by Stacey Lynn
When Ryker leaned forward and gently swept his lips across my forehead, some of my vocal abilities returned.
“That’d be nice,” I told him, my voice shaking like it used to when I had to stand in front of my high school public speaking class. Heat suffused my throat and cheeks. Nice? That’s the word I came up with to describe sleeping in Ryker’s arms again?
“Nice?” he repeated, amused.
I swallowed. “Nice.”
His lips brushed against my ear. The small movement blossomed a fire deep in my lower belly. It was the same as I remembered feeling when I was sixteen and Ryker touched me for the first time. Nothing about my life with Black Death had quenched the way my body responded to him.
Which told me only one thing: Sleeping next to Ryker, wrapped in his strong, muscular arms, wouldn’t be nice.
It would be my dream come true.
And I wanted it more than I could remember ever wanting anything.
I was just about to open my mouth to tell him so when Daemon appeared behind Ryker, a scowl on his face.
His hand came down and clasped onto Ryker’s shoulder, pulling him from me.
“Gotta get out of here. Tripp said bikes are outside.”
Ryker instantly grabbed my hand and I noticed Liv and Jules being pulled off the dance floor by Finn.
“Back door, Ryker,” Daemon said. “There’s an alley out there and we have my truck. Get the girls to the clubhouse.”
I was being pulled before my feet could catch up to my brain to tell me something bad was going on. It all happened so quickly.
The warmth from Ryker’s hand went unnoticed as he pushed through the crowd in the old, run down bar. All I felt was the motion of moving, a small push in my back from Liv’s hand behind me, and adrenaline spiking in my veins.
“What’s going on?” I asked as Ryker pulled me through the back door.
He looked left and right, making sure the alley was clear while he pulled his gun out of his holster and held it confidently in one hand. His other hand was gripping mine so tightly I was almost afraid my bones would crush if he squeezed it tighter.
“Don’t know,” he said.
But then we all heard it.
Tires squealed.
Gun shots exploded in the quiet night air, sounding like they were coming from the front of the bar.
A dark, old vehicle pulled up and blocked the opening to the alley.
The back door opened.
And I screamed.
Sweaty hands gripped my arms, but I pushed them away as I took off running down the alley. By the time I got there, the car was long gone and Daemon was at the body that had been flung out of the back door of the car.
Her face was almost unrecognizable. Her black hair that mirrored mine was matted to her bloody and bruised and swollen face.
“Mom!” I shouted, right as my knees collapsed to her side.
She was bloody—everywhere. My hands pushed away the drying blood as I tried to find where it had come from, but I couldn’t see anything besides her broken, lifeless body lying on the hot gravel in front of me.
“She’s dead,” I cried out and felt another pair of warm hands at my shoulders, pulling me off her.
“No, she’s not,” Daemon told me, his fingers on her neck. “She has a pulse. Barely.”
He wiped away the blood off her face and focused on the bubble of foam at the edges of her mouth.
His eyes pinned mine. I lost the ability to breathe. “She’s overdosed, Faith.”
I stared at my mom. Daemon’s words ringing truth loudly in my head. Her skeletal frame under her ripped t-shirt showed every bone in her body. Even with her swollen and bloody face, her eyes were sunken so far into her head that I would have barely recognized her even if she hadn’t gotten the crap beat out of her.
“We’ll get her to the hospital,” Daemon said, already pulling a phone out of his pocket.
I quit listening.
My knees collapsed and I felt myself fall back into a hard body. Ryker’s hand wrapped around my stomach as he pulled me against his chest. With one hand, he ran it down my hair, trying to soothe me.
I couldn’t speak. Salty tears poured from my eyes as my mother’s barely breathing body went blurry in front of me.
I heard conversations occurring around me, but it was all unrecognizable to my own ears. I had no idea what the men were saying as Ryker kept me tightly pressed against his chest. Then I was turned and lifted into Ryker’s arms as he carried me away.
