I would never look the same again. Even though the doctors in the ER fixed my nose. Even though they’d stitched up my cuts and gave me ointment for the scars. Something about my face had changed. Something in the set of my jaw and the sway of my shoulders when I walked.
My eyes had been forced open, and all the anger toward Aris had been snatched away. I understood why he’d stayed out of my life. I kinda secretly wished he had continued to, but that ship had long since sailed.
“I wish I could tell you so many things,” I said to the headstone, brushing the stray piece of grass off my mother’s name. “I wish I could tell you I didn’t have to forgive you. That I would have done the same thing if I were you.” I shook my head, wiping away the tears. “That I would have done worse.” That I probably still would do worse.
In the weeks since the abduction, I’d started therapy. I’d come to grips with the nightmares and the PTSD and the sounds of my own grandfather threatening to kill me. Sometimes it plagued me, but I was working on making my peace with it. That’s all I could ask of myself.
“What would you do, Mom?” I pursed my lips, glancing down at the picture on my phone, the blurry shot of Leo Caputi, one of Benito’s nephews and the new Caputi boss, hanging on Nikki at a storage facility on the other side of DC. He had his arm over her shoulder, leaning down to kiss her. She carried a baby. Pie’s baby, I assumed. Had Leo taken it in as his? I wasn’t sure I cared. Switch found footage of her sneaking into the club when no one else was there and fucking with the computers.
After the botched attempt to get to Aris through me and Ru, the Caputis had retreated and gone home one crime boss short. I didn’t know how many my rescue cohort had killed that night in that house, and I didn’t want to know.
It would only make me more pissed. It would only twist this vengeance tighter around my heart. I tried to imagine myself standing over Nikki’s sleeping form, a gun in my hand and my finger on the trigger. She deserved it.
“Would you hunt her down? Would you hunt him down to save what he might do to me… to Jericho?”
A wind picked up, rustling the trees around me and carrying a light birdsong with it.
“Is that you?”
The wind blew harder, lifting my hair and swirling it around me. I closed my eyes and smiled softly, picturing my mother brushing it behind my ear the way she used to.
“I thought you were light and love and forgiveness.”
A crow landed on her headstone, startling me. But I didn’t move. It bounced forward, its black beak pecking at the granite. It squawked. Once. Twice. And despite it all, I laughed. I had to.
Yeah, Mom was light and love and forgiveness… until it came to me. And then she was a momma tiger protecting her cub. If she’d been alive and well enough, she would have already done it. Nikki and the Caputi men would no longer be an issue.
But… was I a killer? I believed I had it in me to defend myself, but to seek out violence? To go to her, knowing what I would do, to plan it and execute the both of them like rabid dogs?
After everything she’d done, she was still human.
“Hey, Sunshine,” came the voice behind me, and I turned to find Selene with a bundle of sunflowers in her hand. She sat them next to mine and held out her palm, yanking me to my feet when I took it. Ru walked up on the other side, setting her own flowers down.
After Mom died and I’d been taken, Alba retreated deep down inside my mind. I didn’t know if she died, or if maybe Benito had killed her when he beat the hell out of her. But I didn’t feel like her anymore. She’d been a librarian. A D&D playing nerd. The kind of girl who wore a cardigan and knee-length tweed skirt to a party. She’d been bold enough to invite a stranger back to her house and invite him to fuck her to put it on the internet.
Today? I couldn’t picture myself ever being that girl again.
I would have changed my name to Aurora Dawn, but she still had a life online, hopefully an even bigger and more popular one as soon as I enacted Ru’s plan. I had the top site on OnlyFans. My feed had more subscribers than the next three channels under me combined. I’d never have to worry about money again.
So who was I?
Wright wasn’t a real last name. Caputi made me want to puke. Washington didn’t suit me either, and Aris didn’t want to force that on me if I didn’t want it.
For right now, I was going by Sunshine. It was the name KC had given me, the name he’d inked into his skin under his collarbone shortly after we went official. I kissed it every day of my life.
Of course, I had a delicate KC on the inside of my wrist, which he couldn’t stop licking or biting anytime he fucked me.
Things between us were good.
“What’d you decide?” Selene raised an eyebrow, thinning her lips while she waited for my answer.
“She deserves it,” I said.
“She does,” Ru agreed.
“But there’s been enough death for a while.” I thought of Nikki’s baby. I thought of what it would go through, growing up not knowing its biological father. I couldn’t take its mother from it, too. But Nikki and me? We had unfinished business. And one day, the women of the Steel Roses MC would come for her.
Just not today.
Today, we laid to rest one of our own. We’d finally healed enough to put Trojan in the ground, and since we were already in the cemetery, I’d thought a visit to Mom was in order. Selene grabbed one hand and Ru grabbed the other, and with them on either side, we went back to the ceremony. I took my place next to Jericho, who wrapped an arm over my shoulder and pulled me in for a kiss.
The MC didn’t do funerals like everyone else. Sure, there was the placing of the ashes in the headstone. Trojan had been religious, so Saint said a few words about God calling his chosen warrior home.
