Mace (Untamed Sons MC: Birmingham Chapter #1)

1. Mace

ONE

MACE

PAST…

I blow out a breath, watching how it steams in front of my face. I don’t feel the chill anymore, so used to being cold. Instead, I make shapes, like I’ve seen some of the older boys do when they’re smoking.

The darkness no longer bothers me. I prefer it. It’s easier to hide in the shadows, easier to see the monsters that exist in the light.

I interlace my fingers behind my head, staring up at the ceiling. I can’t see the cracks and water stains, but I know they are there. The smell of damp and mould that covers every inch of the flat makes my chest tight sometimes as it coats my nose.

How the fuck is this my life?

Huffing out a sigh, I roll off the bare mattress and step up to the window. The vehicles parked around the base of the building look like toy cars from up here, and in the distance, the twinkling lights of the city remind me that I’m not alone. There is a whole world out there waiting to be discovered, and I hope it’s better than this shitty existence I’m trapped in.

I press my forehead to the cold glass, watching the first flurries of snow as they spiral towards the ground, carving a path between the high-rises crammed together. It won’t take long until the ground becomes a blanket of white, transforming the ugly concrete world below into something beautiful, but like everything else, it’s not real.

“Mason!” The cracked slur of my name would usually send fear skittering up my spine, but all I feel is irritated.

I don’t have the patience to deal with her tonight… or any other night.

I grind my molars together as I grab my trainers, stuffing my feet into them before snagging a hoodie from the floor. I do a sniff test, and it ain’t clean but it’s not disgusting either, so I drag it over my head.

“Mason!” she yells again, and this time, my stomach knots.

I should have gone before she got back. I know better than to be here when she is, but there’s still a part of me—maybe a na?ve, stupid part—that hopes one day she’ll walk through the front door and be everything I need.

As I step into the living area, she’s standing at the sink with her back to me. Her silhouetted frame is outlined against the light pollution streaming through the windows, and although I can’t see her fully, I can make out that her long hair is lank and probably dirty. She never remembers to shower or wash when I’m not around to remind her. She’s not wearing a coat or shoes either.

Despite everything, a tendril of worry works through me at the thought of her being out in the cold dressed like this, but I clamp my teeth together. Arguing with her is pointless. She never listens. Sometimes, I swear she wants to die.

Sometimes, I wish she would, and I hate myself for it.

None of this is her fault, and I have to remember that when my thoughts turn as sour as hers. She’s lost, trying to find her way out of the same darkness that chokes so many people in life. Her addiction was caused by events far outside of her control, but it’s hard to see it that way when my stomach aches with hunger and my body is cold to the bone.

“Why did you take so long to respond?” she bites out without turning.

I ignore her question, asking a far more important one. “Where have you been?”

Her shoulders tighten. “I didn’t realise I had to run my movements past you .” Her words are sarcastic and laced with a bitterness that I’ve become used to hearing. Still, it cuts me like a knife to be the subject of her poison.

“It’s been three days.”

“And you couldn’t manage without me?” She scoffs. “You’re not five, Mason. I don’t need to be here to wipe your arse. And why the fuck aren’t the lights working?”

“You have to pay the bill for them to stay on.”

She turns to face me, white milky light cutting across her sallow features. I’m pretty sure if the electricity hadn’t been cut, I would be looking into her yellowed eyes.

“I’m your mother. You don’t get to talk to me that way.”

She sways on her feet as she stumbles in my direction, and I step out of her way before she can grab me, but I’m not her destination. The cabinet behind me is, and my stomach plummets. She’s already drunk and she’s still looking for more booze.

“Then act like my fucking mother.”

I shouldn’t let her rile me, but she has a talent for getting under my skin.

“You’re fifteen years old,” she says, dragging the top drawer open. “Act like a man.”

The men she knows are fucking vile specimens who trade her body for alcohol and drugs. They would rape her corpse, given half the chance. The men I know are worlds apart, built on the foundations of honour, respect, and loyalty. She would never understand.