“No!” I shouted, frantic to see my mom as she disappeared from my line of sight.
“It’s okay, Faith, we’re taking her to the hospital.” Ryker’s deep rumble vibrated against my neck. He held me tighter as I cried out for my mom and only loosened me once I was settled into the back of Daemon’s truck.
Then my mother’s head was placed on my lap.
My mom. The woman who quit paying attention to me when I turned ten years old. The woman who sold me for drugs. The woman who, for all I knew, hated me.
And she was dying in my arms.
“Here. Take this.”
I stared at the pale blue piece of fabric that had been shoved into my lap. When I brought my eyes to Ryker’s as he stood in front of me, I shot him a confused look.
“You’re covered in blood.”
His eyes and face held no emotion as he spoke the words. He didn’t move. He stood there, watching me, not blinking.
I looked down.
My pale pink top that had Harley Davidson scrawled across my breasts was lined with blood. It stuck to my arms, palms, and thighs. My black leather skirt was splattered.
Tears instantly burned in the back of my eyes.
“Let me help,” Ryker said. He turned me away from him in the small empty room we were waiting in and had me stripped of my tank top and covered in a nurse’s blue scrub top before I could argue with him.
Then he picked me up and sat down in one of the small plastic chairs and held me on his lap, one arm wrapped behind my shoulders, the other draped over my legs with his hand at my hip.
I said nothing as we waited in the cramped room at the local hospital until someone could come out and tell me how my mom was doing.
Waiting for someone to tell me she had died. An ache in my chest expanded with every breath I forced myself to take. Not because I was sad, but because I was almost relieved.
Her death would break the final hold Cain or Black Death had on me.
I didn’t know if my tears were relief, sadness, or happiness.
My eyes snapped to the door when it opened, only to have my heart skip a beat when Daemon entered with a grim look on his face. Liv and Jules followed behind him.
“We should have names etched on our own chairs for as often as we’re here,” he said before he grabbed a chair across the room from me. He planted his ass in the chair and crossed his feet, legs straight out in front of him.
“Ignore him,” Liv said as she took the chair next to me. “He’s an insensitive ass.”
I watched them glare at each other from across the room in mock disgust. Daemon’s twitch of his lips was my only clue that he wasn’t really pissed or annoyed.
Still, I was thankful for their presence.
“You okay?” Liv asked and turned to me.
I shrugged, unable to answer, unable to describe how the thought of my mother’s death almost made me feel good.
“We’ve got men on Cain,” Daemon said, his eyes on Ryker with only a quick glance to me.
“Cain?” The name leapt out of my throat, scratchy and disjointed.
Ryker’s grip on my hip tightened.
Daemon looked at me, his eyes softening marginally. “Got a call right after you took off. Cain said this was payback for what we did to Nathan.”
I hadn’t yet heard what had happened with Cain’s brother. Based on what Cain did to my mom, I figured it was better I didn’t know.
“Maybe now isn’t the time, Daemon,” Ryker
warned him. His voice was calm and smooth. It sent a wash of security over my skin into my pores as he held me tightly in that cramped little chair.
My eyes speared Ryker until he caught my expression. Slowly, I climbed off his lap and stood in front of him. Everyone watched me.
I didn’t know where it came from.
I only knew that somehow, being encased in Ryker’s warmth and confidence had filled me with a strength that I had been missing for what felt like my entire life.
“Kill him.”
Ryker blinked. His hand reached out to hold mine, but I snapped it back before he could touch me. I watched his face fill with wariness.
I turned to Daemon. My hands ran through my matted and tangled hair and then smoothed out the too large scrub top. I had to look like an utter mess.
I didn’t care.
“I don’t give a shit how many men it takes or what kinds of favors you need to pull. I want that fucker dead.”
“Faith,” Ryker crooned, my whispered name falling softly from his lips. I felt the way he stared at me, felt the way he wanted me to turn to him and forget everything I had just spoken.
