He was never going to let me leave.
He loved me.
“Watch,” he growled into my ear, pulling back on my hair so I had no choice but to watch the house I hated burn to the ground as Bear fucked me from behind. By the time the roof collapsed, I was coming, calling out Bear’s name in a guttural scream until he followed me over, practically roaring as he pumped his release deep inside of me.
We made our way back to Logan’s Beach, leaving behind the wreckage of my childhood in a plume of smoke and ashes.
I’d never felt more free.
More alive.
Bear turned up the intensity on the ride home, weaving in and out of traffic at speeds that called for arrests, not tickets. I found myself loving every second of the freedom, of the rumbling machine underneath of us, and of the biker between my thighs.
“You like that, baby?” Bear called back, turning his head slightly.
“Hell yeah!” I shouted, holding him tighter. I tilted my head back and took a deep breath.
The first deep breath I’d taken in what seemed like forever.
Maybe the first one in my life.
We’re not given forever. We’re given just a finite amount of time on this earth. It’s up to us to decide how we are going to spend that time, and who we are going to spend it with.
I decided on the back of Bear’s bike that my time would be spent having more moments like this.
More moments with Bear, feeling like the world is at our mercy, instead of the other way around.
Bear was right. Home wasn’t a place. It wasn’t Jessep and it wasn’t Logan’s Beach. Home is where you feel the most like yourself. Home is the thing that makes you happiest during this very short life.
The person who makes you happiest.
I’d never known what a real home was, and now that I’d found it, I was never letting it go.
Home for me would always and forever, be Bear.
We started as a broken promise, one never meant to be kept.
We ended on the promise of forever.
THE END
EPILOGUE
Bear
It had been two days since I’d taken Ti out for a ride and burnt down the fucking shit house that had brought her so much grief.
For the first time ever, with no impending deaths or distractions on the horizon, I felt content.
Peaceful even.
Not just because my old lady seemed like the weight of the world had been lifted off of her shoulders, and I helped alleviate some of that weight, but because things were getting back to business as usual.
Well, not usual. Better than usual.
Now that the war was officially over and Chop was officially gone from this world, the first order of business for The Lawless was church. I chose my officers from the best of the men and between Wolf, Munch, Stone, Craze, and Lock, we made the decision to reach out to the Bastards existing business connections and figure out which relationships we could salvage, and which bridges had been burnt beyond recognition.
The second order of business was fixing up the sorry excuse for a club that the compound had become. It was a shit hole when I’d left, but now it was like a bomb had gone off.
Plus, it smelled like dead bodies.
Mostly because of the dead bodies.
We were in the middle of the most thorough “clean-up” in biker history. We tore down all Beach Bastards’ memorabilia, for the exception of a small banner hanging above the pool table, which we kept as a way of remembering the past and where we came from.
A reminder of where we never wanted to go again.
Bodies were removed. Blood was cleaned.
By the end of the second day, Munch even had the pool converted from a mold pit into an actual working pool.
I wanted us to operate like a team. Like a unit. We needed time to do that, but I was sure it was going to happen. We needed to learn each other again, get to know one another and most importantly, remember how to be brothers again.
I considered a party but decided against it. There would be no parties, no celebrating, no nothing until the place didn’t smell like death and we had something to actually celebrate again.
Maybe when I knocked up Ti we could have the first official party. Or when I made the shit between us legal.
My cock was getting fucking hard thinking about her being mine in every way.
The thought of strapping myself to someone forever, of having an actual old lady, used to make me laugh or at the very least, maybe a little fucking sick.
Now the thought of giving Ti my last name, which I planned on making a good one again, made my fucking cock strain against my fucking jeans.
I chuckled. Oh how the mighty have fallen.
An oh how I have loved every single stomach flipping second of that fucking fall.
I walked around the compound all day, assessing what needed to be done and figuring how much it would all cost. It made me wish Preppy was there. Not just because I stopped hearing his voice two days ago, but because as bad as he was at holding a serious conversation, the kid was a wiz at numbers. It probably took me twice as long as it would him, but I got it done and I think he would have been proud.
With the cash I found in Chop’s safe, combined with what I had buried on the island behinds King’s place, there would be more than enough to make the dump a place we could be proud of again.
The Lawless Compound.
“I’m out for the night,” I called up to Wolf who was helping Stone carry out a blood-stained mattress from one of the second story rooms. They tossed it from the balcony, a cloud of dust billowed into the air as the mattress landed on top of a broken chair, sending one of the legs skidding across the pavement.
I wanted to get home to Ti, but I also wanted to talk to King about what he’d designed to cover up my Bastards’ tattoos. Ti had also asked Ray to draw her something for her first tattoo, and I couldn’t wait to see what it was.
Her pale and perfect skin was amazing perfection.
The thought of marring that skin with a tattoo that represented us?
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
“See you tomorrow, Prez. Call me if you need anything,” Wolf called back. “We’re going to take this to the dumpster.”
“Check the back building. See if maybe there are some extra mattresses in there or lamps or whatever to replace the broken shit. This place used to be some sort of motel. Maybe there’s shit back there we could use,” I instructed.
“Ten four, Prez,” Wolf said, wiping his hands on the front of his jeans.
