Blood & Bones: Ozzy by Jeanne St. James

Chapter Eighteen

“Do you think he’s still alive? Is he out there somewhere?”

Shit. He needed to tread carefully until he could fully wrap his fucking head around what he just discovered.

What he feared.

What he had hoped to fuck wasn’t true.

But of course it was true.

Every time he thought his life was doing okay, it went and kicked him in the fucking nuts. Dead center.

Every fucking time. Like clockwork.

But Shay, Ham’s daughter, was sitting in his bed, asking him a question and expecting an answer.

It would be difficult to tell her the truth and so much fucking easier to lie.

Or at least avoid the truth.

For now. Until he knew how to handle this situation that was quickly turning into quicksand.

“Don’t know. Not too many survived. Most who did, disappeared. Dutch stayed ‘cause of the garage. He had a business to run, two boys to raise. Pete stayed ‘cause of the bar. Both had somethin’ to keep them here. Don’t know what your pop had.”

Her mouth opened and for a second nothing came out. But a whole bunch of shit crossed her face and he realized he’d fucked up with what he’d said.

“Us,” she finally whispered, a tear sliding free from the corner of her eye. “He had us. His wife. His daughter.”

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!

Ozzy turned away and closed his eyes, his nostrils flaring as he tried to breathe. Ham had destroyed his family, but Ozzy had destroyed Shay’s.

“You okay?”

She was asking him if he was okay? He did his best to strap his shit down tight. “Yeah.”

“Does talking about what happened with the club bring back bad memories?”

If she only fucking knew. He cleared the thick from his throat. “Kinda.” But not in the way she thought.

Her hand wrapped around the back of his neck and squeezed.

For fuck’s sake, she was trying to comfort him.

She was trying to fucking comfort him.

If she only knew…

For fuck’s sake, if she knew…

He reached back and peeled her hand off his neck, drawing it to his chest and holding it there. With her other hand—the one still holding that fucking picture, the photo that made her cry—she used her thumb to wipe away the tear that had slipped down her cheek.

He should’ve been the one to do that for her.

It should’ve been him.

How can the man who killed her father comfort the daughter who felt that loss so deeply?

“Maybe that’s why the cops didn’t seem too concerned about his disappearance. Because he was a Fury member.”

The MGPD had to have known Marshall Graham had been involved with the Fury. Jet said the club had been mentioned in the notes of the case file but not how he was involved. Not that he was a member. And until now Ozzy hadn’t realized Ham and Marshall Graham were one and the same.

If the Fury was mentioned in the file, for whatever reason, that most likely meant her mother knew. If not before he went missing, then at least after. The pigs would’ve shared that info with Shay’s mother once they put two and two together. So, if the woman knew, she also kept his involvement with the Fury secret from Shay.

Why? He had no fucking clue other than to keep their daughter sheltered. Or maybe to keep her safe. Even though he’d never been a parent, he could understand the lengths parents went to protect their children. He’d seen it himself.

With Cage and Dyna. Judge with Daisy. And Reese with Reilly, even though they were sisters. Reese had stepped in the role of Reilly’s mother and had a difficult time stepping back out of it.

He already knew how fiercely Trip would protect his unborn child once he or she was born.

“Yeah, the pigs hated the Fury back then. The Originals did a lot of shit to rub five-o the wrong way.”

“Like what?”

That was a loaded fucking question. “Anythin’ and everythin’.” Hell, back then they did everything to rub the pigs the wrong way. They would do shit just to torment them.

“Do you think my father was involved in illegal activity?”

Of fucking course he was. They all were.

Drugs, guns, shake-downs. Rape, torture and murder.

“Good chance,” Ozzy murmured.

Christ, he could lie like it was the truth, so why was it bothering the fuck out of him to lie to her like this? It shouldn’t, but it did.

“Were you?”

“Good chance,” he murmured again.

“And now?”

He glanced up from the picture she held as if it was the last connection she had with her father and looked at her.

Really fucking looked at her.

Fuck.

It made sense now. Why the fuck didn’t he put two and two together long before now?

The man’s road name was Ham.

Her father’s last name was Graham.

He was a dumb motherfucker.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

What kind of fucking karma was being served right now?

Not to Shay, but to him.

How could the woman in his bed, the woman he was hoping would stick around, be the daughter of…

Him.

The fucking bastard who killed his mother.

