She might have given him another chance, but he’d given her a family, her life back, her happiness. It was all real. All of it. He had her trust, her heart, her everything.
The End
RYDER
LONELY RIDER MC 6
Chapter 1
RYDER
Red. His world was drenched in it. What was left of his world.
He was free. Finally truly free. But what was freedom? He’d killed for it before and it turned out to be little more than an illusion, an oasis to a dying man that turned out to be nothing but yet another sandy grave.
He might have been free of the Serpents and Scythes MC when their Prez, Bone, took a knife between the ribs compliments of other disgruntled members who didn’t like being told they were little more than cannon fodder in a turf war over a stolen shipment of drugs. The club had been on the downward spiral for a while. Ryder was stupid enough to patch in, hoping for the best. Hoping to find a real fucking family.
Those men might have been a lot of things, but they weren’t brothers. They weren’t fathers. They weren’t blood. They weren’t his family.
He had a family. A brother, a father, a mother. But it wasn’t pretty. Everyday was a struggle to survive. Literally. Their father was nothing but a dark cloud of abuse and violence, making them all feel terrified about his next move.
His brother, Jimmy, left at sixteen to escape the demons.
It continued day after day. Night after night. Until the twelve year old version of Ryder, a kid he no longer knew, finally put a bullet between the old man’s eyes. The devil always claimed to be doing god’s will. Fucking god’s will. Apparently it was god’s will to beat his wife. To blacken her eyes, to rape her, strangle her, break her limbs, to beat the spirit from her until she was nothing left of a shell.
He’d come for him next, as he always did, but that night, Ryder made his decision.
He was no longer a boy. A boy didn’t load that fucking gun. A boy didn’t slip those bullets in, mouth watering for the taste of spilled blood. A boy didn’t cry out in triumph when his father’s body slumped over dead, bathed him in a coppery bloodbath. A boy didn’t commit murder.
Freedom. He’d done it to free them both.
Instead his mother retreated into herself, into her own form of internal prison. He’d served his time, got off on self defense, and went straight into another cage. Nothing good ever came out of people like him.
Red.
His world would forever be painted in red. The thick coppery blood that ran in rivers around him. That dripped in front of his eyes, closed or open. That haunted his waking moments and shrouded his dreams.
Blood. It was in him. It was him. It was his past, his present, his future.
He was cursed, cursed by god and cursed by the devil. Darkness, shadows and evil spirits. The light hid itself away and the sun forever denied the promise of warmth. He’d joined the ranks of the dead a long fucking time ago. Long before he ever pulled that trigger.
There was no escape for people like him.
Chapter 2
RYDER
Philadelphia.
It was fitting, that Jimmy could have gone anywhere in the world, but he ended up there. In Philly. A city that lived and breathed ancient history, justice, freedom. In Philly, people walked like they had some hope in their eyes. The light hadn’t gone out completely. The air was even different.
The sun was so bright it burned Ryder’s eyes, even as it set, painting the sky in spectacular hues, golds, purples, pinks. The beauty of it wasn’t lost on him. Even a dead soul had eyes and he appreciated what little paint there was left in a colorless world.
Detroit felt like another lifetime.
He’d been gone for two weeks. Sold one of his two real possessions, a bike he’d resurrected back from the dead over the past few years so that he’d have some cash in his pocket. He’d taken the only two things he had left. His mother. And his first real love, that cold black metal and steel monstrosity he’d named Bernice, well-aware it was a tad bit corny.
She hadn’t spoken a word in five years. She was gone. Like him.
There was no light in her eyes.
And then, right before he left her in that center, the last place on earth that he hoped could help her, bring her back to him, bring her back to a life that he’d move heaven and hell to make worth living again, she’d muttered one word. Five precious syllables.
Deep inside of her, she’d hidden the truth all along.
Philadelphia.
