Total pages in book: 133
Estimated words: 132332 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 662(@200wpm)___ 529(@250wpm)___ 441(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132332 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 662(@200wpm)___ 529(@250wpm)___ 441(@300wpm)
Hope winces and Rock jumps to his feet, guiding her into Wrath’s chair.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I’m fine.” She squeezes her eyes shut and takes a deep breath. “The lab discovered something else. I, uh, don’t understand the why of it, but they tested the samples against each other… Gosh, I don’t even know—”
Cold fear stabs through my stomach. “What, Hope? Are we sick or something? You’re freaking me out.”
Rock reaches over and grabs my hand. To shut me up? Or reassure me that everything will be okay?
Tears rain down Hope’s cheeks. Pregnant or not, she’s not prone to crying around us. Not even when Wrath used to get his jollies off trying to terrorize her away from the club. Today, she’s shaking and taking deep sips of air.
“There was a match,” she finally says.
“Who? Are we related to someone famous or something?” What kind of testing facility did she send us to? They were only supposed to take samples to match to Inga’s kid. Did they put us in some national database? Shit, did those tests link us to a past crime or something?
Rock slowly turns and stares at me. Is he running down the long list of club enemies we’ve disposed of over the years too? We’re always so careful getting rid of the bodies.
“Rock?” Hope’s strained voice twists my heart. I’ll take the fall for whatever they want to pin on my president. He can’t be in jail when he has his first kid coming in a few months.
“They matched. You two. Teller’s your…Teller’s your son.”
“What the fuck?” I jump out of my chair so fast, I lose my balance, crashing into the wall behind me. “What are you talking about, Hope? That’s not even possible. That’s crazy.”
Being matched to a past crime is more plausible than Rock being my father.
Rock sits there, staring into space. A complete non-reaction. Like Hope just announced she was going to take a nap instead of blowing up our entire lives.
“Are they sure?” he asks in a dazed tone.
“They tested it a few times…” Her quivering voice is a mix of misery and embarrassment. She shouldn’t be the one delivering this news. Some doctor in a lab coat who has no connection to us should be telling us this. So I could grab him by the throat to choke off this outrageous lie. “Because of the age difference, they tested it a few times.”
“Rock, that’s insane,” I protest. For fuck’s sake, he’s barely twelve years older than me. “That can’t be right.” I wait a beat, searching for some sort of response. Anything at all. But Rock’s useless, lost chasing his own internal demons. I turn toward Hope. “How is that possible?”
She struggles to get out of her chair and rounds the table, approaching me slowly.
“How?” I ask again.
She pulls me into a warm, comforting hug. “I don’t know.” Her soothing voice and the familiar floral scent clinging to her hair calm me for a second. But the awkward angle has to be uncomfortable for her. I pull out the chair next to me to get her off her feet. She glides her soft, warm hand over mine and squeezes.
“Rock.” I add a sharper bite to my tone to get his attention. “Did you know my mother?”
He lifts his gaze and snorts. “Apparently.”
“How—I mean, I didn’t think you ever met her…” I can’t recall a single time Rock and my mother were face-to-face, let alone... Once I found the club, I kept that part of my life a secret. I had something that was mine and didn’t want to share my new family with the mother who’d failed me in so many different ways.
“Has to be Tina,” Rock mutters. “My dad used to pay this girl in the neighborhood a couple bucks to watch me when he was gonna be out overnight.”
My heart stops cold. Tina. “My mother hated her name,” I whisper, shaken down to my soul. This is real. Rock’s my father. “Her middle name was Christina… Sometimes she went by Tina, even though my father refused to ever call her that.”
“I never…knew that.”
Why would he? I didn’t give a lot of thought to my mother’s weird hang-ups around her name. I was too busy trying to make sure Heidi was fed and cared for, and that my mother’s creepy boyfriends stayed the fuck away from my baby sister.
Rock clears his throat and sits forward. “I never met her when you started hanging around the MC. Saw her from a distance once or twice. But that had to be thirteen or fourteen years later. When Wrath and I hired people to search for her after she took off, we used her real name.”
“When…I had the issue with my mom and, you know, her boyfriends sniffing around Heidi, I told Lucky and Grinder. They’re the ones who had a chat with her. I wonder if she would’ve figured it out if I’d told you instead.”