When she stopped talking, I realized how heavily I was breathing.
She started talking again.
“Now I see you sitting here, letting them twist shit in your head. Talking yourself into seeing all that’s going down as on you. When you did one thing. You made a tough decision. Look after your brother and get mired in shit or don’t look after your brother and mire someone you love in shit. There was no right decision to that, Evan. You didn’t make the wrong one. You just made a decision. And you’d be in a place right now, beating yourself up, no matter which way that swung, and he put you there. You should not have had to make any decision at all. Do not take that on. Do not let him take away any more of what you fought to have.”
She reached out and took my hand in a firm grip.
And she kept going.
“I know you were sitting here, planning to bolt. Planning that, when I heard you today, gabbing with your girls in your bedroom about shoes. I saw a man who digs you sorting through your vinyl, smiling at himself because you like Metallica. I saw the Evan and the life she had that was meant to be. Not a single fucking soul in this room, or out of it, outside members of your family, are pissed at you about what’s going down. What we’d be pissed about is if you bolt.”
“Danny got shot,” I whispered.
“Yes, he did, and he survived, and I’ll tell you right now, you got a battle on your hands and it’s not what you think. The battle you got is that he allowed that man to get to you and he’s killing himself right now he let that happen. Now you got a real important decision to make. You can give in, let them win, or you can fight for what you deserve. You can take off and leave Mag where he’s at in his head right now, or you can be here and stand strong for your man. What’s it gonna be, Evan? What really makes you? Who really are you? What life do you really want to lead?”
“I wanna get my degree,” I told her quietly. “I want to stop stripping. I want friends to go to movies with. I want a life not defined by my family.” I pulled in a breath and said, “I want Danny.”
She shook my hand. “Then fight for that.”
I felt something weird, like an electric hum, skating up my spine.
“You want Mag, so you understand all there is to have if you have him,” she continued. “Nikki wanted him too. It’s Mag’s to tell you and I’d normally let him do that, but I can’t now. Both of your futures are at stake.”
I thought I’d been listening closely.
But now that she was talking about Mag, my ears hurt, I was listening so hard.
“He’s shared,” she told me. “Mo’s shared. She loved him. She wanted a life with him. She also wanted to dictate what that life would be and made a faulty play for the purpose of protecting what they had. She wanted Mag to quit his job and do something less dangerous. In other words, she demanded that Mag not be Mag. Which means, in the end, she didn’t love Mag. Not more than she loved herself. And there’s one single thing I’ll give to your family. They taught you, if you love someone, you let them be who they are.”
She squeezed my hand tight, didn’t let go and didn’t stop talking.
“That is why I chose you for Mag. And I think the world of you, Evie, but it would disappoint the fuck out of me you gave him a hint he could lay his hands on something that beautiful and then took it away.”
“I need your sister to ask her husband to find a way to get me in to see Mick,” I blurted.
Her head twitched and she asked, “Say what?”
“I need Jet to ask Eddie to find a way to get me in to see Mick.”
Slowly, she smiled.
“And I need my phone,” I went on.
But since I could get my phone myself, I got up and found it.MagMag walked with Boone into the office suite with his arm in a sling, a bottle of painkillers in his pocket and a need to kill somebody.
He looked right immediately, toward the wall of windows beyond which was the conference room, and saw Hawk was not fucking around.
Tack was there, as was his son, Rush, who had taken over from Tack as president of the Chaos MC.
Brock and Mitch were there too, as was Lee Nightingale and his right-hand man, Luke Stark.
Axl and Auggie were in the room, Mo was standing outside.
“Evie okay?” he asked Mo.
“Hangin’ at your place. Tex and Dutch are on her inside and Rush’s got Joker and Jagger keeping watch outside.”