Page 80 of Deserter

I wasn’t and she deserved better. Life had taken what little humanity I possessed and stripped it away until I was nothing more than a machine.

“You’ve never been loved the way you deserve to be loved and I could say it until I’m blue in the face. Some things can’t be said though, Jamie. Some things have to be shown. So, I came after you and I will keep coming after you because you’re my family now.”

I stopped breathing at her confession. She was handing me the one thing I’d never truly had; something that I couldn’t buy with all the money in the world—a family.

Just like that, Celia Cross took down another wall.

Wolverine had sworn that she was too young; too sheltered to make it in this world, but I’d just become convinced that her emotional maturity completely eclipsed mine.

Donald hadn’t loved my ma. He’d wanted to possess her, like a child with a toy. I had similar thoughts when I collected the debt her daddy owed, but Celia wasn’t my mother.

Ma had let my old man consume her until she was a walking corpse. With the exception of Celia’s body, I hadn’t been able to take anything by force. I’d gotten my pound of flesh, but the rest had to be given to me, only when she was ready.

She was willingly handing herself over to a savage.

“Please say something.”

The only thing I’d ever loved was pain, but I was addicted to Celia and didn’t plan on ever getting clean.

I spun the skull ring around my finger once before pulling it off. “Marry me.”

“Are you messing with me?” she asked slowly and I swatted her bare thigh with my palm in response, before dropping the ring into her hand.

“Yes or no, princess?”

“Y-yes.” There was just enough light streaming in from the bathroom for me to see her staring blankly down at the ring.

“I’ll get you somethin’ better.” I’d get her an entire jewelry store if she wanted it.

She shook her head and slipped the oversized ring onto her finger. “It’s not that. The night that I was taken, I was so scared, and I remember focusing on this ring and the tattoo on your finger to get through it.”

“I don’t want you to be scared of me—”

Her mouth met mine, slowly at first, but then with urgency, until my only thought was being inside of her again.

She wrapped herself around me, baby and all, chasing away my demons with every breath. I let her think that she was clinging to me, when really, it was the other way around.

Chapter Seventeen

Celia: 1990

Molly peered over my shoulder, meeting my reflection in the mirror. “You scared?”

“No.” I slid another bobby pin into my hair, securing the crown of flowers on top of my head with a smile. There was snow on the ground and flowers in my hair, proof that Persephone could hold death and life in the palm of her hand.

I was about to become Jamie’s wife and in another two weeks, a mother.

I should’ve been freaking out, but I was strangely content with the direction my life had taken. When Jamie opened up to me that night in the clubhouse, I’d held my breath, afraid to do anything that might shut him down again.

And then he proposed.

So, maybe he hadn’t gotten down on one knee or asked my father for my hand; in all honesty, nothing in our relationship had gone according to plan. I didn’t care. We were stupidly happy.

I was more relaxed now than I’d ever been in my life. I wasn’t cramming for a test or trying to mimic the behaviors of other biker women.

I was just me.

I’d learned over the past two and a half months that life with Jamie was anything but monotonous. We’d had sex in the clubhouse and almost every room of our house—minus the newly completed nursery, obviously. We’d even had a tryst in the basement of the library, up against the stacks.

---