Code dictated that although the Bastards might rip your eyeballs from the sockets in retaliation, they wouldn’t kill your wife and kids in the process.
Innocents were left untouched.
That was until Chop laid his hands on my girl.
MY Thia.
The Bastards were now more like a terrorist organization, bound not by loyalty, but by the orders spewed from the mouth of a power-hungry, soulless tyrant. My brothers used to be soldiers, but somewhere along the line they turned into nothing more than obedient dogs tethered by Chop’s very short leashes. The kind of thugs who do the dirty work, tag cells while they’re inside, and contribute little more to the overall good of the club.
There was no more “good-of-the-club.”
The brotherhood part of it was long gone, and in its place was a dictatorship dripping in motor oil, leather, and lies.
When I took off my cut, I didn’t know who I was anymore. The man in me was lost throughout years of thinking that my old man was somehow more than a mere mortal because he was the one who held the gavel and passed down the orders.
Until Ti.
She made me realize that I didn’t need the club to be a biker.
I can live and I can ride.
I can love and I can kill.
It was both the man and the biker in me who was going to put a bullet in Chop’s skull and end this shit because I knew he’d never stop until I was in the ground.
“You first old man,” I muttered to myself.
Code dictated that a brother couldn’t kill another brother.
It was a good fucking thing I wasn’t a Bastard anymore because if and when I got free of those cell bars, the hurt I planned to inflict upon my old man would make what Eli and his pussy ass men did to me look fucking tame by comparison.
Then there was the little matter of my mother suddenly coming back from the dead.
Sadie.
My mother’s name was Sadie Treme. For some reason I hadn’t remembered that until I found myself sitting across from her in the visiting room wondering how the fuck she was even alive.
The bitch could at least have given me the courtesy of staying dead.
I didn’t trust it.
I didn’t trust her.
I had enough shit going on without having to think about the woman who gave birth to me escaping the fucking reaper, only to crawl her way back to the land of the living.
Throughout the years I rarely allowed my thoughts to wander to the woman who gave birth to me. Chop said she was a traitor, so I believed she was a traitor. Rats didn’t have a place in the club or a place among the living. “We don’t give rats a second thought after they’ve been put down. Rats are pests and the only good rat is a dead rat.” He’d said that the very night he’d caught Sadie trying to escape Logan’s Beach with me in the passenger seat. Hours later, he dragged her into the woods and put her down like a fucking rabid dog.
What’s weird is that I don’t remember crying then. A son should cry for his mom when she dies, shouldn’t he? I racked my brain to try and remember any sort of tear shed, but the memories never came.
What did come back were other memories, like the way her long brown hair had almost touched her waist back then. The way her hazel eyes had lit up when my old man paid her any sort of attention. The way she never wore any makeup around her eyes, but her lips were always painted bright red. The way she never sung me lullabies, but was always humming tunes by Tanya Tucker and Waylon Jennings everywhere she’d go.
Those memories couldn’t have been of the same Sadie who sat in front of me in that visitation center. No, the woman who twisted her fingers and kept peering down at her lap was just a shell of the free spirit I remember dancing to the Willie Nelson song she kept playing on repeat on the club jukebox.
She was alive and breathing, but there was something about her. Maybe it was her sunken cheeks or sallow complexion. Or maybe it was the defeated vibe she was giving off that made me wonder if maybe my old man had succeeded in killing her after all.
Sadie and Chop had gotten together when Sadie was only sixteen years old. She was a runaway turned club whore. Five short years after I was born she was gone and that was that.
Then there she was. Almost twenty five years later, sitting across from me, looking me over with her mouth agape as if I were the fucking ghost at the table.
“Why are you here?” I’d asked, not sure of where else to start the conversation or even if I wanted to have one.
“Honestly, I thought I knew and now, actually being here, I’m not really sure why I came,” she’d said meekly, biting her lip and looking everywhere else but me.
“I thought you were dead,” I countered, stating the obvious.
She nodded. “I thought I was, too. Turns out, I was wrong.”
“What does that mean?” I was already over the vague answers, especially when all it caused were more fucking questions.
“It means when your father pulled the trigger I thought I was dead, but I woke up and was surprised then that I was alive as you are now, but I wasn’t free. I was locked somewhere.” She pinched the bridge of her nose, “but the details are fuzzy. I escaped, but honestly I don’t even remember how. As soon as my mind started to clear, I sought you out.”
“You think Chop kept you somewhere all this time?”
Sadie nodded. “Yes, but I don’t know where.”
“How the fuck didn’t you know where you were for twenty fucking years? You don’t think that sounds a little fucking crazy?”
Sadie lifted an arm onto the table, palm up, and pushed up her long sleeve. Her forearm was littered with pockmarks in varying stages of scarring from pink to white. “I do know it sounds crazy,” she said, her eyes finally meeting mine, “but that’s the truth.”
