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I tugged her close for a kiss after we finished and cleared our dishes from the table. “Gotta talk to my officers, babe.”
“Have fun. I’m going to bake with Bree and set up the teapot for my afternoon with Gail.”
“She loves your teatime. I asked her.”
“I do, too.”
I loved that my ol’ lady and my sister were becoming best friends. Made my life a hell of a lot easier having them both in the same place and protected. “You’re so fuckin’ sweet, Bella. I can’t get enough of that sugar.”
“You will later.”
“Yeah, I will.” I slapped her on the ass. “Meet you at our room for dinner.”
“It’s a date.”
Raven, Hawk, and Talon were already seated around the table in the chapel when I entered. Lucky Lou nearly bumped into my ankles with his new scooter when I started to close the door.
“Hold on. I got shit to say.”
“Don’t let me hold you back,” I grunted as he nearly clipped the side of the table.
Raven coughed to hide his laugh. Hawk sipped from a fresh beer. And Talon? He didn’t react, watching me enter the room and take my seat at the head of the table.
This wasn’t church. I didn’t slam the gavel down. When I met with my officers, it was less formal.
“I’m gonna give the floor to Lou first,” I announced, snagging one of the beers from the center.
“Mighty gracious of you,” he acknowledged. “I want to look at those documents Rook sent to you again. Got ’em handy, Crow?”
I did. There was a safe in this room, and I occasionally kept paperwork that I didn’t stash in my office. “In the safe. Give me a minute.”
I set down my beer and pushed away from the table, walking to the safe to open it. The design was clever. If you didn’t know what you were looking for, you’d never find the location. I’d hidden it within the interior of the bar’s wooden base. The only way to open it was to move a specific stack of glasses out of the way. I spun the dial and worked the combination, popping the door open. Once I had the envelope I needed, I returned to my seat.
Lou reached for the documents as I handed them over. “That’s right,” he murmured, as if he had forgotten what was inside.
I will never forget. There was my birth certificate. Gail’s birth certificate. The marriage license between my father and my mother, Laurel Holmes. And a death certificate for Laurel.
Until I received that envelope, I didn’t know that she died. Rook never told me. My pops could be far too secretive, and this added another on top of the pile I would never learn about. My mother left me when I was a kid and nearly ruined my life.
If I hadn’t had such a devoted father and men like Raven and Lucky Lou to bring me up right, I would have been a lost cause. I battled anger, abandonment issues, and the painful realization that I wasn’t enough reason for my mother to stick around or take me with her. To this day, I still didn’t know why she left and turned her back on us. Was it the club? Something my father did?
“It wasn’t your fault.”
My gaze flicked to Lou. “It felt like it back then.”
“But it wasn’t. Sometimes people can’t work through their shit. It’s fucked but the truth.”
Yeah, I knew that now. Tell it to my inner seven-year-old.
“This death certificate of your mother’s. It’s strange.”
“Strange?” Hawk asked.
“Yeah. It says the cause of death was Diabetes. That’s wrong.”
“What?”
“He’s right,” Raven agreed. “Laurel wasn’t diabetic.”
