Page 100 of Healed

“Oh my God,” I breathed, recognising where he had led me to.

The house was nowhere near the mess it had once been—the fence had been mended and painted a vivid green. The garden was now neat and tidy, with a bench tucked under the front window and a table next to it.

“Who lives here now?” I breathed.

“At the minute it’s just Divorce. It used to be Jenna’s—she moved out when…”

“Yeah,” I nodded, not needing him to say it.

“When Divorce kicked Rachel’s mum to the kerb, he stayed at the clubhouse for a while. But as you witnessed last night, Rachel and Dante aren’t exactly quiet or discreet, and Divorce was desperate to get the hell out of there.”

My cheeks flamed at the reminder. How could he stand there and say something so casually? Did he not possess the right genetics to be embarrassed?

“Well,” I said, clearing my throat. “It seems like he’s taking good care of the place, anyway. I’m sure your mum would be happy about that.”

“Let’s face it,” Vienna said, his voice dry. “My mother didn’t give a flying fuck what this house looked like. You saw the state of it with your own eyes. It was mortifying.”

“Hey,” I snapped, grabbing his arm. “There was nothing mortifying about it. I saw a mother handling more than she could cope with, and a boy holding the edges of his life together as frantically as he could before everything blew apart. I wasn’t disgusted then, and I’m certainly not disgusted now.”

Vienna didn’t respond. He seemed a million miles away, trapped in a memory I hadn’t shared, but one I knew anyway.

Because I had seen it with my own eyes.

I saw the track marks on his mother’s arms and heard the way she mockingly told a young Luke that she slept with the old president, Warrior. Luke was painfully aware that she was a club bunny, and nothing—not even her son—was more important than scoring her next fix and being the prize pick of all the bunnies.

The house had been a mess that one fateful night when I helped him carry her home. There were beer cans all over the garden and littered throughout the house. As soon as the front door had been pushed open, I’d been overwhelmed by the smell of stale smoke.

And yet Luke hadn’t been fazed at all. He still carried his mum over to the sagging couch, placed a kiss on her head, and made sure she had everything she needed to ride out her high and comfortably get through the night.

“You’re a good man, Vienna. You are,” I said before he could protest. “You could have easily left your mum to the men. You could have curled your lip at her and let her fend for herself. But you didn’t. You protected her—you’ve always been a protector, even way back then.”

“And you protected me,” he said quietly. So quietly I wasn’t sure I heard him correctly.

“What do you mean?”

“I know what you did for me that night. The reason you and Damien were here. You were supposed to spy on us all and get information to bring back to your dad after his meeting with Crash. Damien was full of it the next day at school, especially considering he spent the entire evening winding Dante up and sniffing around Laura. But you… you kept quiet about everything you had seen. Why?”

“I…”

What could I say to that?

“There was nothing to report,” I finally shrugged. “As far as I was concerned, there was just a boy getting his mother home after she’d had one too many. And we’ve all been there—lord knows I helped my own mother a time or two. No one else needed the details. They weren’t mine to share.”

“Thank you,” he said quietly.

“There’s nothing to thank me for. I did what was right.”

A comfortable silence fell over us and before we knew what we were doing, we found ourselves stepping closer, our bodies brushing together.

He reached out to brush the hair from my forehead, and we simply stared at each other for long moments. Until he nodded, seeming to come to a decision.

“Come with me,” he demanded, and yet didn’t give me a choice. He grabbed hold of my arm and pulled me further down the path, out of the small village, and into the woods surrounding the compound.

“What are we—?”

“Something I should have been man enough to do last night.”

And then all logic flew out of the window as he slammed me against the nearest tree trunk and covered my mouth with his own.