Chapter Fourteen #2
The same woman who used to tell us that family is everything, that love was the most powerful force in the universe. She’d quote Elvis while braiding Sadie’s hair, ‘Love me tender, love me true.’
What a fucking joke.
“You won’t touch my family,” Maverick snarls, taking a step toward her.
“Try and stop me,” she hisses back, and suddenly there’s a shiv in her hand. Makeshift but deadly sharp. I step in front of Maverick, and Mom chuckles. “You think you can waltz in here and threaten everything I’ve built? You’re still that pathetic little boy crying for his mommy.”
I move toward her again, but Maverick is faster. He lunges forward, grabbing her wrist, slamming her back against the concrete wall. The shiv clatters to the floor as they struggle, my mother laughing maniacally in Maverick’s face, and if I am not mistaken, barking at him like a rabid dog.
“Phoenix, grab her,” he grunts out, trying to keep her pinned.
But I can’t move.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t process what’s happening.
This woman, this monster, is my mother.
How did the woman who taught me that love could move mountains become someone who threatens to steal babies?
“You think I care about you?” she snarls at me while fighting Maverick’s grip. “You were nothing but a burden. A reminder of everything I lost. I should have drowned you both when you were babies and saved myself years of misery.”
The words shatter something inside me.
Every doubt I’ve ever had about being worthy of love, every fear that I wasn’t good enough. For God’s sake, she’s just confirmed them all.
My own mother wishes I’d never been born.
But then Maverick’s voice cuts through the haze, “Phoenix, she’s got another shiv.”
I snap back to reality as Layla breaks free, lunging at Maverick with a second shiv she had hidden.
The blade catches him across the chest, tearing through his leather cut, blood splashing across her blue jumpsuit.
She cackles like a damn maniac at the same time Maverick groans, dropping back, clutching at his chest.
“No!” I move to help, but she spins toward me with the shiv raised.
“I should finish what I started years ago,” she snarls, turning for me.
A glint of metal shines in my peripheral, but I’m too stunned to think as my mother rushes for me, and just as she’s about to reach me, a deafening gunshot pierces the confined space, the bright flash illuminating from the same space in my peripheral.
Layla jerks once, her eyes going wide with shock as blood splatters across my face in a flurry, disorientating me.
I catch my breath, the shock hitting me as I watch my mother crumple to the concrete floor at my feet.
Blood pools beneath her head. I can’t hear anything, no noise, only a high-pitched ringing as my head swirls, making me dizzy.
I stare down at her body, my mind struggling to process what just happened.
My mother is dead.
The woman who gave birth to me, who I spent years believing was lost to drugs and despair, is dead on the floor of this nightmare chamber.
And I feel…
… numb.
A harsh tugging pulls on my arm, but I ignore it, still staring at my mother’s blown-apart head.
It’s kind of poetic in a way.
“Phoenix.”
I vaguely hear something, but my ears are still ringing.
The yanking on my arm becomes firmer as I continue to stare, when suddenly a harsh slap rips into my cheek, sending the chaos and noise, all the screaming, the smells, all of it, slamming back into my senses as my eyes focus on Maverick’s concerned face. “You with me?”
Coughing a couple of times, I use my forearm to swipe the blood from my face. “I’m with you.”
“Good,” Maverick says quietly, lowering his smoking pistol. “I’m sorry. I know she was your mother, but—”
“You had to,” I hear myself say, my voice eerily calm. “I know you had to. She was crazy… Sadie, Jesus…” I can’t finish the sentence, but I don’t need to.
“She was crazy,” Maverick confirms grimly. “I couldn’t let her get to Sadie. I won’t apologize for protecting my Old Lady and our family.”
Our family.
That’s what he said.
Not his family—our family.
Because that’s what we are now.
Maverick and Sadie, Clover and I, even Alpha and Haven.
We’re family by choice, by loyalty, by the bonds we’ve forged through blood and fire.
Not like this woman who gave birth to Sadie and me but abandoned the love she taught us to believe in.
“Phoenix.” Alpha’s voice echoes down the radio. “Mav. You guys, okay?”
Finding my strength that somehow my mother stole from me, I radio back. “Yeah, Pres. We found them. The breeding cells. There are about twenty women down here, maybe more.”
