Tyrant (Satan’s Angels MC #1)

Chapter 6

Lark

“W hat happens when we die, Mommy?”

I stop ripping out weeds and turn to stare at my four-year-old daughter. Penny is the most beautiful child in the world. I understand now why parents would do anything to protect their children and I will doubly never understand how mine let both of us go.

This isn’t about you. You don’t have to forget to forgive.

“I’m not sure.”

I throw the handful of weeds out onto the narrow, crumbling sidewalk. The whole flower garden is choked with them. Not just this one, but every single one that my mom was always so proud of. She never complained about the size of the house or not having a renovation every couple of years, a brand-new car, or a vacation property, but if she’d ever had to sacrifice her gardens, there would have been all the bloody murder to pay.

They’ve fallen so far from what they used to be. My eyes tear up as I remember picking a few pink roses off the bush in front here, padding them with white lobelia, and wrapping them with my spare hair elastics, one for me and one for Gray. I fitted the larger one into the pocket of his suit jacket and when I realized I didn’t have a strap to secure mine around my wrist, I went back inside for a safety pin and attached it to the front of my dress.

As soon as my hands are empty, I open my arms. Penny has a little brown corduroy overall set on with a frilly white shirt underneath, all of it thrifted and utterly adorable on her. Then again, with her soft brown curls, wild all around her face, her sweet features, and that sassy pout of hers, she’d be beautiful in anything.

She thunders over the fresh path of stomped green weeds, the wilted leaves crunching under pink sneakers that light up with each step. She hurtles into my arms and lets me hold her. I breathe in the scent of her. She’s the one asking the big questions, but I’m also in need of comfort.

We’ve been back for almost two days and each minute of each hour has been filled with the blades of red-hot agony. All my fresh wounds have reopened. Even if I could forget them, there are so many more. Seeing my mom in such a shriveled, frail state, battling pain and the fear of the impending end, my dad lost and sunken into himself, both of them shells of who they used to be, was such a shock. It was one I wasn’t prepared for, even if Raiden did try to caution me the whole way home from the airport.

Penny turns her face up to me, far too solemn for a four-year-old. “You have dirt all over.” Her finger traces a smear off my cheek.

I sit back with my butt right in the dirt, but it doesn’t matter. My jeans shorts and tank top are already stained. The hot July sun beats down unmercifully with zero cloud cover to shield it. Rivulets of sweat trickle down my shoulders and trace my spine.

“Grandma’s one last wish is that she sees her flower beds full of flowers again. She hasn’t had the strength to keep up with them. There’s these two in the front and the whole backyard.”

Raiden suggested tilling it and I agreed, but I have to deal with these weeds first.

I have to do this right.

It’s so much more than just flowers.

“I don’t want Grandma to die. I just met her.”

My eyes fill with tears that I let fall. Penny isn’t alarmed to see me cry. She’s seen me do it plenty of times over the years. I’ve explained to her that adults are just big humans like she’s a tiny human and all humans, no matter their age or who they are, cry and that’s a very healthy thing. Have I hidden so many other details from her while I gave her that truth? Of course. Have I lied to her because I felt it was best? Yes. I hate myself for those lies. Constantly .

I told her that her grandparents lived too far for us to easily visit. I live in Dayton, Ohio now, which was about as out of the way a place I could think of to move when I needed to lose myself. A long drive, but a short flight. She asked me last year for the first time about her father. I explained to her that sometimes moms and dads part ways and that doesn’t mean they love their children any less. I gave Raiden and my parents the same, though much more complicated and convoluted version of that story years ago, when I was a few months pregnant. I’ve kept my family at bay for years, though since Raiden was released from prison, we do talk regularly through text and on the phone. I thought I could keep doing it. Keep trying to piece my unraveled life back together until I had something that approximated happiness.

“I know sweetheart.” I stroke her soft, fine hair. Baby down, even though she’s no longer a baby. I didn’t want to tell her at all, but we were staying here, and she’d see her grandma getting weaker every day. “I don’t want her to die either. It’s hard, saying goodbye, but death is a part of life, and you don’t have to be afraid.”

