34. Hayden
34
HAYDEN
I hadn’t talked to Hawk since our threesome and was happy to keep it that way, since he was hell-bent on keeping every hard-on he got for me some sort of dirty little secret. I had enough on my plate with the restaurant and Kara to give a shit about his rejections.
At least that’s what I was telling myself every time his green eyes crossed my mind and I thought about him sucking my cock in the dark, or how much I’d wanted to touch him while he’d been deep inside Kara’s body, making her moan.
So when I’d come home from work and he’d given me a single look and jerked his head toward “church,” all the smart-ass comebacks I’d been mentally preparing to guard myself with had disappeared.
Grayson had already been inside, and all available club members had filed in after, making it clear something was up.
Fucking Josiah starting a nationwide manhunt for Kara, complete with hefty reward money hadn’t been on my bingo card for the day.
Now it was my job to tell her.
With her sitting on the passenger seat of my truck, I drove us out to the bluff while my thoughts tumbled over in my head.
The guys had all suggested calling a lockdown. Possibly even a hard lockdown, where no one came in or out until the threat had passed. It was what they knew. How they’d always dealt with threats to one of their own.
But Hawk hadn’t liked that idea any more than I had. Even Grayson had spoken up and made an argument for Kara and Hayley Jade being allowed to come and go as they pleased.
They’d been locked in cages for far too long for us to put them in another.
“What’s happened?” Kara asked quietly.
I gazed at her in the early evening darkness. “I don’t want to scare you. But I don’t want to lie to you either.”
She sucked in a deep breath, reaching across the center console and running her knuckles down my arm. “Just tell me.”
“Josiah’s offered a reward for your return. Yours and Hayley Jade’s. A big one. One big enough that the people around here, who are already doing it tough, would easily see a way to make a quick buck. He told them your location. Made it so damn easy for them.”
Kara’s face fell. Her hand dropped away from my arm, and she sank back on her seat, shoulders hunching, folding in on herself. “I should just go back.”
I stopped the car. We were at the bluff parking lot anyway, not in a designated space, but it was late and there was never anybody up here at this time of day, which was exactly why I’d brought her here. “Over my dead body.”
She glanced at me. “Don’t say that.”
“You think I’m letting you go back to the man who abused you for years? You think Hawk is going to let that happen? You want Hayley Jade back with him?”
She shook her head hard enough tendrils of dark hair fell around her face. “Hayley Jade will never go back there. I don’t care what happens to me, but you have to promise me she’ll be safe. That you’ll always put her first.”
“You both—”
Emotion clogged her voice, and tears filled her eyes. “No! Promise me, Hayden. Promise me she’ll always come first. Promise me, if it ever comes down to it, you’ll pick her over me.”
I scrubbed my hands over my face. “I can’t—”
Her fingers wrapped in my shirt, desperately clinging to me, searching for the promise she needed. “Please. You have to. I’ve already failed her in so many ways.”
I stared at her. “Are you crazy? You haven’t failed her at all.” Anger rose in me. Not at her, exactly, but at the way she thought. At the way she’d been so gaslit into believing that everything that had happened to her and Hayley Jade was her fault. “I was there the day she was born. I watched you bring that girl into this world when you were at your lowest of lows. When anyone else would have given up, you never did.”
“That was because of you.”
I shook my head. “Stop giving other people credit for what you did. Caleb taking her wasn’t your fault. Josiah ripping her from your arms wasn’t your fault. Can’t you see that all along, you were the victim?”
“Hawk is going to have to call a lockdown.”
“He’s not. We talked him out of it.”
She sighed. “For now, maybe. But for how long? Everyone is in danger while I’m here. If I go back, that all stops.” She stared out the window at the night sky. “My life is just one series of prisons after another. I don’t want all of yours to be like that too.”
Terror rolled its way down my spine. I didn’t like the way she was talking. I understood it, but all I could picture was her slipping away in the night, finding her way back to the commune, giving herself up because she was selfless enough to do that so the rest of us weren’t targets.
“Please don’t,” I begged her quietly. “We both know that if you really want to go, you’ll find a way. I won’t be your jailer. If it comes down to it, Hawk won’t be either. You have to be the one to decide you want to stay. That you want us enough to fight.”
She didn’t say anything.
Just stared down at her hands.
A wave of crushing despair washed over me. Her selflessness was going to be the thing that got her killed.
I couldn’t bear the thought of Josiah’s hands on her body. Of the things he’d do to punish her.
“Don’t be mad at me,” she whispered. “You aren’t a mother, so maybe you can’t understand that this is not a choice. It’s all I am. All I have to give her.”
I heard the words. Understood where she was coming from. But I was mad. I was mad because she was giving up. Because she wasn’t as one-thousand-percent in as I was, ready and willing to do anything to keep us all together.
I was mad because she was going to break my fucking heart.
I stared at the car ceiling, breathing hard. “What do you think is going to happen to that little girl when you leave? What am I supposed to tell her when you disappear in the night?”
“Tell her I loved her enough to give her up.”
“Bullshit!” I shouted.
Kara flinched.
Guilt filled me for scaring her, but I didn’t take it back. Because someone needed to talk some fucking sense into her. “I’m not looking that girl in the eye and telling her you’re gone. She’s five, Kara. You know what she’s going to hear? The same fucking thing I am. That you didn’t love her enough to stay. To fight. To be in her life instead of a goddamned brainwashed cult sacrifice!”
She stared at me, the tears in her eyes melting away, replaced by anger. “How dare you?”
“How dare I? No, sweetheart. How dare you. How fucking dare you come back into my world and turn it upside down? How dare you bring that little girl and make me love her? How dare you sit there, so fucking beautiful and selfless, and then tell me you’re throwing it all away because you don’t believe in us the way I do? How dare you make me—”
I couldn’t bring myself to say it. But silently, my fingers made the sign for, “love you.”
I turned away, biting down on my lip.
For a long moment, only the sounds of our breathing filled the air.
“What did that sign mean?”
I wasn’t giving her that. I couldn’t bring myself to voice the words because it would hurt all too much when she didn’t say them back.
Which she wouldn’t. Because if she loved me…us…the way Hawk and I loved her, we wouldn’t have been having this argument in the first place. “Give us one week, Kara. Give us one fucking week to work this out. To show you that you don’t need to do this.”
She sighed, staring out the window. “I don’t even know how to drive a car.”
I blinked, turning back to her. “What?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know how to drive. I’m always reliant on you or Hawk or someone to pick me up and chauffeur me around. I can’t go anywhere by myself.”
It had never even occurred to me. The clubhouse was in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t like there was a bus stop right out front. She didn’t have her own money or her own vehicle.
When I stopped and thought about it, it was really no surprise at all she felt trapped.
She was as reliant on Hawk and me and the rest of the club as she’d been on Josiah.
We might not have been abusing her, but in trying to protect her, keep her safe, and give her everything, we’d made her helpless.
Kept her in a cage.
Smothered her independence.
The realization hit me like a sledgehammer, rolling my stomach until I felt sick. I took the keys from the ignition and tossed them at her. “Catch.”
Her reflexes were fast enough to snag the keys before they were lost to the darkness of the floorboard.
She stared down at them. “What are you doing?”
“You said you wanted to learn to drive, didn’t you?”