“Say it is the truth, there is still the little matter of why the fuck he would do that,” I pointed out. “Chop has a reason for everything, even the fucked up shit had a fucked up reason. This?” I said, using my hand to gesture to her arm. She pulled her sleeve back down. “I can’t think of any reason for this.”
Sadie continued to tug her sleeve over her hand. “The why doesn’t matter now, Abel. It’s not important anymore. The why doesn’t let me move forward.”
“So why aren’t you already moving forward then? Why come? You don’t think Chop will know you were here? He’s got eyes everywhere, or did twenty-five years of being drugged and locked up make you forget all that?” I said sarcastically, throwing her ridiculous story back in her face. Bitch could have been a junkie who’d recently found sobriety and just wanted to make excuses for her absence in my life for the last three fucking decades.
Ding-dong motherfucker. Chop shot her. Came back out. Told everyone she was dead. Bitch looks alive to me so even if her story isn’t the truth your old man is balls deep in whatever did happen. Ghost Preppy chimed in. I’d been hearing him a lot less since I met Ti and was glad the little fucker was still around. I placed my elbows on the table and covered my mouth with my hands to cover my smile.
Preppy was right, but there was no way I would ever know if she was telling the truth. I wouldn’t put long and prolonged torture past Chop, but why would he lie to everyone about it? There was more to the story, and I didn’t know if Sadie was lying, or if she truly didn’t remember.
She cleared her throat and my eyes fell to her long hair which she was twisting in her hand. It was a lot longer than it was in my memory, touching her waist, and the almost black was now streaked with white. The wrinkles around her eyes were more prominent, her signature red lipstick was gone, her lips bare as well as the rest of her face.
“I signed in with a different name. Plus, after I leave here today, I’m disappearing. For good. I just…I just needed to come, I guess. I had to see you first before I was really gone for good this time.” She picked at her nails.
I no longer had to hide my smile because it had disappeared as quick as it had come. “What do you expect from me?
A big hug and an ‘I missed you, Mommy’?” I leaned back and crossed my arms over my chest.
She ran her fingers over a long faded scar on her forehead that ran into her hairline. She shook her head. “No, that’s not what I was looking for by coming here. It was selfish of me to come, but I had to. I had to tell you what he’d done do me. You needed to hear what kind of man your father is.”
“I know all to well what kind of man he is.” I said, leaning forward.
Sadie shuffled in her seat. “I think he did it. Kept me alive I mean because he thought I told on the club, but I didn’t. Maybe he thought death wasn’t good enough a punishment. It wasn’t good enough to end my life, he wanted to take it and make me suffer more instead of putting me out of my misery.” Sadie sniffled and that’s when I noticed her glassy eyes. “You know? I hope to Christ I never do remember what really happened. I pray that it always stays a mystery.” She pushed her chair back from the table, scraping it along the linoleum, but remained seated. “Because something tells me there is nothing he did to me I’d want to remember.” She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand and suddenly the void look from earlier was back. The sniffling stopped.
“Why the getup?” I asked, gesturing to the light blue scrubs she was wearing.
She glanced down and pinched the hem of the top. “If anyone questions who your visitor was, or if Chop gets wind, hopefully they will be looking for a nurse.”
“Why even risk it at all?”
Sadie ignored my question. She sighed and looked up at my face like she was observing me. “You have his eyes,” she said, staring right into my eyes. I shifted uncomfortably on the hard plastic chair. “You look so much like him, when you first came out I thought you were him.”
“I’m nothing like him,” I barked.
“You’re in here,” she argued.
“I’m here because I chose to be here. Don’t get it twisted in that doped-up mind of yours. You don’t know me. You don’t know the shit I’ve done that’s bad, and it’s worse than you could ever imagine. You don’t know the shit I’ve done that’s good either, and it’s better than you could ever know.”
“It’s for a girl,” she said. It wasn’t a question. The corner of her lip turned up in a half smile.
“So what if it is?”
“It means you might just be human after all.” She pointed out. She seemed to relax, satisfied with her new discovery. “You got that from my side of the family, no doubt.”
“Family?” I asked, scoffing at her casual use of a word she knew nothing about.
“I AM your family,” she argued, “I just wanted to be—”
“I’ve got family,” I interrupted. “You don’t gotta be nothing.”
“Andria? Is that who you’re talking about?” she asked, I hated the way she said my half-sister’s name, like it disgusted her. Andria was family, even though I hadn’t seen her in many years. She was the product of a brief affair Chop had with a waitress in Georgia. Andria should thank her lucky fucking stars she wasn’t born a boy because I had a feeling that if she would have been born with a dick she would’ve been wearing a cut just like me. “Yeah, but she’s not who I was talking about.”
