Ward’s forced laugh didn’t intimidate Hold in the least. He knew his father’s game. Hell, he’d learned it by his side. Once more he tried to remember when the great divide between them began. He’d lost hours of time trying to narrow down the instant when something other than respect had changed everything between them. The reason wasn’t only Hels. Hold now knew she was just part of something larger eating Ward up.
“Damn, boy. You’re never gonna learn,” Ward said, shaking his head.
Hold watched him glance over to a silent Sandman. He knew what this man was capable of doing. There wasn’t any time to waste. He reached for the Glock in his jeans and pulled it for the second time that day. The barrel lined up directly toward Sandman’s heart, and Sandman’s pistol followed suit. All hell broke loose around them.
Out of the corner of his eye he watched Mike draw his own gun and level it at Sandman. It didn’t surprise Hold that Mikey had his back. This was his brother, no matter fucking what.
A small group of Hell’s Highwaymen members who happened to be loitering around the clubhouse drew their weapons. Half the room pulled on Sandman and the other targeted Hold. Then you had a couple that wobbled between them both, their trembling hands wavering between the two, not sure who was the enemy. Had the situation not been so dire, it would’ve been hilarious.
“A club can’t be divided, son,” Ward said, somewhere at Hold’s left.
He didn’t remove his eyes from Sandman. The arrogant son of a bitch stood before him, finger on the trigger. His smile mocked Hold. Sandman was the only crazy fucker Hold knew who would stand unaffected with a gun pointed at him. Hold’s own heart slammed against his ribcage.
“This shit can’t happen. I won’t allow it. Sandman, back down. That goes for everyone else,” Ward sternly ordered and the other men walked slowly backward away from Hold. “We hold church tonight to sort this shit. Eleven o’clock. Spread the word.”
Hold lowered his weapon. Did Ward somehow get wind of their plans to meet tonight? Maybe it’s for the best to end this shit once and for all. Declare war and take care of business.
“Do you even fuckin’ realize what you’re doin’ to the club?” Hold asked, the words rushing out before he could stop them.
“Makin’ money. Building up the town of Harmony for the Hell’s Highwaymen. Take your pick, boy. What have you done for the club? Chose some bitch over your brothers. Sit moanin’ and groanin’ in the garage this entire last year while the men you’re supposed to be leadin’ took all the chances runnin’ shit. Poor fuckin’ Hold. You wanna cry me a river?” Ward asked, bringing his body to directly face Hold.
“I worked my ass off in that garage makin’ money for the club. Legit work for legit pay. I’m not gonna spend another night down in Jackson. If others want to take stupid-ass chances to end up behind bars and guarding their asses be my fuckin’ guest,” Hold said, bucking up to the old man. “You want to continue cookin’ meth and runnin’ guns for the Russian mafia, go for it. You’re right, Ward. You’ll make some money, but at what cost to the men following you? When is enough enough?”
“When I goddamn say it is,” Ward uttered low enough for only Hold to hear him. “Do you hear me, Holden?
“No,” he replied quietly. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? I don’t hear you any longer.”
“She fuckin’ ruined you, son. Just like her mama did, poisoning my own men against me,” Ward spat. “A viper cunt with her lies. Hels was cut from the same cloth.”
“What is your problem, Ward? Why does it always come back to Hels?” he asked, staring intently at the man before him.
Ward eyes blazed and his lip quivered with the intense fury evidently eating at him. It was obvious to Hold and he wanted to know why.
“Why don’t you tell the boy, Ward?” Hound said, coming to stand beside Hold. “You knocked up your best friend’s old lady. And when she didn’t want you, and threatened to run her mouth to Sage, you had her killed. Sorry son of a bitch let Sam raise his bastard.” Hound turned to glance at Hold.
Hound’s words reverberated in Hold’s head. Knocked up his best friend’s lady? Sam raised his bastard. WHAT? Not Hels! A sickening terror unlike anything Hold had ever experienced rocked his gut. NO!
