The End (New Adult Biker Gang Romance) (Night Horses MC Book 7) (2 page)

Those were my father’s footsteps.

I’d heard him a thousand times.

The betrayal coated my tongue like chalk, made it hard to talk, to even breathe.

He walked into the room.

Until that moment, I was hoping it wasn’t true.

I was hoping that the cold look I’d seen on his face earlier that day was all in my head, and the father who played catch with me and carried me to bed when I fell asleep playing was the real man.

Fuck this.

“Megan,” he said, his voice soft with disappointment. “You were supposed to go home to your mother.”

I stared at him. Merle stared at him. Alex stared at him - and aimed his pistol between his eyes. Jackson kept his focus on the other man.

I didn’t say anything. I just stared at him, tears running down my cheeks.

“I’m sorry, little rabbit,” he said. “I was out of work for too long. The money was too good. Your mother was going to divorce me if I didn’t find something, she said she was sick of me moping around the house.”

I remembered that. She hated seeing him miserable. I heard her tell one of her friends that she’d never leave him, but he needed a fire lit under his butt.

I didn’t want to feel bad for him.

Merle’s face darkened with anger.

“Don’t call her that, like everything’s okay,” he snarled.

“Shut the fuck up,” my father said calmly. My father. The man who wouldn’t say ‘damn.’

Merle took a step towards him.

“You’re not going to hurt me,” he said. “My little rabbit is mad at me, but she will never forgive you if you kill me.”

The worst part is that Merle and I both knew that it was true.

I’d look at him, for the rest of my life, and see the man who killed my father.

In that moment, I hated my father.

I wanted to scream and yell, to throw myself at him and beat him with my fists.

I didn’t.

I didn’t even pull the gun out of my pocket.

Violence would not help here.

No matter how much I wanted it.

“So, Dad,” I said. “Why did you let el Jefe take me? Why did you help him?”

“I didn’t help him,” he said. “When I found out, I was furious.”

I shook my head.

“The guys who took me, they knew where I’d be. They were quiet, but they weren’t THAT quiet. Were you waiting up? Did you listen to me crying? Did you hear them threaten Bear?”

He had the decency to look away.

“Did you hear that I went with them to protect you?” I demanded. “I tried to protect you and Mom. Why didn’t you protect me?”

I was crying in earnest now. I wondered if he could even understand what I was saying through my sobs.

Merle walked over and put his arm around my shoulder.

The other four men didn’t move.

This was the wrong place, the wrong time, for an emotional family confrontation.

This was a gang standoff.

How the fuck did my father and I end up in the middle of it?

How is this my life?

“It was the only way I could keep you safe,” he finally said. “Better scared than with trash like him.”

“Trash like Merle?” I asked, hardly believing my ears. “Dad, he respects my wishes. He’s kind to me. He’s helped me. How does that make him trash?”

My father’s face was starting to darken with anger.

“He’s a lowlife with no future,” my father said.

“Oh, so he should have gone to school and gotten a practical degree? Like accounting? He’d have still wound up in this room, apparently,” I said. “How the fuck are you any different?”

“Language!” my father snapped.

I shook my head.

“Nope,” I said.

It was childish, but… I flipped him off.

“You’re a hypocritical dirtbag,” I said. “Fuck you, and fuck the horse you rode in on.”

I turned and walked away.

Merle followed me.

“Don’t wait for us, or anything,” Jackson called. “We’ll be fine here. No, really.”

I stopped.

“Do we need to go back?” I asked Merle.

He shook his head.

“If he’d wanted us to stay, he wouldn’t have been all sarcastic like that. Jackson is not subtle when shit needs doing.”

I thought of the man knocking on the door and simply saying, “We’re fucked.”

Sounded like Merle was right.

I tried not to listen to what was happening behind us, but my ears couldn’t help but strain to hear.

Nothing.

It was silent.

Merle and I walked out of the dusty building and shut the door.
“Why don’t I drive?” Merle asked.
 

Numbly, I took the key from my pocket and handed it to him.

I couldn’t really think about anything but my father.

About the betrayal. How… how hypocritical he was.

Preaching perfect suburban morals and selling heroin.

“What will they do to him?” I asked Merle after I’d sat in the passenger seat and buckled up on autopilot.

He hesitated.

“Depends on what he does and says,” he said. “There’s more information we need. Suppliers, connections. He’s a big piece, but not the only piece.”

I nodded.

“Hopefully, he’ll cooperate, and they’ll just let him go. Fucking up a family man in the community won’t do us any good. Going after the source will shut them down for a while,” Merle continued.

I nodded again.

I think I looked calm, outwardly, but inside I was a hurricane of misery. What the fuck happened?

“Turn here,” I said.

Merle did, without asking why.

“I want… I want to see my mother,” I said.

He nodded.

The conversation with my mother was one of the worst of my life. Me and Merle sitting awkwardly on the sofa, fearing that my father would burst in at any minute, my mother seated on the edge of the chair, back ramrod-straight.

I laid out my evidence calmly. Shockingly calmly. I guess I was  better able to deal with it than I feared.

Or maybe I was just not coping at all.

Whatever.

“I… I don’t know if I can believe this,” she said, finally.

She looked like her world had been turned upside down and shaken like a snowglobe.

Is that how I looked? I’d have to ask Merle later.

I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket.

I went to the recording I had just taken.

Before I hit play, I met my mother’s eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

My father’s voice came from the speakers. Small. Tinny. A little hard to hear.

Unmistakably, undeniably him.

My mother’s mouth fell open.

I was afraid she’d look shattered again. I didn’t want to see her broken.

She didn’t.

She was angry.

I saw it in the tightening of her mouth, in the widening of her eyes.

Her hands balled into fists on her knees.

“I’m going to kill him,” she said.

“Ma’am,” Merle began.

She held up her hand.

“I’m going to kill him,” she repeated. “He let our daughter be taken from me. Twice.”

Merle wisely fell silent.

When the recording was done, we all sat there in the silence for long minutes.

“What now?” I asked.

I really, really hoped that one of them had an answer, because I sure didn’t.

“Now,” she said, “We have him arrested.”

Merle cleared his throat. She nodded at him.

“If you send cops to where he is now, two of my men will be arrested,” he said.

My mother almost asked why the fuck she should care. I saw it in her eyes.

“They’re two of the ones who have helped keep me safe,” I said.

She nodded, slowly.

“Okay. How do we have him arrested without having your… your men arrested?” she asked Merle.

He winced, but he had a plan.

“Simple is better than flashy,” he said.

-----------------

Jackson and Alex played their parts well, with a few texts of instruction from Merle.

They were to let my father go. No matter how badly they wanted to get more information, they were to let him go.

Jackson followed him and took notes on where he went before he finally came home.

When my father came home that night, he found me and my mother sitting on the staircase inside, waiting for him.

“I told her everything,” I said, nodding at my mother.

We both stared at him.

He didn’t say anything. There was not a trace of guilt on his face. There was not a trace of anything on his face.

How much of a monster was my father, really?

None of us spoke for a few more long seconds.

“What I want to know,” my mother said. “Is how you started. How did you even find who to make a deal with?”

“I read the police reports,” he said.

She nodded.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “I did this to save our marriage, to protect our family.”

“Hard drugs ruin lives,” my mother spat, suddenly venomous. “Even if you did try to protect our life together, you ruined other people’s. Maybe killed them.”

She stood up.

“You helped a violent criminal kidnap our daughter,” she said.

She took a deep breath.

“Fuck. You. I’m filing for divorce,” she said.

I didn’t know which was more shocking. My parents getting a divorce, or my mother cussing.

This was all too much for me.