Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
"Yeah, stupid teenage rebellion shit. This, kid, this is not some shit I am going to let slide."
"I'm not a kid anymore, Dad," she reminded him.
"I know that."
"I don't have to answer to anyone."
"See, now, that is where you're wrong," he informed her, leaning forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. Somehow, it was more intimidating than if he rose to full height. Menacing, that was the best way I could think to describe it. "You come back into my house, you upset my family, that is when you fucking answer to me."
One glance at Ferryn let me know something very interesting.
While she had dealt with Reign, the father her whole life, she had clearly never dealt with Reign, the outlaw biker president.
"I'm not back in your house."
"This is my house," he declared, waving an arm out.
"And I didn't upset your family. And, for the record, they're my family too."
"Yeah?" he asked, giving her eye-contact that made me fucking squirm in my seat and it wasn't even directed at me. "I don't know what the fuck kind of warped ideas you got in your head about family, Ferryn. But family doesn't run away and leave everyone else behind. Family doesn't make everyone else worry. Family doesn't waltz back in here and expect for everything to be okay without giving so much as a simple explanation for where they've been and what they've been doing. That's not what family does."
Really, she had no comeback to that.
There was no comeback to that.
"You don't want an explanation."
"I'm sitting here, aren't I?"
"You don't want to know what I've been doing, what I've become."
"Look, kid, I get you wanting to protect your mom from ugly realities. I even appreciate that. But this is me. You don't have to protect me from shit. I doubt you've done shit that I haven't done in my life."
That was true enough.
I hadn't been around in his early days or during the street wars that shook the club and decimated its numbers a long while ago, but I had heard the stories. I knew how much blood was on Reign's hands.
"You haven't been chained up in a basement wondering if it was going to be you who was raped next, Dad," she told him, giving him the same eye-contact he'd given her.
Reign shocked back at that a little, maybe not expecting quite so much bluntness from her. "No, that I haven't."
"And you didn't have to worry that those same men who trapped you in that basement would use another girl's rape against you either."
Chris.
She was talking about Chris.
The other girl in the basement. The one who hadn't been able to escape predatory hands. The one who she managed to save. The one who was adopted by her Aunt Lo and Uncle Cash when they brought her back to Navesink Bank to heal.
"No," he agreed.
"You don't know how that fucks with your head, Dad. Like I know you think you can imagine, but trust me, you can't imagine."
"You're right. But I know you got out. You were free."
To that, there was a small scoff.
"I wasn't free. There's no way to be free of that. It's a part of you. It fucks with your head."
"And that is what getting help is for."
"I didn't want help. I wanted to make it stop."
"Make it stop?" he repeated.
"I wanted to make sure that bastards like the ones who had me would never be able to sleep soundly again. I wanted them to sit up at night worrying about people like me coming for them."
"That's what you've been doing then?" he asked. "You've been hunting them down."
"I've been taking them out," she corrected.
And suddenly, oh, suddenly it all made sense, didn't it?
The coldness. The distance. That reaction to me grabbing her arm once. The random disappearance right after she'd just arrived.
She'd been dealing with the scum of the Earth since she left. No wonder she thought any softness was a weakness. In a world like that, it was.
"Taking them out," Reign repeated, rolling the words around, likely trying to imagine the little girl she'd once been doing anything even related to murder.
"Yes."
"How?"
"Are you asking how I tracked them down, what skills I acquired, or what method of murder I utilized?"
"Yes," Reign answered, sitting back.
"Working at Hailstorm, I got to know some of the case files, some of the people Aunt Lo couldn't get to join her ranks. I tracked one down."
"And he was willing to train you?"
"Yes. He believed in my mission. I tracked the traffickers down on the dark web." Like several of her aunts knew how to do. "And I couldn't use guns because the cops couldn't be alerted."
"Up close and personal," Reign murmured, clearly mentally tallying the repercussions such acts could inflict on a person mentally, emotionally.
"Yes."
"Someone almost cut your throat," he added, voice a little rougher than usual, betraying a bit of his fatherly concern for the first time.