“I’m sorry, son,” Hound said sadly, placing his hand on Hold’s shoulder. “I ain’t keepin’ my mouth shut for this lowdown bastard anymore. Sam was my best friend and when your daddy found out Sam was going to rat him out to Sage, Ward had him and his family killed. Paid the sheriff off to say the fire was an accident, but it’s a damn lie.”
“You don’t know what you’re sayin’, Hound. Keep on talkin’ and see what happens,” Ward threatened, stepping up to speak softly to Hound.
“What have I got to lose, Ward? I should’ve done somethin’ long ago when it all went down, but I was too chicken shit,” Hound said, angrily staring him in the face. “Not anymore.”
Hold didn’t hear a word either man continued to speak. His mind skipped over memories, like a rock skipping across a still pond, each one playing quickly through his head. Hels as a child, looking nothing like the father who never gave two shits about her. Everyone always said she was the spitting image of her beautiful mother who Hold couldn’t remember anymore. Those brown eyes that never matched the father who raised her. Ward had brown eyes. Jesus!
“What the fuck!” Hold said, glancing down to see his hands tightly gripping the edges of Ward’s cut. “Is she yours?”
Ward stared cruelly back at him.
“TELL ME!” Hold yelled, shaking him with brutal strength.
The man standing before him was a pathetic excuse for a human being, someone who didn’t deserve to have this much control over Hold. He’d allowed this sorry piece of shit to ruin his life, to dictate his entire existence, but not anymore. Hold would get his answers, but from the only person he could trust to give him the truth.
He let his hands fall away. With one glance he surveyed the room. Most men stood in horrified awe at the display Hold and his father created while others either gathered in Hold’s corner or Ward’s. War lines were drawn—no turning back from this point. But Hold needed answers and he needed them now.
Hold turned toward the door and walked away from the drama unfolding. If Sandman or his own goddamn father wanted to shoot him in the back… let ‘em. No way would his mother have let him fuck his own sister… unless she never knew. The sickness in the pit of Hold’s stomach grew.
It took only seconds to march over to Sage’s office. He threw open the door and watched her jump as it loudly connected with the wall behind it. She stood when she saw his face.
“What is it, baby?” she asked, rushing to his side.
Her hand reached out to him, but he cringed from the comforting touch she offered. Hold didn’t realize he was shaking. His body seized with the rage blossoming from deep down. It tainted the blood running through his veins and paralyzed him, the words stuck in his throat. How did he ask this question of the one woman who’d always been there for him?
“Talk to me, Holden. Please,” she begged, grasping her hands together against her chest. Tears sprang from her eyes.
“Is Hels… his?” he whispered, watching Sage’s face crumple with surprise and knowledge. It confused Hold, but also scared him shitless.
“God, No! N-Not Hels,” she stammered, shaking her head.
“Are you sure? Don’t lie to me, Sage.”
“I would’ve never let you be with her. That’s sick. How could you even think it?”
A relief coursed through him, cleansing the thought of incest from his body and mind. He couldn’t voice the word before now, even only to himself. Who was it then? Tara? Fuck! Hels’ little sister who’d died in the fire that killed Sam and his second wife, Paula.
“Tara?” he asked, staring at his mother. Hold remembered the little girl who resembled her older sister. The memory of Hels breaking down from the loss of her only sibling seemed fresh in his mind. She never
was able to forget it.
Sage sadly nodded. “Yes.”
“Did Ward kill ‘em?” Hold asked, knowing the answer didn’t change anything and at the same time everything. “His own daughter?”
She nervously glanced away before returning her gaze to his. Hold watched his mother coming to terms with something. He knew she held answers that he desperately needed.
“No lies, Ma,” he stated, locking his matching eyes with hers. His fingers curved around Sage’s upper arm.
“No.” The word seemed to be torn from her throat.
“Who?” Hold demanded. He had to physically restrain himself from bodily shaking her when she glanced away from him. “Tell me, Sage. Don’t lie for him. Who fuckin’ killed them?”
Her tear-filled eyes returned to him. “Me,” she whispered.
“What?” he asked, his heart pounding like a jackhammer in his chest. “No. Don’t you fuckin’ say it! Why?”