“Will it be a long time before I die?”

Oh my god. A brutal bolt of fear liquifies my insides. “Yes. A very long time. When you’re very, very old.” Please, please, please, let that be true. Words and hopes uttered by every parental heart and meant with all their being.

“What’s it going to be like?”

I’ve spent days looking this up, ever since Raiden called me and told me about my mom. Dad called him first, right after they got the diagnosis. They’d barely left the hospital before he called Raiden, broken, panicked, and in tears.

He didn’t have Raiden’s private number. He called the clubhouse and asked for him. I know why he did it. Raiden was closer, right here in Hart. I haven’t spoken to my parents in almost five years, not since they told me not to bother coming home if I didn’t have a ring and a man along with a baby. It doesn’t matter who they called first. Not at all. The only thing that matters is that we hold ourselves together, even if we have to pretend to be the family we once were and can never be again.

“Peaceful.” I kiss Penny’s forehead. “Grandma is in some pain, but the doctors are giving her medicine to help her feel better, even though they can’t make her better.” My mom’s sister, who lives down in Florida, and her brother, in Texas, are going to be flying in soon to be here. Both my parents lost their parents fairly young. I haven’t had a grandparent since I was twelve. “She’ll be surrounded by people who love her, and she’ll know that. You might see people crying and you might want to cry too and that’s okay. We’re just sad because Grandma won’t be here anymore and when you miss someone, you cry.”

“But you’ve always missed them.”

“Yes.” I sniffle, swiping the moisture from my cheeks with the back of my hand. I try to give my daughter a brave smile. “Yes, even when they were always right here. I should have come back sooner. I wasted a lot of time, and I can’t undo that. That’s the hardest part of life. Learning lessons too late.”

“But Uncle Raiden said we made it in time. He says there’s lots of time for hugs and cookies and flowers.”

“Yes. Flowers. If I ever finish pulling up these weeds.”

Penny leaps off my lap with the renewed energy of a four-year-old ready to take on the world. She’s been like that since birth. Happy, but frustrated to be trapped in a tiny body when she has so much energy and so many grand dreams. She’s smart, strong, innocent, and sweet. Most parents think their children are a gift, but I’ll never stop thanking whatever is out there for the privilege of being this girl’s mother.

Penny bends and starts to grab up weeds in her small fists. She tears them, just removing the leaves, but she’s right there beside me and that makes this day perfect, despite all the things that are wrong in the world.

I straighten as soon as my ears pick up a dull rumble in the distance. I shade my eyes with my hand and stare out at my parents’ front yard. I can’t see much past the hedges, which are overgrown and so tall that they obscure the road completely. My dad carved in a small walkway just for the sidewalk. The roar grows steadily louder until the small pebbles on the sidewalk literally vibrate.

Penny looks at me questioningly, but there’s no denying the glint of excitement in her eyes. Raiden dropped us off here in my parents’ car a car, but he came back the next day on his bike. Penny had never been so thrilled or fascinated with anything in her life as she was with that massive black and chrome Harley, so loud that she had to clap her hands over her ears before it even pulled up at the house.

I expect Raiden.

I gather Penny up in my arms even though it’s six billion degrees out here and I’m a soaking wet mess, so she can see her uncle pull up past the hedge.

I raise my hand in greeting as the bike nears, my feet firmly planted on the sidewalk.

I can’t see much of anything, but the roar of the bike is deafening and then it shuts off and there’s nothing but undisturbed silence on the quiet residential street I grew up on.

Against the backdrop of bright sunlight, a shadow appears through the gap in the hedges. “There’s uncle,” I tell Penny, smiling widely.

God, I’ve missed my brother. I missed my parents. I missed this little city where I was born and did so much living before my future and all my plans so wildly derailed.

“Ray,” I call out to him, setting Penny on the ground so she can rush over. She’s never been an overly shy child, which has given me parental heart attacks more than once in the past.

