Page 12 of Surrender
“No.”
“Bad blood with you two?”
Rafe let out a dry chuckle. “To say the least,” he answered, his jaw clenched. “Used to beat the shit out of me when he and Mom were together. He’s the reason I ended up in foster care, ’cause Mom wouldn’t get rid of him for me. Then they had Gabi and Sean, and he up and left not long after.”
“And they didn’t put you back with your mom when he was gone?” I asked with a raised brow.
He snorted. “She told them she didn’t want me back. That Iwas the problem.”
Fucking hell.
“That’s a real fucking shame, kid,” I told him with a heavy sigh. “You let me know if you need us to step in and have words with your mom or your ex.”
“Okay, yeah, thanks.” He swallowed hard, letting me know it was obviously something that had been weighing on his mind.
“Kid, when you have shit going on in your life, you talk to your brothers about it,” I said before tossing him a dusty motor from the back of this fucking machine. He juggled it in his hands before finally getting a good grip on it. “The club is your family. If you have shit going on, we all have fucking shit going on. But we can’t read your mind, you gotta use your words like a big boy.”
“That’s rich coming from the guy who speaks with his fists,” Missy commented from the other side of the clubhouse bar, without even looking up from whatever the hell she was working on beneath the counter.
Hawk stepped out of the hall and scoffed loudly, shaking his head. “Says the woman who used her baseball bat to tell Drew he was a dickhead.”
Missy looked up, her mouth dropping open. “That was different…”
“Oh yeah?” Her old man teased, raising his brows.
She shot him a dark glare. “Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”
Hawk chuckled, unfazed by the way she was trying to light him on fire with her eyes.
“Rafe!” he called, turning his attention to the two of us. “Come on, Bishop wants to talk to you.”
The kid leaped up, quickly dusting off his hands. “On it,” he answered, glancing at me nervously as I got to my feet. “Just me?”
“Him too.” Hawk groaned, nodding down the hall. “Let’s go.”
Rafe hurried in that direction with his shoulders pulled back. Hawk and I both took a pause before we followed, neither of us unable to keep a proud fucking grin off our faces.
“You think he knows?” Missy whispered with a wide grin.
“He doesn’t know,” I scoffed. “I think he already sees himself as a part of something, and if he prospected the rest of his life, he wouldn’t really mind.”
Missy pressed her hand to her heart while her eyes glistened just a little. “God, he deserves this.”
He did.
Rafe surprised me every day.
Not just with his fighting abilities and his determination and grit, but with how much he’d fucking grown in the past year. From an angry, scared teenager to a loyal and level-headed man who every brother in the club could trust to have their back.
It wasn’t often that the people who grew up being treated like shit and beaten and broken down over and over again turned out to be good fucking human beings. They usually had a chip on their shoulder or a thorn in their side—I should know.
But Rafe had never once been thepoor-metype.
He’d never seen his past as anything other than a reason to do better, and he deserved to be recognized for the hard work he’d put in over the years.
It was time.
Hawk slapped his hand on my shoulder and the two of us trudged down the hall to the meeting room, stepping through the large double doors and pushing them closed behind us before finding our seats at the head of the table beside Bishop.
