Page 27 of Risk
“You pay that no mind, Kenna. All you need to do is finish your story so I can get you outta here and take care of my brother,” Kodiak states.
“Alright. After I was discharged, Marshall was waiting for me in the parking lot. By then, all signs of me giving birth were gone. I lost a lot of weight inside the facility and my womb healed. I had no other alternative than to go with him. It was the only way I could protect my son, Kodiak. What’s funny, is that while I wasin and going through therapy, I had made up my mind to find y’all and tell Risk about Phoenix. But when I saw him standing there, with that smarmy smirk on his face, I knew I’d never get that chance. From that day forward, I’ve been monitored. I eventually earned weekends free so I could go see Phoenix, but by then it was too late.”
“How?” Kodiak growls out the question. “If you had weekends free, why didn’t you take advantage of that and come find us?”
“Because I was weak. Afraid. He promised to leave my mom alone as long as I stayed in line. I couldn’t let Marshall discover Phoenix existed, that’d be disastrous for a lot of reasons. My imagination went wild with scenarios of what he could do with my boy if he ever got his hands on him. You don’t know what he’s capable of, Kodiak. He’s connected to people of authority. Bigwigs that could bury a person and wipe all traces of their existence off the map. Even entire groups, do you get where I’m going with that?”
“You’re saying they have enough power to take us down, too, Kenna. Aren’t you?”
“Without getting their hands dirty,” I confirm. “What I did wasn’t only for Phoenix, Kodiak, it was for y’all as well.”
“I need names, Kenna.”
“And I’d love to give them to you, Kodiak, but I don’t know who they are.”
“Dammit to hell,” he hisses. “Then I need you to tell me everything youdoknow about Marshall. Every dirty detail.”
“It’s not much,” I inform him. “Outside of those first two weeks when I was a teenager, I never spent a lot of time with him.”
“You may know more than you think you do, Kenna.”
Before I get a chance to respond, I’m ripped from the corner and find a knife glued to my neck. “I’ll slit her fucking throat if y’all don’t leave!” Risk roars. “Don’t test me on this.”
“You can’t kill her, brother,” Kodiak says, trying to reason with him.
“I won’t, not if y’all leave,” Risk replies. “Swear to fuck, Kodiak, this is between Kenna and me. I need you all to step out of this room.”
“You lay a hand on her, Risk, and you’ll face tribunal,” Kodiak warns. “Let her go and hand me your knife.”
“Kodiak,” I whisper. “It’s okay, you need to rally the boys and give us a minute.”
“He’s unhinged, Kenna. I can’t leave you alone with him as long as he’s acting this way,” Kodiak responds.
“He’ll give you the knife, he already said he would. I knew this was a possibility, I’m ready for it. Please, Kodiak. Let me talk to him,” I implore.
“Fuck no!” Conan protests. “He’s not stable, Kenna. I’m not leaving you two in here alone.”
“Then you can stay, right, Risk?” I ask, trying to come up with a compromise. “One brother staying behind isn’t so bad, right? Risk, let him. He’ll keep to himself while we hash this out.”
Before Risk can respond, the doors fly open and a voice I haven’t heard in a very long time announces, “Honey, I’m home.”
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
Risk
“The freakshow is here!”Conan bellows, his voice sounding relieved. “Wrecker, Dragon, Butcher, what brings y’all to our part of town?”
“My nieces told me to come, so I came and these two stragglers decided I couldn’t be trusted on my own,” Wrecker answers, tossing his thumb over his shoulder where the two others are standing.
Before we became the Deviant Knights, we were the Midnight Riders. Dragon was our president back then when we were nomads. Now, he’s an Imperial Knight with our brothers who split and went with him. That’s when Kodiak stepped in and took control of our wild and unruly ways. For a few years, we ran the roads causing mayhem anywhere we landed. I’ve missed these guys; when they went away to do their thing, our family felt fractured. It took a long time for me to forgive them. Kenna helped me heal from their desertion. We both felt their absence and in our bashing them, it made us closer.
“You always were a nosy fuck,” I grind out. “You didn’t come for the party; you came so you could partake in the drama that is my life.”
“I came to save you from yourself, Risk,” Wrecker advises. “Dragon, make him a puppet and pull his strings.”
Dragon peers over at him and says, “You’re getting a little big for your britches ordering me around, Wrecker. But in this instance, I’ll forgive you because you’re right, someone needs to get a handle on him because he’s a bomb waiting to go off.”
