Page 55 of Vengeance (Ruthless MC 4)
“What’s the little—” I start to ask as I walk out the front door he’s holding open for me.
Only to stop dead in my tracks.
“What the…?”
There’s a huge pond directly in front of me, with a darling yellow house on the other side of it.
I jog down the cabin’s steps and look back over my shoulder. And yep, it’s the same two-story cabin structure from Nebraska, down to the gabled entrance and the stone chimney. But now it’s surrounded by woods instead of a grassy plain.
Vampire pulls up on his bike before I can turn around and ask Hyena and Des-E where we are.
“Hop on,” he yells over the growling engine.
Confusion can wait, I decide. There’s obviously some kind of medical emergency.
I climb on, and memories of the morning that kicked off this crazy story instantly flood me when I wrap my arms around Vampire for the first time in two and a half years. Had the three of them truly been pining to make me their woman for years before that?
No time to wonder. Vampire doesn’t bother with helmets this time, and less than a couple of minutes later, he’s pulling up to what I can only describe as a backhouse health clinic.
Less than a few minutes and a good scrub-in after that, I’m assessing Valeria, an Afro-Latina with a giant curly afro on one of the tiny clinic’s two hospital beds. She’s eight centimeters dilated but with a baby in breech.
If I were at the clinic, I’d be yelling for someone to help me wheel her over to Glendaver Care, our next-door affiliate hospital, for an emergency C-section.
But before I can even suggest it, Waylon’s nurse, Amira—who’s rocking what I’d guess to be a five-to-six-month pregnancy bump herself—tells me the closest hospital is an hour away in Cedar Rapids and overrun with cases from the latest pandemic spike.
“So, it looks like we’re going to be delivering here, Mom,” I tell the patient reassuringly. “Breech births can be challenging but—”
“Val! Val! Is she here? Where is she?” a distraught voice calls out behind me.
A distraught female voice.
I look up over my shoulder just as a tall butch Latinx woman in a Reaper's cut bursts into the room.
“Val!” She runs over to the laboring mother, takes her hand, and tenderly smooths her long dark hair back. “I just got back from my run and heard. Bella, are you okay?”
She turns to me with a beseeching look. “Tell me she and the baby are going to be okay.”
That’s how I come to find out the Reapers have a female member. And we answer her question less than an hour later when Amira presents her with a healthy baby boy.
But as happy as I am that the breech birth turned out so well, I do have some carefully stated, must-know questions about her Reaper status. Apparently, my years of friendship with Bernice rubbed off on me.
“There’s only two of us, and we’re both lesbians,” the biker, whose road name is ElPas, explains over her sleeping son. She rolls her eyes. “I think allowing in a straight cis woman would somehow still be too progressive for this pack. And we’re both related to MC members. The other female Reaper is Hades’s little sister. And I’m your man’s oldest niece.”
“My man?” I ask.
“Des-E?” she prompts. “You know, the Colombian part of your quad? Tallest but youngest brother in his family line? Hates talking? Was supposed to have your ass out here two years ago after you finished your residency?”
“Oh, he’s your uncle….” I’m not sure what else to say. I’m also realizing that I just emergency delivered B2’s cousin.
“Yeah, I know it’s real complicated right now.” As tough and dangerous as she looks, she gives me a soft-eyed, sympathetic tilt of her head. I’m beginning to see the family resemblance between her and Des-E. “But you should bring little Bernardo by to see his new baby cousin when your quad gets this all figured out.”
My quad.
I’m so used to thinking of Vengeance as a trio and myself as a completely separate entity. The idea of us as a quad hits strangely. I’m not exactly sure of the idea. But I’m not exactly repelled by it either.
And I realize that B2 isn’t like me. He has another side of his family—one who might want to meet him beyond ElPas.
“Anyway, thanks for saving my old lady and the baby,” ElPas says. “It would’ve fucked me up for life if I lost either of them.”
I’ve been thanked plenty of times for this exact same thing. But I’ve never heard it put so bluntly.
“Sooo…welcome to Angel Pond,” Amira says with a laugh when I emerge from the hospital room. She’s at a lone desk toward the front of the two-room clinic, doing what every medical professional does between patients—filling out paperwork.
