Saber's Surrender (Imperial Knights #2)
Prologue
PROLOGUE
Saber
When I was four, I met the woman who would own me heart and soul, that is until the day she ripped said heart from my chest and stomped on it, obliterating it to the point that it was deflated, love would never inflate it again.
That organ is nothing more than a limp noodle that my body needs to pump blood through my veins. I’d vowed then and there to never put myself out there for another woman to make me feel as if I had no control over any part of my life.
I can’t recall the very day we met with any sort of clarity, but I can distinctly remember the day she filled my entire soul with hate and loathing. We were both child prodigies. Too damn smart for our own good, but we always lived life confused about how we should act our ages. Our classmates were years ahead of us, and with the way our minds worked, our brains were on the same page as them but our bodies were not.
As I stand here with my back leaning against the counter that holds our medical supplies at the club’s infirmary while she does the triplets' well-care check, anger from when we were freshly seventeen years old resurfaces—the memories of the day that changed the course of our relationship assaults me.
“We can’t, Weston,” Foxy cried, devastated tear stains streaking down her face. “We’re still in school and have no way to support a baby. The best thing we can do for him or her is to put the baby up for adoption so it’s with a stable Mom and Dad who aren’t trying to pave out their future.”
“Don’t do this, Foxy. Don’t give our flesh and blood away to strangers. We can do this. I can apply for family housing and additional scholarships to get us through until we graduate.”
“Don’t be foolish,” she admonished. “We still have medical school once we get through our core classes. That’ll take years. Especially since we both want to specialize in different fields.”
“We can double our classes and graduate early,” I protested. “We basically skipped high school and went straight to college, Foxy.”
“Medical school is different and you know it, Weston.”
“It’s not,” I continued to argue.
“It is,” she vehemently contested. “Babies are expensive. On top of its everyday needs, we’d have to figure out childcare, study time because babies eat every two to three hours, sometimes four if you’re lucky. We have no family to depend on since we both grew up in foster care. It’s too much! I can’t do it and keep up with my schooling and I refuse to live in a rundown home while we barely scrape by… because whether you agree with me or not, one, if not both of us, will end up dropping out of school and working blue collar jobs. I don’t want that kind of struggle for us or any children we’ll have in the future.”
“What future, Foxy? You’re throwing our future away!” I belligerently shouted.
“Please don’t do this, Weston. Be logical here and think about this baby and what’s best for it.”
“Would you stop calling our baby an it, Foxy?”
“I have to,” she whispered.
“Why? Why do you have to, Foxy?” I asked, eating the distance between us as I stepped into her space. “Tell me.”
“Because if I think of it any other way, I’ll cave. And Weston, if I do that I’ll end up resenting you both.”
Those words were like an arrow to my heart as I staggered backward. “What?” I hissed. “You don’t mean that.”
“I do,” she claimed, bobbing her head. “I’ve loved you my entire life, don’t make me hate you now.”
“Naveah isn’t thriving as much as her siblings are,” Foxy says, interrupting my thoughts. My eyes narrow into thin lines as I squint at her, but mask my features before Laney twists, looking at me horrified.
“That doesn’t mean anything’s wrong with her physically, Laney,” I quickly reassure my president's old lady. “It just means she’s a little behind and we need to make sure she has more calories, vitamins, and other nutrients with high additives added to her daily diet. We can do that with supplement drinks or larger helpings of veggies.”
“Saber’s right,” Foxy agrees. Anytime my road name leaves her tongue, I flinch. “We can give her a few pediatric shakes to give her what her body’s lacking. In no time, she’ll be caught up with Nix and Nova.”
“Thank you, Roxy and Saber. I’ll let Dragon know and he’ll make sure we have a stock for her,” Laney states. “Now, it’s lunch time and then I’m gonna put these three down for a nap so I can get some things done around the house. See y’all later.”
Laney gathers her three little ones and places them in their stroller with a little help from me, corralling three infants is easier said than done, and leaves the two of us alone in this room. Suddenly, it feels suffocating in here and I reach up to adjust the collar on my shirt.
