Part 2
### Chapter 1: Chapter 1
Cleo Hart came to Creek Wood for one reason—to start over.
Widowed at twenty-eight and left with two children and more debt than she can handle, all Cleo wants is a fresh start. A new town. A new job. A chance to rebuild the life she lost when her husband died.
The last thing she needs is the attention of Devils Creek MC.
Especially Rick "Graves" Carter, the President of Devils Creek MC, who looks at her like he's seen a ghost.
And Gabriel "Chains" Mercer, the club's loyal Vice President, whose quiet strength and watchful eyes make her feel safe in ways she can't explain.
Cleo has spent her entire life with questions she'll never have answers to. Raised in foster care, she knows only one thing about the woman who gave birth to her.
Her name was Maria.
She never knew her father.
Never knew where she came from.
Never knew someone had been searching for her all along.
As old wounds collide with new beginnings, Cleo discovers that sometimes the family you've been missing your whole life is closer than you think.
And sometimes home is waiting where you least expect to find it.
But from the moment she walks into the town diner, the bikers can't stop staring.
Complete Chapters 26
Rating 4.9 ( 197 reviews ) Age Rating mature
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Chapter 1
Cleo POV
I blinked a few times and forced myself to focus on the endless, rain-soaked highway ahead.
Tommy’s sleepy voice drifted from the backseat. I glanced at him in the rearview mirror, my chest tightening. His dark hair was messy from sleeping against the car door, and his face was still puffy from his nap.
Sometimes, looking at Tommy hurt so much, I could barely breathe.
“Almost,” I lied gently. “Another thirty minutes.”
Beside him, Skylar snorted quietly.
“You said that like an hour ago.”
I smiled despite myself. “Did not.”
Tommy groaned dramatically. “I’m starving.”
“There’s a diner coming up soon,” I promised. “We’ll stop there.”
That seemed to satisfy him for a few more minutes.
Rain tapped steadily on the windshield, and the wipers had squeaked for the last two hours, making me restless. I gripped the steering wheel tighter as another sign appeared through the fog.
That’s what I kept telling myself, anyway.
The truth was, I had no idea what I was doing.
Four months ago, I had a house, a husband, and stability. Bills were paid on time, and the future felt safe, even if life had never been perfect.
Now, everything we owned was crammed into my old Honda. I owed ten thousand dollars, and my kids were counting on me to keep us together, even when most days I could barely breathe.
Life could fall apart so quickly.
I swallowed hard against the sudden burn in my throat.
Wade had been gone for four months, and some mornings I still woke up reaching for him. I still expected him beside me. I still heard his laugh in my head.
People acted like grief got easier once you learned someone wasn’t perfect. Like finding out Wade had a gambling problem could erase fifteen years of love.
It just made everything messier, because Wade wasn’t a bad person.
We met when we were fourteen. I’d just been dumped into my sixth foster home, carrying everything I owned in two trash bags and pretending I wasn’t scared all the time.
Wade was the quiet boy who sat behind the auto shop with a split lip and bruised ribs. He said he got them from “falling off his bike.”
Kids like us always knew the truth.
Wade had an abusive drunk for a father.
I had nobody. No parents. No family. Just one name.
Maria. That was all I knew about the woman who gave birth to me and then disappeared forever. No last name, no photo, no answers.
Wade used to joke that we were two strays who found each other first.
By sixteen, he was sneaking through my foster bedroom window almost every night. By eighteen, we stood in front of a judge, getting married with forty-three dollars in our shared bank account and no idea what we were doing.
A few months later, I got pregnant with Skylar.
Everyone expected us to fail. Maybe, by the numbers, we should have. But we loved each other enough to keep fighting.
Wade worked long hours as a mechanic while I finished school. We scraped by, struggled, and somehow built a life from nothing.
When Tommy was born four years later, Wade cried harder than I did, holding him for the first time.
He loved our children fiercely.
That’s why some of this still didn’t make sense. How could the man who kissed me goodbye every morning gamble away our mortgage payments? How could he hold me at night and hide debt collectors from me during the day?
I didn’t know about any of it until after the accident, the funeral, and the bank notices, when strangers started calling my phone demanding money I didn’t have.
The house was gone within weeks.