I fold my arms over my chest as she rummages through the crap piled inside the cabinet. She’s not going to find what she’s looking for. I tossed the bottle she had stashed there over a week ago, but it won’t matter. She’ll find a way to keep drinking, even if she has to sell her body to do it. My mother is resourceful.

“Where is it?” she snarls, rabid.

“Why don’t you go to bed?” She mutters under her breath, the words mashed together and nonsensical. “Mum, just… stop.” I grab her shoulders, and she rounds on me, spitting fire like a demonic force.

“This is my home, Mason! Mine! You have no right to tell me what to do! You ungrateful little bastard! Tell me where it is!”

My chest tightens, which annoys me. I have heard these words—and worse—a thousand times from her.

“It’s gone.”

Her head snaps up from her searching, and I can feel the knives she is stabbing in my direction. “You cunt! You had no right to do that. I bought that with my money.” As she says the last few words, she thumps her fist against her chest.

She’ll unravel fast, and my best option is to get the hell out of her way before she does, but I’m no longer the little boy she can push around and hurt. I might only be fifteen, but I’ve been training with Nicky for months, packing on the muscle and shaping my body into a weapon I can use to protect myself.

“Do you have any money to put the lights back on?” I ask, even though I know the answer.

She waves this off, resuming her search of the drawer as if she thinks I’m lying. This is a game we play over and over, neither of us ever winning. There are no victors in the world of addiction. When she can’t get her hands on booze, she’ll find a dealer and take whatever will numb her mind.

When she finds nothing, she drags the drawer out of its runners and flings it in my direction. The contents spray across the floor, and I step back to avoid being hit as the wood obliterates.

“Fuck!” she screams into the air, dragging her fingers through her hair as if every inch of her is in agony. “I need something, Mason. Why don’t you understand that? I need to forget.”

I wish it were that easy, but we both know there is no amount of alcohol that will numb the pain she feels. It is buried too deep inside her, too rooted in every part of her. There is not enough drink or drugs in the world to fix what is broken in my mother.

Not even I can help her with that.

“Go to a meeting. I’ll find you one?— ”

“Do you think talking it out is going to get rid of the demons inside me?”

I hear the torture in her words, and although I’ve seen this many times, for some reason, her rantings tonight leave me feeling uneasy. There is only so much suffering a person can live with before they start to come undone, and my mother is close to whatever her limit is. We’ve been existing on borrowed time for years.

“Getting more drunk is not the answer,” I say, watching as she drops to her knees beneath the debris of the drawer, still searching for the bottle she thinks is there.

“You’re such a fucking smart-ass. Well, you’re not that fucking clever, are you? Do you think I don’t know what you’re doing when I’m not around? Do you think I don’t hear about my son running with those fucking bikers?” She jabs a finger in my direction, the creeping shadows of the room no doubt hiding how wild her eyes are. “They don’t take outsiders, Mason, and they sure as fuck don’t take little boys.”

Her words send a frisson of irritation through me. Those ‘fucking bikers’ are the only thing keeping me from drowning in despair. I may not be a member of the club yet, and it ain’t guaranteed they’ll let me prospect when I turn eighteen, but I know what they value, and it sure as fuck ain’t any of what my mother says.

“You don’t know shit about them,” I spit, unable to tame the words.

“They take whores,” she says, as if I didn’t speak. “Women and girls who sell their cunts for a warm bed every night. Is that what you are, Mason? A warm cunt?”

The urge to hurt her back with words just as vile is almost overwhelming, but I can’t. She’s sick. It might not be a disease like cancer or Alzheimer’s, but addiction is just as terminal. So, I throw up my Teflon walls and let her words bounce off skin that has already suffered so many scars. I want to believe that in a different life my mother would be horrified at the way she behaves towards me.

