RACHEL: AGE 13
REMEMBERING SUNDAY – ALL TIME LOW
“My mom said hers is a slut.”
I tightened my arms around my knees, and though they couldn’t see me, tried to burrow deeper into the corner.
While I was catching the tail end of a conversation, I knew who they were talking about. Knew who everyone was talking about today—my mom.
Not the tragic dead girl. Nope. Just the bitch who no one liked.
On the good days, Mom braided my hair and baked cookies with me despite the fact that I’d long since grown out of both phases.
On the bad days, she let her temper get the better of her.
On the worst ones, she let that temper explode…
That was what had happened earlier.
At a wake of all places.
Humiliated, I thought about how she’d slapped Rene, the only nice Old Lady in the MC, the Prez’s woman, and I cringed.
But the floor hadn’t opened and swallowed me up the last time Mom had gotten into a fight where she was punching above her weight, so why I held out any hope this time was beyond me.
“You’re getting too big to hide out down here.”
The intrusion wasn’t an intrusion, but he was the last person I wanted to see.
King.
On anyone else, it’d be a weird name, but everyone knew that one day, he’d reign over this sinners’ paradise—as Axel, Mom’s boyfriend, called it—like an unofficial king.
I tilted my head to the side. “You outgrew it two years ago but you still come down.”
He shrugged. “Knew this was where I’d find you, and if you’re here, then I’m here.”
‘Here’ was a crawl space beneath the building.
It was hard to get into, harder still to get out of. Sometimes, I wished I could live in this tiny space, live like the Hobbit, amass a hoard of books that’d protect me from the outside world. From vicious voices and mean looks. But even I wasn’t weird enough to think this was a permanent solution.
I might be strange, but I wasn’t Tolkien-strange yet.
Dust winnowed down as the girls overhead stomped off to another part of the clubhouse. I could have turned my flashlight away from the pages of my book and passed it over his features, but instead, I peered through the shadows and found him watching me.
He was only a few years older than me, having already turned sixteen, but he wore his years around him like a cloak. Life at the MC had made him older. More mature.
“You came to find me?” I asked unsteadily, nerves and anxiety coalescing in a way that was worse than when I’d seen my mother hit Rene—his mom.
I’d thought he’d hate me.
I’d thought, God, I didn’t know what I’d thought.
Only, his words made it sound like nothing had changed, even though I knew this was the day everything changed. Mom wouldn’t be allowed to get away with this, and I was glad for that.
Axel couldn’t keep her under control, but that didn’t mean Rene wouldn’t.
“Wasn’t your fault your mom’s rabid.”
“No, but—” I swallowed.
Association was everything in the clubhouse.
“No ‘buts’ about it.” King shuffled nearer and his bony arm curved around my shoulder. He pressed an awkward kiss to my temple. “You’re my girl, ain’t you?”
A weird sensation fluttered through me.
He’d started calling me that recently.
I wasn’t sure what being his girl meant, aside from the fact he hugged me when no one else did and that he’d sit with me and read.
I liked being his girl, even if I didn’t understand why I was. I wasn’t innocent, thanks to being raised by a woman who made the clubwhores look like nuns, but King didn’t do anything men did with Mom.
If I was ‘his girl,’ I didn’t know why he didn’t shove his tongue into my mouth or why he didn’t touch my breasts.
That wasn’t a complaint, more an expression of my confusion.
Huddling into him, turning my knees into him, knowing he’d settle them on his lap, I whispered, “Some days, I wish she’d just go.”
“Maybe she will.”
“Then I’d miss her.”
“Nah.”
With a huff, I pulled back and asked, “How do you know that?”
“Because I know you. You read too many books. They fill your head with what a real mom should be, but there’s nothing real about fiction.”
I scowled at him. “You read too.” I threw the words at him like they were an insult. “And you can’t judge. You’ve got a real mom. She washes your clothes and feeds you. Heck, she feeds all your friends too.”
“She’d feed you if you came around,” he pointed out.
“They don’t like me.”
He snorted. “How would you know if my friends like you or not? You’re too busy crawling around down here for them to even see you. I only know you because I came looking for that coin that day.”
I bit my lip, knowing he was right.
I liked it here though.
I was a part of the world, while separate from it. I heard things, things I shouldn’t hear, things I shouldn’t know, but I filed it away. Kept it locked in my mind. Stored with all the other stuff I shouldn’t have tucked up there. Plus, I could read without anyone judging me.
Carly had been my only confidante before King had come along. Now she was gone and I was feeling pretty lost. King had friends who he hung out with, now I just had my books.
He was so cool and I wasn’t. I knew, one day, he’d realize that and would leave me to my Hobbit home and my misery.
But that wasn’t today.
“It was fate you dropped that coin,” I breathed, tucking my nose into his throat so I could suck in the scent of him.
He smelled like cake.
Always did.
I figured that was because he had a sweet tooth.
“It was fate I came and looked for it,” he retorted with a soft laugh, “and found you living down here like something from the Hobbit.”
Because I’d just made the comparison, I preened. “You know he’s my favorite.”
“I do. You gonna come up for something to eat?”
“No.” I cleared my throat. “Everyone’s still talking. I don’t…” I wriggled my shoulders. “I’m not—”
“That bastard.”
Both of us stilled at the sound of his dad’s voice.
Bear was hard, he was mean, but he had kind eyes.
Even when Mom had slapped Rene, he hadn’t had her beaten. He was letting Rene handle it.
King peered at me and raised a finger to his lips to tell me to be silent.
“How long?”
A voice sounded then. One that had my eyes rounding in surprise.
Young but throbbing with such hate that I felt it myself.
Nyx.
