Trick (5th Circle Guardians MC #4)

Prologue

I was jerked out of a deep sleep by the sound of our front door slamming.

I focused my bleary eyes on the glowing numbers of the clock next to my bed, to see that it was just after two in the morning.

I wasn’t surprised. The bar had just closed for the night, so my dad had dragged his drunk ass home.

I eased back down on my lumpy mattress, hoping that the creaking of my rickety, old bed frame through the thin walls of our trailer wasn’t loud enough to catch his attention.

I relaxed slightly when the only sounds that followed were from his footsteps as he stumbled into the kitchen, most likely to get a beer, as if he hadn’t had enough already.

I hated my dad.

It hadn’t always been that way. We’d never been close, like my friends Cole and Caleb were with their dad.

My dad had been gone a lot since he was a long-haul trucker and had mostly ignored me when he was home.

After all, it was hard to play catch in the backyard with your kid when you had a beer in your hand – and Dad had always had a beer in his hand.

Still, he hadn’t been a bad dad. Just an absent one.

Until he’d shown up for work one day with liquor on his breath and had been confronted by his boss. After a heated argument, he had been fired on the spot. Dad responded by throwing a few punches at the guy. He’d been arrested for assault and served a month in the county jail.

He’d had trouble finding work afterward. For some reason, decent employers didn’t want to hire guys who’d been drunk on the job and punched out the boss. Go figure.

After moping around and being out of work for months, a foreclosure notice came in the mail.

Mom’s salary as a hotel housekeeper wasn’t enough to keep up with the mortgage – or keep beer in the fridge, which had been Dad’s priority.

We lost the house and moved into a trailer park a few blocks away.

I missed our house, and our backyard, but at least I didn’t have to change schools or move away from my friends.

Dad finally got hired to work on a loading dock at an appliance store.

Because of his record – and his inability to pass a piss test – he couldn’t get certified to drive any of the equipment used to unload the trucks, so his job involved moving the individual appliances around once they were off the truck.

He was a big guy, six-feet-three and heavily muscled, but it was hard, back-breaking work. He hated every second of it.

He’d come home every evening, tired and sore and angry.

On the good nights, he’d head out to the bar.

On the bad ones, he’d crack open his first beer within seconds of walking through the front door, and drink steadily through the night, staring bleary-eyed at the television and snarling at us if we dared to disturb him.

Dad was a mean drunk. Quick to anger. Throwing empty beer cans, or his ashtray, or even the phone, once. Punching holes in the wall on occasion.

Mom and I had quickly learned to stay out of his way, but it didn’t always work.

About six months ago, I’d noticed the bruises.

Mom had made up some dumb excuse, but deep down I’d known the truth.

I’d heard the arguments at night when they thought I was asleep.

Dad yelling, Mom crying. I just hadn’t realized what it had meant, until I saw the purplish marks peeking out from underneath her shirt sleeve – marks that were the exact size of my dad’s fingers.

Lately, Dad had stopped trying to keep the bruises limited to spots that didn’t show. Last month, Mom had a black eye. Last week, a busted lip.

When I asked her why she didn’t kick him out, she’d told me that I was too young to understand.

I wasn’t too young. I heard the way her voice trembled when she said it. I saw the way her hands shook sometimes when we heard his truck pull in the driveway.

She was scared.

Scared of him. Scared to be on her own. Scared that we wouldn’t have a roof over our heads without him. Just plain scared.

I’d told her that I would help her the next time, but she’d cried again and told me to stay out of it. “I can handle your dad, Jason. Just go to your room and stay there when he gets mad. He won’t hurt you. It will be all right.”

I had just started to doze off again when there was a loud thump, then muffled cursing, followed by my dad yelling for Mom.

“Michelle, git yer lazy ass out here!”

Moments later, Mom dashed past my closed bedroom door, her bare feet slapping against the worn linoleum floor as she hurried down the hall to him.

I sat up, listening as Mom greeted him, her voice tight with fear. My gut twisted as I drew back the covers, carefully sliding out of bed. I held my breath, praying to a God I was pretty sure didn’t exist that Dad didn’t hear my bedframe creaking.

I shouldn’t have worried, since the sound of my movements was drowned out by Dad yelling again, his words slurred.

