I Ran Home With My Baby to My Brother's Biker Friends, and the Three Who Tormented Me Said I Was Theirs to Guard novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: The Lock

I hit Dirk in the chest with both fists, in the jail parking lot, with my daughter in the crook of my arm.

I hit him three times.

He took every one.

He stood with his hands open at his sides and let me, and the third time I did not pull my hand back.

I held on to his vest instead.

"Nine years," I said.

"Yes," Dirk said.

"I hated you for nine years.

"I wrote you into every bad day I had."

"I know."

"You let me," I said.

"I did," he said.

"Why didn't you say?"

"Because you'd have told Marcel," he said.

"Not on purpose.

"At the dinner table, with the wine, laughing.

"He would have asked you one soft question, and you'd have told him who your brother's friends were and what they said.

"You were twenty-one and in love with him.

"I wasn't going to hand him that."

"I wasn't a child."

"No," Dirk said.

"But you had no reason to doubt him.

"I gave you every reason to doubt me instead."

I put my forehead against his vest.

He stood stiff as a post for a count of three.

Then his hand came up and settled on the back of my head, the flat of it, light.

Zuri patted my cheek and said, "Ba."

Somebody laughed behind me, a wet, wrecked laugh, and it was Nik.

He had come across the snow with his hand still over half his face.

"That was cheap of me," Nik said.

"The laugh.

"On the curb.

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