“Some of them are pregnant,” Maverick adds, pressing a hand to his chest where blood seeps through his cut. “Some look like they just gave birth. And some…” he pauses before continuing, “Pres, we need all hands on deck down here,” he states.
“Got it,” Alpha states. “Every brother converge on the lower decks for extraction.”
I glance up at Maverick with a weak smile. “Thank you. Sorry I dropped the ball.”
He clips my shoulder with his hand. “Actually, for once, I’m gonna let this slide. That shit was tough, kid. You did okay… considering. Now let’s start getting these women ready to extract.”
Dipping my head, I roll my shoulders. “You got it!”
Maverick and I work together, moving the women who are pregnant first toward the exit, then making our way back for more.
We hear boots on the stairs and both raise our guns as Ink appears, looking pale but mobile.
We smirk, lowering our weapons. Rip grins despite the blood on his face, and Alpha strides in holding up a clearly injured Montana, who is supporting a limping Valerie.
Now there’s a mother who would do anything for her son.
Maverick raises his brow as they stride in. “The fuck happened?”
Alpha rolls his eyes. “Montana decided to be a hero, went after Valerie when the guards took her, and they held a knife to her throat. So he lunged at them, and they shot him. They nicked Valerie’s neck, but she’ll be fine. I had to come in and save the day… it was a whole spectacle.”
I smirk as Valerie peers up at her son with the biggest loving smile crossing her face. “Worth it. Even just to be here holding you for a while. I haven’t been able to hug you like this in seven long years,” she whispers while Montana leans in, embracing her.
My chest squeezes before I turn away from them to keep moving the women.
Maverick steps up beside me. “You good?”
I nod. “I just want to get back home to my wife,” I tell him.
And for the first time, when talking about Clover and me being married, Maverick smiles. He slaps me on the back with a light chuckle and a reassuring nod. “Then let’s get us the fuck out of here.”
As my brothers spread out to start opening cells, I kneel beside my mother, Layla’s body, one more time. Not to mourn, exactly, but to finally understand.
She chose this.
Every step of the way, she chose power over family. Cruelty over love. The Cartel over her children. This chamber of horrors over the life we could have built together.
She stopped being my mother the day she walked away from us.
Everything after that was just a stranger wearing her face.
I stand slowly, my jaw set with new determination.
The sound of women crying, not in pain, but in relief, fills the chamber as my brothers work to free them from their cells.
Some are so weak they have to be carried.
Others are in active labor. All of them have stories that will haunt my dreams for years to come.
But they’re alive.
And they are free.
The monster who helped create this hell is dead at the hands of someone who actually cares about me, even if he doesn’t want to admit it.
Rolling my shoulders, I help a pregnant teenager to her feet, her hands shaking as she grips my arm. “It’s okay,” I tell her softly. “I don’t know where you’re gonna go after this, but it’s gotta be better than here.”
She smiles up at me. “I don’t care where I go… just thank you for getting me out.”
I dip my head as I hand her off to Rip, and continue, moving for the next woman. It won’t be the life my mom tried to force on her victims. These women will be headed for real safety now.
Maybe even a real family.
As we begin the slow process of evacuation, I take one last look at the woman who gave birth to me. She looks smaller in death, less threatening.
Just another casualty of a war she chose to fight on the wrong side.
Maverick’s hand rests on my shoulder, steady, supportive, real. “You good, brother?”
“Yeah,” I say, and mean it because for the first time in my life, I understand what family really means. It’s not about blood or genetics or the people who brought you into this world.
It’s about the people who would die to keep you in it.
About who you would die for.
Clover is my world, and while part of the reason we got married was because of my past connection to my mother, it doesn’t change the fact that I love how we got married.
I love that we were spontaneous in the moment.
And even though my thoughts on my mother will now be tarnished, my memories of Elvis and all things that go with it can now be replaced with Clover.
Because she ‘loves me tender.’
She has me ‘all shook up.’
And it might sound corny and stupid, but I love my woman more than I care about the fact that my mother was the villain in my story. So, while it shook me, I won’t let this ruin me and the life I am making for Clover and me.
Smirking to myself, I glance over at Maverick, seeing him lift another woman into the waiting van, using all his strength even though he has a gaping wound across his chest.
Yeah, I have to pull my shit together, or Maverick really will kill me.