The drunken revelry raged around them, spilled out of the clubhouse to emblazon the inky darkness of the square along with a bonfire of flaming relief that was rekindled by Tara's sure, unfaltering, movements as she'd expertly taken charge of Cameron's injuries. Their longtime Irish connection was steadily improving, his prognosis looking infinitely better with each second that passed but it was nothing compared to the agonizing faith that had resurrected Jax's hopefilled heart, burning him, branding his beleaguered soul with the knowledge that when it counted Tara had surely claimed him once again.

Whether in a court of law or looking down the lethal firing squad of his mother's eternal disapproval, his woman had stated her place with an elemental resolve that left Jax nearly dizzy with the unspoken repreive, emotionally high with the awe inspiring reverence of a man that had been given clemency when he'd least expected it was the headiest brew the M.C. officiant could sip tonight no matter what liquor was in his glass as he sat outside plotting retaliation, mischief, and certain mayhem with his fellow Brothers.

"The Irishman kept yammering worse than the Yiddish women where I grew up," Juice offered with an unusual sense of wonderment and pride along with just the slightest hint of lingering self-doubt as he sipped from his bottle of beer, "but Tara said I helped save his life."

"What does that mean," Jax pointedly looked at each of the men assembled at the picnic table, ignoring the cacophony of the riotous celebration around them that was acting as both a cover and decoy for the Irishman's presence on the Teller-Morrow lot, until he got an explanation from the Scotsman who'd been there for the entire procedure.

"Ah, Jackie Boy," Chibs regretfully informed him, "Tara heard Cameron demand that we take out that rat bastard Heffner when he became conscious again."

"Shit," Jax exclaimed after running his hand helplessly down his face to slam it ruthlessly on the battered wooden table. Yet, that single epithet didn't even begin to cover the enormity of the clusterfuck this could become for him personally as dread and panic started to race with each other through his veins. His woman had always been a smart girl, she would know they weren't talking about fucking dinner and a movie here. "We gotta move Cameron to the cabin. Now."

"Hold on, Boy," Piney gruffly countered from the other end of the table beside Bobby. "You need to settle down. Deal with Heffner first."

"Don't tell me what I need to do, Old Man," Jax yelled; his temper instantly seething. "Friend or not, that Irish prick needs to stop talking about this shit around my Old Lady."

"Jax," Op interjected, "he's right."

"Look," Jax stated; his blood suddenly pounding like an out of control jack hammer in fear of his wife's uncertain withdrawal with the drug-induced revelation of anymore Irish truth and knowledge this evening, "this isn't just about Tara." He pointed to the drunken bacchanal surrounding them desperately trying to get them to understand, "this won't fool a search warrant or stop a raid. We need to move him before we deal with Heffner."

Warily, he eyed his Brothers across the scarred wooden planks gauging their own levels of acceptance, each incessant thud of his heart pushing him that much closer to a reprieve as they nodded their accent, knowing that it was the best move for the club even if his motivation was initially the personal fear of losing the monumental capitulation he'd received from Tara earlier.

"Okay," Tigg finally acquiesced for the group with his usual contempt for brains over outright blood and brawn, "how should we go about this V.P.?"

"You, Piney, and Chibs will take the Irishmen to the cabin tonight then Bobby, Op, and I will take care of Heffner tomorrow," Jax leveled with a calm certainty that belied any of his earlier turmoil. "Use the van and tow truck as cover."

"And, Tara," Happy grunted out the question

"There's nothing to worry about there," Piney's authoritative declaration did little to alleviate the old ache that settled once again around Jax's heart even though he knew that his woman's ink had already proven indelibly true. She might have claimed him once again tonight but knowing that she'd never betray him was going to be cold comfort if Tara ultimately decided to uphold that promise somewhere other than in his arms once Romeo charmed Galen and the other Irish Kings but, until then, Jax added, "She doesn't leave the compound. Not until this Irish-Cartel shit is locked down and we've take care of who attacked us tonight."

"You sure you're ready for that fight, Brother," Op smirked at his best friend knowing what an implacable resistance Tara could put up if she truly chose to be difficult. She had never been mean just immovable and way too fucking smart for him to out maneuver easily.