I drop my hand and let out a harsh gasp at the broad figure. A little too broad to be my brother, a few inches taller, dirty ash hair shot through with burnished copper flowing well over his shoulders. My heart thrashes like an animal caught in a leg trap, immediate pain searing through me.

Penny stops short when she realizes it’s not her uncle standing there, so fierce and intimidating. She looks at him, then immediately reverses direction and rushes back to me. She grabs onto my leg, and I pick her up, turning her face to me, eager to shield her.

Protect her. Hide her. Oh god, please no.

I’d recognize Gray anywhere, but it takes me one delayed heartbeat to reconcile this new version of him. Gone is the striated and easy athleticism, the charm and charisma he used to ooze. Even though he was a biker, he was never scary.

His eyes are still the same vivid, slightly alarming green, but his face is older and harder. His beard is longer now, braided into one thick plait, darker than his hair, but still mixed with lovely gold and copper. There are scars, one on his temple and one above his right eye, that I don’t recognize, along with a new bump in the bridge of his nose. It’s his lips that give his face all that new hardness. A jagged white line cuts through them at the corner of his mouth, giving a horrible sneer.

There’s no longer anything boyish about him. He’s a feral, beast of a man, so broad across the chest and shoulders that his white t-shirt and the black leather vest with all the patches on the front strain against his muscles. He still prefers old, faded jeans with a wallet chain hanging from the waist to the back pocket, and his worn leather boots, but he wears them now like an added snarl. With his tattoos fully on display and that new perma-scowl of his, he’s utterly fearsome.

Raiden told me about the club. I knew that Gray was president and that most of what I’d predicted that night had come true, but I’m so unprepared for the sight of his rough and feral in-your-face masculinity that my heart starts to palpitate unevenly in fear and reluctant awe.

I was so stupid to think that Gray wouldn’t come here.

“Sweetheart,” I whisper to Penny. “Could you go inside and get washed up? It’s time for a snack. Until I’m in though, you can play with your toys in the living room. After, maybe we can set up the blow-up pool in the backyard and cool off.”

“Okay, Mommy.” She doesn’t look at Gray again. She’s intimidated by him too.

Who on earth wouldn’t be? He now looks every inch the outlaw demon. Not a king, because he hated being called that. Not a god, because this is no god. This man looks so much closer to the devil. Because I’m an idiot, something wickedly hot starts to burn in my stomach. I’m instantly wet even though my heart is literally slamming in fear and it’s making all of me cold and clammy.

I watch Penny mount the three concrete steps, open the screen door, and disappear into the house. My dad would have come out here all those years ago, if he heard a bike pull up, but now he’s likely with my mom in Raiden’s old room on the main floor that has her hospital bed and all her medical supplies set up. Did he even hear the bike? He seems to have tunneled inside of himself. I thought my parents would carry on the way they were when I left, but I was wrong. They started to age and withdraw, to become unrecognizable. Time passes. Time is cruel. The world didn’t freeze. Nothing here stopped just because I left.

I can see Penny’s shadow through the door. I step closer to be sure. My dad brought up an old toybox filled with things I had as a kid. She starts to rifle through it. I turn, trying to force a mask in place to face Gray, but I don’t get the chance.

He storms up the sidewalk. I was wrong. Fuck, I was so wrong. He’s a god. An angry, terrifying god, ready to rain down justice and retribution on me.

He doesn’t stop until he’s in my space, towering over me, scarred lips curled back in a scowl. His hand shoots out and grasps my wrist before I can turn and run to the house for sanctuary. “What the fuck, Lark?” His eyes aren’t just green. I can pick out all the swimming gold flecks, the bright emerald whorl surrounding his pupil.

I lose my breath. My heart refuses to beat. Whatever limits there are for a body, I’ve reached them. Once, this man chased away all my demons and all my darkness and now he’s the thing I fear. His body a weapon, an army of leather clad bikers at his command. He owns this town. He could very easily own me, whether I’m willing or not.

I barely hear Gray’s words, and not just because his tone has dropped to something low and menacing. His lips form the familiar shape of his earlier question. “What the fuck?”