Everything we built disappeared right along with him.
A soft rustling sound pulled me from my thoughts.
Skylar sat curled against the window in Wade’s old grey sweater, sleeves hanging past her hands. Headphones covered her ears, and an old iPod rested in her lap like something precious.
At ten, she’d become too quiet lately, too watchful, and it broke my heart because she looked just like me.
Sometimes, when she looked at me, it felt like seeing my younger self—the lonely foster kid who pretended she wasn’t scared of the world.
“You okay, bug?” I asked gently.
Skylar glanced at me before shrugging one shoulder. “You’re doing the worried thing again.”
“You get this line right here.” She pointed at her forehead seriously.
I laughed. “Great. I’m aging rapidly at twenty-eight.”
“You’re basically ancient already.”
That earned me the smallest smile.
God, I missed seeing her smile.
For weeks after Wade died, our house felt unbearably quiet. It was as if grief had moved in with us.
New town. New school. New memories. A chance to breathe somewhere Wade wasn’t in every corner, because staying had been slowly destroying me.
Every street reminded me of him. So did every grocery aisle. Every unpaid bill sat on the counter.
I couldn’t keep drowning there.
The teaching job at Creek Wood Elementary felt like fate when I found it online at two in the morning during another money panic.
Small town. Steady paycheck. Temporary teacher housing.
It was a small, fragile hope, but it was enough to keep me going.
As we drove further into town, rain continued to fall. We passed beneath tall pine trees and through thick mountain fog. Creek Wood appeared to be a place that time and people had overlooked.
Old storefronts. Flickering neon signs. Weathered buildings. Quiet.
The kind of quiet that felt heavy.
Tommy stirred awake just as a glowing diner sign appeared through the rain.
I smiled as I pulled into the parking lot. “Yeah, baby,” I whispered. “We can stop.”
Tommy was practically asleep again by the time we climbed out of the car.
Rain drizzled as I hurried around the car and opened the back door. Tommy reached for me with tired arms, and I lifted him onto my hip, even though my back ached from hours of driving.
Skylar climbed out beside us, pulling Wade’s sweater tighter around herself as she slipped the iPod into her pocket.
The diner glowed warmly against the dark, wet evening. Neon lights buzzed in the windows, and for the first time in days, I felt something inside me loosen a little.
Maybe because it looked normal.
“Come on,” I said softly. “Let’s get some food.”
A bell chimed overhead when I pushed open the diner door, and instantly the room went silent.
I hesitated as every head in the diner turned toward us. Heat crept up my neck under the sudden attention. A few older women near the counter stared openly, and a man halfway through lifting his coffee cup froze.
Tommy buried his face against my shoulder while Skylar moved closer to my side.
Three men in leather jackets sat in the back corner near the windows. Large patches covered their backs and shoulders.
The biggest one had dark hair streaked with grey and a face shaped by hard years. Next to him, a younger blond man stared at me like he’d seen a ghost. But the man in the middle caught my attention.
He was calm in a way that felt dangerous.
His gaze locked onto mine with an intensity that should have made me uncomfortable. It should have scared me.
Instead, something strange settled low in my chest.
Somehow, impossibly, I’d just walked into a room full of strangers and the tight knot in my chest loosened for the first time in months.
The dark-haired biker’s expression tightened just a little as his eyes moved over Skylar and Tommy before coming back to me.
The whole diner still felt frozen, and suddenly I had the overwhelming sense that walking into Creek Wood had changed everything.
1 Chapter 1 2 Chapter 2 3 Chapter 3 4 Chapter 4 5 Chapter 5 6 Chapter 6 7 Chapter 7 8 Chapter 8 9 Chapter 9 10 Chapter 10 11 Chapter 11 12 Chapter 12 13 Chapter 13 14 Chapter 14 15 Chapter 15 16 Chapter 16 17 Chapter 17 18 Chapter 18 19 Chapter 19 20 Chapter 20 21 Chapter 21 22 Chapter 22 23 Chapter 23 24 Chapter 24 25 Chapter 25 26 Epilogue
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Read it. Hear it. Feel it.
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Inkitt’s mission is to discover talented writers and turn them into globally successful authors.
