All Chapters of The Devil's Moon (The Road Devils Motorcycle Club 6): Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Cole couldn’t remember crossing the parking lot.One second he was standing against a brick wall with a cigarette burning forgotten between his fingers, staring at a woman he had loved for fifteen years, and a child who looked so much like him it physically hurt to look at her. The next, he was in front of them.Close enough to see that Nala’s hands were shaking despite the way she had curled them into fists at her sides, close enough to see exhaustion carved so deeply beneath her eyes that something dark and protective shifted inside him before he had any right to feel protective of her at all anymore. Close enough to understand, with a sickening certainty that hit him straight in the gut, that whatever had brought her here after eleven years of silence, it wasn’t nostalgia. It wasn’t regret. It wasn’t love.It was fear.“Nala,” he said, and her name sounded wrecked coming out of his mouth.She flinched. Barely, but he saw it, because of course he did; once upon a time, Cole had know

“Anyway,” she continued quickly, chattering to distract herself. “I got downstairs to Luna through the dumbwaiter.”Cole blinked. “The what?”“The old service lift built into the walls, it goes between my bedroom and the kitchen. The realtor thought I liked the ‘historic charm.’” A humorless laugh slipped from her throat. “It’s one of the biggest reasons that I bought the place.”Understanding dawned slowly across his expression afterward, followed almost immediately by horror.“You bought a house based on a hidden escape route.”Nala looked toward Luna. “Yes.”No shame, and no apology, because motherhood had stripped those things from her years ago. There was no embarrassment left in survival.“Did the fucker hurt her?” he asked softly.The softness made it worse somehow.“No,” Nala said, then cleared her throat. “No. But he terrified her.”Rage flared bright and hard and hot in those dark eyes, just for a second. Then Cole turned away sharply, one hand braced against the wall while

Cole swallowed painfully, his gaze shifting briefly toward the narrow crack in the office door where warm yellow light spilled into the hallway, because somewhere beyond it slept the little girl he should have known from the moment she took her first breath.The little girl whose first words he had never heard, whose first steps he had never seen, whose birthdays had arrived and passed ten times without him even knowing what kind of cake she liked, or whether she was afraid of thunderstorms, or whether she woke cheerful in the mornings or needed time to become human.His daughter was twenty feet away from him, wrapped in his cut, exhausted and frightened because someone had tried to take her, and yet somehow the oldest wound in the room was still Nala standing across from him with eleven years of silence in her eyes.“Why didn’t you try to contact me after I got out of jail?” he asked, and though he tried to keep his voice steady, the question came out rough anyway, scraped raw by too

Nala stared at Cole in stunned silence, the words still hanging between them like smoke.And I’ll hand you the matches, baby.Baby.God. It should not affect her the way that it did, not after everything that’s happened between them, after eleven years of fear and grief and loneliness and anger layered so thickly over old love that sometimes she honestly couldn’t tell where one emotion ended and the next began.But the second the word left his mouth, something inside her reacted instantly and treacherously, some deeply buried part of herself remembering exactly what it had once meant to belong to this man completely.Baby.She used to hear it murmured against her skin in the middle of the night while his arms tightened around her half-asleep. Used to hear it spoken with quiet amusement every single time she got herself worked into one of her little tempers about something. Used to hear it growled softly into her hair when he came deep inside her. And for one horrifying second standing

The motel room smelled faintly of old carpet, industrial lemon cleaner, and the kind of stale cigarette smoke that no amount of repainting ever fully erased from walls. Despite the rather yucky environment, Luna had fallen asleep within seven minutes of climbing beneath the stiff floral comforter, which made the place suddenly feel like the best hotel in the entire goddamn world.Nala stood beside the bed for a long time after that, watching her daughter sleep curled on her side with one hand tucked beneath her cheek and the other wrapped around the stuffed bear that Cole had won at the state fair more than a decade ago.The bear looked ridiculous now, worn nearly bald in spots, one button eye slightly looser than the other, the tiny fake leather jacket cracked along the seams from years of love and travel and being dragged through childhood. Nala had attempted once, when Luna was four, to replace it with something newer and softer and less heartbreaking, but Luna had cried for nearly