The fucking bastard Ozzy killed in retribution.

Christ.

What a tangled motherfuckin’ web we weave…

Deception then.

Deception now.

Maybe always.

The fingers of the hand he still held against his chest curled and took a hold of his shirt. “How did my mother not know?”

Shit. He didn’t want to be the one to upset Shay by telling her her mother most likely knew, but he could hint at it so she didn’t think her father was deceiving both of them. That her parent’s secret was to protect Shay, not hurt her. “Who said she didn’t?”

“Then they both hid it very well.”

He gave her hand a squeeze. Even at thirty-eight, for her, the pain of the past still remained. “Sweetheart, back then it was typical for the Originals to have a family they shielded from the club, then a side piece he’d call his ol’ lady in the club. That’s old school biker shit. Especially the way the Fury was. If you had a family you wanted to protect, you kept that life separate. It wasn’t out of the ordinary.”

“Does that still happen?”

“Sure. In some clubs. Happened a lot when I was part of the Thirty-Eight Calibers.”

“Never heard of them.”

Of course she hadn’t. Her father might have been a biker, but she never lived the life. She wouldn’t know shit about other clubs. And, for fuck’s sake, he never would’ve heard of the Thirty-Eight Calibers, either, if he hadn’t been out there wandering like the nomad he was at the time. He’d come across them by accident. “Better that way. Bad fuckin’ news.”

“Were they what you’d call an outlaw club?”

“Yeah. One percenters. Ran drugs, guns, did all that shit.”

“Did the Fury?”

“Yeah. We did a lot of shit, too.” The Calibers were just as crooked as the original Fury.

“Did you ever hurt anyone?”

Christ. “Only when I had to.”

“So, no longer?”

He didn’t want to hide shit from her, but she was leaving him no choice.

“The Fury don’t run guns or drugs anymore. Don’t even sell them. Trip runs a tight fuckin’ ship. He don’t wanna lose the few members we got ‘cause they’re thrown back inside. That’ll weaken the club since it’s stronger with numbers.”

“Back inside,” she repeated. “Were you ever in jail?”

“Yeah. A few times. Short stints, luckily. Mostly for minor shit. ’Til that last time. Thirty-Eight Calibers were runnin’ guns for the mother club and I got caught up in that shit. Hate it inside, so once I got out, I hit the road to scrape that shit off me.” No reason to mention how his woman at the time was doing his club brothers while he was doing time. By then, she was strung the fuck out on smack and they were all passing her around like a fuck toy. Worse, she was letting them.

“So, you don’t do anything illegal now?”

They were going down a dangerous road. A route he didn’t want to take. “Shay…”

She slipped the hand free he had pinned under his, pushed the shoebox out of the way and got up on her knees to face him.

Her dark brown eyes held his.

At her age, she was far from innocent, but she had to be the most innocent woman he’d ever been with. By looking directly into her eyes he could see her insecure teenage self. It had left a mark that still remained. The same with the loss of her father.

She had been a child who grew up into a woman who let things deeply affect her. Both then and now.

“Just tell me,” she whispered, causing his chest to tighten.

That wasn’t going to happen. She might have spent the last two weeks in his bed but she was still an outsider. It didn’t matter that she was Ham’s daughter. She had zero loyalty to the club right now. And might never have it.

“We protect what’s fuckin’ ours. We protect our women, our children, our businesses. Our brotherhood. We do what we gotta do to get that done.”

She didn’t need to know details. Especially with all the shit that had gone down with the Shirleys in the past three years. Because he wanted to protect her, too.

“Just know all of us do our fuckin’ best to stay on this side of a fence topped with razor wire. That said, the fuck if we’ll let anyone destroy what we have here, what we’ve built. We also won’t let anyone take what belongs to us.”

That answer must have been good enough for her since she nodded.

He was about to sigh in relief until she flipped the photo of her father, Tigger and Beans around to face him.

“I need to know… The man in the picture, did he have an ol’ lady on the side?”

Oh fuckin’ fuck!

He forced his expression to remain neutral. “You mean your dad?”

She shook her head and tapped Ham with the tip of her finger. “This person wasn’t my dad. This is a man I never knew. A man who kept secrets. Who lived a whole separate life other than the one I thought we were living as a family. He might’ve been my father but it turns out he was also a stranger.”