“No,” I snapped. “This has gone on long enough. If Cain was in that car, if he was responsible for this shit to my mom—which we know he was—go. Go get him.” I leaned closer, my pulse beating wildly out of control against my chest. “Gut him.”
Ryker’s eyes pleaded with me. He uncurled his long frame from the chair until he stood at full height in front of me. One of his hands went to my hair, again running it down the length. He gave a small tug when he hit the end.
I couldn’t stop my smile. That same action was one he always pulled when I had humored him before.
There was no amusement in his eyes as I maintained my focus on him.
My hands curled into fists against my thighs. Ryker tilted his head to the left, examining me, before he leaned slowly forward and pressed his lips gently against my temple. “I will gladly gut that fucker for everything he’s done to you. When we find him, I’m the one who will take him out, I promise you. But tonight isn’t the time to worry about it.”
“Tonight’s the perfect night to worry about it.”
He opened his mouth to say something, but the door opened at the same time.
A bedraggled looking doctor walked slowly through the door. His eyes took in us women and then Ryker and Daemon, now both standing with their arms crossed over their leather cuts.
“Which one of you is Faith?” he asked. His voice sounded slow and tired. His eyes looked like he hadn’t slept in days.
“I am.”
“Your mother—” he started and stopped. Uncertainty and sadness flashed in his eyes. He swallowed once and recovered.
My knees shook and I reached out to grab onto Ryker’s forearm so I didn’t collapse.
“Your mother,” he repeated, “is incredibly lucky to be alive.”
Hot, wet tears spilled down my cheeks as I gasped for breath and listened to him explain the extent of her injuries. Broken bones, internal bleeding, overdose from heroine. He talked about track marks in her arms and between her fingers and toes.
He told me all of it while I stood in the small room feeling like the walls were caving in on me. Ryker’s arm was the only thing that kept me on my feet as disappointment from the news washed over me.
I was upset my mother was actually alive.
It wasn’t until after he gave us her room number and told me I could see her, after the door shut behind him, that I finally collapsed into Ryker’s chest.
“She’s okay,” he whispered in my ear. He repeated it over and over, trying to soothe me, mistaking my sobs for ones of relief instead of frustration.
“It’s not that,” I said, choking down the last of my tears with a deep, shaky exhale and large swallow. “I’m not…” I shook my head, trying to put words to my emotions that felt reprehensible, but I had to stand by them.
I wanted to stand by them. To be strong and truly live in the knowledge that even though I had at one time loved my mother… the woman who had allowed me to be sold for sex was no longer that same woman.
And I hated her.
Slowly, I dragged my eyes from the shiny white member patch on Ryker’s cut to his narrowed, dark and tired eyes.
I rolled my shoulders. “I wanted her to die.”
I whispered the words and awaited the condemnation. I expected a gasp of surprise or a gentle rebuke from Liv who I knew was still in the room, although silent.
Nothing came. No one bothered to tell me I didn’t mean it. And as each beat of my heart blasted ferociously against my chest, it dawned on me that no one—especially no one in that room—would ever judge me for those hideously spoken words.
I watched as Ryker blinked. The lines at the edges of his eyes softened right as his lips parted minutely. The edges turned up slightly and he reached out and softly brought my hand into his warm, firm grasp. “Let’s go say good-bye to her, then.”
I squeaked out, “okay,” and allowed Ryker to lead me out through the waiting room and down the sterile but brightly lit hospital corridor until we reached the doorway to my mother’s room.
From the open doorway, the gentle beeping sounds of monitors filled my ears. The medicinal smells stung my nose as I felt a slight nudging from Ryker on my lower back.
I didn’t turn to him. I didn’t move. “I need to do this myself.”
His fingers on my lower back dug lightly into my skin, flexing from the impact of my words. “I’m not letting you be alone with that toxic woman.”
