Chapter 15

Rage

M y first stop is at a local lab that a friend of mine works at. I deliver the uncolored strand of Mia’s hair along with one of my own to Maggie, an older woman I once met when her husband had a heart attack while waiting for her to finish grocery shopping. She came out to find me giving him CPR in the parking lot and we still speak when we run into each other. I fill out the form asking for a DNA match, slide the samples into a sterile container and pay the fee.

When she reaches out her gloved to hand to take the container, I hang onto it for a second as I quietly ask, “Can you put a rush on this job?”

The older woman looks at me intently. “I can try, we’re swamped right now. I might be able to process it by the end of the week, if not by next week for sure. Is that fast enough?”

“Yes. That’s perfect. Thank you for seeing to this personally. I owe you one.”

Her expression morphs into one of gratitude. “You paid a lifetime of favors in advance. Ralph, told me to tell you hi when I see you again.”

“Tell him I say hello back and that we should go out for lunch sometime.”

“I’m sure he’d like that.” Tugging the container gently from my hand, she tells me, “I’ll call you the minute I get the results back.”

As I head back to my bike I check the first item of the day off my list. Next, I want to meet with Rigs. I send him a text and discover he’s in his office at the clubhouse. I go straight there and stalk into his office without so much as a good morning to anyone.

He can tell by the look on my face that something’s up. “Sit down, take a few deep breaths and tell me what’s bothering you, brother.”

I sit in the chair on the other side of his desk and just blurt it all out to him. “You already know I’m back with Priscilla.”

“If you’re here about the rabbit thing, we got a match on the fingerprints on the box, but the perp was picked up by the police on a drug charge before we could get to him. He’s in county lockup. We plan to jump on him the minute he gets released.”

Making an imperious slashing gesture with one hand, I say, “Good information to have, but I’m not here about that. I was taking care of Mia today and caught a glimpse of both of us in the mirror. It hit me pretty hard how much we look alike. We both have green eyes, the same complexion, and exactly the same type of hair.”

Rigs begins to pull back. “What exactly are you saying?”

“I asked her how old she is, and she said she was ten. Going by her birthday, and assuming Priscilla had a nine-month pregnancy, that means she was pregnant when she took off. To my mind that means there’s a good probability that Mia is my daughter.”

Rigs’ expression is cautious. “That’s good news, right?”

“Yeah, I’d love it if Mia turns out to be my kid. What I don’t appreciate is her mother running out on me pregnant, pretending she thought I was dead and marrying an asshole like Conrad. He had no business being within striking distance of my daughter. I cannot forgive her for not telling me right away when we first got back together. I mean, why wouldn’t she tell me?”

“Why do you think she didn’t tell you, Rage?”

I shrug, still angry. “I don’t know. She sent me a letter years ago saying that we were from different worlds, and she wanted someone who could provide the kind of life her parents did when she was growing up. Then she told me the letter was fabricated by her parents and given to me behind her back.”

“So you don’t believe her. Is that what I’m hearing you say?”

“When she came back into my world, she convinced me that everything I thought I knew about our breakup was wrong. She got me to trust her again. We’ve gotten really close over the last few weeks. I fell in love with her all over again and we’ve been sleeping together. And then she never fucking told me that Mia was my daughter.”

“I know that hurts and she should have been honest with you, but we need to look at the reasons she might not have felt comfortable doing that—that’s if Mia is yours and we still don’t know if that’s true.”

“You’re right. I know you are. But it feels like I’m good enough to save her life, take her in when she has nowhere to go, provide for her and protect her but somehow, I’m not good enough to be Mia’s dad. That’s really fucking unfair because I’ve gone the extra mile for this woman.”

“I’m not trying to play devil’s advocate here, but I don’t think you should get yourself worked up until you get a court ordered paternity test.”

“Fuck that, I dropped off hair samples from me and Mia at the lab in town just now. I know it won’t hold up in court, but it’ll be enough for me, I need to know this. I can always get a court appointed one if and when I file for custody and make no mistake I will file on her.”

Rigs gives me a hard stare, “You sound really angry right now, like a guy who’s earned his club name a hundred times over. I’ll do everything in my power to help you get to the bottom of this but my best advice for you is to stay away from Priscilla and Mia until you calm down. Going in half-cocked won’t do anyone any favors.”

“Fuck being calm! Do you understand what this means? It means the only woman I ever loved is just using me. How do I know she didn’t make up a bunch of lies to excuse away our breakup because she needs me right now.”

“I know you don’t want to hear it, but this is your anger talking. She didn’t engineer the situation with her husband shooting her, she didn’t know that you’d be called in as the medic. We don’t know what she’s been through, if she’s been hiding things from you, then she might have a good reason,” the older brother’s voice is calm but deadly serious. I know somewhere deep inside that he’s talking sense, but right now I don’t give a damn, “But why—”

“First things first, brother. You’ve got the ball rolling on the paternity test which will answer your main question. What’s next?”

“Ven has agreed to go to the courthouse with me. I want to pull her marriage license and Mia’s birth certificate. I want to see with my own eyes what she wrote down on those dates. I have the breakup letter from years ago and I want to see if the handwriting matches up, if she wrote the letter or someone else did.”

