Brawn: Lethal Darkness MC (26 page)

Micah

Four Months Later

Paris was squeezing the living daylights out of my hand. “Jesus, you’re stronger than I would’ve guessed,” I said.

She glared at me. Her hair was slicked over her forehead with sweat, and both cheeks were flushed bright red.

“Not the time,” snapped a nurse to my right. “Move.”

I shuffled out of the way as the woman went over to check the IV bag on a stand next to the hospital bed. It was chaos in the room. Doctors and nurses were swirling around, Paris was moaning in pain with each contraction, and the air was filled with beeps and clicks of a thousand different machines. But goddamn, the girl could really grip. I’d lost all feeling in my fingertips.

“Push,” ordered the doctor, crouching between her legs.

“Come on, baby,” I said encouragingly. “You got this. I’m right here with you.”

A piercing wail broke the air and my heart stopped in place. Paris’s face scrunched up, then she slumped back in exhaustion. The doctor at the foot of the bed rose with a grime-covered infant in his hands. I looked at it in amazement. It was my son.

“Paris, baby, look,” I said, stroking her forearm gently. “Look at him. We made him. That’s ours.”

Her eyes fluttered open. The doctor brought me over to snip the umbilical cord before gently sponging away the slickness covering his skin. When he’d been dried off, he brought the baby over to Paris and laid him in her arms. I crouched over the head of the bed, my fingers resting on her shoulder, as I stared at my son. Words failed me. That was happening too often lately, but then again, this was never a direction I’d expected my life to go in. I was in a hospital room with my wife and son. Now there was a sentence I never thought I’d say.

“He’s beautiful,” she whispered.

I kissed her on the forehead. “You are, too.”

She looked up at me and smiled. She looked dead tired, like she’d just fought a war, but there was so much beauty and power in those gray eyes of hers. Those otherworldly gray eyes, the ones that had caught my attention so long ago, sticking out of a crowd and demanding that I walk over and into her world. It meant so little at first. Now, it meant everything.

“I love you, Paris.”

“I love you, Micah.”

# # #

I pushed the wheelchair carefully through the double doors into the waiting room on the other side. Paris was seated in it, with our swaddled son nestled in the crook of her elbow. I kept glancing down at him. That skin was so perfect. He’d fallen asleep and I marveled at how calm and still he was, how flawless. I didn’t know what to call the emotions I was feeling.

As soon as we walked in, we were swarmed. Zeke, Bolt, Carter, and Bear were there, lingering on the back edge of the crowd, looking ridiculously out of place with their tattoos and leathers in the middle of this pristine white hospital. In front of them, Paris’s friend Katy had swooped to her knees in front of my wife and was clutching her arm and cooing at the baby.

I leaned down and planted a soft kiss on top of Paris’s head before walking over to my men. Zeke shook my hand. “Congratulations, prez,” he said with a grin. “Now you’re really in for it.”

“Don’t remind me,” I said.

“You ready to be a poppa?” Carter asked.

“I don’t think anyone’s ever ready, but being around you idiots has definitely given me experience in the dealing with children department.”

We all chuckled. Then I felt a soft touch on my shoulder. I turned around to see Valeriya. She was smiling, but her eyes were wet with emotion. “I just want to say thank you, Micah,” she said.

“I’ve told you a million times, Valeriya, you don’t need to thank me.”

“Without you, I would have no closure. I needed that.” She paused before correcting herself. “We needed that.” I looked down and saw her son, standing wobbly on two feet with her hand clasping his.

“He looks so big,” I said.

“He is going to be very strong and handsome. Just like his father.”

I laid my hand on her shoulder. “Without a doubt.”

She smiled again. “Congratulations on your son, Micah. I’ll let you get back to your wife.” Leaning down, she scooped up her son in her arms and kissed him on the cheek before strolling away.

I walked back over to Paris and crouched at her side. “You look exhausted, Par,” I said.

She groaned. “My whole body hurts. I want to sleep forever.”

“Ready to go?”

