Boner and Curtains were in my living room playing video games on a console they must have brought themselves while Heckler and Blade cheered them on, betting on the outcome. Cleo went to Axe-Man, who sat in my window seat looking out at the snow falling lightly in the street as if each flake was a memory he was desperate not to miss.
Out the window on the back door, I could make out Kodiak teaching Ransom how to pull his gun seamlessly from his holster.
Everyone was there.
My entire biker family.
Except Priest.
“Hey, sweet Bea,” Loulou called when she saw me standing silently in the middle of the chaos. She moved out of the circle of her husband’s arms and came to me, kissing me on the cheek and offering Angel the chance to do the same. “How’s my sunshine girl today?”
Angel pulled at my hair, then pulled at her own as she giggled, obviously delighted we shared the same pale curls. I took her from Loulou so I could drag in a deep breath of her sweet-scented hair.
Unsurprisingly, she smelled of cherries.
“I’m okay,” I told her honestly. Even though I felt overwhelmed with emotion, it was mostly happiness tinged with a cloud of malcontent. I wondered obsessively where Priest might be and why he was absent from such a gathering again.
If it was self-imposed isolation or deliberate on the part of the club.
“You look tired,” Lou noticed, reaching out to cup my cheek. “I wish you’d stayed with us again last night. I feel better when I know you’re safe.”
“I was safe.” There was nowhere safer for me than at Priest’s side. “And honestly, I loved staying with you guys, but I missed my own space.”
Lou bit her lip but nodded. “Okay, I can understand that. Did…did Priest stay with you last night?”
I ducked behind a sheaf of hair, ostensibly to pepper kisses all over pretty Angel’s plump cheeks, but mostly to hide from my observant sister.
She sighed, but then her arms were around me, and all I could feel was her soft embrace. “Oh, honey, I can’t say I don’t wish you could’ve picked someone a helluva lot easier to love, but you’re a Lafayette, so I guess I should’ve been prepared.”
I grinned at her when she pulled away. “We tend to like dangerous men.”
Both of us looked over at Phillipa, who appeared behind Smoke’s massive back, laughing at something he said. Maja and Buck sat with them at my dining room table, the older contingent of the club shooting the shit together.
“You think she’s finally going to agree to go out with him?” I asked Lou.
She shook her head, absently playing with Angel’s little foot. “She’s too scared to be different.”
“Different isn’t bad,” I declared even though I knew my sister had already learned that lesson. “Just because something is different than the norm doesn’t make it intrinsically bad. Why do people fear so much what they don’t automatically understand?”
“People want to be prepared. If they know what’s coming, they don’t fear it. People who act outside the law and normal social mores like the club are aberrations. They don’t know what we’ll do in any given circumstance, and that’s frightening to them.”
“I wonder if that’s why the killer is targeting people they feel are on the fringes of society. The prostitute, the First Nations’ woman, the teacher who had an affair with Kodiak…” I mused. “Maybe the killer is trying to cull chaos.”
Loulou snorted, eyeing the mess of bodies and noise surrounding us. “Good luck to them if they want to cull all this.”
I shivered even though she was joking. I knew the mind of a serial killer. A massive, thriving outlaw organization like The Fallen would be a big, red target for someone obsessed with conformity.
“Don’t look so scared, little Lafayette,” Z said as he stalked up to his wife and claimed her again with a big hand at the dip in her waist. Monster scowled at me and shook his fist as if to emphasise his father’s point. “We got the club on alert, nothin’s gonna happen to ya, yeah?”
I bit my lip because I wasn’t worried about something happening to me. I was worried about them.
“Why did you guys all come over?” I asked, desperate to change the topic and rid myself of this persistent forbidding chill. “You know I have to leave for Church in an hour?”
Harleigh Rose appeared beside me and slung an arm around my shoulders. “Are you kidding? You’re being obsessed over by a killer. You’re lucky we even let you out of our sight.”
“Which is why you must be at our place for dinner tonight,” Cressida declared from her spot on the ground, snuggled up at King’s side. Prince babbled happily from her arms, and I felt something like envy tighten my womb. “I’m making apple pie for dessert.”