Before Rigs can interject, I continue. “Then I want to visit Meli. She and Priscilla have been getting close and I want to know if she’s told her anything. I know what Meli is like, if she suspected anything she’d have come right out and asked. If Priscilla has lied to her, I’m not gonna be okay with that. Meli has been nothing but nice to us. She doesn’t deserve to be lied to because Priscilla is ashamed of who Mia’s father is.”

“Why would she be ashamed of you, Rage? You’re a fine, upstanding member of our community and member of the Savage Legion MC.”

I jump to my feet and start pacing. “Because I grew up being kicked from one placement to another because of my shitty, uncooperative behavior. Because I never went to college. Because I’m a member of an MC. Because I still fly off the handle sometimes when I’m super stressed. There is a pile of reasons why a woman wouldn’t want me to be her baby daddy, but I don’t care. If Mia is my child, God help anyone who stands in my way of getting my fair share of parent time with her. Even if she isn’t mine, I was getting used to her being in my life. I could see myself as her father.”

“Sit down,” Rigs commands. I do as he says. “You’ve got it into your head that she’s yours and that Priscilla is lying. You’ve just admitted that you’d still want to be a father figure to her even if she wasn’t yours. This is exactly why you cannot go off like a damn wrecking ball ruining what you’ve built up with Priscilla over the past few weeks. Do you understand? Before any accusations are made, you need to back them up with facts. I’d go as far as to say you don’t even present them as accusations. Have a talk like fucking adults.”

Rigs rarely swears, but it does the job, and I find myself nodding in agreement.

“Do you have this letter on you?” he asks.

I whip it out of my back pocket and drop it on the desk in front of him “I spent years thinking this is why she left me and now, I don’t know what to think.”

I watch Rigs carefully unfold the letter. It’s torn around the edges because I used to take it out to remind myself that she left because I wasn’t good enough. I didn’t earn enough, wasn’t on a trajectory to go to college or make millions of dollars. She didn’t want the only kind of life a man like me could give her.

“So you think she came back to you for your money. Does she even know anything about your financial situation?”

I look at him. “No, why does that matter?”

“Clearly, she can’t be a gold digger if, in her mind, there is no gold to dig. Also, she didn’t come back into your life. You came into hers.”

I reluctantly have to admit what he is saying makes sense. “She doesn’t know about my little windfall. Well, she didn’t until recently. She tried to pay me back for everything I’ve done for her and Mia since she got out of hospital. I told her she didn’t need to do that, that I was okay for money.”

“Then clearly she’s not after your money.”

My mind is working overtime to figure out why she came back to me if it wasn’t for my money. An ugly little voice in the back of my mind tells me that it’s for safety and security, because she literally has no place else to go.

I don’t want to think bad thoughts about Priscilla. Truth be told, I recognize that dark little voice that’s talking shit about her in the back of my mind. It’s the same little voice of doubt that told me I wasn’t good enough for her all those years ago, that told me I wasn’t smart enough to go to college to become a doctor, so I went into the army and became a medic instead. It’s the same little voice that’s been sabotaging me my whole damn life.

Well, not this time. This time I’m gonna take the high road. I’m going to keep my head screwed on straight and give her the benefit of the doubt until I have proof that she was intentionally trying to manipulate me. I’m not going to lose the best thing in my life over self-doubt and low self-esteem again.

“Alright,” I tell Rigs. You’re right about me jumping the gun. I’m not going to make any snap judgments until I know for sure what’s going on.”

“Thank God for small mercies. I thought we were going to have to hog tie you there for a minute to keep you from imploding your whole relationship over things you don’t even know are true.”

My head lifts and I stare at him for a long hard moment. “Are you saying that you don’t think Mia is mine.”

“I can see the similarity, and from what you’ve told me it sounds like you have good reason to believe she’s yours. What I’m saying is that women don’t necessarily think like men, and there’s probably something going through her mind that explains why she’s reluctant to talk to you about that. I say we cut her some slack until we can verify that Mia is your daughter and talk to her about why she didn’t tell you.”

Rigs is making good sense and although I’m still upset about the way things went down, I’m willing to hold off on judging her on this issue until we unravel this mystery. “Alright, what do you make of the letter?”

“A couple of things jump out at me.” Putting the letter down on the table between us, he smooths it out with one hand. “It’s all written in the first person. It’s ‘I this’ and ‘we that’. Except this sentence here in the middle,” he points to the page. “Whoever wrote the note slipped up and wrote, ‘Going off to college is a rite of passage in our world. She wants to have that experience’ . Why would Priscilla refer to herself in the third person instead of ‘I’ like in the rest of the letter?”

Staring down at where he’s pointing, I can clearly see what I’ve missed all the other times I’ve read the letter. My mouth falls open and I berate myself for not picking up on that at the time.

Rigs’ finger drops down to the signature at the end. “She signed her full name. How many people do that when they’re writing to their partner? It seems very strange that she would do that. She could have written just P, and you would have known it was her just by reading the contents of the letter.”

