The Heir (Steel Legacy #1)

Chapter One

Blaze

No matter how much fury my mother’s pristine, blue eyes projected, Oak still answered her with the same patient, loving tone that he always did. Somehow, he had even managed to keep the damn car on the road, in the correct lane and moving at a legal speed, despite the palpable tension she’d created for the past two or three hundred miles. She hadn’t had an explosion since before we crossed the Tennessee state line, which meant she was due for another anytime, if that Illinois sign was any show of things.

Shit, even if it weren’t I could tell by the way her veins were pressing out at her throat, that we were edging toward the mother of all outbursts. Her nails began to tap out a deadly beat on the car door and she was staring at Oak so hard, I wasn’t even sure she was seeing him.

Karlotti, my seventeen-year-old younger sister, was looking at me in the same way, with those same blue eyes. I squinted at her and shrugged.

As if any of this were my fault!

She didn’t have the same savageness in her that our mother did. Thank fuck, she’d inherited her father’s temperament. She was playing with the shredded part of her pant leg and nibbling her lower lip like she wasn’t sure if she wanted to scream at them or burst into tears.

“Oh, honey…” Oak started, when he spotted her in the rearview mirror. “Hey… It’s okay, baby doll. Everything is going to be–”

Before he could get that next word out for my sister’s benefit, our mother launched across the middle console and attacked him.

“Daddy!” Karlotti shrieked far too late in warning, causing me and Oak both to flinch just before my mother swiped her nails across his face in a smack, or maybe it was a grab? I wasn’t sure what the fuck had happened. There was a crack and now there were claw marks rising angrily on Oak’s cheek.

His massive arm shot out, pushing my mother back onto her half of the car while the other clutched the steering wheel.

“Crystal!” he snapped, but it didn’t do any good.

“What the fuck is wrong with you,” my mother roared. “You cannot take him back. We cannot go back! What are you thinking? What are any of you thinking? You’re not! What the fuck, Oakland?”

She hadn’t stopped swinging, and every other word was emphasized by a pop or two.

Oak made a low growling sound as he absorbed the blows on his shoulder, and the side of his head while trying to maintain control over the vehicle and safely navigate us off the road. To his credit, the route was pretty smooth, until he found the culvert. It launched the car up a bit on one side and Mom smacked her head off the roof.

“Fuck!” I spat, before reaching forward and jerking her back toward the seat.

She grabbed the dash like she might launch at me next. Instead, when she focused on my face, her features crumbled, and she started to sob.

Oak kept his hands in the air, on either side of the steering wheel. His wide eyes slowly blinked, and his face was a mask of shock. It took him a second to snap out of it, like he was still trying to inwardly take inventory of everything, reassuring himself mentally that we were all still alive. When he managed to look at my mom, his face twitched with poorly concealed disbelief and disgust. He was trying to keep it at bay, I knew he was. Oak never lost his temper, ever, but his face was flushing deeper by the minute.

“Are you fucking serious right now, Crystal LaDawn?” His voice was a calm rage that shook me a little.

I’d heard he used to be a drill sergeant amongst other things, in the service, but I’d never seen anything near that side of him until today, and he’d been my stepfather for something like sixteen years, now.

“Woman, I better be choking or having a goddamned anaphylactic reaction behind the wheel, before you ever go to snatching at my face while I’m driving our children again.”

It must have shocked her to hear it, too. She blinked, rather than answer.

“Do you hear me?” His tone rose for the first time since he’d addressed her. “Look, I’m not playing about this. You know what… No.” He grabbed his cell phone from the cubby beneath the radio. “I knew I should have just put him in a plane with me and had Daisy grab us at the airport.”

“Like fucking hell!” She let loose again, coming back to her senses, and whirling to confront him face to face. “Don’t you ever call him your child again.”

Oak froze with the phone in his hand, his eyes locked on hers.

I’d never seen them like this.

These two were what ride or die love stories were made of, riding off into the sunset together and all that shit.

“That ain’t your choice.” I piped up, causing both to jerk around and look at me.

“Stay your narrow butt out of this, Blaze,” Oak warned, returning his livid gaze to my mother.

“Yeah. All due respect, fuck that.” I carried on, drawing a sharp gasp out of Karlotti.

She was only seventeen years old, but already a freshman in college. She’d graduated early, and though she was as book smart as they came with her lawyer aspirations, she’d lived under our mother’s rock for every last one of those seventeen years.

