Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
A challenge.
Like she was daring me to tell West when was the last time I saw her.
Like she was daring me not to.
I decided to avoid both options.
"Ferryn, where the fuck have you been?"
"That's a long story," she told me, putting her helmet on the seat of her bike. "What are you doing here? With a cut on?" she asked, eyes going to my chest.
"That's a long story too," I told her.
"I have a feeling there are going to be a lot of long stories in store for me," she said, and it was impossible to tell if she was dreading or excited about that prospect.
"So, I am just going to cut through all this fun cryptic shit," West interjected. "And ask what you're doing back here all a sudden and unannounced."
To that, her chest rose as she sucked in a deep breath.
Looking for courage, maybe?
Though there didn't seem to be a bit of this new woman standing before us that could possibly be uncertain or insecure.
"It was time to come home."
And just like that, after almost nine years, Ferryn was home.
Four
Ferryn - Present Day
I don't know what I had been expecting heading home.
Honestly, I wasn't sure I even really let myself mull it over too much. I knew that doing so would make it impossible to drive into Navesink Bank after all these years.
Once I bested Holden, the decision was simply made. I didn't sit around, wondering what it might feel like to go back to the place that raised me, the people that raised me.
I wasn't sure I was prepared to feel much of anything at all.
There had been a drought in the softer, mushy sort of emotions for years for me. My life was too hard, too dark, to allow such weaknesses in.
So when I turned my bike to head down the main street, I had been woefully unprepared for the unexpected surge of nostalgia.
Maybe a part of me had expected so much to change. After all, so much about me had changed. And towns, well, they were a fluid thing, always growing, always evolving. Stores went in and out, faces changed, buildings were torn down and rebuilt.
It should have been different.
But it was almost a time capsule to my youth.
There were the same places.
She's Bean Around, the coffee shop where my friends and I had spent so much of our time. The Garage, a local, well, converted garage that served as a venue for all the local bands to practice and perform on weekends. There was the floral shop, the convenience store, the fancy lingerie store that my Aunt Elsie took me to when I turned fifteen to get me some cute sets my father would have had a conniption over if he knew I owned.
Then, of course, there was my destination.
The clubhouse.
The place I had spent a huge chunk of my childhood. Hanging out with my father and uncles and my aunts and the women who I knew would eventually become aunts.
There had been cookouts and birthday parties and Christmas extravaganzas.
I'd snuck my first taste of alcohol inside those walls with my best friend Iggy. I'd broken my first bone jumping off an old car my uncle Repo kept in the back in an attempt to prove I was the ballsiest of the group. I'd spent time in the glass room on the roof used for guard duty just to watch the stars and talk with Iggy about how cool it would be if I married her brother, and we could become sisters for real.
So much of my formative years was behind the gates, inside the walls. So much of who I was was created there.
Was.
Who I was.
I was not the same girl that had last seen the Henchmen MC compound.
My stomach, usually so steely, flip-flopped as I pulled my bike up to the gates, finding the Hailstorm guards situated there like they always were.
They were a familiar sight with unfamiliar faces.
Which meant that they had no idea who I was.
How humbling it was to finally come back home after so long and not be recognized in a place that had been like a home away from home for me.
Then just as I was trying to explain who I was there to see, why they should get out of my way, there were two new men there.
Both were tall, fit, wearing cuts. Only one was familiar.
A ghost from my past.
The boy I had once fantasized about marrying.
At the club.
Wearing a cut.
One of my father's men.
It so far from made sense that I was having trouble actually stringing my thoughts together in a way that could suss out what, exactly, was going on.
"So, where's my dad?" I asked into the awkward silence, my people skills definitely lacking thanks to no one but Holden to talk to. And, well, let's face it, Holden was not exactly an expert conversationalist. "What?" I asked when West shifted his feet, when Vance's arm rose, his hand rubbed across the back of his neck.