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“Where are we going?” he asks.
“Wherever, just drive,” I repeat and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry as he speeds down the dark country road and the wind hits my face and makes my hair go flying. I tie it into a knot at the back of my head because I need the fresh air.
“What made you change your mind?” he asks quietly, sounding very far away.
I’m telling everyone else to trust him and that I love him, and yet I’m sending him away. How does that work? That’s the sum total of my reasoning for calling him and being here.
“You have one week, Jax,” I tell him pointedly and look at him for the first time. His eyes are already fixed on me, dark yet somehow liquid like a pond at midnight.
“OK…” he says and pauses, I guess for me to add something. I don’t.
“I guess that’s more than I had a couple of hours ago,” he adds, an edge in his voice. As if he has any right to lecture me about leaving him.
“Did you break up with me because my father told you to?” I ask.
And I see the answer in his eyes right away. It’s a yes. But he’s not saying it, he’s not saying anything, which is doing nothing to calm my anger. Or frustration. Or whatever the hell it is I’m feeling.
“You didn’t think I had a say in it?” I ask once I can’t wait for his reply any longer. “You didn’t think that was something I deserved to know?”
He nods and shrugs and looks back at the road ahead of us.
“I didn’t want you to blame him,” he says so softly I barely hear him over the whooshing wind and the humming of the engine.
“Of course I blame him, he has no business deciding who I can be with,” I snap and cross my arms over my chest so hard it hurts. “And I thought you loved me.”
He glances at me again, and there’s more anger than apology in his eyes.
“Of course I love you, Harper. But your father’s a scary guy,” he says. “And besides, you’re like the MC princess. More so than even Ice’s daughters and you know that very well. No one was gonna stand for the two of us being together. Especially not if Scar was against it. And he never liked me. Why do you think I wanted to keep it a secret?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Jax?” I ask snappishly. “Maybe because you had one foot out the door the whole time anyway?”
His eyes widen in shock, but then turn right back to hard, dark glass.
“Well, you could’ve come with me. But there was always something holding you back. Whether it was your mother’s need to keep you close or everyone else’s… you know,the family’s.”
“You were a part of that family too!”
“Yeah, not quite, Harper,” he says with more venom in his voice than I’ve ever heard.
“We were going on my tour together,” I say, but the wind has gone from my sails considerably.
He had mentioned the two of us going away somewhere together a few times over the years. If he had gotten his way, we’d have gone on this tour years ago. But I never put two and two together. Never saw it as him wanting us to leave together. I’m only just realizing it now and I’m not even sure I’m right.
“And here we are,” he says and grins at me, but his eyes are still two very hard black glass orbs.
“Oh, yes, that’s right, Jax, you’re right,” I say. “This is perfect. You’re on the run from the FBI and facing the death penalty when they catch you. Yes, this is exactly what I had in mind for my first tour and our first road trip.”
That wipes the grin right off his face. We’ve just entered another small town like the one he picked me up in, and he brakes hard then makes a sharp left turn into the nearly empty parking lot of a closed convenience store. The smell of burned rubber is heavy in the cab as he rounds on me.
“What is this gonna be, Harper? A week of you beating me over the head with everything I’ve ever done wrong? You’re right I fucked up. I fucked up so many times I lost count. But don’t fucking tell me I had any other choice than to leave after Scar warned me off. He would’ve killed me to get his way.”
The breath I was taking lodges deep in my throat like a spear. “He’d never. You were one of us.”
I’ve only just accepted that my father is the ruthless, merciless killer everyone thinks he is, but I’ll never believe this. He wouldn’t kill a man just to keep him away from me.
He scoffs. “I wasn’t, not really. I was always just some stray who wandered in. I’m also no good at taking orders from bossy old men and it showed.”
“Yet you took Scar’s order and left,” I interject into his pause and shock him into an even deeper silence.
