Hawk
Vengeance
Revenge
Retribution
Those words have always been at the forefront of my vocabulary for as long as I can remember. It’s the norm when you grow up in an MC. We live by vengeance. That’s what makes us feared, and being feared is something that we need to survive. Sin has wanted revenge for his sister’s death for the past seven years. He’s still so hell-bent on serving out his retribution on the man who ended her life. I never truly understood his desire until now.
Tessa has gone silent. She’s a statue next to me. I can feel her anxiety radiate from her. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to proceed. My mind is telling me to roar with anger. To rip this place apart until my need to kill has weakened. But I can’t. I can’t scare her, and I’m not going to be that man to her. I don’t care that her eyes hold so much fear every time she looks at me. I now understand the reasoning. It’s her body that tells me no matter her worries, she trusts me. I’m not going to let my anger destroy that. Not when trust is hard for her to come by.
I do the only thing I can do, I pull her towards me. Her body is rigid but once she realizes it’s me she relaxes. Goddamn, I wish I can take away her pain. “I’m so fucking sorry, Tessa.” I know the words don’t mean shit. Nothing I can say will ever make what happened to her all right. It will never be all right.
“Mommy,” Sam’s sleepy voice calls from his room.
Tessa sucks in a breath but doesn’t move from my lap. I take the initiative to get up for Sam. I place her back down on the couch. I push her hair away from her blotchy, tear-streaked face. She’s still distraught, and I know the last thing she wants is for her son to see her like this.
“Go get cleaned up,” I tell her. “Get to your room and get in bed.”
As soon as I step inside the room the tension in my shoulders subsides. Sam is sitting in his bed, covered by a blanket with dirt bikes on them. The first time I met him, he was wearing a Harley shirt, and now his bed is covered with bikes. Something tells me this little guy, and I have something in common.
“Hey there.” I take a seat at the foot of his bed.
He rubs the sleep from his eyes, “Hi.” His voice is tiny, hoarse with sleep. “Where’s Mommy?” he asks as he drops his hands in his lap.
“She’s not feeling well.” The news makes his eyebrows shoot up, and he pulls back the covers. His little legs struggle to get out of the bed. “Hey now, it’s all right. She’s okay. There’s no need to worry, little man.” He stops trying to move from the bed but continues to look at me with his brows creased. He’s studying me. I pat his head. “What’s with the frown?”
He purses his lips. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m just visiting. It’s been a long time since your mom, and I got to talk. What made you wake up?”
“Bad dreams. Monsters and all that.” He draws a deep breath in and huffs out of his chest, making his hair that’s covering his forehead blow up. “Petey from school says that I’m a baby because monsters scare me.” He looks down and picks at his blankets. “But I can’t help it. I can’t control when the monsters come.”
I scoot closer to him. “You know what? I bet Petey makes fun of you because he has monsters, too. He’s probably just as afraid of them as you are.”
He looks up, eyes tight as he thinks about what I just said. “You think so?”
I give him a chuckle. “I know so because it happened to me when I was your age. My best friend did the same thing to me.”
“He did?”
“Yep, all because he didn’t want to get made fun of from his older brother, so he opened his big mouth and told his brother and his brother’s friends that I was afraid of monsters that hid under my bed.”
“Wow, that wasn’t very nice.”
“Kids aren’t always nice, and sometimes they don’t know any better.”
“Well, what did you do?”
“I punched him.” His eyes widen at my confession.
“Wow. And he was still your friend?”
“Yep. To this day, he’s my best friend.”
“Mommy says I’m not supposed to fight, so I don’t think punching him is gonna work.”
I know that I have no experience with kids, but the thought of Sam practically getting bullied irritates the shit out of me. “I’m sure what your mom says is probably the right way to handle it. But I’m telling you what I did when that happened to me.”
“Hawk?” He scoots his little body back under the covers, letting me know that he’s must be all right with his nightmare.
“Yeah, buddy?”
“How did you get rid of the monsters?”
“My dad.”