There were parts of the city that weren’t pretty. Where sprawling green parks with landmarks, statues, fountains, memorials, nice homes, clean streets, thriving businesses, gave way to the darkness. Even in the fading light of day, it was dark.
Ryder felt at home there, among the homeless. The lost. The damned.
He’d left his bike in the safer parts of town, where he could park it and be assured it would still be there on his return. He’d donned a black hoodie and a black pair of jeans. His shit-kickers scraped over the crumbling pavement as he dodged between decaying buildings. The alleys were filled with the hopeless, homes for those who had lost their way. The stories of pain, loss, tears and regret, floated above those slumped over and those huddled up. Even though the night was warm, some were praying to survive just another night and some were praying for death. It was like walking among ghosts.
The streets were broken and filled with holes, but no one sensible drove down them anyway. The cars that shuffled by belonged to another era or were so far gone that they were already dragging on the ground, the tires already bald. Even the sidewalks were little more than a pile of cracked, pitted concrete.
Ryder could have looked up the neighborhood’s name, but he hadn’t bothered. It didn’t matter. He had an address, written in faded ink on a piece of paper worn soft and frayed, soft as butter, by his mother’s hands over the years. Every single crease on that paper, the smudged ink where a tear drop fell, the color of the faded blue, the slant of the letters, the slight hesitation between the first word and the second, the bolder numbers… all of it was emblazed on Ryder’s mind.
A rustle to his right brought Ryder’s head around. His body tensed, every instinct honed in to the familiar fight and flight response. Except he wasn’t built right there. He didn’t have a fucking cell in his body equipped for running. No. It was fight. Every. Single. Time.
He breathed out a long exhale when he realized the sound came from a paper bag a few feet off to the side. An ancient man, his skin weathered, the wrinkles lined with grime and hopelessness, lifted a bottle to his lips. The paper around it rustled, though why he bothered to disguise what he was doing in a place where not even the law dared to venture, was beyond him.
The man sighed and let the bottle drop back into his lap. He reached up with a gnarled hand and wiped sheen of spittle off his thin lips and grizzled white beard. He flashed Ryder a toothless grin before he slowly turned his palm upwards.
Begging. He’s asking me for money.
Ryder hesitated. He had his hood drawn up around his face. That must be it. No one in their right mind cast him a second glance. One was more than enough to instill fear in the hearts of even the toughest men. It wasn’t his looks. It was his eyes. Cold. Dead.
The stench of the man assailed Ryder as he dug out a twenty. He breathed it in, just another function of living that he registered but didn’t truly process. A thin, grimy sweater that was more black and brown than the original gray, clung to the man’s bony frame. He was thin, painfully so, and Ryder imagined the skeleton that lay beneath the dirty layers, the flesh sunken and hanging off the bones.
“Use it for food,” he grumbled, as he set the bill in the gnarled, skeletal hand. It surprised him that he bothered. He hadn’t cared about anything in a very long time.
The old man grinned his same toothless smile. A line of spittle formed at the corners of his lips and he withdrew his hand, lightning fast, back to his chest, clutching his pr
ize. He nodded emphatically, though they both knew that the twenty would just end up producing another bottle, like the one the man held onto so desperately.
What it was truly buying was escape.
Ryder wished it was that easy. To fall into it at the bottom of a bottle, to snort it up his nose, to fucking inject it into himself, to fuck it away. Oblivion. That was his curse. He’d never found it. Never found that escape, that peace, that easy place, that one second of sweet oblivion. He’d fucking tried over the years. He’d failed.
“Bless you,” the old man rasped. Without his teeth the words were skewed, but Ryder caught the gist of it.
“I very much doubt there’s any chance of that,” Ryder said, voice surprisingly soft.
The old man kept on grinning and nodding, like he could actually grant peace himself. His eyes strayed to the bottle and back up to Ryder.
Ryder turned slowly. He resumed his path. He had a map, one of those ancient road atlases that became obsolete right around the time people got cell phones and GPS in their cars. He’d memorized the street names, found the address, the one burned into his brain. He’d left the damn atlas where he’d parked his bike, in the safer part of town.