Hold let go of her. The sinister thought of his own mother killing an innocent child crippled him. Sage was capable of many things, but this wasn’t one of them. Was it? Was she protecting Ward? How could she? The questions kept building. He watched her sedately walk around her desk and sit down. Within minutes she’d lit a cigarette.
“I swear to you, Holden, I didn’t know she was in the trailer. I checked and when I didn’t find Tara or Hels anywhere, I left. You have to believe me,” she said, pleading with him.
“What happened?”
“I can’t… I can’t tell you,” Sage whispered.
Hold shot across the room, reacting swiftly to her words. His arm cleared the contents of her desk. Papers drifted carelessly on the air while a stapler clattered to the ground at his feet. Sage didn’t move. She sat stiffly behind her desk, taking another long drag of her smoke.
“Fuck that! You tell me everything now, or I’m out. For good!” Hold yelled. He was barely hanging on to the last strands of his sanity. “No more lies. Why did you kill them?”
Sage crushed the cigarette out directly on her barren desk. “You have to understand, Hold. Things were different back then—we were all different.”
“I don’t understand anything anymore,” he uttered into the madness surrounding him.
“Sam and Ward were always together. Best friends long before your dad and I became serious. It was hard to love one without the other. But where there’s love, there’s also hate. Jealousy. Mistrust. Family becomes your enemy in the blink of an eye,” Sage said, crossing her arms before her.
He watched his mother and realized he never really knew her. Did he ever know any of them? His father? His brothers?
“When Hels’ mother came into town she was already knocked up with her, but Sam didn’t care. He fell hard and within a week made her his old lady. Shit had been brewing with him and Ward so it calmed things for a while.”
“What things?” he asked, but saw her hesitation in speaking the truth to him. “What things, Sage? Don’t make me ask you again.”
“You always looked like me, son, with your dark hair and blue eyes. Nothing like your father. He questioned if you were…” she paused, searching for an answer that didn’t seem to come easy.
Her unanswered words hung heavy. Hold saw her spy the pack of cigs that lay scattered on the floor with everything else that had been on her desk. As much as he needed one himself, now wasn’t the time. He stomped his boot on top of the pack and twisted his heel, grinding them beneath his feet.
“Who did he think I belonged to?” Hold asked, not wanting the answer. His nostrils flared as he tried to control his breathing.
“Sam.”
Hold lifted his head to stare unseeing at the wall. The life that had been carefully crafted for him, the one that he’d lied for, killed for, sacrificed love for, was not even his for the taking. It belonged to a dead child.
“Holden, listen to me,” she said, coming to stand beside him. “You’re Ward’s son. Do you hear me?”
A small sliver of relief inserted itself in his mind at not being kin to a man he hated. And in the same breath, gut-wrenching agony at not belonging almost buckled his knees. His emotions warred within him. Too many possibilities representing who he never was or never would be played havoc with his mind.
“Sam is not your father,” Sage kept repeating.
Her words finally reached Hold. “You weren’t with him?”
She glanced guiltily away. Damn! Fuck! He had to know.
“Tell me everything,” he growled, the fury battering him from the inside out.
And so she did. Sage explained how after Hels was born, her mama, Els, went on to be the club whore—even though she was Sam’s old lady. It caused friction within the entire MC. Then add on to that, Ward’s growing suspicion of his only son’s paternity. It was a cauldron filled with deadly mixes, waiting to explode.
The jealousy ate at Ward until he retaliated by knocking up Els. But Sage brokenly admitted that Ward fell for her. When Els didn’t heel to him like everyone else, he threatened her—but she only laughed in his face. The careless bitch didn’t care that she tore the Hell’s Highwaymen apart so her suspicious death didn’t upset any of them in the least. The damage had already been wrought.
Sam grew restless with the club, with Ward. One day he called to tell Sage that he was going to Ward about Hold possibly being his son. He wanted to raise his own child and let Ward raise the daughter he fathered. Sage thought she could go reason with him, but when she arrived at his home, Paula, Sam’s wife, was drunk and started running her mouth. She said Sam had told her everything and she couldn’t wait to expose club secrets, especially Sage’s.
