Page 138 of Gunner

“Physically maybe. I didn’t have good parents. They were both crack addicts with a side of alcoholism. I would have left had it not been for my baby sister. I was eight when she was born. How she wasn’t born addicted, I have no idea. But she was perfect.”

I thought about the day they brought Mellie home. I was so fascinated by her tiny fingers and toes.

“My mother had cut back while she was pregnant. It was the only good thing she ever did. I learned how to take care of her. I learned how to make formula and how to change diapers. God, she was so tiny I thought I was gonna break her.

“I hated going to school every day because it meant she was home alone with my parents. They did the bare minimum, and I took over when I got home.”

“You were just a kid.”

“But she was a baby. I’d been taking care of myself since I was six. I learned how to take care of her.”

My hands latched on to her hips, hoping to ground myself as I recalled my first kill.

“When I was fifteen, Mellie was seven. She was a cute little kid. Brown curls that were everywhere. She fought me every day when I had to brush her hair.”

I smiled, remembering her little pout and the way she tried to convince me her hair didn’t need brushing, and neither did her teeth.

“My parents had people in and out of the house at all hours. One night, I woke up to Mellie’s screams. I ran to her room and found some motherfucker watching her with his dick out.”

“Oh my God,” she whispered behind her hands that had flown to cover her mouth. “What did you do?”

“I’ve always been bigger than other kids my age. By the time I was fifteen, I was the size of a full-grown man. With the parents I had, I learned early how to fight. My old man was a mean drunk. High, he was easy to manage. But there’s a reason behind the saying ten feet tall and bulletproof. When he drank, it let him believe he was untouchable. So, I learned to protect myself and Mellie when he came around.”

My hands contracted on her hips. She must have sensed my struggle because she put her hands on my arms and rubbed up and down like I had done for her when I pulled her onto my lap.

“I grabbed the bastard by the back of his neck and tossed him out of her room. I had intended to leave it at that. But he thought he was untouchable like my old man. Only, he wasn’t as big as my old man. He was in his twenties. Maybe six feet. I was as tall as him, but bulkier. When he got up, he started mouthing off about how he was owed. Said he should get to finish what he paid for. I saw red. I punched that fucker, and when he went down, I went down with him. I laid into him until my father pulled me off. By then, his face had caved in, and he was bleeding from his ears.”

Even at fifteen, I knew what that meant.

The man was dead, and I had killed him.

“I didn’t regret a single minute. I turned on my father and told him if something like that ever happened again, he would get the same thing. I slept in Mellie’s room after that. Every goddamn night until I joined the Silver Shadows at twenty-one. Mellie was thirteen, and I got an apartment and moved her into it. I explained to my president why I couldn’t live at the clubhouse, and he let me live off site with the condition I would still be on call. I only prospected for six months. He realized quickly I was an asset he wanted.”

“Where is your sister now?”

“When she graduated, I paid for her to go to college and I cut her from my life.”

“Oh, Gunner, why?” There were tears in her eyes when she asked.

“She’d had enough of living in fear. I didn’t want her near the club. I send her money every month. She’s got a good job, and Nav keeps an eye on her for me. She seems happy.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“It’s ok that you don’t feel remorse, baby. But you need to talk about what you do feel. I don’t feel bad about killing that son of a bitch. I did it to protect my baby sister. And I would do it again without blinking.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Haizley

“Thank you for sharing that with me. I can’t tell you what she said, but listening to Amber’s story, and now yours, has helped me understand what I was feeling. Why I didn’t feel bad. In a perfect world, life would be black and white. But this world isn’t perfect, and we all live in the gray.”

What Gunner did when he was a kid shaped him into the man he was. The fighter, the outlaw, the protector. It was a crime of passion, carried out in the heat of the moment when his sister was in danger. He had no way of knowing what that man had ‘paid’ for. He only knew it would be hurtful to his sister. Both physically and emotionally.

That kind of loyalty should be celebrated. But often it resulted in the protector being the one getting punished.

“What happened to the man you killed? How did you not get in trouble?”

“My dad took care of it. No idea what he did, but he didn’t want the cops showing up. Not with what was going on in that house. He would have ended up in prison.”

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