Authors can write and upload their manuscripts on Inkit for free and writers retain 100% of their copyrights while writing on Inkitt
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### Chapter 2: Chapter 2
The moment the diner door opened, all my instincts kicked in. She wasn’t a threat, but she was impossible to ignore.
Rain dripped from her dark, honey-brown hair as she walked in, holding a sleeping boy on her hip. A girl about ten clung to her, lost in a worn-out grey sweater.
The woman looked exhausted. Not just tired, but truly worn out.
Life had taken everything from her and still demanded more.
Something clenched in my chest.
Then the entire diner went silent.
I frowned. The woman stopped near the entrance, uneasy with all the eyes on her. Honestly, I’d feel the same way; everyone in the room was staring. Sally was the first to move.
The diner owner dropped the coffee pot and walked straight toward the woman. When Sally got closer, she stopped in her tracks. Her face went pale. For a moment, she just stared, then her eyes filled with tears.
“What the hell…” Bolt muttered beside me.
I looked back at the woman. I really looked, and then it hit me. Not everything made sense, but enough did.
Nearly thirty years had passed since Maria disappeared from Creek Wood.
I’d seen old photographs, and the woman near the door looked so much like her that it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Only one thing didn’t match.
“Oh, sweetheart,” she murmured gently, looking between the woman and the two exhausted kids. “Come on. Let’s get you seated and get some food into those babies.”
Relief flashed across the woman’s face. The little boy buried his face in her shoulder. The girl stayed close.
Sally led them toward a booth. The entire diner tracked their movement. Nobody said a damn word.
“Why the hell does she look like Maria?”
The words came out lower than I intended. Nobody answered right away. Then Rage sat forward, his eyes fixed on the woman.
A strange feeling formed in my gut because I knew exactly what he was thinking. Everyone in the club knew the story.
The missing baby. The child nobody ever found. The child Graves spent years searching for.
Our eyes locked across the diner, and something hit me square in the chest.
Something far more threatening.
I hated the feeling immediately. If she was who we thought, she was completely off limits.
I couldn’t look away from her. The sounds in the diner faded. Sally talking, coffee cups clinking, Bolt muttering. None of it mattered.
The woman sat in the booth, the boy curled up beside her, and the girl slid in next to her. She looked deeply tired, as if she’d carried the weight of the world for years. But that wasn’t what caught my eye.
Not often. Dad rarely talked about it, but everyone in the club knew the story.
The girl who’d gotten pregnant with the President’s child. The girl who’d disappeared before he could bring them home. The girl who’d taken his daughter and vanished.
I never knew Maria. I’d only seen old photographs.
Dad kept a handful of faded pictures hidden, but the woman across the diner looked so much like them that my pulse raced.
It was the same green I saw every day in the mirror, the same green as my father’s.
“It can’t be,” I muttered, because it seemed impossible. Twenty-eight years had passed.
Twenty-eight damn years without a single trace. People don’t just show up in your hometown after almost thirty years.
My gaze shifted to the little girl sitting close to her. She had the same honey-brown hair and green eyes.
The resemblance was everywhere once you saw it.
I pulled my phone from my pocket. My thumb paused over Dad’s contact for a second. What the hell was I supposed to say?
Hey, old man. A woman who looks just like the girl you lost almost thirty years ago walked into Sally’s diner.
Three dots appeared almost immediately.
The woman laughed softly at something the little boy said. For a second, she smiled.
My heart nearly stopped, because I’d seen that smile before in a photograph Dad thought no one knew about.
I gulped nervously and typed the only response I could think of.
For the first time in my life, I prayed I was wrong.
I looked at my phone for a long moment before reading it again.
That was all. No explanation, no sarcastic comment from Roman. Just four words.
Across the clubhouse office, Stella glanced up from the paperwork spread across the desk.
The woman who’d stood with me through every damn storm life had thrown my way.
One dark eyebrow lifted. “Roman?”
The look she gave me showed she was just as confused. Roman never panicked, and he didn’t send cryptic texts unless something was really wrong.
I pushed to my feet. Before I could say anything else, Stella grabbed her jacket from the back of her chair.
A small smile tugged at my mouth. Some things never changed.
Stella still said it the same way.
I never stopped her. Never wanted to.
Stella had earned the right to stand wherever the hell she wanted.