Ah shit. She had good memories of her father. He didn’t want to destroy any of them. “Plenty of men live double lives, Shay. He ain’t the first.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

“Did it to protect you.” He was having to defend the motherfucker who killed his mother. He was right, karma was what it was. Fucking goddamn karma.

“How do you know that? Did he ever mention us?”

They needed to end this conversation right this fucking second.

He needed to distract her.

Do something to knock her off this path.

But the question was, where to go from here?

Did he tell Trip and the other officers she was Ham’s daughter? Or just let her go home to Boston without them knowing?

Did he tell Shay the truth about what happened to her father? Did he give her the partial truth? Or just let her go home without her ever knowing?

She would hate him if she found out the truth.

No matter that the man lived a “secret” life to protect his family. She still loved him. Her father had been everything to her.

The same way his mother had been everything to him. Maybe his hadn’t been the best mother in the world, but she was the only one he’d had.

It wasn’t Shay’s fault that her father killed his mother.

But it was her goddamn father’s fault that Ozzy killed him.

Would she understand why?

Would he risk telling her to find out?

“Hiding things tends to hurt the person they’re hiding it from.” She had said those exact words one night at The Barn. For some reason they had stuck with him.

But worse, they were damn true.

His response at the time was, “Or it could protect a person they care about from gettin’ hurt.”

While that could be selfless, it could also be selfish.

He cared about her and wanted to protect her from getting hurt, but right now he was being selfish by keeping the truth to himself.

He also wanted to keep her for himself.

That was all he could think about on the run earlier today. The way his soul suddenly settled simply with her being on the back of his sled. Holding onto him. Like she belonged there.

Because she did.

Never in his life had he felt the need to protect anyone but himself.

Until now.

Until Shay.

During those few hours on his sled, he considered whether he could give up his sexual freedom. He hadn’t done it for Liz because their relationship had been different, and Liz was so opposite of Shay.

But could he do it for Shay?

While Shay wasn’t shy about sex, he couldn’t imagine her allowing another woman to join them in bed. Or more than one.

Or getting fucked on the bar in The Barn.

He already knew he would never share her with another man. Not with his brothers, not with anyone.

The fact that he even considered giving up his sexual freedom to only be with Shay had fucked with his head for the rest of the damn day.

By keeping her, by convincing her to stay, his life would change drastically.

But if he got too restless and wanted to take off, nothing stopped Shay from coming along with him. Not a damn thing except for her willingness to do so.

Would she be willing? And did she want him the same way he wanted her?

She’d given him no indication whether she would be interested in continuing to land in his bed once she was done with her work here.

In fact, everything she’d said, everything she’d done, showed him that she was planning on going back to Boston when she was finished with this job. The only reason she’d stayed in Manning Grove in the first place was because it had been part of the deal.

Once she gathered all the info and pictures, she could’ve taken off. Done everything else she needed to do to complete the job at home. Away from Ozzy.

She didn’t.

She had stayed willingly and without argument, agreeing to stick to the deal she made with Trip. The requirement Trip pushed on her because Ozzy asked him to without her knowing.

Even so, the fact she didn’t argue it, or seem in a rush to get home, made him think she might be willing to stay after the month was up. They hadn’t discussed it because he hadn’t been sure about what he wanted.

Until earlier when it hit him what that was.

Not just her in his bed for a month.

But for longer.

Maybe even forever. Though, forever was an uncomfortable term for him to think about.

But now…

Fuck. Now…

Karma had bitten off a chunk of flesh and it stung. Knowing she was Ham’s daughter changed everything.

If he didn’t tell her his secret and somehow convince her to stay, would it eat at him? Could he face her every fucking morning with the knowledge he was to blame for her father’s death?

Would that lie fester like a wound?

Eventually infect him? Infect them both?

Would it be better to confess now before things got too deep between them, rather than later?

It would be painful either way.

For her.

For him.

The past never stayed in the fucking past where it belonged. No matter how much he wanted it to.

No matter how much he needed it to.

Another problem might be that now she knew her father was an Original, she’d want to dig. Find out exactly what happened to him. What exactly made him disappear.

Because she would need to know.

She would want to know.

Ozzy didn’t want to tell her.

He didn’t.

The best thing that ever walked into his life would be turning around and sprinting right the fuck back out.

Just like Liz.

He fucked up with her by not recognizing what he had within his fingers. Not letting himself see it. What could’ve been.

He saw it now. With Shay.