“Try to sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

I step over the broken pieces and trash piled on the floor, intending to escape before things get out of control, but she has other ideas.

She flies at me, grabbing my nape with a surprising amount of force. I don’t want to hurt her, but I will defend myself. My instincts are sharp enough that the moment she lays hands on me, I twist, grab her wrists, and shove her back against the wall behind me.

The alcohol on her breath is enough to put out a fucking elephant, and her feral gaze does little to mask the fear as her eyes bounce around. She didn’t expect me to fight back. Before tonight, I would have taken whatever shit she doled out, but I’m done pandering to her.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” I say in a low, menacing voice, “but you won’t ever put your hands on me again. Do you understand?”

For a moment, it seems as if the alcohol haze clears and there is a softness in her eyes that I have not seen for so long, it makes my chest hurt. But it’s gone as fast as it appears, and in its place is the monster that is a servant to her affliction.

“You’ve never understood the way I feel,” she says, emotion making her voice thick. “You judge me. I see it in those eyes of yours. But you have never experienced what I did. I tried to be a good mother. I tried to forget what they did to me, but I have to live with that inside me every minute of the day, and I can’t.” I flinch as she trails her fingers over my face, as if she is trying to map every part of it. “I’m sorry. I want to be the mother you need, and I want desperately to love you, but I can’t.”

I wait for the pain to blossom through my chest, but it doesn’t. It’s not the first time she’s said this to me, and it won’t be the last. I am a reminder of her demons, and maybe if I didn’t exist, she could have found some semblance of peace with what was done to her.

Her fingers grab my chin, her grip light as she leans up to peer into my eyes. “Every time I look at you, I see him , and I remember what he did to me.” She whispers the words, a thread of fear running through them. “I should’ve drowned you at birth.”

That breaks through the moment. I tear my head out of her grasp, my jaw tight enough to ache as I step away from her. “Fuck you. I didn’t ask for this either, and it’s not my fault what happened to you.”

I back away, keeping my gaze locked on her in case she decides to attack me again. As soon as I’m out of her reach, I turn away, heading for the door. She screams and yells obscenities at me as I pass through it and into the hallway. I don’t stop or look back as I make my way down multiple flights of stairs at a run. By the time I reach the ground floor, I’m dizzied from the motion of going round and round the stairwell.

Fuck.

I hate that she has the power to shatter me with so few words almost as much as I hate that fucking cunt’s DNA pulsing through every cell in my body. There isn’t a moment that goes by where I don’t worry that I could have his darkness inside me .

You’re not him.

No, I’m not. I could never do the things he did to my mother.

The cold hits me as I reach street level, chasing away the dark thoughts sliding into my mind.

There are a few kids hanging around, trying to make snowballs, but there’s only a thin blanket covering the tarmac. In the past, I would have joined them, but tonight, I walk in the direction of the clubhouse.

Nicky should be there, but if he’s not, his dad will be, and he’ll let me sit in the warmth of the common room until morning.

As I make it to the end of the building, I hear a scream followed by a sickening thud.

A car alarm instantly begins blaring, the hazard lights of the vehicle flashing frantically and casting orange strobes around the walls of the high-rises surrounding me.

A wailed sound of horror wrenches the air and my blood freezes.

“Fuck, someone call the pigs,” a voice shrieks.

I turn, and with feet like lead, I walk back, stepping around the crowd of people gathered.

Nothing could prepare me for what I see.

The bonnet of the car is caved in, and there is a spiderweb of cracks in the windscreen behind the twisted body sprawled on top of it. Dark hair trails like a blanket, and blood spreads down the metalwork, staining the snow.

I lift my gaze to look up the length of the building to the ninth floor. The window in my room is open, the curtains flapping through to the outside.

I couldn’t see her face properly in the flat, and I can’t see it now, buried beneath the river of blood covering it, but I don’t need to.

I know exactly who it is lying mangled on the front of the car.

My mother.