The address existed. It fucking existed.
He could have ridden right up to it. Parked his bike there and stormed in. Demanded to know why the bastard left him, left their mother, why he’d never returned even after the Monster was gone. He’d never once acted like he gave a shit. Maybe he’d forgotten where he’d come from. Maybe he forgot that he had a mother and father at all and like the Monster before him, was convinced that he’d come from a place of immaculate fucking conception.
Maybe the piece of shit genetics that their father carried had been passed down to the oldest son. Maybe he thought he was god. Or maybe he was just a fucking asshole who turned his back on his own flesh and blood when they needed him most.
The latter was probably closer to the truth, given that his mother had the bastard’s address all along. That she’d worn the paper so that the letters were almost illegible. That it was old and faded. She knew all along where Jimmy was. Which meant he hadn’t forgotten. He’d sent her the damn address, but he’d never come back.
Red.
Ryder could almost taste it. He walked quickly, the force of his anger quickening his steps. For a man who felt nothing at all, the anger was a nice change. He embraced it, let it flow through his veins and fuel him like a poisonous gasoline. He needed the walk. He hadn’t just left his bike so it could be safe. He needed time to sort out the murderous rage that flooded his veins.
All around him cloaked figures sat huddled on scraps of cardboard. A middle aged woman lay passed out in a doorway, her head slumped against the wood door of a crumbling brick building, eyes glassy, her tongue hanging out, a needle slack in her arm.
Other figures shuffled by, hunched against the burden of simply fucking living, their internal struggles unseen, but cloaked about them, a shroud of human misery.
It was a real motherfucker of a depressing place alright.
Ryder didn’t stop until he faced the monolith of a brick building. It was the only well kept structure in the entire neighborhood. There weren’t bars on the windows and the glass remained surprisingly intact. Two huge double doors stood at the entrance and above them, a sign that proudly proclaimed the place to be a refuge, a haven, a shelter.
Maybe his brother inherited those god complex genetics after all.
Because the address on the front of the building was the same as the one burned into Ryder’s memory.
Chapter 3
LAURA
Empty. It was the word she’d use to describe herself. Her life.
Laura Cannelli combated what was an increasingly futile, useless, violent, empty existence in the only way she could. Her older brother controlled every aspect of her life, but fortunately, he liked maintaining appearances. If the Cannelli family was seen helping society, then people would be less concerned that they were currently pumping in the shit that led to the very lifestyle in the first place.
“Here you go.” Laura ladled out a bowl of soup for a middle aged man who had a few wispy, greasy strands of hair clinging to his bald head.
Though there were deep purple bags under his eyes and his skin sagged like he was eighty, not forty, he managed to give her a smile that reached his haunted eyes. “Thank you.” The words were genuine, as genuine as the track marks on his bare arms. They were on full display, as he had a faded blue t-shirt on and a pair of stained, grimy jeans.
She blinked hard and forced herself to tear her eyes away from the marks that railroaded the man’s skin. “My pleasure,” she said, and she meant it.
Since her father died and Nico took over the family business, her life contained little that could be classified as good or wholesome. She was a prisoner in the sprawling Cannelli mansion she’d called home the entire twenty-three years of her life. The shelter was her escape. She volunteered three nights a week. Nico didn’t allow her to work so she filled her days studying business online. It didn’t matter that she hated it or that she wasn’t good at it. Nico told her that it was her path, and she was forced to walk it.
“Mommy, that lady is so pretty.”
Laura’s thoughts were pulled out of her internal misery, by the shyly spoken comment. She blinked and found a little girl and her mother standing in front of her. The girl couldn’t have been more than four or five. She was tiny for her age, with long dark hair and huge eyes. Her mother was small and young herself, no more than five feet, probably around twenty-one or twenty-two. She had the same dark hair, though hers hung in unwashed, lack luster clumps. Her eyes were just as large and wide, but they’d seen far too much life. Her skin was sallow and she had on a black hoodie and jeans that were too big for her frame.