"Oh, shit," Jax replied already knowing that he was likely to have lost this battle before it even began.

"Don't worry, man, I've got your back," his best pal since they were infants stood and clasped his back in brotherly affection. "She still owes me for not kicking Hale's ass when he was her paper boy."

For an instant, he felt a shimmer of relief that the mountain of a man he'd called his best friend his entire life was going to be easing Tara into her current travel and safety restrictions until Jax realized he'd never known there was something that might have merited shit kicking back in the day that he'd never been made privy to before and yelled, "Wait, Op, what the hell are you talking about?"

The grizzly man's only answer was a frustratingly enigmatic grin before he slipped through the clubhouse door.

That sneaky little bitch.

June still couldn't believe the good doctor had pulled one over on Hale and the desk duty sergeant by simply pulling two accident reports and then only taking a copy of one of them. Idiots, the both of them. Little Miss Tara hadn't really cared about the accident that her parents had been involved in at all; it was all just a clever ruse to get into the records room so that she could have access to the seemingly benign report on John Teller.

However, that trivial piece of paper couldn't be that innocuous if the good doctor had endeavored to procure it after all of this time. Now just what was she doing poking into the accident investigation that had eventually claimed the life of her future father in law? Better yet, as she stared at the rudimentary paperwork, it all seemed a little too clean and precise for a collision that left the founding President of the Sons of Anarchy MC fighting for his life in a fated losing battle for two days.

She couldn't put her finger on it but something felt slightly off kilter about this report and then she spotted the unmistakable signature at the bottom in the blank left open for the supervising officer. Wayne Unser.

She didn't need to be a grease monkey in her spare time like her father had been to spot a coverup when it was right in front of her in black and white and little Tara had known something all this time or she'd never have pulled that file. Was that really why Clay had tried to kill her? Was it because she knew something about how John Teller had really died and not because she'd disloyally left Charming when Jax went to lock-up? What other damning secrets lay hidden behind those disarmingly innocent eyes?

Biting her lip in contemplation of how she'd play this latest tidbit of information to her advantage, June automatically answered her cell, "Stahl."

Quickly, she stashed the report in her temporary desk drawer as she simultaneously holstered her weapon, knowing that the remainder of her evening had just gotten even more interesting with the report of two dead bodies and earlier shots heard at a local RIRA controlled bar. She wasn't exactly sure how all of these puzzle pieces fit but she'd be sure to carve them into her own masterpiece of destruction for the Sons with the heir apparent's little woman as her lynch pin.

Meticulously, Tara washed the instruments that had become so familiar that they seemed merely an extension of her own body. The sterile metal as malleable and adept as her own fingers when wielded with her well-trained expertise but, now, in this moment, the surgical tools she'd used earlier seemed cold, hard, and unyielding like the fine line she'd always been taught should exist between right and wrong until circumstance had taught her so long ago that her innate boundaries were arbitrary at best.

Maybe, that was just her long-standing remorse and culpability talking but Tara couldn't just forget what she'd seen or heard tonight. Even half-way unconscious and barely clinging to his own life, the Irishman she'd been treating had been gasping and sputtering out grueling details of what was surely going to be part of a retaliatory hit during his more lucid moments.

It was a bitter truth, another reality of Jax's hazy outlaw existence, that had always scared her. Not just because of the harsh brutality that could be meted out for not adhering to a code of loyalty that had nothing to do with the legalities the rest of the world sought comfort and safety within but because she, somehow, had always known that her moral compass had always been skewed toward the darker fringes of acceptability rather than strictly the straight and narrow path that her own mother had cherished. It was a shadowed timbre of self-honesty that Tara never had to face while sheltered within the regimented life she'd built for herself in Chicago but each minute she spent back in her hometown that wall of plausible distance was no longer offering protection and deniability from her introspective desire for justice. The foreboding knowledge of a rapidly growing need for retribution had reemerged to plague her battered heart and soul since the horrific events of her past had been forcefully revealed in Charming. How the hell was she supposed to reconcile who'd she'd become with what she'd always been?

