we find Meredith, he and Rowen Shay refuse to leave Sinclair’s side.”
“Hey, Bane,” Silver greeted me with a smile from behind the bar. “Want your usual?”
I shook my head, waving Silver off. “Thank you for asking, but no. Maybe in a little bit.” My hands felt heavy as I moved through the shifting crowd—each face reflecting a different grief or anger, each brother holding their silence like a weapon when Dante rushed over to me.
“I don’t know whether to be happy for you or angry at you. But you need to understand that Sinclair raised me. He’s been there from the very beginning. You may be my biological father, but Sinclair is my dad. He always will be.”
Holding up my hand, I stopped Dante from saying anything further. “You don’t have to explain anything to me. I understand, and I am truly sorry for what your mother did. I promise you she will get the justice she deserves.”
“Here,” Dante said, holding up a vial of blood. “Take it. Fury insisted I have my blood drawn. Said you needed it for the database.”
Looking around the gathering room, my eyes landed on Fury, who stood firm, unrepentant, daring me to challenge him. Taking the vile from Dante, I simply spewed the same club line I had for twenty years. “It’s club protocol.”
Sypher huffed. “Bullshit. Don’t lie to my husband, Bane. You want verification that Dante is your son.”
A hush fell over the room, as if the air itself hesitated, stretched too tight across old wounds and new secrets.
Fury’s gaze didn’t waver, and neither did Sypher’s, the tension between duty and honesty crackling in the dim light.
I tightened my grip on the vial, feeling its chill seep into my palm—a reminder of everything unspoken, everything waiting beneath the surface, restless and unresolved.
For a long moment, no one moved. Then Silver slid a glass across the bar with a gentle clink, a silent offer of comfort in a world where comfort was scarce. Shame’s fingers stilled on his keyboard; Sypher’s eyes narrowed, not in anger, but in measured wariness, calculating the cost of truth.
I tucked the vial into my pocket, the weight of it heavier than it should’ve been. “Sypher’s right,” I said, my voice hoarse, worn thin by loss and responsibility. “The club wants verification that you are my son.”
“And what about you?” Dante asked stiffly, glaring at me.
“I claimed you.”
“That’s not what I asked, Bane.”
For a heartbeat, the question hung between us, raw and jagged. Dante’s eyes burned with something I couldn’t name—hope, fear, a demand for something more than club loyalty or inherited duty. The silence pressed in, heavy as the vial in my pocket, as if the walls themselves waited for my answer.
I looked at him, truly looked, past the bitterness and the bravado to the boy who had no one and the man he’d become.
The truth welled up, sharp and unvarnished.
“You’re mine,” I said finally, each word weighted with all the years and all the pain I felt.
“No test, no protocol, nothing could change that. I claimed you because you were always meant to be claimed.”
Dante blinked, his anger faltering, swept aside by something quieter, more dangerous. “Then why do I still feel like a stranger?”
The question carved through me, leaving a new ache in its wake. Around us, the others remained silent, their presence a tapestry of trust and suspicion—threads woven by time and shared blood.
“I know I haven’t been the father you needed,” I said, voice low. “But I’m here now. For as long as you’ll have me.”
Dante’s shoulders slumped, defiance giving way to exhaustion. He nodded almost imperceptibly, the gesture fragile as hope. Fury’s stare softened, just a fraction, and Sypher let out a breath he’d been holding.
I really didn’t care what the test said.
I meant everything I said.
Dante was mine.
He always would be.