“I’ll be fine.” I glanced at him over my shoulder. His eyes stared through the slats of the window blinds into my mother’s room. I had already glimpsed at her. She looked tiny and fragile. Her skin ashen. Her black hair greasy and wet from having blood scrubbed off her. Bruises and scratches covered her skin much like mine had been—much like mine still were—just a week after being freed from the cabin.
I took her entire appearance and committed it to memory as the last memory I would ever see of my mother again.
Shifting on my feet enough so I could rest my arm on Ryker’s forearm, I watched his jaw tighten. He kept his eyes focused on my mom.
“I have to do this,” I told him, my fingers squeezing his arm to get his attention. “I need to say good-bye to her. And then you need to go get Cain.”
A slow smile grew on Ryker’s face. He removed his glare from the window and shifted his look to my hand on his arm and then to my eyes.
He shook his head back and forth once.
“No. Tonight, you’ll say good-bye to your mom, and then I’ll take you back to the club where we’ll sleep like I promised you we would earlier.”
I opened my mouth to object, but he silenced my words my cupping my cheek with the palm of his hand. His thumb gently rubbed one of my bruised cheeks. “Tomorrow, I’ll go looking for Cain until I find him and gut him. Tonight, I want to hold you.”
Warmth from his palm spread from my cheeks to my neck to the tips of my fingers and toes. I relished in it while we stood in the hallway of the hospital, gazing at each other with softened eyes as if we were still lovers.
“I’ll be right back,” I told him, my words quietly spoken.
“I’ll be here.” He pressed his lips against my forehead before sending me into the room.
My feet trudged slowly, as if in mud or boots filled with drying cement, but I forged through the sadness of my long lost youth and focused on the woman laid before me.
“Mom,” I said quietly. I didn’t reach out and touch her hand but kept my hands firmly pressed against my thighs.
I stared at my mother and saw the nights of her passed out on the couch or the kitchen table. Her eyes flickered open and the only thing I saw inside them was a life that had died well before her body was ready to let her go.
I shivered under the coldness of the room and her expression as she slowly dragged her eyes to mine.
“I hate you.” I
expected a sadness at speaking the words. I expected some niggle in the corner of my conscience to whisper words of reprobation for speaking to my mother in such a horrific way.
Instead, I felt peace and freedom grow from my spirit and fill my body with a calmness I had never had, not even in my youth.
“I never wanted you.” I fought a flinch at her quietly stated words. There was a slight pain in hearing them, but I had long suspected that to be true, and yet simply unwilling to acknowledge it. “Your father wanted children. I wanted him all to myself. And as soon as you were born, you took over every spare thought, every spare minute he had. And nothing was left for me.”
“Nothing was left for you because he probably felt your jealousy of your own child. But that’s not my fault and never was.” I leaned forward, my hands gipping the edges of her small, narrow hospital bed. “Someday you will die alone. And no one will mourn you. No one will care, and it’s all your fault because you pushed everyone who ever loved you so far away until they felt nothing for you.”
She blinked and looked away.
I left the room before she could come up with a vicious, selfish retort.
When I met Ryker in the hallway, I wrapped my arm around his and slid my hand down his arm until he entwined his fingers with mine.
“I’m really tired,” I said as my eyes focused on the end of the hallway.
“Do you want to talk about your mom?” I asked Faith as she crawled under the covers in my bed. I tried to ignore the way the Nordic Lords shirt she wore barely skimmed passed her ass cheeks.
My hard dick told me I had failed. But I also knew that I couldn’t crawl into bed with Faith, wrap my arms around her, and let her feel that.
Talking about her mom was a sure way to get my erection to shrivel into nothing. She hadn’t spoken a word since we left the hospital, anyway. All she’d done was stare out the window of the truck with a glazed look in her pale blue eyes, watching as we passed evergreen after evergreen on the narrow, windy roads through town.
In the slight darkness, the room barely lit by one small lamp, I saw her shoulders move.
“It wasn’t anything I didn’t know before,” she said and draped her arm awkwardly over her eyes. “I just never wanted to admit it.”
