Page 5 of Rebel's Fairytale

Her smile turned playful. “So, is that all I have to do?”

She was quickly taking over his heart, piece by piece, and she had no idea. Rebel closed his eyes as he pulled her into his arms and held her tight. He would gladly hand the thing right over to her. All it would take is for her to ask.

Niles

Standing in between two large vehicles in the parking lot of the high school, Niles Flynn watched as his ex-bitch wrapped herself around that Howler asshole on the back of his bike. If it wasn’t for those fuckers, his kids and his wife would still be at home where they belonged.

Niles knew it was wrong to put his hands on her, but she knew better than to talk to other men, and she still did it. She tried to tell him it was just that a guy approached her at the gas station, and she had done nothing wrong, but he didn’t trust the lying bitch. He taught her that lesson, or at least he thought he had, until she disappeared on him.

When he found her at her friend’s house, he was pissed. She knew she wasn’t supposed to hang out with that bitch. The bitch’s husband was always in their business. Niles didn’t like that shit. He planned on coming back for her after she calmed down.

Unfortunately, the day he showed up to get her, he found her with those fucking bikers, and they were taking her somewhere with a moving truck. He tried to follow them, but an hour into the drive, he was ambushed by two people he’d never seen before and knocked out. He woke up naked in his sister’s car, parked in front of a church, with the wordschild abuserwritten on his forehead in permanent marker, and the police were tapping on the window. That was not a fun night in jail.

He had never abused the children, like the bitch and her new bodyguards accused him of doing. Whooping their asses when they needed it wasn’t abuse in his book. If they just followed the rules and stayed out of adult business, everything would have been fine.

In court, they wouldn’t let him address her. They just gave the bitch everything she wanted — a divorce, sole custody of his kids, and a no-contact order for all three of them.

Seeing her looking even better than she did the day he met her pissed Niles right the hell off. How dare she give that fucker a better version of her than she gave her fucking husband? There was no way in hell he was going to stand by while she rode off into the sunset with some biker trashorlet that man raise his kids.

With a plan forming in his head and his jaws clenched tight, Niles turned and headed for his mom’s car.

Chapter three

Rebel

AfteragreeingtopickRuby up the next day for their brunch date, the two of them said their goodbyes and headed their separate ways. Rebel wanted to walk her to her car, but she had refused, letting him know she was a big girl and would be fine. He still didn’t like it, but he didn’t push her on it.

After mounting his bike, Rebel headed back to the compound for the memorial. As much as he wanted to honor their dead and spend a few moments with his dad before he left town, Rebel wasn’t looking forward to the ceremony. The individual loss of any of their family members would have been enough to make it a heart wrenching experience, but there were several losses. On top of that, he was dealing with his own guilt and grief that he didn’t fully understand.

His uncle was unsavable. He had been too far gone into his world of violence and addiction to come back, but part of Rebel wished he would have found another way to handle the situation.

When his uncle mentioned Rebel’s deceased brother, Patrick, something in Rebel’s brain short-circuited, and his wolf took over. Normally, he was still in control when he was shifted, but that day he had been too overwhelmed with his own anger and the need to protect the twins to hold back.

If he was being completely honest with himself, it wasn’t killing his uncle that he felt guilty for. A part of him felt like he had avenged his brother’s death, as horrible as he knew that logic to be. No, his actual guilt was rooted in the fact that he had done it in front of his cousins.

Ross and Ryker had been through a hell that he didn’t even know all the details to, and it was all because of their father. Even though he had put them through so much heartache and trouble, he was still their father, and they would always care about him. It wasn’t their fault they were born to that man, and he didn’t blame them for loving their father. Rebel wouldn’t have blamed the twins if they hated him for taking their father away. They were insistent that they didn’t, but he wondered if Ross and Ryker would come to have hard feelings about what he did someday in the future.

All Rebel could do was be there for them and try to provide them with the stability they had never received from their father. Their mother had taken off when they were just boys, unable to deal with their father’s addictions. When she abandoned them, the parent they were left with had barely made sure there was bread and lunch meat in the house.

Rebel couldn’t count how many times his father had picked the twins up and brought them home with him. A few times, the twins had been at their house for weeks before his uncle even realized they were gone.

His father had talked to a lawyer about suing for custody of the twins, but Ross and Ryker had insisted they wanted to live with their father. Rebel had suspected it was to make sure he was eating and looked after when he went on a bender.

That suspicion was confirmed by the fact that they basically submitted to servitude to a drug lord in order to pay their father’s debts and to keep him safe.

The anger that boiled up inside of Rebel at the memory of finding them in that warehouse made him wish he could bring his uncle back to life only to kill him again.

He just wished he could have avoided hurting his cousins in the process.

After the memorial, Rebel shook off the thoughts as he climbed on his bike outside the clubhouse and headed for his house. He had offered to let the twins stay home during the memorial, but they had insisted on being there for Rebel and his club family. They had driven over in a truck Rebel had bought them and were already heading home.

What Rebel really wanted to do was ride over to Ruby’s and just spend time in her company. Something about her made him feel like he wasn’t a murderer and an asshole. She made him feel like a good man.

He may have taken the life of his uncle for a good reason, but that didn’t erase the fact that he murdered him in front of the man’s children. Nothing could erase that.

How Ruby accepted that without being afraid of him, he didn’t know. The fact that she didn’t balk at shifters being real was mind-boggling to him. Oh, he knew she had questions. He could practically see the wheels turning in her pretty head when she looked at him, but she didn’t run. She wasn’t afraid of him, and that was a damn miracle.

Halting at a stop sign, Rebel gazed ahead. If he continued on a couple blocks and took a right, he could stop at Ruby’s. The urge to go to her was strong. He didn’t examine whether it was right to have their resident hacker, Keys, get him her address long before she gave it to him. It was wrong, but it was done.