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He looks up at me and smiles sadly. “You can ask me anything you want, darlin’. To answer your question: she was killed by a rival club. The leader. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the cost was her life. It happened right in front of me, and I couldn’t save her.”
Oh myGod.
He watched his mother die. I couldn’t even imagine the emotional scars that kind of trauma would leave.
So that’s what he and Ezra have in common. They couldn’t save their mothers. The circumstances are different, but the trauma is still the same.
I grab his hand. “I’m so sorry.”
Lee lifts my hand to his mouth and presses a soft kiss to my knuckles.
“How did you meet Ezra?”
At that, he laughs. “Oh, darlin’, that’s a story for another time. Right now, I’m eager to go back to the room and fuck you some more.”
I bite my bottom lip and look around the table. “We’re going to need a bunch of to-go boxes.”
Lee waves dismissively and pulls me up from the table. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll reorder later.”
And with that, he leads me out of the restaurant and back to the room.
* * *
Leeand I unexpectedly spent the entire day at the hotel. We fucked, ate, watched movies, fucked some more, took a hot bath together, then passed out. In between rounds, he told me more about his life, and I told him about mine.
He takes me back to the mansion the next morning, and after giving me a tender kiss, Ezra whisks him away to get back to work. I try not to let the look Ezra gives me hurt too much.
INTERLUDE #4
LELAND BEGINS
Sixteen years old
“Where’s my boy?” Johnny asks when he walks through the front door of the Clubhouse. I hop off the barstool, happy to have a reprieve from the mind-numbing homework I was doing, and run to give him a hug.
“Where the hell have you been, Johnny?” I ask when we break apart. He’s got a black duffel bag hanging from his shoulder and a mischievous grin on his face.
I know that look. It means he was out doing what he does best.
He nods towards the front door and motions for me to follow him. “Come here. I want to show you something.”
Calling behind the bar to Ma that I’m going outside, I follow my father out the doors and into the gravel parking lot of the Clubhouse. He goes to sit on his bike, a sleek black Kawasaki, and balances the bag on the seat between his legs. After rummaging around inside for a moment, he pulls out a sleek, black-handled knife.
“Whoa,” I breathe, taking the beautiful weapon from him. “Where’d you get this?”
He cocks his brow. “You really want to know?”
I nod.
He claps me on the shoulder and leans in closer, his blue eyes boring into mine. “Once I show you, Lee, there’s no going back.”
“Show me what?”
He smirks, and the look chills me to my core.
I follow him as he walks around the Clubhouse to the back, where we keep the shed. We call it a shed, but it’s actually a detached trailer we use to store extra weapons, extra clothes, and pretty much anything that could be potentially incriminating. When Johnny opens the door, the coppery scent of blood assaults my senses. I cover my nose with the sleeve of my shirt as I follow him inside.
A bruised and bloodied man is sitting in the center of the small room, and if it wasn’t for his labored, rasping breaths, I would swear he was dead.
