19. Nyah
NYAH
Dear Diary,
Nobody warns you that pregnancy comes with a full identity crisis.
War and Grayson had quietly pulled me into the room they used for “church,” and though Lynx sat at the table wordlessly, it had been the club president and the doctor who had asked me not to spend my nights in Lynx’s room.
At least not until they could be one-hundred-percent sure of what was causing his blackouts.
It was clear neither of them was fully convinced of Lynx’s innocence, even if they were giving him the benefit of the doubt. I’d hated the idea with every inch of my body, and had been devastated when he’d agreed with them.
“I’m not worth risking your life, Nyah,” he’d said quietly.
“I didn’t murder Virginia. But we never should have asked you to babysit me.
My mental health isn’t your responsibility.
Getting attached to me now isn’t fair, when there’s every chance I’m going to get arrested once the cops realize who I am and that I’m here. ”
I’d argued that I’d never felt safer with anyone and that I could handle who I did and didn’t get attached to, but my pleas hadn’t been enough to convince him.
And so a distance had cropped up between us, where I saw him in the halls and the common room, but neither of us could really look at each other.
Days sluggishly rolled into each other, all of them spent wandering the Slayers’ compound while my belly grew and I tried not to lose my mind.
Since Lynx was on warning, and there were still cops intermittently poking around the crime scene outside the gates, Reaper and the other guys with families who lived off site had kept them all away.
So I hadn’t seen Violet or Bliss or Rebel.
I’d had a few cups of coffee with Kara, but she was busy between her job at the hospital and all the people who lived in her house, and the last thing I wanted was to be in her way.
Kiki and Amber hadn’t been around either, the two of them packing gorgeous, skimpy clothes into bags and taking off to a music festival with a couple of the prospects.
They hadn’t invited me to go with them.
I couldn’t have gone anyway. I had no money. No resources. While I lived here, I had everything I needed.
Except agency.
As days rolled into weeks, with Luca mad at me, Dax buried in grief, and Lynx working with Grayson, trying to get his head in a good place, I found myself hating it more by the second.
I hated my father most of all, because at the root of everything, he was the one to blame.
He’d sold me to Carlos Guerra to pay off his debts, and I’d been paying the price for it ever since.
Kiki and Amber and the prospects had returned, all of them full of smiles and laughter and stories about their road trip, their spirits high. Luca and Lynx were in equally good moods after their hockey team had actually won a game.
They all buzzed around the clubhouse on a Friday night. While I was in a foul mood I couldn’t shift, no matter how much I reminded myself that being here, in this clubhouse, was the safest place for the baby I was protecting.
But it wasn’t lost on me that everyone else had lives. While mine had whittled down to being nothing more than an incubator.
When Dax arrived with a smile on his face for the first time in weeks and chatted happily about the huge back piece he’d been commissioned to do, I was glad for him.
I really was. He’d been so thick in grief and in blaming himself for his mother’s death that he’d become a shell of the man I’d known, and this was the first glimpse of the real him coming back to me.
But it was only another reminder I had nothing other than these four walls. I knew why I couldn’t leave them, and yet I was going stir-crazy with the fact nothing was happening inside them either.
A party lit up, with drinks free flowing, the mood high, and I so wanted to join in. Instead, I stood just outside the doors, alone, staring up at a night sky full of stars, wondering how the hell this had become my life.
It seemed I’d just traded one prison for another. First my father’s house. Then Carlos’s. I didn’t want to feel like the clubhouse was yet another jail cell, that wasn’t fair on War or the other guys who’d been nothing but decent in giving me a place to live.
A place I was grateful for, because I had nowhere else.
The sky out here was so incredibly beautiful, nothing like the smog-filled skies I’d grown up with, living in cities.
The door behind me opened, but I didn’t bother looking over my shoulder. It didn’t matter who it was. I felt safe here with all the guys and didn’t feel the need to watch my back, even though Lynx kept insisting I should be careful of him.
I just wanted to roll my eyes every time he said something like that.
Lynx might have been dangerous.
But not to me.
“Penny for your thoughts?” Luca asked.
My heart quickened just at his voice, like it always did.
It didn’t matter that he’d barely spoken to me for weeks and had clearly been avoiding me.
There was something between us that lit up every time we were in a room together.
