Page 22 of Archer (Dirty Misfits MC 3)
Then again, what did I have to lose?
“My sister,” I said.
She took a bite of her fries and kept her eyes on me. “What about her?”
I stared off into the watery horizon. “She, uh, kind of got herself tangled up with dudes she had no business being around.”
“What happened? I mean, if you don’t mind me asking.”
I peeked over at her. “You know that if I answer this, you’ll have to come back with something equally as vulnerable, right?”
Her eyes held mine for a while before she nodded her head. “Yes, I know.”
I drew in a sharp breath through my nose and looked back out at the water. “My sister and I grew up in a rough part of town. We never had much, and every damn day I was having to dodge the gangs scattered around town just to make it home from school safely. That was just the life, you know? Gang life or no life.”
“Wow,” she murmured.
I cleared my throat. “Anyway, I grew up and out of it. I hit eighteen, packed on some muscles, got myself a nice piece to carry around, and no one fucked with me. I escorted my sister to and from school, so she felt safe. But one day, Mom overdosed on heroin and I had to get her to the hospital, which meant not getting my sister from school.”
“Oh, no,” she murmured.
I closed my eyes. “That was the day the gangs decided to prey on her. She was kidnapped by a local gang and forced into their prostitution syndicate. Mom and Dad couldn't even get the fucking police interested enough to go looking for her, seeing as girls went missing just about every damn day.”
“What the fuck?” she asked.
I swallowed the knot forming in my throat as my eyes opened. “I decided that if the police weren’t going to go after her, then I would. And I got pretty close. I joined up with the gang to try and get closer to her. I worked my way over the course of a few months into bodyguarding for their auctions. But when I tried to get my sister out of there, they caught us both. Decided to make an example out of her.”
“You mean…?”
I gritted my teeth. “Yeah. They killed her.”
Her hand rubbed my back. “Jesus Christ, I’m so sorry, Archer.”
I shrugged. “It was a long time ago, but it still formed me as a young man. It’s why I had such a stark reaction to you doing this. After slaughtering the men that killed my sister, Hyde—our former President—essentially dug me out of the hole I had shoveled for myself. It’s a long story and I won’t get into it now, but I promised myself after Hyde helped me clean up that I’d always—ALWAYS—save women like my sister.”
“And right now, you’re agreeing with tossing me into it.”
I nodded slowly. “Yep.”
Her hand fell to the small of my back and stayed. “Do you know why I started stripping in the first place?”
I slowly turned my gaze toward her. “Why?”
Then, it was her turn to move her gaze out toward the ocean. “I grew up in a very traditional sort of family. Mom always stayed at home, she cooked the best dinners every night, and Saturdays were meant for family before we went to church on Sundays.”
“Sounds nice,” I murmured.
But she snickered. “To the outside world, sure. But there were a lot of lessons they tried drilling into me that simply didn’t work. My mother was a big proponent of always looking nice for my dad. She felt it was a woman’s duty to always keep the bar high, so the man knew just how high he had to reach to keep her. And that sort of morphed into her trying to teach me that being smart and all that shit was great, but it meant nothing if I didn’t look good, too.”
“Well, fuck,” I said flatly.
“I hit puberty and gained a lot of weight. You know, like most girls do. But to Mom? That wasn’t good enough. She put me on diets and hid all of the snacks in the house. It was like I was being shamed for something I couldn't control. And it eventually morphed into an eating disorder that I carried with me well into my older teenage years.”
“Jesus, that’s some bullshit.”
I giggled bitterly. “Yeah, and had it not been for Astrid trying to talk some sense into me, it actually might have killed me. It wasn’t until a doctor looked at me one day and told me that if something didn’t change that year, I’d be dead before the next one.”
“So, where does the dancing come into play?”
She shrugged. “I used plain old dancing to distract my mind from the reel my mother had embedded into me as a child. Every time I felt those thoughts creeping up, I went and danced. And when I felt strong enough to deal with the real world on my own, I ventured out and found a group dancing class.”