Mentally exhausted, confusion and uncertainty weighing heavily upon her shoulders, Tara finished drying hands that somehow never seemed to feel clean and reached for the steaming pot of the molten tar the club somehow managed to pass off as coffee as her mind continued to run in furious circles like a top crazily spinning out of control. Unfortunately, she wasn't given a moment longer to consider her predicament alone before her contemptuous mother in law interrupted her internal debate.

She wasn't nearly ready to make nice and there was no fucking way that Tara was backing down this time because she'd never been able to bring herself to do whatever Gemma seemed to want. Still. She tried to momentarily defuse the normally explosive situation that volleyed between them one last time by matter of factly stating, "I'm tired and in no mood to argue with you in what's left of the night."

"Oh, no fight," Gemma replied in a sweetly pandering tone that immediately irritated her more than the boisterous racket spilling over from the party in the main room. "You saved the Irishman."

"You're welcome," Tara blandly offered trying to get her fortifying bit of liquid caffeine poured and leave before the cunning matriarch got to her ulterior motive for engaging in what could loosely be construed as their first civil conversation in over a decade.

"I'm just curious," the surgeon internally groaned at Gemma's words knowing that she was already too late to avoid the viper's quick fangs as her dark venom filled the room just as surely as Tara's coffee nearly reached the brim of her mug. "How do you and Jax see whatever this is working out?"

"What are you talking about Gemma," Tara automatically questioned knowing that she was certainly stirring up more than the sugar in her warm brew with that inquisitive remark.

"You're obviously reconnected and you're not really one of them," her mother in law scoffed as the older woman pointedly eyed the bevy of Crow Eaters over her shoulder that had seemingly slunk out of the woodwork like an army of slutty cock roaches once the tequila shots had begun.

"Glad that's clear," she barely managed to keep from rolling her eyes at the woman's audacity for even trying to put Tara in the same degrading sentence as the Sam Crow sweet-butts with that less than distinctive comparison. It was just one more item that she'd add to the ever-growing pile of things Tara was likely never telling Jax because it would send him into another rampage that his mother would still treat his wife with such blatant disrespect even though Tara had never been that type of girl.

Instead, her morbid curiosity finally won out after a lifetime of not knowing as Tara eventually wondered aloud, "Gemma, why have you always hated Jax and me together so much?"

Taken aback at first by her blunt inquiry, Gemma's shrewd gaze ultimately leveled, "Okay. I'll tell you since its way past time that things should be over between you and my boy."

With a forward stance that clearly screamed the older woman's ever-present loathing and disregard, Gemma pushed out her furtive condemnation, "For someone whose smarter and more headstrong than anyone I've ever met; you're certainly a dumb bitch. "

"You can't exist in the haze of ignorant obedience required of Old Ladies. You've always been too anal and neurotic for that even as a kid- and you've never really lived in our world even when you and Jax were together before but it's the only one that my son has ever known." Fiercely, the older woman leaned even closer and added, "I won't let you twist his head around, try and tear him away from me again, not even with all your dead baby bullshit."

It took Tara a minute to recover from Gemma's vicious verbal sucker-punch; to finally glean the rank motivation that lay putridly beneath Gemma's hostile and underhanded actions all of these years as Tara succinctly unearthed her bewildered astonishment through furrowed brows, "You've never liked me simply because you think that I could somehow take Jax away from you or the Club. That his love for me would be stronger than your stranglehold over him. That's why you couldn't handle me leaving Charming while he was inside."

"You killed my baby," she heartbrokenly shot back through the shield of agonized tears, "because you were jealous of how much Jax cared for me."

Tara watched the other woman's cold, icy, stare further harden into crystal shards of lethal animosity at her all too perceptive admission as she sagely continued, "Do I really scare you that much, Gemma?"

"Sweetheart, I've only been scared of three women in my life and you certainly aren't one of them," the ball busting M.C. Queen lowly snarled her false denial. "Why don't you just head back to Chicago before any more irreparable damage is done since we both know that you'll run back there eventually anyway. You should just end things now and save both you and Jax from even more heartache."