“This place is a fuckin’ pigsty! You were home all night, and couldn’t be bothered to clean up? I just tripped over these goddamned boots!”

Two loud thumps against the living room wall – the one that butted up to my bedroom – were followed by the sound of flesh hitting against flesh, and my mother’s cry of pain.

I eased open my bedroom door and tiptoed down the short hallway into the living room, almost tripping over the pair of boots laying on the floor. I guess that explained the two thumps on the wall.

Ironically, they were my Dad’s work boots that he’d left in the living room when he’d changed out of his work clothes before heading out to the bar. The rest of the house was spotless, just like it always was.

Hearing me come in the room, Dad swung around to face me as Mom frantically shook her head, motioning for me to go back to my bedroom. I could see the red mark across her cheek, standing out in stark contrast to the unnatural paleness of her skin.

“What the hell do you want, boy? Git yer ass back to bed!”

I tried to ignore the ball of fear twisting my stomach as I stared at my dad looming over me. He was almost a foot taller and was easily one hundred and twenty pounds heavier than me. I tried not to think about how my mother was even smaller and weaker than I was.

“Leave her alone,” I said, trying my best to keep my voice from wavering.

My Dad laughed – an ugly sound that contained absolutely no trace of humor.

“Leave her alone,” he mocked in a high-pitched voice, before snarling at me. “Get the fuck back to bed, boy.”

He started to turn back toward my mom, stopping only when I spoke again, more forcefully this time.

“No! I said leave her alone!”

Dad’s shoulder’s stiffened as he drew himself up straight then slowly turned back to look at me, his face twisted into something ugly.

My pulse was pounding in my ears as my heart raced and my breathing quickened. I was vaguely aware of Mom reaching for his arm, at the same time begging me to “listen to your father, Jason. Just go to your room, honey.”

As hard as I tried to lock my knees and stand tall, I couldn’t help but shake as Dad unbuckled his belt and whipped it free from the belt loops of his jeans. He was surprisingly fast for being as drunk as he was.

He’d taken his belt to me a few times over the years, whipping my ass as punishment for various rules I’d broken. He’d even backhanded me across the face a few times when I’d smarted off to him. He’d never hit me while this drunk and angry though.

“Doug, no, please. He didn’t mean it. I’m sorry for not picking up your boots. Please don’t!”

Before I could move, Dad grabbed my arm and swung me around, slamming the side of my face against the wall with one hand and bringing down his belt against my back with the other.

The air was filled with the crack of the leather, and my mother’s cries.

For a fleeting moment, I felt nothing but the pain of his fingers digging into the back of my neck, and my cheekbone pressing hard against the wall.

The coppery taste on my tongue told me he’d probably busted my lip, too.

In the next instant, fire bloomed in a stripe across my back.

I couldn’t hold back my cry as the belt cracked again, hitting lower this time.

Then again, across my thighs. Again, higher this time, across my right shoulder blade.

Then again, and again, and again until every nerve ending was coated in hot, searing pain.

The sound of Mom screaming at him to stop rang in my ears, and I watched, helpless and pinned face-first to the wall, as she charged at him, knocking him off balance. Her slight body would never have been able to do that if he’d been sober.

He roared, totally enraged as he stumbled backward, knocking a lamp off the end table and barely keeping himself from falling down.

He lunged toward Mom, grabbing her by the arm and backhanding her.

I watched in terror as her head whipped to the side with the force of the blow, and he twisted her arm behind her back as he drew her close, shaking her like a ragdoll.

“I work like a dog all day long, and this is how you treat me? I should have beaten you senseless long before now, you worthless cunt!”

He yanked her arm up higher, causing her to scream and rise up on her toes to relieve the pressure on her shoulder. He brought his other hand up and gripped her chin, squeezing it hard as he continued screaming in her face before throwing her to the floor as she sobbed and begged him to stop.

Without thought, I ran for my bedroom, grabbing the baseball bat Mom had bought me for my twelfth birthday when I’d told her I wanted to try out for the baseball team at our school.

It wasn’t one of those fancy aluminum bats that some of the kids had – we couldn’t afford those.

It was a plain, wooden Louisville Slugger, and I loved it.

I loved how it felt in my hand as I took a swing.

I loved the “thwack” it made when it hit a baseball.