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I found myself sitting alone, the weight of the day, the weight of what might have been keeping me immobile.
Pagan came in telling me they couldn’t find Eve nowhere. His words sounded distant, muddled like they weren’t at all real. He offered me some comfort.
Lighting a smoke, I tried to draw some calm from the familiar action, but it was like trying to grasp smoke with bare hands. Shaky hands. My brothers, my family, they were out there, around me trying to piece together the puzzle, to understand the why and the how of Eve’s disappearance. But I was absent.
At that instant, sitting there amidst the remnants of our planned celebration, I felt isolated in a way I hadn’t in years. The brotherhood, the solidarity we shared at Royal Road even seemed a distant memory as I grappled with the possibility of having lost Eve, not to circumstance or fate, but to a choice.
Hallow’s words echoed in my mind. “She’s ran off.”
Just like before, I thought.
The idea that she might have decided to walk away from what we had, from the future we’d dreamed of together, was a blow that ended me.
The smoke from my cigarette curled up into the air, a silent witness to the turmoil churning inside me. She left me? I pondered over every argument Eve and I had and could come up with nothing that would make her up and leave me and her babies. Not one damn thing. Yet, the questions, the doubts, the fears all mingled together, forming a knot of uncertainty that I couldn’t untangle.
Where was Eve?
Why had she left?
And what did this mean for us, for the future we’d envisioned together? At the moment, those questions had no answers, leaving me adrift in a sea of confusion and concern, waiting for my brothers to bring back some semblance of clarity to the chaos that had become my wedding day.
Chapter 12
Kingpin
A heap, I sat there in the hall, the cold weight of confusion and despair pressing down on me. I lit another smoke and tried to make sense of the turmoil that had erupted outside. The news from Eve’s dad, the ruckus, the sight of Gunn grappling with Hallow, who I knew all too well, went by a different name now. Hallow shouting, drunk and enraged, blaming me for… what? Eve’s disappearance?
For a moment, I was paralyzed, the fear that Eve had left me, that she’d changed her mind, clouding my thoughts. But then, as the smoke filled my lungs, my mind started to clear. Karma. That old, cruel twist of fate. I had taken Eve from Hallow, hadn’t I? Was this how it was going to end, with karma laughing in my face?
Karma was a bitch. But I wasn’t about to let a bitch win.
I couldn’t just sit there and wallow in self-pity, not when Eve was missing. Whether or not she left me. Standing up, I crushed the cigarette beneath my boot and headed back outside, ready to face whatever came next. My brothers, who had been with me, followed my lead.
Outside, Hallow was still there, a sick reminder that my wife was not. Subdued now by my brothers but still shouting, Hallow still spewed his malice for me. But his words… they were not about Eve. He said Sky, plain as day.
“Sky ran off. It’s all because of you, Kingpin. You and your whore already practically killed her.”
Confusion reigned, but one thing was crystal clear. Eve was nowhere to be found. Everyone seemed to be talking at once.
The girls, Jassica and Leo, told me the last they’d seen of her was the night before, leaving Bootsie’s.
“Bootsie’s?”
They confirmed it and said Hallow had been there. A specter from the past come to haunt us all. Fuck.
Grabbing Hallow by the neck, I pushed him up against the clubhouse wall, my grip threatening to end him.
“What did you do to her, Hallow? Where’s Eve?” My voice was a low growl, the threat behind it clear.
Hallow’s eyes, clouded with drink and anger, met mine. There was a moment, a flicker of something like regret, before his usual defiance snapped back into place.
“I didn’t touch her, Kingpin,” he spat out, his words slurring but laced with a venom that had nothing to do with Eve and everything to do with me.
“Then why the hell are you here, causing a scene? You think crashing my wedding’s gonna change anything? You think this is gonna make things right between us?” I shook him, looking for any sign of deceit.
He laughed, a harsh, bitter sound. “Change things? No. I knew I couldn’t change anything. But I thought… I thought I could make you feel a fraction of the pain you caused me. You took her from me, made me a laughingstock. I wanted to ruin this for you… like you ruined my life.”
“So, you admit it? You came here to mess with my head? On my wedding day?” The pieces were starting to come together, but the puzzle wasn’t yet complete. “What did you do with Eve?”
