Page 59 of Diary of a Biker Queen

NYAH

Dear Diary,

Nobody warns you that pregnancy comes with a full identity crisis.

War and Grayson had quietly pulled me into the room they used for “church,” and though Lynx sat at the table wordlessly, it had been the club president and the doctor who had asked me not to spend my nights in Lynx’s room. At least not until they could be one-hundred-percent sure of what was causing his blackouts.

It was clear neither of them was fully convinced of Lynx’s innocence, even if they were giving him the benefit of the doubt. I’d hated the idea with every inch of my body, and had been devastated when he’d agreed with them.

“I’m not worth risking your life, Nyah,” he’d said quietly. “I didn’t murder Virginia. But we never should have asked you to babysit me. My mental health isn’t your responsibility. Getting attached to me now isn’t fair, when there’s every chance I’m going to get arrested once the cops realize who I am and that I’m here.”

I’d argued that I’d never felt safer with anyone and that I could handle who I did and didn’t get attached to, but my pleas hadn’t been enough to convince him. And so a distance had cropped up between us, where I saw him in the halls and the common room, but neither of us could really look at each other.

Days sluggishly rolled into each other, all of them spent wandering the Slayers’ compound while my belly grew and I tried not to lose my mind. Since Lynx was on warning, and there were still cops intermittently poking around the crime scene outside the gates, Reaper and the other guys with families who lived off site had kept them all away. So I hadn’t seen Violet or Bliss or Rebel. I’d had a few cups of coffee with Kara, but she was busy between her job at the hospital and all the people who lived in her house, and the last thing I wanted was to be in her way.

Kiki and Amber hadn’t been around either, the two of them packing gorgeous, skimpy clothes into bags and taking off to a music festival with a couple of the prospects.

They hadn’t invited me to go with them.

I couldn’t have gone anyway. I had no money. No resources. While I lived here, I had everything I needed.

Except agency.

As days rolled into weeks, with Luca mad at me, Dax buried in grief, and Lynx working with Grayson, trying to get his head in a good place, I found myself hating it more by the second. I hated my father most of all, because at the root of everything, he was the one to blame. He’d sold me to Carlos Guerra to pay off his debts, and I’d been paying the price for it ever since.

Kiki and Amber and the prospects had returned, all of them full of smiles and laughter and stories about their road trip, their spirits high. Luca and Lynx were in equally good moods after their hockey team had actually won a game.

They all buzzed around the clubhouse on a Friday night. While I was in a foul mood I couldn’t shift, no matter how much I reminded myself that being here, in this clubhouse, was the safest place for the baby I was protecting.

But it wasn’t lost on me that everyone else had lives. While mine had whittled down to being nothing more than an incubator.

When Dax arrived with a smile on his face for the first time in weeks and chatted happily about the huge back piece he’d been commissioned to do, I was glad for him. I really was. He’d been so thick in grief and in blaming himself for his mother’s death that he’d become a shell of the man I’d known, and this was the first glimpse of the real him coming back to me.

But it was only another reminder I had nothing other than these four walls. I knew why I couldn’t leave them, and yet I was going stir-crazy with the fact nothing was happening inside them either.

A party lit up, with drinks free flowing, the mood high, and I so wanted to join in. Instead, I stood just outside the doors, alone, staring up at a night sky full of stars, wondering how the hell this had become my life.

It seemed I’d just traded one prison for another. First my father’s house. Then Carlos’s. I didn’t want to feel like the clubhouse was yet another jail cell, that wasn’t fair on War or the other guys who’d been nothing but decent in giving me a place to live.

A place I was grateful for, because I had nowhere else.

The sky out here was so incredibly beautiful, nothing like the smog-filled skies I’d grown up with, living in cities.

The door behind me opened, but I didn’t bother looking over my shoulder. It didn’t matter who it was. I felt safe here with all the guys and didn’t feel the need to watch my back, even though Lynx kept insisting I should be careful of him.

I just wanted to roll my eyes every time he said something like that.

Lynx might have been dangerous.

But not to me.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Luca asked.

My heart quickened just at his voice, like it always did. It didn’t matter that he’d barely spoken to me for weeks and had clearly been avoiding me. There was something between us that lit up every time we were in a room together. I didn’t know if he still felt it the way I did, but it was all I could think of whenever he was around.

It was entirely distracting.

“I was just wondering how I got stuck with the parents I have. Like, what did I do in a past life that was so bad I would be born to a man who cares so little about his own daughter he would sell her to pay off his debts?” I snorted in my derision. “He literally tried to sell me twice, to two different men, at the same time.” I shook my head at his gall. “Like, seriously, what do you think I did?”