Her smile made my chest do that funny twinge, the one it had done the first time I’d seen Paris, and every time since. It didn’t show any signs of stopping. “Take me home, Micah.”

“As you wish, princess. Let’s go home.”

I stood up and pushed through the crowd, out the doors, and away into a future that looked as bright and pure as my son’s skin. I was a bastard and an outlaw, always had been. But maybe a little grit was what made my wife and child seem so shining and perfect in my eyes. There was redemption for everyone, I supposed. Even for a man like me.

THE END

Revenge came at a price. So did she.

They say if you love something, let it go. 
I’ve never believed in that B.S. 
When I see something I want, I 
make it mine.
 
That’s exactly what happened when Isabel showed up on that auction block. 
She looked innocent. Terrified. And oh so f**kable. 
I had a mission to complete, but I put it on hold and did what I wanted: 
I bought her.
 
It could cost me my life. 
After years of waiting to strike back, I’m going behind enemy lines. 
If I let Isabel become a distraction, I could get a knife in my back. 
But I’ll take that risk. It’s time to 
have my revenge.
 
It turns out that my enemies might be one step ahead. 
Before I can stop it, betrayal comes fast and blood comes faster. 
They’re coming after everyone I love. 
They’d better be careful, though. I always 
protect what’s mine.
 

Chapter 1

Dominic

The first thing I remembered was white. White everything. Blinding, imposing white, closing in on me from every side like a huge, pale hand pressed over my eyes.

The second thing I remembered was a noise. It was a steady beep. It chirped every few seconds, as steady and reliable as a heartbeat. That was because it was a heartbeat. My own, to be exact. The monitor to my right showed a skittering blip that tracked the ups and downs of the organ pumping in my chest.

A nurse came by, although I didn’t know at the time that that was what she was. I thought she was just a warm voice and a soft hand mopping the blood from my forehead and picking out the bits of glass that stuck out from my skin.

It was a miracle the crash didn’t kill me. At least, that’s what they used to say, back when I was in the group home. My parents’ bodies had been all mangled to shit, hardly recognizable as the people who had once walked and talked and more than likely did things that were at least a little bit valuable for polite society as a whole—like jobs or volunteering or whatever. But little baby Dominic had made it out with just a few nicks and scratches. Hell, I hadn’t even cried. That’s how the story went.

It wasn’t even a particularly good story. We were headed down the road; a drunk driver swerved across the partition doing ninety in his pickup truck. Boom, bang, life over. Happened every goddamn day. No dignity in that shit.

But if you didn’t remember something, how could you be sure it was real? I didn’t remember my parents one bit, and for all that I knew, the bastards at the holding facility for state wards, the place where I grew up, could have invented the whole damn story. I wouldn’t know the difference.

A head-on collision at ninety miles an hour seems like something worth remembering, but maybe the impact shook up my soft, underdeveloped baby brain and turned that particular memory into mush. I guessed it doesn’t matter much. I woke up in a hospital, and that was where it all really started for me. White all around, electric beeps, and not a single person in the world who gave a fuck whether I lived or died. Not much had changed since.

For as rough of a start as that was, it got worse. Most of the time, babies get adopted into foster families way quicker than anyone else. They’re cuter, I supposed, or else would-be parents just didn’t like the idea of picking up a child who’d already gotten someone else’s fingerprints all over it. Kinda gross, goes the thinking. Like using a fork that another poor sob just slobbered all over. Babies were preferable. That way, they were a clean slate. You got to fuck them up yourself.

But I didn’t get adopted at all. I lingered there. I liked to imagine that there was something to me that scared away the people every visiting day, a big shadow haunting those baby eyes of mine. I’d seen shit. One look at me and you knew it. Parents didn’t want that. They wanted innocence, purity, childlike wonder. I didn’t ever have any of that bullshit. I was then the same thing that I was now—a cold-blooded son of a bitch. I was an outcast from day one.

When you grew up in the shadows like I did, you learned a lot about people. Folks act differently when they think no one is looking. They get sloppy, show you who they really are. They steal and pick their nose and scratch wedgies out of their asses. But that’s just the little shit. Sometimes, you saw truly fucked-up things.