“You can go now,” Foxy says with a sharp tone. “I know how to do my job, I’m pretty good at it. I don’t need someone standing over me like I’m an intern.”
“Put your bitch away, Foxy. I know how good you are at your job, it’s why I picked you to watch over the triplets.”
“Picked me!” she huffs and harrumphs, saying some unflattering words about me beneath her breath. “You mean it’s why you kidnapped me.”
“You say kidnapped but I don’t think of it that way,” I debate. “My president’s kids were in peril and I got that for him.”
“With brutal force.” She snorts, giving me the evil-eye.
“You’re the one that made things harder than they had to be,” I remind her. “It’s not my fault that you wouldn’t stop yelling at me long enough to see reason.”
“Reason?” she whispers before the volume goes up in her voice and she begins screeching louder than a motherfucking crow, “Reason? You… you… you’re a snake!”
Feeling childish and like hitting home, I purposely stammer the same way she just did when I hit the target, saying, “And you… you… you are a child stealing cunt!”
Should I feel bad about using the C word on her? Maybe, if she were any other woman than who she is I would be ashamed of myself. But my hate for her is still as strong today as it was the day that she refused to even look at our son when she signed the papers, giving him away to strangers. It’s been hard to wake up each morning and close my eyes each night not knowing if he’s been taken care of. There are so many things that plague me, and I have nightmares not knowing several key things about him.
What were his parents like toward him?
Did they treat him like their own?
Has he known hunger?
Has he known love?
Is he safe?
Is he dead or alive?
Each and every night I dream of him. I never see his face because I don’t know what he looks like, but the dreams are never good ones. I see him on the streets begging for scraps of food. Beaten within an inch of his life for not doing something his ‘parents’ wanted him to as a boy or young teen. Tossed in a closet and ignored like that damn program I watched once about the same sort of scenario and the adoptive parents went on to have other biological children, and the adoptee became an obligation to them that they no longer wanted. That kid was so damn malnourished and his health had been ignored for too damn long that he eventually perished from his lack of care.
So no, Foxy deserves every ounce of my ire because she’s the cause of it. I even begged her to let me raise him as a single dad, but she outright refused. She wanted him to have both parents in his life raising him side by side.
She didn’t come right out and say it back then, but it was implied that I wasn’t enough. Not that it should surprise me considering that’s the way I’ve always been viewed by my foster parents and other children that resided in that home, outside of who was, during that time period, my Foxy Roxy, she didn’t see me in the same light as the rest of them did. She always, back then, made me feel important, valued, and worthy.
“Fuck you,” she says, her chin wobbling. She slams the chart down on the counter and scurries from the room.
“Yeah. Fuck you too,” I mumble, picking up the chart so I can jot down the notes from today’s appointment. I notate what we need to add to Naveah’s diet and how I think we should adjust her diet. I know that Dragon will want to see this report later, so I input as many details as I can onto her growth chart. Foxy will have to fill in the blanks later. I know that she’ll be back to wrap things up once I’m gone so I quickly put the supplies away, discard the trash, and head out. I need to do my rounds at the hospital anyway before I can come back and unwind with my brothers.
As I head out and am about to mount my bike, Wrecker comes out from the shadows and says, “At some point, you and Roxy need to sit down and hash your past out, brother.”
“There’s nothing to hash out, brother, ” I argue, spitting out the word brother in my haste to get the fuck out of here and his all-seeing bullshit.
It’s freaky that he knows things he shouldn’t and isn’t afraid to call us out when he thinks we're in the wrong. One day, he’s going to put his nose in someone’s business and pay the price for doing so.
“You need to reach out to your cousin,” Wrecker says, changing the topic. “He’s back in town and it’s time for him to pay his penance for what he tried to do to my old lady.”
“Fucker’s not related to me by blood, so do with him as you wish,” I spit out, pushing the start button on my bike and twisting the throttle. Soon enough, the roar of my bike drowns out whatever response he had and I give him a quick nod as I shoot out of my designated spot and let the wind become my therapy.