But when we got back to the clubhouse, some of the hang-arounds had already fired up the grill, the smell of cooking hamburgers hitting me in the face as soon as I’d arrived.
After a brother fell, the MC partied until they couldn’t feel the pain anymore. They locked the gates and drank to their lost soldier the entire night.
Hollywood drank the hardest, as was his right. Mom had died almost three months ago, but the pain felt as real as if it had happened yesterday, so I understood. Bear and Castor kept up, urging him on, reminiscing about the first time they’d met Trojan. Slip, Picasso, and Thor lit the fire pit, and Crow made his rounds through the crowd, the father figure checking on everyone.
“I want to make a toast,” he finally said, bringing everyone’s attention to him. “First and foremost, to our beloved Trojan. He lived life to the fullest, and he went down fighting. When I met him, he wasn’t nothing but a fucked-up soldier with a little brother to feed. We took him in. We gave him a home. And he repaid that with his life. A true fucking brother.” Crow held up a shot and shouted, “May we see him at the end,” before slinging it back.
I drank to that, tears burning my eyes when I thought about how much this club had sacrificed for me. How much more they’d have to go.
“May we see him at the end!” everyone chanted.
“Next, to our brother, KC.” Crow pointed at him, standing by the pool table.
Everyone whooped and hollered, and Bear clapped him on the back.
“Who stabbed Benito Caputi in the neck so fucking deep that it severed his spine.”
“I said I’d cut that fucker’s head off. I’m a man of my word.” Jericho laughed and clapped when everyone whooped again.
“Finally, to Thor and Selene, for getting our people out of there. And taking some fucking Caputis with them!”
Everyone shouted and clapped again, and I toasted to them, too. If it wasn’t for Selene, we all would have died. If it wasn’t for Thor’s plans B, C, and D, we definitely would have died.
“All right, you fuckers,” Crow said, winding down his speech. “Have a good time. Celebrate life the way Trojan woulda wanted. Drink like you’re dying and fuck like you just got outta jail!”
After that, someone put on the radio, and once AC/DC blared into the night, Ru grabbed a few of her friends. She pulled them into the center of the parking lot to dance, everyone getting drunker with each song.
I sat at the bar and watched the revelry go on around me. Jericho played pool with Pollox, occasionally shooting me a wink to let me know he still had his eye on me. After I’d been kidnapped, it took me three weeks to convince him to let me out of his sight. And even then, it was only so I could go to the grocery store with Slip and Thor to get more beans to make chili.
“How you holding up?” Aris sat down next to me, tipping a beer over his mouth and downing a deep gulp. Since Mom died, I’d decided to give him a shot. If she loved him so much, there must have been something to love. After experiencing Benito myself, I understood their discretion. That didn’t mean it didn’t fuck me up. That didn’t mean I didn’t bring it up in therapy. It meant I was human. And so was he. And so was my mom.
“Not feeling much like celebrating, to be honest.” Trojan had died protecting me and Ru. If I hadn’t needed protecting, if I hadn’t been stupid enough not to reset the alarm, Trojan might still be here today. I bore the weight of that shame inside me, another thing my therapist told me I had to work on.
I do not own the actions of others. I do not own my mother’s. I do not own Trojan’s.
“I get that.” Aris nodded. “Trojan would have understood, too.”
“Do you believe in an afterlife, Aris?”
He shrugged and took another sip of beer. “Never thought much about it.”
“But if you had to guess?”
He nodded, pulling one side of his mouth into a smile. “I hope so. I hope Trojan and Penny are here. That they know how much we miss them.”
I blinked back tears and nodded, trailing my gaze across the space to find Saint and Ru talking in a dark corner alone. She had her arms wrapped around his waist and tears streaking down her cheeks. He looked heartbroken, but in that marble way of his that meant he was trying to hide it.
I’d been pretty fucking out of it in that basement, but I remembered the kiss she’d given him. I remembered the way he kissed her back and the panicked look in his eyes when he found her.
Ru and Saint had been together a few months, but after the abduction, they’d broken up. She wouldn’t tell me why, but from the looks of it, things had gotten bad between them.
“I don’t think I ever thanked you.” Aris’s voice got my attention, bringing me back to him. “For letting me be there. At the end.”
I laughed. “Let you?” I raised an eyebrow. “Aris, she loved you. I saw it. Every day of my life, I saw it.” I shook my head and sighed, wishing she had told me sooner, wishing so many things had been different. “I grew up thinking I didn’t have a family. And now I’ve got the biggest, baddest family in Madison County.” I said the words, knowing them to be true in my heart. Once upon a time, I’d planned to pack my shit and take off. My heart still hurt enough to do that. But the thought of leaving these people, of leaving Jericho? It ached almost as much.
I couldn’t live knowing I wouldn’t see my sister every day. I couldn’t abandon Selene when I’d just started getting to know her, another sister I’d always wanted. And I couldn’t leave the only parent I had left, not when I’d just started to get to know him.
See? Therapy. Progress. I was healing. One mindset shift at a time.