Like when I peeked my head around the doorway of the state facility late one night and saw the teacher, Ms. Parker, bent over a desk with her skirt hiked up high while the security guard plowed into her with his fat, greasy dick. I’d never seen someone moan like that before. Shit, I thought she was getting killed at first. Took me a minute to connect the shit I was seeing with the rumors the older kids were always going on about—sex. Fucking. You know, the good shit.

This prim little teacher getting rammed by an illiterate semi-retard making what, eight bucks an hour? How could she do shit like that and then pretend to get mad when I drifted off during her stupid ass lessons? Fucking hypocrite. Fucking liar. Most of all, fucking whore. I didn’t have the words back then to say all that out loud or even to think it, but I knew that I wanted out of that place. It wasn’t for me.

Which was how I came to be tying together bedsheets in the middle of the night. Eight years old and I was working like a goddamn slave, knotting those things together and pulling on them as hard as my scrawny arms would allow to test the strength and make sure I wasn’t gonna end up four stories below with a sudden and undesirable right turn in the bones of my neck.

“Psst!” hissed Charlie. He slept in the bunk above me. He’d been there just as long as I had. He wasn’t about to get adopted, either. A club foot was bad enough on its own, but when you have a lazy eye, too…well, I guessed some kids just had shitty luck. Charlie was one of them. He was gonna be a lifer in the group home. I almost felt bad for the guy. But I was even more determined to get the hell out.

“What do you want?” I whispered back.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

I answered immediately, “Getting the fuck away from this place.” I’d never cursed out loud before. It felt good. A nice meaty, grating tone to the word. It came out of my mouth ugly and grim, just like I wanted.
Fuck.
I liked that one.

I heard the sound of sheets thrashing, then the
clunk-slush
of Charlie struggling his way down the ladder. He hobbled around the bed to stand in front of me. “You’re leaving?” he asked, bug-eyed in awe.

I nodded fiercely, not looking up from the long rope of sheets passing under my hands. I pulled hard on every knot, making sure it would be able to hold my weight.

“What are you gonna do? Where you gonna go?” he said.

I paused and fixed my gaze on him. I did everything I could to screw a serious expression to my face, clenching my jaw as I spit out, “Anywhere but here.”

I hated the white everywhere. Not everything was so light and happy all the time. The shit they tried to make us see and think was so fake. Bright primary colors and stories about kids with puppies who went home to their families? What a load of bullshit. Every time Ms. Parker tried to reprimand me to pay attention, all I could think about was her bent over that desk, legs spread wide as the man in the jumpsuit fucked her through a torn hole in her pantyhose.

“But how are you gonna, like, eat?” Charlie persisted. “And where will you stay? You can’t just leave!”

“Quiet,” I said, “you’re yelling.” He bit his lip and shushed. I took one end of the rope in my hand and squatted by the bedpost where it stood on the floor. “I can do whatever I want,” I told him as I carefully passed the coiled sheets around the post and fixed a knot to anchor it down. “Here, hold this.”

He took the fabric I offered him in his bunched hands. “Tighter,” I commanded. He leaned back, gritting hard and throwing his whole weight against the tension. I used his leverage to cinch the knot as tight as I could get it. Satisfied, I stood up and wiped the sweat from my hands.

“Time to go,” I whispered. Charlie’s eyes were still riveted on me. I turned and scooped from under the bed the small bag I’d filled. It only had a sandwich and the few clothes I owned. The night yawning through the window was black as hell, but I wasn’t scared. I wanted out and away. Nothing else mattered.

I picked up the rest of the sheets and tossed them out the window. They unwound and clunked against the side of the building softly. Peeking out, I saw them reach almost all the way to the ground. Perfect.