The mother’s hand tightened around the little girl’s, but Laura gave them both an easy smile and the mother’s shoulders sagged a little.
“I’m Laura.” She stuck out a hand. She ignored the grumbles around her that the food line was being held up.
The mother reached out and shook her hand, though she didn’t volunteer her name. The little girl grinned up at her. “I’m Sarah.”
“Hello, Sarah.” Laura shook her hand next. She was careful with the dainty little bones. The girl’s hand was cold, though it was the middle of summer. Her clothes were threadbare and too small. Laura turned back to the mother and lowered her voice. “We have a room upstairs where you can pick out clothes. Once I’m done here, I’ll come find you and take you up there, if you like. You can choose some things for yourself and Sarah.”
The mother hesitated and Laura read the fear in her eyes. She was probably a battered woman, seeking refuge from whatever piece of shit had crawled into her life and turned it into a living hell. Laura knew too well what real fear felt like. What it looked like. How it manifested itself. She knew that the woman wouldn’t stick around.
She dropped her voice further. “I can go up and find you something. I’ll get someone to cover for me here. You can go enjoy your meal. I’ll be back before you’re finished.”
The mother’s eyes held a weary caution that tore at Laura’s heart. Just as quickly, the emotion was gone, walls slammed up in place. God, she was so familiar with that. Hiding the fear. Banishing the pain. Somehow surviving, though it couldn’t be close to being defined as living.
“It’s alright,” Laura assured her. “I’m just here to help. I- just to help.” She smiled down at Sarah, who smiled back. The fear was there in her eyes too, though it was just a speck. Obviously her mother took the brunt of it. She did what any mother would do and moved heaven and earth to protect her child.
“Thank you,” the mother muttered, before she moved on down the line.
As soon as she was past her station, Laura mumbled something to Betty, a thirty-five year old nurse who volunteered at the shelter in what little free time she could find. “I’ll be right back. Can you cover for
me for five minutes?”
She didn’t bat an eye. “Of course.” Her smile was tender. She had one of those round faces that was naturally motherly. She was shorter and curvier and in her purple turtleneck and leggings that were just a little too tight, she was still adorable. It was the kindness in her eyes that made her beautiful. Her demeanor, probably gained through years of reassuring patients, was naturally reassuring.
Laura turned away from the buffet line and stalked quickly through the massive open gym, past rows and rows of tables and chairs. The shelter used to be an old school, the brick building long ago fallen into disuse before their founder, Jim Anderson, bought it and had it transformed.
A series of halls led to a set of stairs that spiraled up towards what had once been classrooms. The large rooms now contained anything from food stores that wouldn’t expire, things like sleeves of crackers, granola bars, fruit snacks, sugar packets, bottles of water- the list went on and on, to rooms carefully organized with racks of clothing.
Laura carefully picked up a used duffel bag, which was smaller and still in good condition. It had a logo for some fitness center on it. She deftly walked through the children’s clothing, folding socks, underwear, a sweater, some shirts, and a few pairs of jeans and leggings, into the bag. After that she moved off to the women’s room and chose the same items. She was guessing on size, but she figured something was still better than nothing.
“Laura.”
She started at the deep voice behind her and whirled, nearly dropping the duffel. She placed a hand over her rapidly beating heart and her pulse spiked. “Oh. Jim. You almost gave me a heart attack.”
“I thought you were downstairs serving.” His smile was soft and easy, though his features were at odds with the easy mirth. Jim was a big man. A man who could easily have made himself feared instead of softening his heart and living his life to help others. Parts of him reminded Laura of Nico, though her brother was a decade and a half younger than Jim at least.
Lonely Rider - The Box Set: A Motorcycle Club Romance - The Complete Series Page 65