I don’t elaborate. I don’t need to tell him that my father wasn’t the type to check under the bed and in the closet. He wasn’t the man who would sit with me until my fears had subsided. He was the type who told me I was his son, his blood and there was no way he was going to have a son that was a pussy.
Sam’s shoulders fall. “I don’t have a dad,” he whispers.
Damn, this kid. “But you have a mom.”
He brings his gaze to mine. “Yeah. She’s pretty great.”
He doesn’t say anything else. I watch as he pulls the comforter over his shoulder and turns away from me. Taking that as my sign, I lift myself from the bed. As soon as I wrap my hand around the doorknob, I hear his voice.
“Can you please keep the light on?”
“No problem, little man.”
* * *
Checking the living room, I see that Tessa did what I asked and went to her room. As soon as I push through her room, I’m assaulted by a soft floral scent. There’s a side lamp on that gives the room a soft glow. My eyes quickly scan the room, seeing it’s sparsely decorated. There’s a low dresser on the opposite wall of the bed, with a few large prints arranged over the wooden structure. She’s already in bed, the covers pulled up close to her chin.
“Tessa?” I ask quietly, making sure to close the door gently.
“Yeah,” she responds as she rolls to her side, facing me. Her face is fresh looking. The redness washed away with the makeup. This is the girl that I remember. The one before she was introduced to makeup. My Tessa.
“Is Sam all right?” she asks.
“Yeah. He’s good. Monsters. You know how that goes.”
She pushes herself to the sitting position as I make my way farther into the room. “More than you know,” she deadpans, and I know that I fucked up by my comment.
Putting one knee on the mattress I give her a smile, hoping that I ease her tension. “Do you trust me?”
Her eyes widen, for only a second, but I know she remembers the first time I asked her that question. She gives me a slight jerk of her head, so I continue on with my plan. I reach out for her hand, the same way I did that night of prom, and she gives it to me without question. I keep hold of her hand as I lie down and make myself comfortable. I take her hand and wrap it around my torso. She instantly wiggles her body closer to mine.
I have so many questions that are swarming around in my mind. The fury from earlier is still a simmer under my skin, and I know one wrong question, and one unbearable answer will set it off into an inferno, and that’s something I can’t let happen.
“How are you doing?” I decide to start with the small stuff. I know I need to ease into the subject at hand. Trust.
“Okay.” Her warm breath dances along my neck and shoots straight to my dick. I adjust my hips while keeping a firm hold of her. That’s not what tonight is about.
“So that’s why you left?”
She nods, not verbalizing the answer. This tells me that if I want to get my answers, then I’m going to have to go the easy route.
“Do your parents know the extent of your injuries, of what happened to you?” I feel her shoulders lift. “Tessa, do you still talk to your family?”
I feel the wetness hit my shirt because she sniffs. “No.”
I pull her up, making it so that she’s looking at me. Her heart is racing. I can see the vein in her neck pulse with every beat. There’s no sparkle in her coffee eyes, and it kills me that it’s no longer there. I could kick myself for not going after her when I found out that she skipped town. I should have gone to her parents and demanded that they tell me where she was.
I swipe my thumb along her cheek, catching her tears as they fall. When she closes her eyes, it takes all my willpower not to haul her closer to me and cover her lips with mine. I need to ease her pain, to bring light back into those eyes.
The next question is one that I don’t want to ask, but it’s crucial for me to know. More for my own sanity than anything. I make sure I own her gaze before I speak the words. I need to be able to read her.
“Is Sam’s dad one of the guys that attacked you?”
She squeezes her eyes closed, biting her bottom lip she chest heaves with a sob. Her shoulders shake as she cries. Small whales of pain escape her throat. I pull her towards me, wrapping both arms around her and kiss the top of her head as she cries away her pain. Seven years of built-up strength crumble with one question. It makes me wonder just how fragile she really is. This woman, living life by choices she didn’t have. Loving a child not brought to this earth out of love, but out of pure evil. He’s a symbol of innocence tainted by the devil’s hand.
As she continues to cry, I hold her. Her weeps turn to whimpers that turn to soft even breaths. This woman will continue to be safe in my arms. No harm will ever come to her or her son, again.
I bet my fucking life on it.