I rode back to the apartment feeling more content than I had in my entire life. Pancakes greeted me in the driveway, but instead of his usual tongue-down, he was growling and focused behind me. I turned around to see a black van pull up behind my bike. I grabbed my gun and started walking toward the van, because if whoever it was, was bringing a battle to my front door, they were going to be stopped before they got anywhere near, Ti. King must have seen it on the security cameras, because he was beside me in an instant, his own gun in hand.
The driver’s side door opened. “It’s just me, boss!” Wolf called out, jogging around to the passenger side. He slid open the side door and Munch leapt out, colliding with Wolf who pushed him back and held him at arm’s length.
“What the fuck is going on?” King asked as we both lowered our guns.
“Boss, we tried to call you right after you left, but you didn’t answer your phone, so we got here as fast as we could,” Wolf said, jumping back inside and shuffling around in the darkness.
“We went to the back building to see if there were any mattresses to replace the old ones out there, and that’s when we heard screams. Not just one either, but a bunch of fucking screams. The entire inside was lined with mattresses to muffle the sound. In the floor there was some sort of manhole looking thing with a chain. We snapped it with some bolt cutters. Down inside were like…makeshift cells with dirt floors and zero light. There were tons of them. Some were empty and some had skeletons with skin rotting off their faces. And some Prez…were alive. Whores I ain’t seen in a long time, even Lance.”
“Lance?” I asked. Lance was the brother who Chop had declared a traitor at least five years back and who he claimed to have killed while out on a ride.
“It’s gotta be where Chop was keeping your mom all those years,” Munch said, waving his hands around in the air like he was painting us a picture. “Dude was sick and fucking twisted, but none of us knew he was running his very own Bastards’ prison.”
“Fuck,” I said, “that’s impossible…”
Munch stepped aside to make room for Wolf and Stone, who between the two of them were maneuvering something heavy.
“It’s not impossible, because it fucking happened. Look,” Wolf said, emerging from the darkness. Between him and Stone, was an emaciated body, his arms draped around their shoulders, his head down and wobbling from side to side as they walked toward us. His hair so dirty, I couldn’t tell what color it was and his clothes were nothing more than blood-stained rags.
“What the fuck is going on?” I asked. “Why the fuck did you bring Lance here?”
“He alive?” King asked, crossing his arms over his chest.
“Oh, yeah, he’s alive, all right,” Stone confirmed, walking toward us with the man’s head bobbing around loosely with their movements. They had to be lying. I’ve seen my fair share of corpses and this looked very much like one of them. Maybe even worse. There was no way a man in that kind of condition could still be fucking breathing, but sure enough I heard a strained gasp for breath as they approached.
King looked over to me. “Why would Chop…” he started, but I knew what he was asking and we didn’t have to wait long for an answer, because Lance’s head popped up and suddenly we were face to face…with a ghost.
Who wasn’t Lance.
“As I said, there were dozens of ’em down there,” Wolf said. “Only five or six alive though.”
“No fucking way,” King gasped, dropping to his knees in the driveway. I would have dropped too, but I was too stunned to move a single muscle. Too stunned to even look away.
Too stunned to fucking breathe.
The ghost looked between myself and King, and before passing back out, he managed to choke out a few raspy words.
The greatest goddamn words I’d ever heard in my entire fucking life.
“Miss me, motherfuckers?”
BONUS SCENE
Thia
Four years later…
“Mama, tell me a stowy,” Trey said, yawning and rubbing his eye with the back of his little hand.
“Which story, baby?” I asked, as though he didn’t ask for the same one every night.
“The one of you and Daddy,” he said, climbing up on my lap.
“Okay sweetie,” I said, covering us both with the blanket and brushing his angel soft white hair out of his face, and as I did every night, I kissed the familiar freckles below each of his eyes. “When Mommy was ten years old she met a big biker…”
“Daddy!” Trey cheered, knowing the story well after hearing it a million times. That’s when I noticed Bear standing in the doorway, wearing his cut, wiping grease off his hands with a rag, listening to our story time.
“Yes, that’s right, it was Daddy. He was so tall and so strong. He walked right into the store where Mommy was, and the second he smiled at her she just knew…” I trailed off when Bear flashed me that exact same smile, bringing all the feelings flooding back to me in a rush.
“Knew what, Mommy?” Trey prompted, pulling at the collar of my shirt. “What did she know?”
Bear and I locked eyes. “She knew that he was her forever.”
I finished the story and tucked Trey into his bed. I turned off the lamp and gave him one last kiss. “Mama, can you sing to me?” I looked up to Bear who had to cover his mouth to stop himself from laughing out loud. This is how it went every night. Just when I thought Trey was all settled in, he’d request just one more thing and just like his father, I found it very hard to say no to him.
“Sure, baby. What song do you want to hear?”
Bear chimed in, “Sinatra.”
I sang my little boy to sleep that night singing “Fly Me To the Moon” as his father listened on and I couldn’t help but feel a presence as the song ended and Trey’s eyes finally fluttered closed. I knew Grace was there with me and my boys just like she promised she would be.
We were the family I’d always wanted.
A real family.
Ghosts and all.