Cruz (Dark and Dirty Sinners' MC #5) - Serena Akeroyd Page 0,131
hospital in a day's time to sit with Bear, but now the mass funeral service was done, and we'd laid so many Sinners to rest, I knew it was the start of change.
Not necessarily good change, either.
I wasn't a fool.
We'd been in a stasis. Our home had been hit, and we needed to rebuild. The ex-Prez, a man who was like a surrogate dad to all of us, had been horrendously maimed, and we'd lost men and women whose deaths we'd mourn for a long time.
But that stasis was going to come to an end.
I'd already been warned about the 'war' that the Sinners were supposedly engaged in with the Famiglia, but now they'd pulled this move—assuming it was the Italians—there was no way this was the end of it.
The guys would hit back harder than Thor slamming down his hammer, and to be honest, I was grateful for it.
The people behind this deserved to pay.
With their lives.
As I slipped into the chair behind the desk, relief hit me as I toed off the Doc Martens' I'd worn to walk on the grassy marsh where we buried our dead in the private graveyard on our land, and pushed my feet into flip-flops.
Wriggling my toes once they were liberated, I sat up just in time to see Giulia pushing the door open.
"Hey!" I arched a brow at her. "Didn't expect to be seeing you so soon."
She sighed. "You're normal. I need that right now."
I blinked at that. "Me? Normal?"
Her lips twisted into a smile. "Yeah. You're more normal than your brother, that's for fucking sure." She sniffed. "He only wants me to either never leave the house or walk around with a Prospect."
I shrugged. "Makes sense. You're carrying precious cargo. You had to know that Nyx was going to make his psycho ass of before look positively Hannibal Lecter-like now."
Her nose crinkled. "Shit. You're not making this better."
I just grinned, before I peered outside and saw the Prospect leaning against a truck, his gaze on his phone.
There were some new faces I didn't recognize since the explosion had taken place on the night of a patch-in-party that had taken Giulia's brother, Hawk, and Jaxson, a brother we'd buried today, and made them full members of the MC. But a few guys had also been sworn in as Prospects, and they tended to get the shittiest of jobs.
Like guarding irate mothers-to-be.
Not a job for a faint-hearted man. Not when that mother-to-be was Giulia, at any rate.
"How's Hawk doing?" I asked, my gaze still on the Prospect.
She sniffed. "Spent most of his time pissed this week."
I grimaced. "I think a lot of the brothers have spent way too much time at the bars around here. The ones not tucked up in the hospital, anyway.”
"Yeah, dumb fucks. Like that's going to do anything."
"Sometimes you just need to forget," I mused, aware I sounded wistful and not really caring that I did.
Her brows soared. "Sounds like you've been there yourself." She tipped her head to the side. "With Carly?"
I snorted. "I was only a kid."
"Like being underage stops anyone from drinking."
“Nah, I started that when I went down to New Orleans. Things weren't great for a while, then I nearly lost my apprenticeship at the tattoo parlor I was working at, because my mentor, Jimmy, was a hardass, and that sobered me up real quick.
"Too many parties, too much booze, too many guys." I admitted with a wince. "Those weren't the days."
"You regret it?"
"Hell, yeah. But I had to make the mistakes to figure out that I wasn't—" I broke off, unsure of what I was trying to say.
"That you weren't?"
I shook my head. "It doesn't matter."
"Doesn't it?" She studied me long enough for her eyes to soften, and that wasn't necessarily a good sign with Giulia. She was more perceptive than I thought Nyx gave her credit for. Even though I had no doubt in my mind that he knew she was a smart little shit, sometimes, you could mistake someone younger than you as not being wise.
If anything, Giulia, who was at least five or six years younger than Hawk, was a damn sight wiser than her elder brother.
As for North? He had dumb POS scrawled all over his forehead.
Not that their stepmother agreed with me, seeing as she’d run off with him.
Giulia let out a shaky breath as she moved toward the storefront and peered out onto the road. “I feel bad.”
“Understandable, Giulia. We’ve just been to a mass funeral—”