“Fuck is right,” I agreed. “Now, fuck off.”
I held eye contact with him for a long beat, just to reinforce my threat, and then let go, stepping back immediately with my arm moving around the girl to bring her out of reach with me.
“When I find you again, you’re in deep fucking shit,” he spat at the redhead before gunning the engine and roaring off down the street.
I watched the car turn the corner before looking at the girl beside me. She was absolutely lovely. Exactly that word. Heart-shaped face with delicately winged brows, a perfectly formed mouth, and a small nose topped with large pale brown eyes the colour of sunlight on syrup. She was so beautifully feminine she almost looked like a cartoon, but the glaze to those eyes and the jitter in her thin frame made her something all too human.
A drug addict about to come down from their high.
What a tragedy.
“Hey, honey,” I started to say softly, the way one would talk to a stray cat, but she looked startled and then angry with me for addressing her like that.
“How do you know my name?” she demanded.
Her eyes cut to the garage and the emblem of The Fallen MC Nova had spray painted on the side of the clubhouse.
“Fuck me, fuck,” she cursed viciously, then took a huge step away from me as if I was infected with the plague. “Listen, bitch, you keep you and yours the hell away from me. You hear me? I don’t need to be messed up in biker drama.”
“Your name is Honey,” I said slowly, less a question that a memory dredged up from the banks of my brain.
Honey Yves was the daughter of Farrah, the ex-wife of Zeus and ex-mother of Harleigh Rose and my King.
I’d never heard of anyone else named Honey, and I very much doubted it was a common name so…
“Honey Yves?” I asked, vaguely aware of movement in my periphery.
She shivered and clutched her stained hobo bag to her chest as she started to back away from me. “You don’t know me. And listen, I didn’t need your help with Cisco, and I don’t need your help now, you get me? I’m a grown ass woman.”
Lies. She wasn’t a day over fifteen, maybe sixteen. I’d taught teenagers for enough years to be able to peg their age.
“I’m not trying to take you anywhere or force you to do anything,” I told her with my hands open to the heavens. “I just wanted to get that creep away from you.”
“Yeah, well, don’t expect a thanks or anything.”
“I don’t.” I bit my lip, warring with myself. “Listen, I’m starving, do you want to grab a bite to eat with me?”
I wasn’t hungry. I’d made Ares and me grilled cheese in the clubhouse kitchen before we went outside to read, but Honey looked frail. As if she hadn’t eaten more than a candy bar in days.
I knew she had nothing to do with King and Harleigh Rose, that they hadn’t even seen the girl since she was a baby, but I still felt compelled to do something. It was just human decency.
She peered at me suspiciously and licked her lips almost convulsively, a high tic I recognized from years ago when my own brother had partied too hard and too often.
“Why?” she asked, and the one word was an accusation.
I shrugged. “I’m hungry as I said. I also believe in the sisterhood. You were basically just accosted on the street, and I’m feeling like you could use a girl friend to chat to.”
She snorted, and whatever tenuous relationship I’d been trying to form between us dissolved like sugar in water. “Yeah, right. For all I know, you and your Fallen bastards work for Cisco and the lot of them too. No way I’m going anywhere with you, bitch.”
“Wait,” I urged, reaching out to stay her with a hand on her arm.
She went berserk at my touch, whipping her bag around to knock it savagely into my chest, robbing the air from my chest.
I bent over with a loud exhalation, clutching my belly as I tried to breathe.
“Fuck,” a familiar voice exclaimed as the gate jangled open and then motorcycle boots appeared in my limited view.
A hand went to my back, slid up my spine, and cradled the back of my head before King dropped into a squat beside me. His pale blue eyes were glacial with anger as he studied me for further injury.
“Who the fuck did this to you?” he demanded.
I sucked in a shaky breath, tipped my head to find Honey long gone, and said, “Your sister.”
Cressida
* * *
“I can’t believe it,” I said, still shocked by the news hours later. “How could they have the balls to set something like that up in Entrance of all places? This is Fallen territory.”