“You must have grown up with parents and money.”
“You grew up on the street?”
“Close enough.”
I took a swig of beer. Seven in and my mind was well beyond thinking logical. The most important thing was that I knew where the gun was. Just in case anything happened.
“Tell me about it,” I said. “You want to be an open book tonight, right?”
“Yeah, right,” Winter said. “I don’t know. My father was the one who tried to raise me. My mother left long before I could remember her. At one point my father tried to convince me she was dead because I guess it’s easier to believe a parent is dead rather than believe that they just abandoned you.”
“Did that work for you?”
“No. I knew the truth. My mother was this phantom and my father never let it go. He was a drunk. He lost jobs every week. We had no electricity. Got kicked out of apartments and houses. There were times when he’d wake me up in the middle of the night and we’d have to leave to avoid paying the rent.”
“What happened to him?”
“What makes you think something happened?”
“I can see it in those blue eyes, darling,” I said.
Those fucking blue eyes.
They were staring right at me. They were big, beautiful, and goddammit, they deserved something so much better than all this happening.
“He was stabbed to death when I was sixteen.”
“Christ.”
“He got involved with gambling and had some serious debts. He thought he could work cards to make things right. He owed a lot and was killed. Then I found out he was going to offer me as payment. My… innocence.”
“Fucking asshole,” I muttered.
“So be it,” Winter said. “So I was on my own. I survived. I moved around. I tried not to trust anyone. I made a friend, Angie. She was a stripper and bartender. I started out behind the bar. Then there was a night the owner of the club begged me to help out when he was short a girl. So I took a few shots of whiskey and got up there. It was like one in the morning and everyone was just throwing money around. They wouldn’t remember me if they saw me the next day. I made more that night than I did an entire month bartending.”
“You don’t do that anymore?”
“No. Not for a while. Years.”
“Because of the MC?”
“Yeah. Something like that.”
We both finished our beers and I leaned over to the small fridge and pulled it open. I grabbed two more, assuming Winter would need one. Next time I looked at her, she was teary eyed. I told myself I couldn’t comfort her again, not when we were damn drunk.
I twisted off the cap and handed her the beer. She took it and drank half the bottle in one big drink.
“Feel better?” I asked.
“Hardly,” she said. She then put her left foot forward and kicked at my foot. “Tell me your story, Tripp.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to know. You’re protecting me, which doesn’t make sense. You owe someone favors, which doesn’t seem like your style. And you’re going to fight someone from the Red Aces MC for the hell of it.”
“First off, there are no favors,” I said. “I’m supposed to be dead right now. But that’s a different story. You want to know about my life? I was forced to fight to survive.”
“Survive what?”
“Whatever guy that was done fucking my mother.”