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“And I’m sure, though I can’t really think of an example right off the top of my head, that somewhere along the lines, in the many years of this club’s history, a woman has been hurt because of the club. That said, again, not fatally. And not permanently injured. And someone always paid for it.
“We have a lot of… protocols now,” he added.
“What kind of protocols?”
“If there seems to be some sort of threat going on with the club, everyone comes in. Either here, where we have safe rooms in the basement, or up to a sort of… compound on the hill that my cousin runs. Military-grade shit up there. No one and nothing could hurt someone there. So if things seem dicey, the wives and kids typically go hang there until it is handled.”
“Did you have to spend time there as a kid?”
“Yeah,” he said, smirking. “I fucking loved it there. Kinda like a summer camp, really.”
“Weren’t you scared?”
“I don’t remember being scared, honestly. When I was too little to understand the club and the life, there was nothing to be scared of. We were just having an adventure. When I was older and did understand the shit that was going on, I always knew that it would be handled. Because that was what history had shown us time and again.”
My head felt like it was spinning.
“Hey,” Seth said, placing his hands on each of my knees. “I know it’s a lot. Which is probably why I didn’t tell you sooner. But that was wrong of me. You had a right to know before you got involved with me.”
I did believe that.
But if that was true, then so was him having a right to know about my past before he got involved with me and my kids, right?
And I’d been careful not to reveal any of that.
“I understand why you didn’t. And it is a lot. But that’s… it’s not an automatic no for me,” I said. “I just need to wrap my head around it.”
“And maybe be around it,” he suggested. “I’m not saying the kids. I get that you want to protect them. But maybe just you. To get a feel for it, decide what you think about it when you have some lived experience with it.”
“That’s… fair,” I agreed, nodding.
“Now,” he said, exhaling hard. “Why the fuck were you here to buy a gun?”
“That’s a long story,” I admitted.
“I got time. I’m assuming it starts with the father of your kids.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “What you have to understand is that it didn’t begin how it ended,” I said.
“How did it begin?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Lana
I’d like to think I had been a pretty well-adjusted person.
No, I didn’t have any family of my own growing up.
And, yes, I’d been bounced around in the system and then in group homes as I got older. Until I aged out.
But I came out of it pretty unscathed. One of the lucky ones. No mental or physical abuse. Yes, there was a feeling of… disconnection, a yearning to find a place where I belonged, with people who loved me.
That was the story of a lot of people who grew up with relatively good homes, though. Sometimes what you needed had to be sought elsewhere.
That was what found family was.
I’d been determined to create a family for myself, even in those early adulthood years, back when I was trying to work, to pay bills, to figure out a career path for myself. My end goal was always a husband and kids. If I was lucky, he would come from his own big family, and there would be aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, all those things that I’d never had much experience with, but had craved.
So, yeah, you could say that there was a certain vulnerability in me that a man with predatory tendencies could easily see, could exploit.
But in my mind, I was doing well.
Working at night, taking classes at the community college during the day. Considering a career in media or even editing. Anything that might involve writing of some sort.
I had my shit all on the right track.
And then there he was.
Simon Dunn.
By all outward accounts, a normal man.
Older, sure, but at the time, I’d been so flattered by his attention, so unaware of a power imbalance between a twenty-year-old girl and a thirty-five-year-old man.
I did a lot of soul-searching in the years that followed, trying to understand what would make a man so much older want someone so much younger. Especially as I grew older, and looked at men of that young age and saw them as little babies in comparison.
I concluded that it typically fell into two types.
The men who were immature and couldn’t connect with women of their own age.
Or the men who saw a younger woman and knew how much easier they would be to impress and then manipulate and control.