Now he was going to fuck it up with her, too.

That slap Liz gave him would not be nearly as painful as Shay leaving when she no longer wanted anything to do with him.

It would be so much fucking worse.

Two fucking weeks.

It only took two fucking weeks.

When Liz left, he realized he’d loved her.

But now… He realized he was falling in love with Shay.

He’d fucking tripped and fell like all the rest of his brothers with ol’ ladies.

He also now understood what Liz had explained to him about the difference between loving someone and being in love with them.

When you loved someone and they left, it hurt.

When you were in love with someone and they left, it devastated.

So, yeah, maybe he needed to keep his connection to Ham to himself.

And hope like fuck it never came to light.

“Ozzy, I take it from your silence that he never spoke about us. That none of you knew we existed. That he had a family.”

He needed to get the fuck out of his own head and concentrate. “Never heard him talk about havin’ a daughter.” At least that was true.

If Ham had mentioned a family, would his decision have changed? Would he have wanted Ham’s daughter to feel the same loss he experienced when he found his mother murdered on the kitchen floor? Like some collateral fucking damage?

He didn’t know. He couldn’t go back in time to rethink his decision.

Just like he couldn’t go back in time to bring back his mother.

Everyone had to live with their decisions after they were made. And whatever resulted from those decisions.

Right or wrong.

He closed his eyes and saw his battered and beaten mother in the kitchen. Discarded, bloody and lifeless on the floor like she meant nothing to no one. Her eyes open, staring sightlessly.

Fuck.

The rage began to bubble up again. That need for revenge had been strong and only became stronger as the years went on.

He forced his eyes open again and glanced at Shay.

An innocent casualty of a situation beyond either of their control. Both of them victims of other people’s actions.

“I have a question for you.”

That drew him out of his fucked-up, run-away thoughts.

But it didn’t surprise him since he figured she’d have a shitload of questions. Just her finding out he was an Original wasn’t going to end her need to know the details. She wasn’t going to simply move on until she knew the truth.

“Since we’re talking about the past... By the way, this has nothing to do with my dad, I still have plenty of questions about that, too, but I know those won’t all be answered tonight.”

While that was fucking true, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to hear her next question. If it had nothing to do with her dad, what the fuck could it be about?

The weather?

How often she should change the oil in her damn Lexus?

“What happened between you and Liz?”

That was not on his list of potential questions. “What the fuck?” he growled before he could stop it.

“Stella wanted me to be aware of the situation between you and her since Liz still comes back to Manning Grove now that they know they’re sisters. Or half-sisters. She wanted to warn me.”

Warn her? Fuckin’ Stella. “Warn you about what?”

“About what happened between you and Liz.”

“Liz left. That’s what happened. That’s all.”

“Does it bother you when she comes back?”

“Why we talkin’ about this?” Especially right now.

She shifted again, grabbing the box of photos and putting it on the nightstand, placing her father’s picture on top.

“They must’ve had a reason to bring it up to me today. Maybe they think I’ll be jealous.”

“Why the fuck would you be jealous?” Liz had been a great sex partner for the past two years, but she was no longer in his bed.

She would no longer return to it, either. She’d moved on. She’d found a man worth giving up her sexual freedom.

He had moved on, too.

“I’m not. I haven’t even met her yet.”

Yet. Was she actually considering staying?

“And why would I be jealous of someone you’ve been with in the past?” She shrugged. “What reason would I have to be?”

“Sweetheart, what Liz and I had was great for the time it lasted. But for the short amount of time you’ve been in my bed, I can tell you what’s between us is so much fuckin’ better.”

She blinked. “But… I’m not staying.”

Shit. “Right. You ain’t stayin’. But right now, you’re here, so let’s fuckin’ make the most of it. So, we done talkin’ for now?” For fuck’s sake, say yes.

She gave him a soft smile. Much better than that damn tear rolling down her cheek earlier.

He needed to get her mind off her father, off Liz and onto him.

Same with him.

He needed to forget about her father for now, forget about Liz and concentrate on the woman before him.

He didn’t wait for her answer. Instead, he reached over to the shoebox and flipped that fucking photo over.

The hell if he wanted Ham watching him fuck his daughter.

He needed to make hay while the sun was still shining since he didn’t know when the next storm was coming.

Because when you least expected it, another fucking storm would come rolling in creating havoc.

Guaran-fucking-teed.