My mother drove her to and from the college bookstore each semester. It was the only time she was permitted on campus, unless directed there by an instructor, and even then, my mother transported her personally. All her classes were done online from the sanctuary of our family home.

“Blaze,” my mother scolded, but I threw the door open and jerked at my seatbelt.

She could scold Karlotti. That was fine, she was a teenager, but I was a man. I was twenty-three, and unlike my sister, I had lived on campus. Twenty minutes from my mother’s house, that's all it was, but to hear her tell it, I’d gone to Mars for my education. I’d forgotten how suffocating life with her could be, until I was stuck in a fucking car with her on a trip all the way from Georgia to Illinois.

I finally managed to get the seatbelt off and hopped out.

“Blaze, stop!” she shouted, trying to throw her door open, too.

I was already hauling ass down the highway. I’d known by the impact, the tire had taken some damage, but a mere back glance told me it was shot. It also revealed my mother frantically racing after me.

I huffed and stopped, unwilling to allow my mother to chase after me like some heartbroken hoodrat.

She wrapped her arms around me, and bear hugged me from the side, her face more behind my arm than not.

“You don’t understand,” her voice was so wobbly and weak.

That broken tone killed me. My mother, for all her overprotective bullshit, wasn’t a broken woman.

She was a federal agent.

She’d participated in the case that took down the head of the Chicago mafia seventeen years ago, this wasn’t like her. She had control issues, but she wasn’t overly emotional and prone to outbursts.

“You don’t know what we went through back there, Blaze. You don’t know what you’re walking into… What we’re risking,” she quietly pleaded.

“I was seven.” I reminded her. “I know my father was a Steel Disciple. I know he died on his bike, for the club.”

Her head jerked away from me, and her grip tightened on my shoulder as she tugged and forced me to face her.

“He didn’t die for his patch, Blaze. He died in a war with the mafia.”

I nodded.

“Yeah. Whatever. Stupid, outlaw shit.” I summed up my sentiments about all that street stuff.

I could feel her eyes on me as I studied the tree line on the opposite side of the highway.

“That outlaw shit was what he lived and died for.” Her voice softened further, into a whisper, “It was what a lot of people died for. There was a massacre.”

I nodded again, not wanting to rehash all the ugly events that had dictated my childhood. Some I could recall with clarity, others were twisted in my mind, perhaps due to my youthful comprehension of what was going on in the very grown-up world around me at the time, who knows?

“Yeah, I get it. A lot of people died. It was a massacre. And then you guys went to Chicago, and you killed the son of a bitch.” I knew the story.

“Blaze, you can’t go there like this. You can’t talk like that.” Her voice peaked with that edge of pleading in her tone again.

“Who says so?” I laughed, looking at her. “Is some mobster’s ghost going to come and haunt me?”

She paled and her lips tightened into a thin line.

“It’s complicated,” Oak quietly chimed in from behind me. “Listen, I don’t want Karlotti to hear about this shit. Let’s not talk about the mafia or the war or any of that unpleasant stuff, okay? Don’t talk about–”

“Don’t say his name.” My mother ground out, her eyes shining with hatred.

“The head of that mob– His sister is married to Makaveli. She doesn’t have any more love for her brother than we did, but she was still his sister and he’s dead… So, be respectful,” Oak advised me.

I stared at him, not believing him at first, but the more I searched my memory, I decided I did recall Makaveli’s having a second wife.

“Izzy.” I summoned her name, despite having forgotten it for the many years.

“Mhm,” Oak confirmed in his throaty Georgia drawl.

“Why do we have to travel all this way, and have Mom so upset?” Karlotti all but whined, finally catching up with us all.

“Because, baby doll. Your brother’s uncle, Easy, has a bike that used to belong to his father. He is giving it to him as a graduation present. That’s not the kind of thing you pass up. Especially if you don’t have anything of your father’s to remember him by. Motorcycles were a huge part of Anthony’s life. He might have even put hours of his own time and energy into it. Blaze should have it. We won’t be staying long, we’re just picking up the bike, saying goodbye to Aunt Daisy and Uncle Monty before they leave for California, and bringing it home.”

Karlotti looked back at the blown tire with a frown of annoyance. She ran a plump hand through her red hair, and hefted her brows, “Don’t look like we’re going much of anywhere any time soon.”