him, then stared up at me. “I hope he suffered,” was all she said, and though I wanted to wince, wanted to tell her not to say shit like that about the Prez of this club, I couldn’t reprimand her. Not when Bomber had treated her the way he had.
“He did,” I told her softly.
“What was he mumbling?”
“Like I said, about hiding shit.” Blowing out a breath, I admitted, “I thought he was talking to your mom at first. He kept calling out her name, then he’d call her a bitch for leaving him. And, this is the truth, ‘for making me do it.’”
Her nostrils flared. “Why burn down the house? You think he buried her body in the walls or something? Were any bones discovered at the property or in the wreckage?”
I shrugged. “He warned us about the bones, said it was an enemy. He told us to pay off the cops, and we did. Your mom… he always just said she ran off. Didn’t he talk about her to you?”
“No. Why would he? She ran off. That had to sting his pride and he spent most of his time pissed at me, I wasn’t about to make him even angrier. It didn’t even matter because I remembered nothing about her anyway.”
And she’d never asked either. At least not us, and we were the ones she asked everything. Fuck, we’d even had to talk to her about sex and periods—information Axe’s mom had given us to prepare her for what was about to happen.
That had not been a fun conversation.
To this day, I wasn’t sure who’d been more mortified. Her or us. Fuck, yeah, now I thought about it—us. The guys who’d killed at eighteen to get in as prospects had been mumbling about periods and menstruation. Knowing Lucie, she’d probably already Googled that shit and had made us discuss it just to embarrass the fuck out of us.
Now that I thought about it…
Fuck, I bet she had.
Shame I couldn’t call her out on that right this second.
Instead, I just told her, “She supposedly ran off around your fourth birthday. Maybe she never did. Maybe he found out you weren’t his biologically.”
A grunt escaped her. “It would make sense, considering he’d never have let her go without chasing her down, bringing her back here, and making her life fucking miserable.”
I shrugged. “Wasn’t like we could argue when he didn’t go after her. His bitch, his wishes.” I cut Dagger a look and saw his concerned gaze was focused on her. “We all thought it was weird, but we weren’t about to argue. Not with Bomber.” Who put the psycho in psychopath.
Her jaw flexed at my statement, but I wasn’t about to change it. Whether or not she liked being called a bitch was tough shit. She knew how it rolled in this world. Trouble was, Ryan had probably been the softest of us all. Not that he’d been a pansy ass or anything like that, but he’d been raised by non-bikers. People who didn’t understand how things worked.
Though he’d wifed her, he probably hadn’t called her his old lady.
“I wonder who your pop is,” Dagger mused, and I shot him a look.
“Really? That’s where you’re taking this conversation?”
He shrugged. “What else is there to wonder about? I mean, fuck. If he killed his wife, they’re both dead, it’s not like we can get justice for Maria post-mortem.”
“I hate that you’re right,” Lucie whispered, and there was such starkness in her eyes that it hurt me. Literally fucking hurt me. Worse than that time I’d had a bar stool wrapped around my goddamn head.
I blew out a breath as the desire to comfort her hit me just as hard as that stool. Lucie had always called to me in ways no other woman had. Back when she’d been seventeen, that had felt right. After? It had felt like I’d been condemned to a life sentence. Loving a manipulative, lying bitch who’d tossed over the MC for some cash?
A living nightmare.
It was hard, but my free will was snatched from me by this conversation. I’d never anticipated talking to her about this today. I’d wanted to discuss how Amaryllis was ignoring me, but even then, it wouldn’t have been much of a conversation. I knew, in my heart of hearts, Lucie wouldn’t have said shit to turn Amaryllis against me.
A woman who’d introduced her daughter to four men as her ‘daddies’ wouldn’t do that. All along, Lucie had been working up