The moment the little girl stepped into my line of sight, I felt like I’d been hit by a fucking lightning bolt. My body shuddered from the aftershocks. It was as if I were looking at the female version of myself when I had been that age. “Fuck me.”
“This belongs to you. Willow, she your daughter.”
At that moment, the room tilted and spun, and if it hadn’t been for Rev behind me, I probably would have done a pansy-ass thing like fucking passing out. I momentarily leaned on his strength until I could recover. Although the physical evidence showed that the kid was mine, I immediately went on the defensive. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I don’t have any fucking kids.”
Wide-eyed, the little girl stared up at me. From her expression of wonderment, I knew she was putting the pieces together. Regardless of my denial, she knew the truth—I was her father. As I glared down at her, an unwanted feeling of pride coursed through my veins.
Mine.
I’d created the angelic-looking thing before me. As I mentally counted the months and years in my mind, I couldn’t help but think she had been conceived during that one perfect month with Lacey. We’d fucked morning, noon, and night, so I guess it wasn’t hard to imagine I’d knocked her up. I’d certainly been barebacking, and she was off all meds. I guessed now that had included her birth control.
The woman reached into the large bag on her shoulder. After taking out a piece of paper, she thrust it at me. “You on Willow’s birth certificate,” she argued.
Just hearing the girl’s name caused a stabbing pain to shoot through my chest straight to my heart. Willow … My daughter’s fucking name was Willow. The first time Lacey and I had ever fucked was under one of the willow trees in the field down the hill from the compound. Before we’d fucked, we’d sat under one for hours, talking and laughing. Like a lovesick pussy, I’d even carved our initials into one of the trees. Then everything had gone to fucking hell, but she’d remembered enough to name our daughter something meaningful.
“Look,” the woman instructed, flashing the paper in front of my face.
I grabbed it from her and stared down at it. There it was in bold, black ink. Under “Father’s Name” was David Malloy. What the fuck had Lacey been thinking? She’d put my name on a legal document, yet she’d never fucking picked up a phone to tell me I had a kid? There were a thousand things I wanted to scream at her at that moment, but I couldn’t. I’d never get to have the answers I so desperately sought, because she was dead. Worst of all, she’d been murdered. What the hell had she gotten herself into?
Even with the evidence before me, I still replied, “Yeah, well, I still want a DNA test.”
Rev’s strong hand gripped my shoulder. “There’s no doubt in hell she’s yours, Deacon.”
I jerked my head to glare at him. “And if she is, what the hell am I supposed to do with a kid?”
He pinned me with a hard stare. “You’ll do the responsible thing and try to raise her.”
“Fuck that!” I shouted before tossing the birth certificate back at the woman. Without another word, I turned and stalked out of the bar. There was no way in hell I could stay there one more minute. Suffocating panic had invaded my body.
Lacey was dead—she’d been murdered. I had a kid—a daughter I had no fucking idea what to do with. A boy would have been one thing, but a girl? You had to be tender and sweet to girls. I didn’t have a tender or sweet bone in my fucking body.
My out-of-control thoughts sent me sprinting down the dirt road. My heavy boots kicked up a cloud of dust behind me. When I reached the last row house on the left, I threw open the door without even a hello. Now retired, my mother spent her days volunteering with her church. But she was always home by five, because she wanted to watch fucking Little House on the Prairie.
Her blue eyes appraised me from her seat on the couch. She rose to her feet, beckoning me to her. “David, what’s wrong?” she questioned, fear resonating in her voice. From her expression, I could tell she was envisioning a hundred different scenarios involving the death of Rev or Bishop.
Although I wanted to put her out of her misery, I couldn’t. I couldn’t move—I was frozen to the fucking floor. I didn’t know how to break the news to her. I just knew I wanted her to somehow make it all right. “I have a kid,” I finally blurted.
Relief flickered through her eyes, and she momentarily raised her face to the ceiling as if she was thanking God that her boys were safe. For now.
When she looked to me, her brows rose in surprise. “Cheyenne’s pregnant?”
I scowled at the assumption. My mother sure as hell didn’t approve of my fucking around, and she didn’t care very much for Cheyenne. She wanted me to find a nice girl to settle down with to make babies, not knock up the club whore who’d been on her back in all the guys’ beds. But I could tell she would swallow all her negative feelings if there was a baby involved—a grandbaby for her.
“Talk to me, David,” she instructed.
Finally able to move, I picked one foot up and then the other to close the gap between us. As bitchass as it sounds, just the feel of her hand on my arm brought me so much comfort. With a sigh of both anguish and contentment, I let her pull me into her arms. And even though I had the most amazing woman before me, I couldn’t help letting my thoughts go to my birth mom.
Hers was the sad tale of a good girl who’d gotten involved with the wrong man. She’d been a warm, nurturing mother who kissed my cuts and scrapes and wrapped me in her arms when I had nightmares. She just hadn’t planned on my abusive old man getting out of prison, hunting us down, and then strangling her one night when I was seven.
She went in the ground, he went to jail, and I went into the system. From there, I ricocheted from one shithole to another. The anger and violence I’d inherited from my old man started surfacing when I hit puberty, and that’s when I went out on my own. Yeah, a thirteen-year-old kid couldn’t do much for himself on the streets but steal … and fight.
The ring is where Preach found me. Big for my age, I fought illegally in an underground circuit. For six months, I lived a hand-to-mouth existence, busting noses and cracking jaws, thinking no one in the fucking world cared about me. But I was wrong.
Fate is a funny motherfucker. Once upon a time, my mother had attended Preach’s church. In fact, Preach and Mama Beth had hidden her and me from my father when he was on one of his drunken rampages before he was sent to prison. We’d run away in the middle of the night when my mother found out he was being released. It was probably the worst thing she could have done. She might still be alive today if she had stayed. After all, we had shelter and protection when we were with Preach.