Cruz (Dark and Dirty Sinners' MC #5) - Serena Akeroyd Page 0,110

girl. I hope she brings you peace, Nyx. I really hope so."

He tensed in my arms. "I don't deserve peace."

"No? Well, I disagree, and I know Carly would too." Much like I had Giulia, I leaned up on tiptoe and pressed my lips to his cheek. "I want you to be happy, brother."

"You going to stick around to see me fuck up as a dad?"

"Nah, I'm gonna stick around to make sure you don't." I smiled at him.

"Wasn't sure. I overheard your conversation with Cruz."

"Figured you did."

He grunted. "Don't want you to go back to New Orleans, Indy. Want you here. Right here. Might not seem like it's the safest place to be, but whoever the fuck declared war on us will pay. You and I both know it."

"I do, and that's what I don't want to get involved in."

"Cruz was right. We were born tangled up in this mess. Moving won't change shit. Just means you're dealing with it all alone. I don't want that for you, sis."

"Well, it's a good thing you knocked Giulia up then, isn't it?" I muttered gruffly. "Because I sure as hell am staying around now."

His grin was pleased even if he did look a little nauseated, and I got it.

Nyx was a murderer.

A bad man by anyone's definition.

Just not Giulia's.

They'd made a baby together, and I meant it when I said I hoped it gave him the peace he was chasing, even if he didn't know it.

With one last squeeze, he let me go, releasing me from the most meaningful conversation I'd had with my brother in years.

When I saw the councilors gently hugging Giulia thanks to her injury and ribbing her about her kid being born with horns, saw Rex who was staring at nothing like he’d heard bupkis and Rachel whose face was tight with longing, I released a sigh.

So much was up in the air, so much was wrong, so much needed to change, and yet, deep in Giulia’s belly was the seed that heralded the future.

I needed to remember that.

Cruz

The day after the bombing, shit was still up in the air, which, I figured, was to be expected.

That damn clubhouse had housed a dozen of us permanently, which meant we had no clothes, no toiletries, no nothing.

Throw in the fact that our phones had been lost to the blast, and that it had taken out our monitoring equipment too, well, things couldn’t get much worse.

Not only had we lost people, good people, we'd lost our identities as well.

None of us had any goddamn ID, except for those of us who'd been carrying their wallets on them, but if you lived at the clubhouse, you didn't often carry cash on you. It would be like going to the john in your house and taking your fucking briefcase along for the ride if you were a regular businessman.

The clubhouse was our home, and we'd just lost it.

I was grateful the bunkhouses were still standing, even if they were severely damaged, because it meant Stone and Steel hadn't lost everything, neither had Lodestar, the girls, or Ghost and the others.

That Tatána had been found where she had, well, it didn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that E equaled MC squared, did it?

Tatána and David had been mixed up together, but deciding when to slot that information in, to keep the council in the loop when the major congregator of information and intel was still knocked out in a hospital bed wasn’t easy.

Triage of the clusterfucks going down in our life was something that was difficult to calculate, and for the first time in a long while, I was grateful not to be on the council, grateful that I didn't have to make the big decisions for the MC as a whole.

A part of me had been resentful about being nothing more than a gofer, but now the time came for life-altering choices to be made, I was glad to be in the backseat.

Figuratively and literally, because our bikes had gotten caught up in the blast. Far as the Feds could tell us, they were actually the major propellent in the bomb.

Sure, the boom had been big, but the gas in our tanks had just taken things to a whole other level. Making the explosion gnarlier, and just that more ferocious.

So, as I was one of the brothers who was considered closer to the council than most, I was riding with Link and Nyx in a cage toward the Budget Basement