Chapter 10 Remember to look both ways before you go fuck yourself. -Creole to Audric CREOLE "Here goes nothing," Audric said as he walked outside to greet the man named Gunner. I'd met all of them at Webber's wedding-though I'd been introduced to most of them through Laney at one point in time-except for Gunner. He'd apparently had a very large project he'd been working on at his job and couldn't get away. According to the club brothers that'd talked about Gunner today while we waited for him to arrive at Webber's house, Gunner owned a business called Angel Security. AS was founded by Gunner after Gunner's son passed away in a school shooting. He'd made it his life's mission after he retired from professional baseball to help secure schools and prevent school shootings from occurring all over the country. He was very good at his job, and he was the one Truth Teller that I knew the most about, because he was semi-famous for both his role in his organization as well as his major league baseball career. It'd been a few years since I'd seen him in person, though, and the mop of curly hair surprised me when he got out of his truck and came up the front walk to meet Webber and Audric in the front yard. I looked down at Lottie's curly hair and shook my head. That should've been one of the first clues. Their hair had the same texture and everything. And damned if the cute little dimple that flashed on Gunner's face when he offered his hand to both men upon arrival didn't outdo the one on his daughter's cheek. Seeing them both like this...there was no way that I should've missed it. "It's obvious now," Cakes said. "I can see how y'all would've thought she was mine. But it's the hair and the dimple. Different shades of blonde, but the curl pattern and everything. Like father and daughter." I agreed. I also didn't back away when Cakes came up to the window a couple of feet away from me. My feet seemed glued to the carpet where I stood at the window. Not even the men in the room-and there were a lot of them-could peel me away. I was invested now. So damn invested that not even my instincts that told me to run screaming out of the room could pull me away. Audric gestured toward the house, and Webber said something else, and I wondered if they were going to do it right there in the front yard. Webber's nosy neighbor was in the front yard watering her flowers, staring at every single thing that was going on across the road. "Think they're just going to drop the bomb right there?" I asked the man at my side. "He might feel overwhelmed and ganged up on with all of us here witnessing this. So I'm thinking probably right there," Cakes said. A ding sounded, and I looked toward the kitchen in surprise. "That's my cake." "You made cake?" Copper asked. "What the fuck, man?" "You'll get to try it now, at least," Cakes said as he walked out of the room. "I got out of prison. I got married. I've got a kid. And not once has he made me a cake. And my wedding doesn't count because I never got a piece. But all of a sudden Gunner gets some great news, and he gets a cake?" Copper grumbled. "Stop your bitching, brother," Copper's younger brother, Chevy, grumbled. "Each slice is like eight hundred calories. You're not getting any younger, and that shit sticks to your gut." "Fuck off," Copper grumbled. "I don't have a gut. You do." "I do not." "Boys." Silver laughed. "Neither one of you have a gut. And Cakes made a cake because he's stressed. Not because he wanted Gunner to have it." I turned back to the lawn, and my heart dropped. They'd told him. Gunner looked like he'd been punched in the gut. His eyes were huge, I could physically see the pulse at his neck throbbing. His mouth had dropped open, and his hands were fisted at his side. He looked wild and in disbelief, and two seconds away from bolting. They talked some more, and Gunner was shaking his head, his face ashen. "He's gonna bolt." Another man came up beside me, and I looked up to find the man they called Hagrid standing there. He was over six-foot-five, had a long beard that resembled a Yeti's, and looked like he could break lesser men in half. Still, my instincts didn't tell me to bolt. What was going on with me? "I see that," I murmured. "I'm going out there." I didn't bother to turn around to see that Apollo was heading for the door. The door slammed, and then Apollo was outside, marching right up to Gunner. Gunner watched him come, his feet practically bouncing as he prepared for flight. But something Apollo said must've caused him to stop and think. "Fuck it," Hagrid said beside me. Then he was opening the window, and Apollo's deep, strong words flowed in along with the breeze. "...give fucking anything to have a second chance," Apollo finished. My eyes flicked to Gunner's face, and I saw the second that those words clicked into place, settled somewhere deep that he could really comprehend them. "And deep down, you know you would, too," Apollo continued. "No one is asking you to do anything right now. We just want to get some information out of you. She needs surgery. You are her father, and you can provide that information that we need to make sure that she has the best chance." "Surgery for what?" Gunner croaked, looking sick all over again. Fuck. I hadn't thought about that aspect of it. The thought of losing not one, but two kids, seemed like the worst form of hell. That had to be where his mind was going. Without thought, I walked out the door with the little girl asleep in my arms. She'd been there asleep for the better part of an hour. She was exhausted and hurting, the poor thing. She'd been passed around to everyone in the room as they tried to calm her down, and she'd finally passed out on me after an hour of fighting sleep. So I didn't think twice about taking her with me as I hurried outside. I was talking before I could even comprehend what I was saying. "She's perfectly fine," I said. "This is routine with her ears. She needs tubes for sure. Nothing too scary or invasive. Her eyesight they were talking about having issues with is a genetic disorder called amblyopia. It's an inherited trait. That doesn't require surgery. I looked it up. It does require her wearing an eyepatch, though." His wild