I looked at Charlie one last time. Even then, I knew that there was something different about me. I wasn’t the same kind of kid as him. It wasn’t just that I’d seen shit. My parents were dead, yeah, but then again, so were his. I wasn’t getting adopted, but he wasn’t, either. The thing was, that shit didn’t matter. Plenty of brats in here had the same kind of miserable, tear-soaked life. We were all pathetic in the eyes of the world, whimpering little runts, so desperate to be saved or loved or whatever.

But I wasn’t desperate. I didn’t need any of that. I wasn’t yet sure what I needed, but I knew I had to go find it for myself. So when I climbed out the window, I wasn’t sad or frightened.

I was ready.

Or at least, I thought I was ready. When I heard the ripping sound, halfway down the four-story descent, my heart froze. I looked up just in time to see the last few frays of the sheets pop off one by one. The sharp, rusty edge of the windowsill had sliced right through them like a knife. Cheap fabric like this was no match for it. Every tiny jolt of my body ripped another strand. The ground was still a good twenty-foot drop below me. I stayed as still as I could, not sure whether to go up or down.

A few seconds later, the choice was taken out of my hands. A tiny breeze pushed me, swaying like a pendulum, and the increased pressure against the windowsill was all it took to finish parting the fabric. I fell silently through the night. The bushes below didn’t break my fall. All they did was add some bloody scratches to go with the snapping of my ankle.

I laid under the shrubs, groaning softly. Tears were threatening to well up in my eyes. I forced them back, but I couldn’t believe I’d fucked up so fast. Barely a minute out of the door and I’d already gotten hurt.

I looked down at my foot. It was twisted at a strange angle, pointing farther inside than I’d ever thought possible. Pain radiated up it like sunbeams. I was in agony. “Fuck,” I said. That was the only word that even got close to expressing how badly it hurt. “Fuck, fuck, fucking fuck.”

The arc of a flashlight piercing the distance caught my attention. It was headed this way. If I got caught here, I was dead meat. I’d never see sunlight again. The facility didn’t have time to deal with runaway risks. The only place equipped to deal with that was juvie, and I sure as hell didn’t want to end up there. I had to keep going forward with the original plan.

Struggling to my feet, I waited until the flashlight swung for a beat to the opposite side of the field. Then I limped out into the darkness as fast as I could, pain erupting in my leg with every step. But I didn’t stop.

Pain couldn’t make me stay here.

# # #

If I thought that I’d made a mistake when I first left the orphanage, then I learned what that word truly meant two weeks later. A sandwich could only last so long, and the clothes I’d brought with me weren’t all that warm. An early-onset winter meant I was spending my nights shivering on abandoned stoops and the grimy underside of concrete overpasses. Chicago sure wasn’t friendly to the homeless.

Hunger was a real bitch. It took me over from the inside, making my teeth ache and my skin shiver. I couldn’t think straight, could barely see or stand up. I’d managed to steal a few candy bars from the local bodega on the corner, but after the man behind the counter had caught me in the act last time around, I didn’t dare go back. I’d barely managed to run out in time to avoid getting snatched up and beaten.

I thought about all the meals I was missing back at the group home. The food tasted awful, but at least it was three meals a day, enough to keep my belly from caving in the way it had started to do.

Yet as hungry as I was, there was no going back. I’d made a choice, and I didn’t renege on my choices. I was going to make it out here come hell or high water. I’d find a place to live and food to eat and I’d be my own man.

But first, I needed some money.

It was easy to spot the men who had cash to spare. They stood on the corner in big, fur-lined parkas, laughing loudly and rolling dice on the sidewalk while they threw around crisp twenties as wagers on the games they played.

The rich men sold drugs. Filthy, deranged men and women would stagger up to them, begging for product, and forking over crumbled bills in exchange for a tiny plastic baggie of something brown and moist. I’d never tried it, but the junkies acted like the brown stuff was a miracle from God. Their faces would light up, they’d spread their lips to reveal dirty, gap-toothed smiles, and they’d skip away with joy in their step. Then they’d be back two days later, looking worse than ever, begging for more.

I didn’t care about the crackheads. They were only a means to an end. What I wanted was the money. That was the ticket to getting everything going the way it was supposed to go.