"You still think that you can do or say whatever you want in this town," Tara scoffed back in acrid disbelief. "That you and Clay can keep all your dirty little secrets buried in the past but it doesn't work that way, Gemma. Not anymore. Not with me."

Despite the quick advance and harsh rebuttal of defensive words from Gemma, they both now knew that Tara could have the biking diva quaking in her laced up knee-high boots if she really tried. Tara was honest enough with herself, at least, to admit that she kind of liked the perverse idea even if she'd always known that Gemma's instinctual fear was without true merit because Jax had never put her needs over his loyalty to the Sons. However, Tara couldn't help but take satisfaction in realizing that Gemma wasn't aware of that crucial bit of information and, likely, never would be either.

Somehow it would be so much easier to deal with Sam Crow's reigning bitch now that Tara understood the crowning point of Gemma's less than noble insecurities. The surgeon was about as likely to forget that useful tidbit as the still grieving mother was to forgive Gemma's lethal duplicity because time hadn't healed her festering maternal wounds and Tara was still mad as hell at the woman who'd orchestrated the brutal attack that had turned her adult life into a wretched and lonely existence for so long.

And, Tara silently promised herself; Gemma would soon learn that she should be very afraid of her daughter in law but not for the more obvious reason the older woman had always feared. If Gemma thought that she'd already atoned for the misery that the biking matriarch had wrought on others during her sordid life with her recent fallout with Jax; the older woman would soon learn that her true reckoning hadn't even begun yet.

Romeo was never a particularly happy man.

Especially tonight.

"Two shooters hit Jax and his crew when they were meeting the Irishman," Luis simply informed his long time commanding officer. "They got the shooters. Lobo Sonora."

"We'll need to deal with that. Quickly," a narrowed eye was already heavily pointed at him.

"Men are already enroute," Luis efficiently confirmed knowing that wasn't the worst that they needed to deal with this evening. "Cameron was hit bad. Teller's wife had to patch him up so that he'd pull through."

"Clay reached out to say she was a security concern," Romeo drilled him even harder with that same grueling stare. "What have we found so far?"

"Not enough," was his resigned response. "Yet."

They looked like fireflies dancing over a midnight field, the ember tips of their glowing cigarettes circling round and round like they were merely floating on an easy summer breeze from up here on the roof but Opie knew the people below them in the square holding the ends of those smoldering butts were far from innocent so unlike the brunette woman he'd followed from the kitchen up here.

Quietly, knowing that he wouldn't startle her but rightfully concerned after the brutal emotional exchange he'd overhead between the woman who'd been more of a mother to him than Mary ever had been and the girl who'd been like a sister to him since his earliest memories, Opie dropped down carefully next to her on the exhaust vent and silently pulled her into the balm of his sturdy embrace.

It wouldn't be the first time he'd offered Tara the quiet solace of his arms when her world had gone awry.

He figured that she'd stay stoic after having already spent the grief stricken tears that had only come recently to the woman and not the girl he'd known but Tara surprised him once again by demanding, "Tell me what really happened with Donna."

There was something elusive that he'd never seen in the depths of Tara's hazel gaze before but there was also a desperate need clawing at her that haunted him as well that earnestly compelled Opie to respond, "That ATF bitch, Stahl. She hung me out as a rat."

"Clay," Tara's whispered question resounded between them like a shotgun blast destroying what was left of the numbing dam he'd built up around his personal need for vengeance.

His resulting silence didn't deny what they both inherently knew to be true but, somehow, that hadn't eased anything for Opie. It just made it even worse. This couldn't have just been her own tragic experience with Clay that led Tara to that quick of a conclusion because what had even gotten her to asking about Donna's passing in the first place. Furrowing his brow as he truly looked at the woman who sat beside him in the inky shadows of the night, he finally acknowledged what had eluded him in her insightful stare before. Tara's formerly clear green eyes were shaded with angry hues of retribution and revenge.

And it made Opie suddenly fearful to ask what the hell else she might know about their formerly revered King?