Again, he’s right. I’ve never written a note or letter to a friend and felt the need to sign my full name that way. I’m starting to feel like the world’s biggest fool, and also the world’s biggest asshole the way I stormed out of my house this morning. I’m gonna have to do some making up to Priscilla when I get back. “Yeah, now that you mention it. Those are two big red flags that it was written by someone other than my Prissy.”

Rigs steeples his fingers in front of him and is silent for a moment. When he speaks again, I know why people come to him with their problems. This man is smart. “I remember thinking that day I saw the headstone with your name on it in the back of your truck that these people would stop at nothing to pull the two of you apart. They went to absurd lengths to convince Priscilla you were dead. It stands to reason that a carefully worded letter which was meant to play on all your anxieties wouldn’t have been a bridge too far for them. In fact, it’s the perfect counterbalance to the headstone they had carved to convince her you were forever beyond her reach.”

He’s not wrong about that, at all. I’m reluctantly forced to admit that it’s looking more likely that she was telling the truth about the letter being fabricated by her parents.

Rigs reaches into his drawer and pulls out a file, “While we’ve been waiting for the cops to move forward with the headless rabbits threat, Siege asked me to review the information we know so far about this case. I’ve got a copy of the statement Priscilla made to the cops. Let’s compare the handwriting from the statement with this letter. It could be that there’ll be enough differences to conclude the handwriting is not hers.”

“That’s a fantastic idea. I was thinking along those lines myself earlier today. It’s one reason I took the letter with me this morning.”

We spread the two documents out side-by-side and right away, I notice some significant differences. Priscilla makes the loops on the top of her Ls short and fat. In the letter that shattered all my hopes for the future the tops were tall and almost pointed. Rigs begins pointing out all the more subtle differences. By the time he’s finished I feel like a fucking fool for ever doubting her version of events.

“I can tell you’re feeling guilty for thinking the worst of her.”

“I’m an asshole and a half, for even thinking someone like Priscilla would lie to my face about our breakup.”

“What you need to understand is your doubts had nothing to do with Priscilla, and everything to do with your own insecurities. You, like many of us, carry a lot of trauma from being abandoned and shuffled around during your childhood. In doubting her honesty, you were really doubting that you were worthy of love and loyalty from the woman you love. Being abused as a child makes us feel unlovable so we look for evidence that we’re not being loved and respected.”

Before I can respond, Venom comes bounding into the room with a piece of paper in his hand. “I went ahead and stopped by the courthouse for you. I got a copy of everything that had Priscilla and Mia’s name on it.”

He slaps the documents down on the desk and drops down into the seat beside me. By this point, I don’t even care that he did it without me. Jumping the gun is kind of his thing.

We look over the documents and discover that Mia had written deceased in the space for father, but someone had marked a line through it and the same doctor who signed the bottom also initialed the correction by putting their initials. Priscilla also initialed the correction. “It feels like she was trying to acknowledge that I wasn’t available to sign because I was deceased, but they wouldn’t let her.”

Rigs who is also a justice of the peace, responds, “Of course they couldn’t allow her to just write deceased in that space. She would have had to either have a court order or a death certificate with proof that you were the father.”

Rubbing my chin, I think about what that time must have been like for Priscilla. “I feel sorry for her being put in that position. She probably felt terrible. I’m sure Conrad was a real ass about it too.”

Venom says, “That asshole got what he deserved in the end. The only thing I regret is that we can’t kill him twice.”

I wholeheartedly agree with that statement, but I keep it to myself. “So the letter was legit. Her trying to acknowledge that I was deceased on the birth certificate seems like she really believed that it was true, and she was trying to do the right thing.”

“It’s shit like this that triggers postpartum depression in women,” Rigs grumbles. “Imagine having to deal with toxic assholes like Conrad and his family right after you give birth to your dead boyfriend’s child.”

Guilt over doubting her is now eating me up at this point but I press on. “So, the next order of business is verifying that Mia is actually my daughter. I’m pretty damn sure she is.”

Venom mumbles, “Anyone who’s seen the two of you together is pretty damn sure she’s yours.”

My head slowly turns to stare at him. What he’s saying is that I’m the last to realize what everyone already knows. That’s just fucking great.

“You already got the ball rolling on the paternity issue. You’re just gonna have to wait until the lab calls you with the results.”

I stubbornly want to do something, anything to get some closure on this situation with Priscilla and Mia. “What about tracking Conrad’s father. We verified that he’s cleared out of his mini mansion. Did Zen or Smoke get a lead on a new location for him? Does the fucker have a yacht, a summer place, or a country cabin? Anything at all?”

Siege’s voice drifts from behind us as he enters Rigs’ office. “Yeah. As a matter of fact, Zen tracked down a secondary location. It’s a ski lodge in the mountains. It’s the only other place he owns in this state.”

Dark glee fills every corner of my soul. “I say, we go head and pay him visit.”

Rigs jumps to his feet. “Great. Let’s get this asshole before something more depraved than the bunny box pops off.”

I ask, “Who do we want on our team and when do we want this to go down?”

Siege grabs a seat, and we get down to planning out how to overwhelm the security at the old man’s fucking ski lodge.