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LILY
Eagle took his sweet time making sure his bike was well covered by a dirty dark green tarp Tina produced from somewhere. It actually took so long that it had stopped raining before it was done. We were all covered in mud by then, and probably needed another shower, but we’d wasted enough time.
The mud that had formed in Tina’s yard was every bit as hard to navigate as Eagle feared and much worse than Tina described, but we managed not to get stuck in it, so that’s something.
The Lucky Star cafe is dark again this morning, and the deck is soaked with water, which splashes all over the back of my calves as I walk and soaking into my chucks. I wish I’d thought to wear boots instead. But at least it’s not cold.
I’m glad Eagle and Tina are with me, because it’s Mitch, not Ariana who opens the door for us before we even knock.
“You again,” he says with a half-smile, which disappears as he looks Eagle up and down. “And you’ve brought company. After last night, I’d thought he’d be long gone from here. Threatening our people like that.”
Eagle opens his mouth to argue, but I grab hold of his forearm and step between him and Mitch. “Can we see Ariana? He’s her nephew, after all.”
I’m still having trouble wrapping my mind around that, even though I made Eagle tell me everything his father told him several times last night. It wasn’t much.
“She’s not feeling well,” Mitch says, but I see movement in the dimly lit main room of the cafe behind him.
“I’m here,” Ariana says quietly. Her hair is pulled back into a tight ponytail and she has dark circles under her eyes. She’s wearing a pair of white pajamas under the star quilt she’s wrapped in.
“You don’t have to do this, dear,” her husband says, but she shakes her head and opens the door wider and stands beside him.
Her bottom lip is shaking as she looks at Eagle, her eyes growing bigger and bigger.
“You look exactly like your father did at your age,” she says quietly.
I hear thumping on the wooden boards behind us and turn to see Frank and Miriam, and a couple of guys I haven’t met yet approaching.
“I can’t do this," Ariana wails, grabbing everyone’s attention. The thumping of footsteps stops and she’s shaking all over when I look at her.
“He was a bad man, your father was,” she says. “He lured young women away from here and they never returned. He sold them.”
She starts sobbing and buries her face in her husband’s chest as he wraps his arms around her tightly.
Eagle is looking at me with a totally confused look on his face, which probably matches the one on mine. “He’d never… I mean… your father wouldn’t stand for it for one thing… and even before then he wouldn’t… and the Devils never did anything like that.”
He’s making perfect sense to me, but I see the rest are very confused. Tina has even taken a step away from us to stand with Frank and Miriam.
“Are you calling my wife a liar?” Mitch says harshly.
“No, I’m saying my father never abducted any women from anywhere,” Eagle says just as sharply.
Despite the fact that his dad’s been locked up for most of Eagle’s life, they have a very close relationship. And I do know that my father or any of his MC brothers have never abducted women, much less sold them. They’ve risked their lives saving women other clubs had abducted and were trying to sell.
“Women and girls had been disappearing whenever he was around,” Ariana says shakily. “Even a very long time ago. Before either of you were born.”
“If you mean my mom, Rose-“
“Not your mom, although we thought she’d gone missing too for a time,” Ariana interrupts me. For all the shakiness in her voice and body, her eyes are very sharp, and kind of dead as she glares at me.
“There were others too, over the years, girls as young as thirteen,” Miriam says as she comes to stand beside me. “Is that what you’re talking about?”
“This is ridiculous,” Eagle says. “My father’s been in prison for almost twenty years, he couldn’t have been out here abducting anyone.”
“And I wonder what he’s in prison for,” Mitch says snidely. But he made a pause, because he didn’t know this about Eagle’s father. Nor did Ariana, who gasped in surprise at the news.
“Something else,” Eagle snaps.