She again looked down at her lap. “My Abel. My boy. I think that you and I should—”
“McAdams!” a deep voice bellowed. “Time’s up. Stand,” the guard ordered. By pulling on the back of my chair, he forced me to obey.
“You should know I’m not a Bastard anymore,” I said to the ghost of my mother. “I took off my cut and laid it at that motherfucker’s feet. I might not be a monster, but I am a dead man, so I guess it’s good you came to see me, even if you don’t know why you came.” I stood up, sliding the plastic chair against the concrete, startling Sadie who looked up at me with big hazel eyes filled with sadness and naivety, as if she was still the teenager who gave birth to me almost thirty years before. “Get a good look at me now while you can, Mom,” I said, emphasizing “Mom” and holding my arms as wide open as the cuffs attached to my wrists would allow. “’Cause it might just be the last chance you’re ever gonna get.” The officer yanked on the chains connecting my cuffs, dragging me away from Sadie.
From my mother. Even thinking of her as my mother didn’t feel right.
Because, I realized. I already had a mother, even if I didn’t address her as mom she was someone who’d earned the title.
“Oh,” I said, shouting back to Sadie over my shoulder, “And you can go wherever you need to go and disappear to because I already have a mom. Her name is Grace.”
“Grace?” Sadie asked, sounding as confused as I was when she’d showed up. The guard buzzed me out of the room and lead me back to my cell. I don’t know why I felt the need to be hateful toward her, but maybe it was because she’d come back from wherever she’d been and her first instinct was to run away. Maybe it was because no matter what had happened to her the fact was that she’d let Chop break her.
One thing was for fucking sure, it didn’t matter what that motherfucker ever did to me.
I would never fucking break.
CHAPTER THREE
Bear
Thirty minutes after the visit with Sadie, I was out in the yard thinking about our conversation about family when it occurred to me.
Dead men don’t have families.
Suddenly, the thought of never having one with Ti, never seeing her grow round with my kid, hit me in the chest like I’d caught a fucking bullet.
A feeling I’d been familiar with a time or two.
Dizzy with the unwanted thought, I slipped up and hadn’t been scanning the yard for potential threats like I should’ve been. The only bastard I’d seen since I’d been locked up was Corp, and considering the condition I left him in I knew at least he wouldn’t be a threat again any time soon.
Or eating without the aid of a straw.
But they were coming. I knew that as well as I knew my own name. I could practically smell it in the air.
“You look like you could use one of these,” a voice said. I snapped out of my Ti induced thoughts to find a black guy around my height, but double my body weight, his jumpsuit ripped at the collar and arms to make room for his protruding muscles.
“Thanks,” I said tentatively, reaching for the smoke he extended out to me from the open pack. I figured if this guy was sent to kill me he’d already done it, probably by flexing my head between his forearm and bicep. The stranger lit a match and cupped his hand around the flame, lighting my smoke and then his own before waving out the match and tossing it into the grass. He set the pack on the table. “Keep ’em,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said, and although I was pretty sure he didn’t want to kill me, I was still skeptical of anyone who was willing to do you favors in jail. Favors never came without a price.
“I’m Miller,” the stranger said. “A mutual friend asked me to look out for you.”
“Friend? Well that narrows it down then, because it seems like I don’t got much of those these days,” I admitted.
Miller straddled the bench of the plastic table and it bowed under his weight.
“It’s important to have friends in a place like this. Word is a bunch of bikers caught a bullshit misdemeanor case and are on their way in. Our friend figures that reason is you.” His voice was so deep it almost echoed when he spoke. He took a long drag of his cigarette. “Our mutual friend helped me out when I was in Georgia State, and I owe him one. Shit, I owe that motherfucker twenty at the very least. Figured that preventing a bunch of white boy Beach Bunnies, or whatever the fuck ya’ll call yourselves, from carving you up ain’t shit compared to what he did for me.”
“I don’t think I gotta guess who this friend of ours is anymore,” I said taking one last drag of my cigarette and putting it out on the tabletop. King had done his three years up at Georgia State. He stood up and the bench kept the Miller shaped indent.
He stubbed his smoke out on the table. “He gave me a message for you.”
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“What would that be?”
Miller shielded his eyes from the sun. “He said not to get yourself killed and that the girl is safe.”
Thank fuck. That meant King had her at the grove and that the protection I’d set up was with her. Ti staying at King’s was not an option. Even though I was the easier target in jail, Ti could still be at risk and without me there to protect her, King’s family was more at risk then ever. Although I told King he was taking her back home because it didn’t look good for my confession if the DA could link us in any way. If King recognized differently I knew he’d insist that she stay, and I couldn’t do that to him after he’d done so much for me.
“Guess I’m just in time,” Miller said, tipping his chin to the fence on the other side of the yard. I stood and turned around just in time to see the gate slide open and three men enter the yard.
Three of my former brothers.