The MC President's Forsaken Wife (Zara and Knox) novel Chapter 487

Chapter 239-1

+25 Points

stand before the full–length mirror in our bedroom, smoothing down the front of a black matte–jersey dress. It clings tailored and dark around my frame, accommodating the gentle, unmistakable curve of my swollen belly.

My hands rest over my bump for a moment, feeling the quiet, rhythmic swell of life inside me while everything outside feels so dangerously steeped in death.

In the mirror, my eyes look tired, shadowed by the relentless strain of the past few week – Locke missing, Vane lurking, the shadow army moving, and now this.

Today, we bury two of our own.

My gaze drifts from my reflection to a framed photograph sitting on my dresser, one that Dad dug out of the depths of a trunk in his attic. It’s a grainy shot taken at the clubhouse about fifteen years

ago.

Brick dominates the left side of the frame. He was already a legend when I was just a gangly, stubborn kid running around the Grinning Skulls repair bays with grease on my knees.

Brick was twenty years older than my father, a Vietnam veteran who came back to the States with

a shrapnel scar across his jaw and a soul that only found peace in the steady, low thunder of an

engine.

I remember one hot July afternoon when I was five. I’d scraped my knees raw falling off my bicycle behind the garage, refusing to cry because I wanted so badly to be as tough as the patched men walking around me.

Brick sat me down on a heavy wooden tool chest, hauled out a first–aid kit that looked like it had seen actual combat, and dabbed iodine onto my skin with a hand that was massive, heavily calloused, and surprisingly gentle.

“A Skull doesn’t cry over dirt, little bird,” he told me in that raspy voice that sounded like grinding gears. “Dirt stays on the road. Leather stays on your back. You wipe the grit off, you tighten your

boots, and you keep riding.”

Then he reached into his heavy leather vest, pulled out a warm, slightly melted strawberry hard candy, and pressed it into my palm with a quick, conspiratorial wink.

“Our secret, right little bird?”

“Yes,” I promised him solemnly. “Forever and ever.”

He was the rock of the road captain line. Losing him feels like someone pulled out a foundation

20. 20.

O

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