With control.
With strength.
His nothing fucks with me presence filled the room well before he did.
His eyes searched the room as he stepped inside, and the second they fell on me, it felt like I was breaking through the surface of the water. I could breathe.
“The fuck happened?” he demanded, storming toward me. When he hooked his finger under my chin, lifting my teary gaze, he asked, “You good?”
“Yeah,” I croaked, the lie instantly followed by my daughter’s objections.
“She’s not okay,” Blair exploded from across the tiny club medical room. “The whole side of her leg is torn up from where he dragged her from the pool by her hair.”
“Blair!”
“Call Mouse,” Huntsman ordered in the direction of the silently stern-faced guy to his left. “Tell her it’s urgent.” He held out his hand to me, and I held his gaze for a long few seconds, my lips pursed in defiance.
“Woman,” he growled. The harsh growl sent a shudder through me. What surprised me was how he softened it a second later. “Zoey. Show me.”
“It’s fine.”
“I can see where you’d mistake that as a request,” he threw back, his brow raised. “It wasn’t.”
My first instinct was to tell him to take his ‘request’ and shove it somewhere there is no sunlight, but my body was giving in. My hand was twitching with a mind of its own, wanting to feel him support me.
It’d been a long time since I had ever not had to hold myself up—broken or not. Or to keep me from falling into the flames that seemed to be constantly burning around me. My eyes caught Blair’s across the table, my heart sinking to see the tears silently slipping down her cheeks. I had to do this for her. Put my secrets and ghosts from my past to the side.
Placing my hand in Huntsman’s, I tried to keep that instant rush to myself. But I knew between the way I was shaking and unable to catch my breath that he could see right through me. He pulled me to my feet, tugging me gently toward him.
It was like having a protective shield wrapped around me, and the need to lean in closer and wrap myself in his warmth was an almost impossible magnetism I didn’t want to fight.
The towel I had tied at my hip was instantly tugged loose, his intense deep blue pools holding me captured as the material fell to the floor. His gaze shifted, his eyes dropping to my lips, my neck, my chest. My heart shot up into my throat the lower he traveled.
“Turn.”
Pulling my lip in between my teeth, I slowly shifted, shuffling to the left and revealing what I knew was a hot fucking mess. The throbbing was painful and deep, making it feel as though my entire limb was pulsating. After years of swimming, I was intimately aware of just the kind of damage pools could do. The edges were often either rough concrete or tile, or with a lot of indoor pools, they were surrounded by grates, which caught the overflow from the movement of the water.
I’d been on the receiving end of both on the odd occasion and being dragged over them like hot coals was not my idea of fun.
Huntsman dropped to his haunches, his tattooed hand reaching for my hip.
I hadn’t looked yet, but I really didn’t need to after seeing my blood leaving a trail like some psychotic Hansel and Gretel along the pathway between the pool and my car as Drake forced us into the backseat and broke several speed limits just to get us away from the house and the asshole who was possibly still lurking around, to a place he considered safe—the Exiled Eight clubhouse.
Huntsman’s fingertips brushed surprisingly gently across my broken skin, drawing an uncontrollable whimper from my lips.
Tears rushed up my throat, the burn up until this point, something I’d managed to fight off. My fingers curled in, my nails pinching at my palm as I formed tight fists. It was the only thing I could do to keep from kneeing Huntsman in the face.
“Blair,” Huntsman announced, though his eyes were glued to mine. Dark and unwavering, he held them as he spoke, “Ripley and Junior are going to take you back to your place. Pack everything you’ll need to stay awhile, then pack your mom’s stuff, too.”
“Woah, wait a sec—”
“Ripley’s old lady, Dakota, will help you get everything,” he continued, ignoring my objections but finally looking over his shoulder to my petrified teenager. “Then she’ll help you settle into a room upstairs. That okay with you?”
My baby girl’s eyes moved between him and me. Like she wasn’t exactly sure what was going on, whether she snapped a salute and said yes sir, or waited for me to object to everything he just said in a flurry of who the fuck do you think you are?
But instead of waiting, her eyes met mine, and she swallowed hard. “You’ll be safer here,” she whispered before moving her gaze to the large burly biker in the room and narrowing her eyes sternly. “You have to promise to keep her safe.”
“Blai—”
“I promise,” Huntsman cut in. “Now go get your stuff, kid, while I help your mom get patched up.”
With a kiss on my cheek, she was gone seconds later, a cheerful voice joining her out in the corridor before disappearing into silence.
Huntsman wasted no time, grabbing a bottle with a little squirty lid and crouching back down beside me. “I’m gonna clean some of the gravel out before Mouse gets here to bandage it up.” He was right. The deep grazes had stones and other foreign crap embedded in the skin. It needed to be cleaned, or I was looking at an even more painful infection. When I nodded, he started squirting the water, allowing it to run down my leg and naturally wash away the debris. Much less painful than trying to pick at it or wipe it down.
“So who was he?”
I don’t know why I thought I would be able to avoid the question. I’d just watched a piece of my past collide with my future.
Something I was promised would never happen.
Something I was promised protection from.
And yet here I was, about to say a name that I’d spent sixteen years trying to forget.
“A man I put in jail when I was a teenager,” I croaked, clearing my throat, determined to get this out loud and clear so I wouldn’t have to fucking repeat it. “A man I testified against before they put me into witness protection.”
I was waiting for him to gasp or his eyes to shoot open in shock.
But when he just continued to help clean my wounds, I knew then that I’d underestimated Huntsman again.
He already knew.
Of course, he did.
9
Huntsman
“You did good tonight, kid.”
She didn’t startle when I dropped into the chair beside her, though I noticed the way her fingers curled a little tighter around the handle of the bat—the one she was still carrying around hours after beating that asshole over the head with it.
“You’ve got a good swing.”
“He was hurting her,” she whispered finally, continuing to stare off into the darkness of the compound’s backyard. Like she was expecting this asshole to reappear at any moment so they could go for round two.
There was nothing there, though. Just a single light on down the back, letting me know Ripley was having nightmares again and was in his woodshed, trying to work through them with his hands. He’d been doing it since he was a kid. Since he walked in on his mom in the bath, dead, with blood everywhere.