“I snapped. The Hell’s Highwaymen are our family, Hold, and they wanted to break it up, destroy the very person that mattered the most to me. You,” Sage cried, staring directly at him. “So I took the gun out of my purse and ended it.”
“You ended it?” Hold automatically repeated. Was this fucked-up reality really happening?
“Yes. Paula had already mentioned that the girls weren’t there, but I doubled-checked each room. Then I went to my car to call Ward, and waited.”
“What did you tell him?”
“The truth as he knew it. That Paula and Sam wanted to expose Tara to the club. And in the process, destroy the MC. Ward told me to go home and I did. He and Sandman evidently set fire to the trailer, but didn’t check under the beds. They didn’t check under the bed,” she quietly added to herself.
Hold didn’t know what to say to his mother. He knew what this life had made her, what it had made of all of them. He couldn’t judge her for murder, because he’d murdered too. Ended a life to protect those he loved. Sacrificed himself for the club over and over. But a child had paid the price for her secrets and another continued to.
“How could you raise Hels, knowing what you did to her sister and dad? She saw right through your bullshit,” Hold said, nudging the stapler with his foot.
“We gave that girl a home. She’da been in a sucky foster home if it weren’t for us,” she said, standing to walk over to the window. “I think Ward hates her because she reminds him so much of her mother… including turning away from you, son. Just like Els turned away from Ward.”
“And what about you, Sage? It wasn’t because of your Christian duty that you took her in. Maybe you kept her to torture Ward a little for cheating on you.” Like Hels, Hold now saw right through her bullshit.
She only shrugged her shoulders, not denying it. “You have to let all this go: the club is your family, Ward is your father, this is the life we all chose. Do what’s best for the MC, Hold,” Sage said, never glancing at him as she stared at something on the other side of the glass.
“Fuck you, Sage,” Hold bit out, his rage rolling like a black sea underneath his skin.
He turned to exit her office, walking past club members who loitered outside of the garage. The shout of his name didn’t stop Hold as he hopped on his motorcycle. Nothing could have halted his escape. Wh
o was he? A bastard? Every accusation ran rampant, pushing him to speed faster, driving him farther away to a nothingness that awaited him.
“I’m packing a couple of things and I’ll be over. Don’t worry,” Shyla said into her cellphone that she balanced between her chin and shoulder. Both hands were busy folding some clothes she planned to bring to her aunt and uncle’s house.
The club seemed to be imploding in on itself. She wasn’t exactly sure what was going down. On the drive home she thought about leaving, but she couldn’t now. Not with how she felt about Hold. Shyla knew that running wasn’t an option: she’d carry him with her no matter where she went.
“Don’t worry, Aunt D. I’m a big girl. See ya soon,” she finished, disconnecting the call.
Badger had ordered Hard Ink to close for the day, sending Diamond home. Shyla was to join her. Safety in numbers is what he said. But where was Hold? Part of her wanted to rush to find him, to protect him. But from what? From whom?
Shyla knew he could handle his own business. She’d seen the hard part of Hold. It’s what was left of the softness that he never showed that worried her most. The side she needed him not to lose. It could cost him what was left of his humanity.
Her unlocked apartment door swung open, drawing her immediate attention. Hold stood at the threshold, still bare-chested from earlier, his wild gaze finding hers. She’d been unwilling to remove his shirt that he gave her. It still covered her body, claiming Shyla as his.
Hold’s damp eyes glittered, narrowing toward her, his cheekbones reddened with whatever emotion drove him. She watched him stride angrily toward her, every step bringing him dangerously closer. His darkened eyes spoke of the edge of violence that rode him hard. It seethed around them both, demanding to be freed. Hold held his pain close, rarely sharing it, but now it was visible on the surface. It almost scared Shyla to be a witness.
He didn’t stop when he reached her, but brought his hand up to cradle Shyla’s face. His body careened into hers. She gasped as she began to stumble back, but he caught her with his other arm, securely locking it around her waist, forcing their bodies tightly together. Hold had no idea how desperately Shyla wanted him, not because he was handsome as sin, but because of who he was inside, accepting who he’d become.