I chewed my gum anxiously then decided to answer him by blowing a big bubble with my Hubba Bubba. He stared at the pink balloon as it stopped an inch from his face then shook his head when I popped it with a loud smack.
“You’re not going to tell me. My dad’s important, I can get him to help you.”
“My daddy’s important too,” I told him proudly, because Zeus Garro was the youngest officer the club had ever voted in.
He squinted at me, his eyes greener than traffic lights, encouraging me to go, go, go and tell him all my secrets. “What’s your name?”
“What’s yours?” I shot back instantly.
Another bitten-off grin. “Lionel.”
I wrinkled my nose. “That’s a stupid name.”
“Yeah? Yours is better?”
I scoffed into his face, liking that I was close enough to see the deeper ring of green around his outer irises. “Duh. It’s Harleigh Rose ’cause I’m a biker babe.”
Something flashed behind those eyes that made me lean back from him.
“Now you know my name, you wanna tell me who hit you?” he asked in a low, metallic voice that I recognized from my dad and his brothers when they weren’t screwing around anymore.
“What the hell’re you doin’ with my sister?” King’s voice called out from behind me and an instant later I was snared in his arms.
The boy stood up, so much taller than my kid brother that he had to bend his neck to look down at us. “Making sure she’s alright. She’s a kid, shouldn’t be alone in a store even in a town as small as ours. We got outlaws living here.”
“No shit,” King laughed meanly. “Think we can handle ’em more than you.”
I knew he was taking in the teenager’s nice outfit, his button-up shirt under an open blazer and pants so fancy they even had a crease in the front.
“You judging a book by its cover?” Lionel retorted, his arrow hitting home in a way that said he understood rebels.
We weren’t about judgment, not ever.
I could hear King’s teeth grinding above me. “When you don’t got much else to go on, what’s a man supposed to do but assume and move to protect?”
“A man?” Lionel laughed. “What’re you, eight years old?”
King puffed his chest out, constricting me even more in the tight circle of his arms. “Now you judgin’ based on my age? I’m eight, but I’ve been learnin’ to defend myself and my family since I could walk.”
Lionel lifted up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “No doubt in my mind that you can. Just checking in on a little girl who has a handprint plastered to her cheek.”
King’s arms spasmed around me. He hated that for me, for us, but there wasn’t much he could do. She was our mum.
“Sometimes, you gotta play the long game,” King said cryptically. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
“Could be,” my teenage friend said with a shrug. “You let it be. I’ve got the means to help you two get away from the biker fold, get you somewhere safer.”
“Nowhere safer than with Daddy,” I spoke up.
“H.R., King, get over here,” Old Sam yelled suddenly from the front of the shop.
Seconds later, shots rang out through Main Street. I’d heard the innocuous pop sound before and instantly knew it for what it was, what it meant.
Death.
Before they could stop me, I ducked out of King’s arms, swerved around Lionel’s outstretched hands and booked it to the poster covered glass front door. I pressed my face to a gap in the posters and peered out.
Nothing.
But I had this feeling, this sensation in the pit of my gut like the gates of Tartarus had opened and these horrible monsters were spilling forth, wreaking destruction on my body and taunting my soul.
Something was wrong. So wrong, I knew whatever was happening outside the doors of Mega Music was big enough to change my life.
Looking back and knowing the woman I’d become, it’s not so surprising that I defied reason and safety to yank open the door shielding me from gunshots and run into the street. I vaguely head Old Sam bellowing after me then King fighting with him as he was held back from following me, but I was too focused on finding the source of that sound, on making sure it wasn’t what my gut was telling me it was.
Main Street was a long stretch of quaint shops, eateries, the courthouse, town hall, police station, a big park, and First Light Church.
The church was across the street from Mega Music and towards the ocean, but I could see immediately that the chaos stemmed from there.
There were men in leather cuts everywhere, my father, and his brothers.
My heart seized.
I started sprinting down the asphalt.
I only made it half a block, close enough to the action to spot my father standing closest to me at the edge of the parking lot, when hands snared me from behind and pushed me to the ground. The pavement scraped my palms as I went down but the weight of the person caging me to the street didn’t descend. I twisted my head to look up at my captor and found Lionel’s face, stern and strong over my shoulder.