All Chapters of Three ruthless bikers : one temptation : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

LENA'S POVRook was outside my door again in the morning.Not sitting on the floor this time. Standing with his back against the wall and his arms crossed and his eyes open, like he had been there a while and was perfectly comfortable with that fact. He looked up when I opened the door and said nothing."Did you sleep out here," I said."No," he said."When did you get here.""An hour ago," he said. "Maybe two."I looked at him. At the bruise that had faded now under his eye and the cut on his lip that had healed and the general stillness of him that never seemed to require effort. He just was still the way some people just are loud. Like it was the most natural thing in the world."Ghost assigned you to stay close to me," I said."Yes.""You were already doing it before he assigned you."He looked at me for a moment. "Yes," he said again.I did not know what to do with that so I stepped back and held the door open and said "come in then" because the alternative was leaving him in the

LENA'S POVNobody talked about what happened at the east wall directly.That was something I had learned about the Iron Grave MC. The things that happened at night stayed in the night. You felt the aftermath of them in the way the compound moved the next morning, quieter, more deliberate, eyes that had seen something processing it in their own time without discussion.I did not ask questions.I ate my breakfast and watched and learned what I could from the spaces between things.Ghost called the inner circle together after breakfast. Not the full club this time. Just the four of them and two senior members whose names I had learned were Patch and Colt. I was not invited but Ghost did not tell me to disappear either so I sat in the common room within earshot and listened to what came through the door.What came through was not much. Low voices. Serious. Then a longer silence. Then Ghost's voice saying something short and final the way he always ended things that were decided.When they

LENA'S POVAxel saw it first.He came into the kitchen where I was eating lunch, put his phone screen in front of my face without saying anything, and waited.I looked at the screen.My face looked back at me.It was a news article. The photograph was from outside the church on the wedding day, taken by someone I had not noticed in the chaos of running. I was mid stride, wedding dress lifted in both hands, mouth open, eyes wild. The headline above it said BILLIONAIRE'S RUNAWAY BRIDE HIDING WITH NOTORIOUS MOTORCYCLE GANG.I put down my fork."When did this go up," I said."An hour ago," Axel said. "It is already everywhere."I read the article while Axel stood beside me and Ghost appeared in the doorway and Rook came in from the corridor and suddenly all four of us were crowded around a phone screen in the kitchen reading about me.The article was not subtle. It called the Iron Grave MC a known criminal organization. It called Ghost an unidentified dangerous associate. It called me emo

LENA'S POVMargaret came three days later.Ghost arranged it carefully. A neutral location, a small meeting room in a building the club used for legal consultations, nothing that could be traced back to the compound directly. Two club members outside the door. Rook inside with us because Ghost trusted his ability to read people and Ghost himself across the table because nothing this significant happened without him present.I sat beside Ghost.Margaret walked in and the first thing she did was look at my stomach.I had not seen her since the dressing room. Since the slap and the perfume that smelled like a trap and the veil she had pinned into my hair with hands that did not shake because she had made her decision long before that morning and felt no conflict about it.She looked older than I remembered. Or maybe I was just seeing her differently now that I was not afraid of her.She sat down across from us and put a brown envelope on the table and did not reach for it again. Just lef

LENA'S POVI did not tell anyone what I was feeling that night.Not Axel who knocked on my door at nine and asked through the wood if I needed anything. Not Rook who I heard pause outside my room at eleven, those distinctive footsteps stopping briefly before continuing down the hall. I lay in the dark with the photograph on the nightstand where I could see it and stared at the ceiling and tried to organize twenty two years of missing something I did not know I was missing.My mother was alive.That sentence kept coming back around like a wheel that would not stop turning. My mother was alive and her name was Anna Graves and she had been kept by Edmund Hale for twenty years and she had journals. Journals she had been writing every year. To me. A daughter she could not reach.I pressed my face into the pillow at some point and cried properly for the first time since all of this started. Not the careful crying I had been doing. The ugly kind. The kind that comes from somewhere you did no