eyes calmed just a bit at my matter-of-fact tone. "There are a few other things with her ears that they're worried about since she might have damage to an eardrum, but again, that's something that's easily fixed. It's not a scary surgery. It's normal." As I spoke, I watched the man visibly relax more and more. But the moment his eyes dropped down to the little girl in my arms, he was back up to freaking out. "You want me to call your uncle?" Webber asked, looking at Gunner. Gunner swallowed hard, his throat bobbing in a comically loud move. "Would you?" "Yeah." Webber slammed his hand on Gunner's back so hard that the crack startled the little girl in my arms. She woke up and looked around in confusion. She smiled when she saw Gunner. "Hey!" Gunner visibly swallowed before he said, "Hey." She patted my chest and said, "Down!" I put her down, and she walked right over to Gunner and touched his hand, then hauled ass toward a tree that had flowers growing under it. Gunner, Audric, and I watched her closely. She raised her leg to get a better angle on the flowers, and the brick that was surrounding the flower bed slipped, causing her to squeak in surprise. She didn't fall, though. Gunner was there before she could think about falling down, righting her with a large palm across her back. "She was practically raised by the club," Audric mused as he watched Lottie bend down and pull a flower out by the root. "I worked, one of them watched her. She has sleepovers all the time. Gunner's probably the only one that really hasn't spent all that much time with her, though. He's pretty standoffish with the kids." I watched as Gunner took a seat on the bricks that made up the flower bed and said, "Looks like she doesn't hold that against him." "She wouldn't," he agreed. "She's a really good kid. I think it might break my heart a little bit when she's not under my roof." "But that's not a super surprise, is it?" I asked. "I think you knew all along that this was never a permanent thing. She loves you. I can tell. But she also loves them all. I think she could take you or leave you as long as someone else from your club is in the room. And you made that possible. You made sure that, in case one of them was the father, that they would all transition over well with her." "Should've tried harder with Gunner, though," he admitted. "Just never thought Laney would do that to him of all people." I had no answer to that. "Surely it was the liquor," I said, but the excuse sounded pitiful, even to my own ears. "Guess we will never know," he admitted. "Unless there's some long-lost diary explaining why she did the things she did." "Not that I know of." He crossed his arms, and his large, bulky arms brushed against mine. I didn't freak out, which had me examining the feeling deeper, but he chose to move away from me anyway despite my not asking him to. "What do you think that Luciano and Paula will do about this?" I wondered. "I'm sure they'll just pivot," he grumbled. "The only thing that Gunner will have going for him is the fact that his money won't be tied up in an estate battle like mine." "I thought that the court gave you access after the last fight?" I wondered. "To help Lottie get into that fancy preschool." "It had to be agreed upon by both of us, and when I finally agreed, the Combs found something wrong with it. So I let the nanny go for no reason," he grumbled. "Wasn't that nanny friends with Gunner?" I asked. "She was his best friend. I felt fucking awful when I had to let her go after only three months," he admitted. "But it worked out okay in the end because she was interested in taking a full-time, live-in nanny position with Shasha Semyonov." Shasha Semyonov was loosely tied to the Truth Tellers via a marriage through Cutter Clayborne and Shasha's sister, Milena. "I heard they had another kid," I mused. "They're up to like ten," he joked. "They needed the nanny more than I did. Plus, she's damn good at what she does. She's not used to only taking care of one kid. Her skills, though not wasted, were definitely underutilized." "Ta da!" Lottie screamed just before Webber came back shoving his phone into his pocket. "Parker, his uncle, is heading here now." He looked at the father and daughter pulling out all of his petunias that his wife had planted not too long ago and said, "What's our next step?" "Wish I knew," Audric admitted. "There's going to be a lot of paperwork. We also have to do a lot of visitations. I'm not even sure that he wants her to stay with..." "Yes." We all looked over to see Gunner standing there, looking very serious, with a look of determination on his face. "I'm not going to say that I won't take a few missteps, but I want to do this." His voice cracked. "Fuck, I don't even own a car." Webber snorted. "That's the easiest fuckin' thing to fix at this point." Gunner ran a hand through his unruly, curly hair. "You know," I drawled. "You're going to have to learn how to put product in your daughter's hair. You can't let it go all crazy like you do yours." Gunner opened his mouth, then closed it. "What kind of product?" "Well, that might be the one thing I can truly help you with, with a hundred percent confidence." I clapped. Tiny, toddler clapping followed my clapping, and I looked down to see her holding up some petunias, roots and all. "Oh, thank you, Lottie." "'Elcom!" she cheered as she went back for more. "Fuck," Gunner said. "This fucking hurts." Gunner shook his head before saying, "I need to go. I'm not going to go far. I just need a few minutes...can you watch her?" Audric smiled. "Been watching over her for you for two years, my man. Though, you and I didn't know it." Gunner's smile was brittle as he disappeared around the corner of the house. "We're going to make this work," Webber said. "How do you feel about a new roommate?" "I think I don't have room for a new roommate." Audric chuckled. "But I don't see why we couldn't move into Gunner's place for a while. That's where she'll end up eventually, anyway." The sadness in his voice hurt my heart, and I couldn't stop myself from patting his forearm. This was going to royally suck for him, but he would survive. The man I knew Audric to be, he wouldn't have it any other way.