I didn’t know if he still felt it the way I did, but it was all I could think of whenever he was around.
It was entirely distracting.
“I was just wondering how I got stuck with the parents I have. Like, what did I do in a past life that was so bad I would be born to a man who cares so little about his own daughter he would sell her to pay off his debts?” I snorted in my derision.
“He literally tried to sell me twice, to two different men, at the same time.” I shook my head at his gall.
“Like, seriously, what do you think I did?”
Luca lit up a cigarette, the flame from his lighter casting a warm glow across his tan skin. “You returned library books late. Repetitively.”
Despite myself, I cracked up laughing. “Wow. I mean, that definitely is quite the sin to be punished for. Nobody likes an overdue fee.”
He took a drag on his smoke and turned his head to blow it out so it didn’t go all over me. “What do you think I did? ‘Cause fuck knows my parents are just as bad as yours. My father anyway.”
I fought the urge to ask him for a drag. I knew I couldn’t, but it would have been nice. “You were one of those people who claps when a plane lands.”
His smile flickered at the corner of his mouth. “I hate those people. Guess I deserved this then.”
But we both knew nobody deserved the childhoods we’d had. Or the parents we couldn’t seem to escape, even as grown adults ourselves.
“You don’t,” I said quietly.
Luca stared at his cigarette slowly burning away. “Neither do you.”
I didn’t ask if he truly meant that, even after the way I’d lied to him. It was clear he did. That sent a sparkle of warmth through me.
Luca grinned over at me. “Want to make a pact? We kill our parents, take over their empires, and then…”
“Then what?” I asked him, raising an eyebrow. “Become them?”
He shook his head hard and fast. “No. Fuck that. I’ve already walked too far in my father’s shoes.” He stared off into the darkness in the direction of Kara’s place. “I don’t want that anymore. I never did, I just thought I didn’t have any other options.”
I sighed out heavily and rested my hand on my now very obvious baby bump. “I don’t want it either. For me, or for him.”
Luca raised an eyebrow. “Him? It’s a boy?”
I shrugged. “Just a gut feeling. I didn’t find out.”
Luca’s brow pinched like it pained him. “I need to kill my father before he’s born then.”
A trickle of fear worked its way in around the nice feelings being in Luca’s company created inside me. “Don’t say things like that.”
He looked over at me. “I have to. We bought ourselves some time by telling him your baby was a Guerra. But you know it’s opened up Pandora’s box. He’s either going to want that baby raised in his house, beneath his guidance…”
“With me an optional part of the equation, I’m sure.”
Luca nodded grimly. “Or…”
I swallowed thickly. “Or he’s going to want all of us dead.”
“Definitely a viable alternative in his mind, I’m sure.”
Anger rose inside me so swift and strong, all of it fueled by a deep-rooted instinct to protect my child, no matter what. I shifted until I was staring Luca directly in the eye. “I’m going to kill your father.”
His amusement showed in the crinkles at the edges of his eyes. He winked at me. “Deal. You kill my old man, and I’ll kill yours.”
A smile twitched at my lips. “Stop talking dirty to me.”
He laughed out loud at that. “You’re all right, Matish. You know that?”
For the first time since everything had gone down on the plane and in Scotland and with Lynx, I felt like I was really seeing the real Luca again, the one who hid behind sharp words and threats. “I don’t know if I ever told you I was sorry for what happened—”
“I don’t need your apologies, princess.”
I grabbed his arm, forcing him to face me. “But maybe I need to say them.”
He smirked at me. “There’s better things you can do with your tongue.”
I rolled my eyes at him and huffed out an annoyed sigh. “Okay, all desire to apologize just disappeared. You’re a pig.”
He leaned in close, so his lips were right by my ear.
Despite myself, a shiver ran down my spine, which only intensified when his warm breath tickled the loose strands of hair, lifting them off my neck so they fluttered around my skin.
I made the fatal mistake of inhaling and caught a lungful of his deeply masculine scent.
I wanted to roll around in it so I never forgot what it smelled like.
His lips brushed the sensitive part of my neck so softly I wasn’t entirely sure if I was imagining it.
And then he whispered, “Oink.”
Completely ruining the moment. As always.
He walked away laughing, and all I could do was flip a sexually frustrated middle finger at his back as he walked back inside the clubhouse.