One of King’s best friends, and the only one with a roadname at his age.
“Years,” Nyx rasped, sounding furious and miserable all at the same time. “H-He’s the reason Carly killed herself.”
King’s brow furrowed as I mouthed, “What’s going on?”
We stared up at the ceiling, their floor, and there was the muffled sound of boots thumping as someone clearly started pacing. With every step they took, the floorboards groaned and eddies of dust twisted and twirled around us.
Some must have gone up my nose because the urge to sneeze hit me.
My nostrils itched with the need, my eyes watered, and I sucked in a huge breath to stop it.
The tiniest noise escaped me as I contained the blast. My brain rattled with the aftereffects of trying to keep it quiet, and my lips ached where I’d accidentally bitten them as I slapped a hand over my nose and face—
“Did you hear something?” Nyx demanded.
Only, Bear, who was still stomping, clearly heard nothing as he ground out, “How do you know Carly was being abused by Kevin, Nyx?”
I swore that my heart stopped throbbing at those words.
Kevin Sisson.
I hated him.
He was a creep.
He had a way of looking at me and all the girls my age, sometimes younger, that reminded me of how Axel looked at my mom.
But there was a twenty-year age difference between Mom and me, and no one should be looking at young kids like that. Not even King, who said I was his girl and whose chest puffed up whenever he called me that, looked at me like Kevin did.
I shuddered and King sent me a questioning look, even as he tightened his arm around me.
“I caught him,” Nyx said miserably. “Them. I-I found them.”
Nyx wasn’t a bully. But he was mean. He was hard. So when I heard him start to cry, my whole being rejected the sound.
Nyx wasn’t the kind of guy who cried. He was angry, so angry… Maybe this was why. God.
Maybe.
This.
Was.
Why.
I guessed I had an answer for the unthinkable thing Carly had done.
Shoving my hand against my still-aching mouth, I tried to contain the moan of pain that wanted to pop out and only succeeded when King turned my face into his throat once more.
“When?” Bear barked.
“Years ago.” Nyx gulped. “I-I was too scared to come forward. Too scared to say anything. He threatened me, and Carly, she said…”
“What did she say?” Bear rasped softly when his words waned.
“That she’d deal with it. But Dad… he loves Kevin. That’s why he’s always at the house—”
There was silence then.
Deathly silence.
Bear’s feet came to a halt. “You think she told your father and he didn’t believe her?”
I heard a loud sniff, then a whispered, “Yeah. I think that’s what happened.”
More silence.
It thudded like it had its own heartbeat.
It pulsed through the room like the fallout from a nuclear bomb, only being broken by:
“Leave this to me, Nyx.”
Five words.
I might have been thirteen years old but I knew what they meant.
“No!” Nyx snapped. “Carly killed herself because I was a pussy. Because I didn’t put a stop to this—”
“This ain’t your job, Nyx. Ain’t your duty. This is above your pay grade. I’ll see to it.”
“She’s—” His voice broke. “She was my fucking sister.”
Bear sucked in a breath. “Leave this to me.”
It was a command.
An order that the fifty-plus men in the MC would immediately obey.
But Nyx wasn’t like those fifty-plus men.
Not just because he was a guy.
Not just because, as a part of his heritage, he was a man now.
But because he was Nyx.
Everyone knew a wildness flowed through his veins. Everyone knew that he was rabid and feral. Until it came to family.
Family was his weakness.
My throat tightened as I thought about poor Carly, and King squeezed me again in comfort.
Nyx didn’t reply to the Prez, just stomped off, and as the door opened and smashed to a close, letting music from the bar trickle in, I heard the remnants of the wake the MC threw on Carly’s behalf.
“Fuck,” Bear rasped under his breath before he repeated, “Fuck.”
There was silence again, then the tread of boots, and the soft snick of the door.
“I need you to tell me that Kevin didn’t touch you like that.”
It was the first time I’d ever heard King talk that way—just like his daddy.
Swallowing, I turned to him. “No. I didn’t let him near me.”
In the meager glow from my flashlight, I saw his eyes narrow. “Because you knew he was… a creep?”
I bowed my head. “He looked at me how the brothers look at the bunnies.”
King’s fingers went to my chin, and he urged my head higher. “Did you know about Carly? Did she tell you about this?”
“No,” I whispered truthfully.
His shoulders slumped. “If she didn’t tell you, then she wouldn’t have told anyone else.”
He wasn’t wrong.
I might not have been here a long while, but Carly and I—
My eyes burned.
We were more than just friends; we were like sisters.
I’d lost my sister ten days ago.
Five years might have separated us, but she’d taken me under her wing the first day I showed up at the compound with Mom and Axel, and this was the first time I’d been without her for an extended period of time.
I’d been her shadow. She’d been a safe space for so long, so adjusting wasn’t easy. Knowing that I’d let her down, that she’d thought I was too young to confide in hurt even more.
“Nyx won’t listen to your dad,” I told him after he held me for a good twenty minutes.
Twenty minutes of me crying, of me accepting his hug and of giving it back to him.
His voice was soft, sad. “No, I know he won’t.”
My throat bobbed at the admission.
That feralness, the wild streak in Nyx was about to be channeled somewhere.
The man who would find himself at the center of Nyx’s crosshairs was about to have a brutal death at the hands of a teenager…
I didn’t have any pity in me to waste on an animal like that.
A sick predator who’d taken my best friend from me.
I’d always believed the world was black and white, but it was the first time I recognized there was gray…
So much gray.
Sometimes, I realized as I nuzzled into King, letting him gently kiss my temple and pet my hair as he tried to soothe my tears and my grief away, gray wasn’t a bad thing.
It was, in fact, the best thing in the world.
