Page 27 of Biker's Dark Revenge

"I’m so sorry, Lee," I told him. "I – I can’t even imagine what it was like to..."

I trailed off. My words felt useless, almost insultingly so, in the face of what he just told me. Losing a little girl like that? Hell, I’d only had Kara in my life for a matter of weeks, and I still felt like I wouldn’t be able to recover if something happened to her.

"No, you can’t," he replied. Not angrily, just matter-of-fact. "And I hope you’ll never have to find out what it’s like, either. Nobody deserves to go through that. Nobody."

I swallowed again. This was it – this was what he had been keeping from me all this time, holding back, clearly still carrying some enormous guilt over what had happened to his daughter.

"What...what happened to her?" I asked him. "If that’s okay to ask ..."

"It’s fine," he murmured. He took a deep gulp of beer and continued. "It was...a car accident. Drunk driver. Hit and run. She was outside playing on the sidewalk one second, and then the next...poof. That was it. She was gone."

"How long ago was this?" I wondered aloud. I knew no answer would soften the blow of her loss – it could have been a hundred years, and any parent would still be carrying it just as closely as they ever had.

"Nearly ten years now," he replied. "But I can still see...I can still see the moment it happened. It plays on my mind all the time. Like it’s torturing me."

"Oh, Lee," I sighed, and I slipped my arm around his shoulders. He leaned into me, and I pressed a kiss to his temple. If I could just lift some of the weight from his shoulders, I would consider it worth having this conversation.

"Why are you telling me this now?" I wondered, after a long pause. He had been so defensive before, as though he didn’t want me to know any part of the truth about what had happened. What had changed to make him spill his guts to me like this?

"Because I saw the man who killed her again tonight."

His voice was hollow as he spoke, and I had to pause for a moment to take in what he’d said to me. He...?

"What are you talking about?" I gasped. "What do you mean...?"

"He was working for Lombardi. Is working for Lombardi, I guess," he replied, shaking his head. "I... after Dina...after what happened to her, I went after him. The cops didn’t do anything about her case, and I figured I had to take revenge for what he did. I couldn’t let him keep living, knowing what he took from me. I tracked him down, I pulled a gun on him, but I couldn’t..."

He shook his head.

"I couldn’t pull the trigger," he admitted. "I had never killed someone back then, so I just shot him in the foot. Every day since, I’ve wanted to get revenge for what he did, that alcoholic bastard – it was his bullshit that got Dina killed and he never paid for it, not really."

He chuckled, hollow.

"I should have guessed he would end up working for someone like Lombardi," he muttered. "An asshole like that, he doesn’t know anything else but that life. That kind of bullshit. The only person who would want to work with him would be Lombardi..."

He trailed off, shaking his head.

"So what happens now?" I asked him. I didn’t even know what to do with the enormity of the information he just hit me with.

"We have him locked up in the compound, behind the tattoo shop," he replied. "And we need information out of him. Someone’s going to have to shake that information loose."

His eyes flashed with dark cruelty – a cruelty that could only be reserved for the man who had harmed his daughter. I didn’t blame him. It was how I felt about Lombardi, for what he had done to Kara – and she was, thankfully, still alive, sleeping in the next room, utterly oblivious to everything going on here.

I grabbed Lee’s hand and squeezed it tight.

"You do anything you need to do," I told him firmly. "Anything. Whatever it takes to bring Lombardi down. All right?"

"All right," he replied, and he turned to me and planted a kiss on my lips. He knew it was a promise – a promise that he could do anything he needed to do, and I would support him. I wasn’t going to get spooked; I wasn’t going to run, and I wasn’t going to blame him for getting his revenge. I just wanted this over. And if it meant taking down the man who hurt his daughter, too? So be it.

"Come on," I told him, rising to my feet, and tugging him upright behind me. "You should get some rest."

"I’m all right," he protested, but I shook my head.

"I want you to sleep next to me tonight," I whispered to him. I couldn’t remember the last time I shared a bed with someone, but I knew it was what I needed right now, what we both needed, more than anything. His arms around me, the promise that everything was going to be okay.

Whether or not I believed it.

Chapter Eighteen – Lee

---