Especially beside me. She’d stood by my side so many times. She’d been there through everything.
The nights I almost drowned myself in whiskey after Maria disappeared.
The years I spent searching for the daughter I couldn’t find.
Most women would’ve walked away. Hell, they probably should have.
She’d held me together when I was barely hanging on. Never once telling me to let it go. Never once asking me to stop looking.
She gave me Roman, gave me love, gave me a life, and somehow still found room in her heart for the daughter I lost before I ever got to know her.
I slid my cut on while Stella zipped up her jacket.
A few minutes later, we were on the road. Cold wind rushed past as my bike sped toward Sally’s diner. I didn’t know why Roman wanted me there, but my gut twisted more with every mile.
Something was wrong. I could feel it.
The diner parking lot was packed when we arrived. I cut the engine. Stella climbed off behind me.
Together, we headed inside. The familiar bell above the door rang.
Their attention was fixed somewhere across the diner.
Slowly, I followed their line of sight toward a booth near the far window.
A woman was seated there with two children.
A little boy curled against her side, fighting sleep. A girl sat close to her, wearing an oversized grey sweater, her green eyes watching the room carefully.
The woman laughed softly at something the boy said. The sound carried across the diner.
A smile I’d spent nearly three decades trying to forget.
For a moment, all I saw was Maria, twenty years old and laughing under a summer sky. The girl I loved. The girl who disappeared. The girl who took a piece of my soul with her.
Her green eyes met mine from across the diner.
The world seemed to shift beneath my feet. Every sound vanished. The conversations, the music, the clatter of dishes all faded away.
Twenty‑eight years of searching.
Twenty‑eight years of dead ends.
Twenty-eight years of wondering if she was alive. If she was safe. If she’d ever known I wanted her. If she’d ever known I looked.
My chest squeezed so hard it hurt to breathe.
Stella’s voice sounded distant, because all I could do was stare at the woman. I looked at the little girl who looked so much like her, at the little boy leaning against her side, at the life she’d built without ever knowing me.
Not if those eyes meant what I thought they did.
And suddenly, after twenty-eight years, I was looking at my daughter.
She knew people were staring, knew something was off. The discomfort was written all over her face.
Slowly, I forced my eyes away from her.
Stella squeezed my arm gently. When I looked at her, she gave me a small nod.
She’d seen the same thing I had.
The same impossible possibility.
She didn’t smile at me, but at her, across the diner.
The woman blinked in surprise before giving a hesitant smile in return.
A kind smile. The kind you give strangers when you have no idea they’re looking at a piece of their own heart.
The word appeared automatically before I shut it down.
She wasn’t a girl. She was a woman, a mother. She’d built a whole life without me, and she had no idea who I was to her.
No idea, I’d spent years following every lead I could find.
No idea, I’d wanted her from the second I knew she existed.
The little boy was nearly asleep against her shoulder. The girl sat straight and watchful next to her mother.
How was I supposed to walk over there? How could I tell her that everything she believed about being abandoned was wrong? I’d searched. I never stopped looking. Not a single day passed without wondering where she was.
How could I tell her she was my daughter without scaring her away?
Because after twenty‑eight years, I’d finally found her.
I’d be damned if I lost her again.
1 Chapter 1 2 Chapter 2 3 Chapter 3 4 Chapter 4 5 Chapter 5 6 Chapter 6 7 Chapter 7 8 Chapter 8 9 Chapter 9 10 Chapter 10 11 Chapter 11 12 Chapter 12 13 Chapter 13 14 Chapter 14 15 Chapter 15 16 Chapter 16 17 Chapter 17 18 Chapter 18 19 Chapter 19 20 Chapter 20 21 Chapter 21 22 Chapter 22 23 Chapter 23 24 Chapter 24 25 Chapter 25 26 Epilogue
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Read it. Hear it. Feel it.
Experience this story in a whole new way. Available on the Inkitt app.
Inkitt’s mission is to discover talented writers and turn them into globally successful authors.
Authors can write and upload their manuscripts on Inkit for free and writers retain 100% of their copyrights while writing on Inkitt
Readers can read all books for free, without any ads and give the authors feedback.
Books that perform well based on their reader engagement are published on our Galatea app.
--------------------------------------------------