Page 88 of Resilience

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Mom put her hands to her face and rubbed her eyes, dragging her fingers harshly across her lids. For as long as Athena could remember, that was a sign that her mother was at the end of her patience, and Athena was about to get in trouble.

Athena was twenty-two years old and beyond getting grounded or having something taken away, but she still felt the little pulse of guilt and worry. She tried to ignore it.

“I have to do this, Mom.”

“I understand why you think that, but it’s a mistake. For more reasons than the immediate risk it puts you in.”

“What does that mean?”

It was Thursday evening, and Athena and her mother had been arguing for almost half an hour. What Sam and she had been calling Operation Hunter Hunt for the past few days was in motion. Dad, Dex, and Uncle Simon were already on their way west, meaning to get hold of Hunter after he left the nursing home. Sam and Jay were coming to pick Athena up, and they would meet the others at the place where the club did stuff like this.

Athena would be lying if she suggested she wasn’t conflicted about all this, and feeling nauseated for reasons that had nothing to do with the blob of goo temporarily in her uterus. Even after that nasty TikTok, in the cool of reflection and able to consider only herself, Athena wouldn’t have chosen to kill Hunter for what he did. She wanted him hurt. She wanted him to pay. Honestly, killing him, even killing him hard, seemed too easy. He’d have a really bad night, and then any suffering, any guilt, any hard consequences would be over. It was his family who’d suffer the longest.

But it was too late to back away now. She’d put this all in motion. Not intentionally, exactly, but each time she’d tried to find a way to exact her own revenge and had been dissatisfied with her options, she’d elevated the situation until—exactly as she’d thought, the precise reason she’d first wanted to keep it secret—the only option left was to kill him.

If she’d been able to keep it a secret, maybe ... but that thought chafed. Keeping it a secret would have meant Hunter going on with his little life, making TikToks about how she was crazy and garnering support from thousands of likeminded assholes, and a scary number of women who thought he was too hot to disbelieve. Keeping the secret would have been no kind of justice.

Maybe that was why she had sucked so incredibly bad at keeping it. Fuck, Sam had figured it out the very same morning. Then her mom had figured it out, then her dad had known something was really off. Mom had even figured out about the uterus blob before she had. It seemed like the dominoes had started falling immediately, leading to the inevitable conclusion.

As she’d expected, once her father knew, it was out of her hands. There was no way to keep him from going for Hunter and stripping him down for parts. And fuck, it pissed her off to have to constantly fight for her place in her own revenge. She was the one who’d been raped and betrayed by someone who was supposed to care for her. She was the one who’d been bitten like she was a dog in heat. She was the one who’d ended up with a blob. Now the men in her family were all, ‘We can’t let that bastard get away with it! Athena is one of ours! She’s under the protection of the club! Grunt, growl, chest thump, howl.’

It also galled her that they were, in one respect, right. If she wanted him hurt, she couldn’t do it on her own. She needed the club. That right there shifted the balance away from her.

WHICH COMPLETELY SUCKED. All of this was about reclaiming what he’d taken from her. She wanted him to feel frustrated and helpless, to have something awful happen to his body that he could do nothing about. She wanted that! Not just to make him suffer but to make him feel what he’d done to her.

To do that, she needed the club. In needing the club, she’d lost control over the result. Hunter would die, and it was too late for her to back out of the whole revenge thing and stop that happening, because now it was also about the Bulls and their precious reputation.

Her mother had warned her that to get the kind of revenge she wanted, she would have to give up control. And now she was having to fight her mom as well, because Mom wanted her to give up all control. She did not want Athena on the scene tonight.

“What I mean,” Mom answered her, “is this: you have never seen the club do their thing. You think you know what they do, but you don’t. I have seen them do their thing, and it will change the way you see them all—your father, your boyfriend and best friend, your family. Do you want this in your head? Do you want to think of what they’ll do to Hunter every time you look at Dad? Or Sam? I have never felt close to your Grampa D, and the reason is what I saw the club do to your father, on D’s orders.”

Athena knew about that—Dad had a pretty serious burn scar on his shoulder, and a few smaller scars on his back, from the time, well before she’d been around, that he’d faced club punishment. She knew the broad strokes of the reason for the punishment, and more detail about what they’d done to him. “That was a vote. The club voted to do that, and they gave Dad a choice.” He could submit to being burned over flame, or he could leave the club. He’d chosen the flame, and thus the club.

Athena had always understood that story to be about her father’s loyalty and bravery. He’d made a mistake and faced the consequences. Actually, Mom’s father had really made the mistake, and Dad had taken on the blame for him. Athena saw the whole thing as a testament to her father’s honor.

But Mom was waving off her take on it. “Technically, I suppose that’s true. But you only know your Grampa. I know D, and I remember the kind of president he was. I’m not saying he’s not a good man, and I know he’s a wonderful grandfather. But he had a way of getting the club to do what he wanted, to put his finger on the scale. Do you know what I mean?”

“He cheated?”

“No ... not cheated. Nothing so obvious as that. More that he used his influence in ways that weren’t always ... honorable.” She shook her head briskly. “I don’t know, starlight, and it’s off the point anyway. I’m just saying, when you see what these men we love are capable of, it’s not something you can erase from your memory, and it might change how you feel about them.”

There was literally nothing Dad or Sam could possibly do that would change her feelings. Certainly nothing they did to help her. She was sure of that. Anyway, she intended not to be an observer but a participant. She wanted to remove that jackass’s dick. With a dull blade.

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