“Yeah. She was. I was beaten for a while too. Until I got big enough to stop him.” I cleared my throat, wishing it was that easy to rob myself of the memories. “I don’t think your granddaddy will be able to do much, Ama.”
“He has to. She’s pregnant.”
I shook my head. “He’s seen that. Will have seen the bruises. And he hasn’t done anything yet, has he?”
I hated to disillusion her, but what I was saying was the truth. It was a shitty truth, but it was a truth, nonetheless.
Her hand was shaking as she raised her fingers to her lips. When she covered her mouth, I knew she did that so I couldn’t see the tremor there.
Reaching over, I patted her knee. “Call him,” I urged, even though I knew it was futile. “See what he has to say. I could be wrong.”
Starkness puddled in her eyes. “We both know you’re not,” she mumbled from behind her hand. “I just—I can’t believe he’d turn a blind eye to something like that.”
Sadly, it wasn’t all that uncommon. Not that I rubbed salt in her wounds.
Kicking my feet apart, I slipped off my bed where I’d been laid out, reading a magazine with an article on the late, great Lyle Tuttle—a tattoo artist who’d been beyond epic. Getting to my feet, I crossed the room and sank into the sofa where she’d been sitting, her calves propped up on the armrest as she chilled with me.
These moments where we just hung out were some of the most restful of my life. They’d started when she was seventeen, and they’d always been innocent. I’d never have broken her or her fathers’ trust by doing anything so fucking vile as coming onto her like that. But I knew she found a strange sense of peace when she was with me.
This had all begun when Lucie had taken her to a shrink, and the shrink had suggested I come along. We’d been doing sessions together for a few years now, me only heading in with her a couple of times a year, but ever since, I’d seen, with my own eyes, how her behavior changed when I was around. So, though many would think it weird, I’d never discouraged her from hanging out with me.
Sure, it cramped my style to have a teenager hanging on to my cut, but this was Ama.
I’d never believed in that bullshit about falling in love at first sight. And in this instance, it was BS. I’d known her since she was five and her mom had traveled across Texas to bring her home to the clubhouse. But the first moment I’d recognized her as an adult?
Yeah, that was when I’d fallen.
And apparently, her fathers were in the know.
The second I was close enough, she raised her head and settled it on my lap. I began to play with her hair, stroking it back from her forehead as she tapped her phone, set it on speaker, then waited for her grandfather to answer.
“Had a feeling I’d be hearing from you or your momma tonight,” Lucifer grumbled—but we called him Martin around the MC. Mostly because it was confusing as fuck to have two Lucifers around.
“If you knew, then why didn’t you do something,” she growled, and there was silence on the phone, silence because I knew Martin wasn’t used to hearing that from his granddaughter.
Ama was a good girl.
The best.
She was soft-spoken, gentle. Delicate.
Until she wasn’t.
Few knew that side of her though. Few knew she had a temper, because it rarely came out to play. I’d seen it. A couple of times actually. Not just in therapy either.
Flame might not have been her biological father, but fuck, the fire that emanated from her was all him when she was in a rage.
“Hex is her old man. You know we can’t—”
“Can’t is bullshit, Granddad. You can’t let a woman be beaten by her old man just because we’re set in the fucking Stone Age—”
“Ama!” Martin sputtered, and if the situation hadn’t been so serious, I’d have laughed. As it was, I enjoyed the way she’d discombobulated her grandfather, all while I enjoyed her proximity and appreciated the silk of her hair against my fingers and palms. It actually calmed me, soothed my roiling mind as I thought about my mother, thought about Kenzie, and realized Ama was right.
Not that that came as a surprise. For one so young, she was incredibly mature. Most people just failed to spot that. Saw the stain of her past in a different light, treated it almost like they would a severe mental illness, when, instead, it made her more advanced than her years.
But in this, she was totally correct. Brothers were the opposite of perfect. We were in this lifestyle because we didn’t want to tread the path of goodness. We liked the dark too much. But I thought there was a special place in hell for the bastards who abused their old ladies.
“What? It’s true, Granddad. She’s being beaten, while she’s pregnant, and that’s just a level of degradation that is going to spiral even further. What are you going to do when he accidentally hits her so hard it kills her? Feed her to the pigs? Use her as slurry for them when she’s the sister of my best friend?”
“How do you know about the pigs?” he ground out, and I was pretty much on board too, because I knew for a fact that her fathers tried to keep her out of the business as much as possible.
“Please,” she snarled. “I’ve watched Snatch, I know how these things work.”
“I highly doubt that, and I hope you don’t. This side of the life isn’t for you—”
“And I’m not meddling. Truly, I’m not. But this has nothing to do with business, and everything to do with one human being allowing another human being to be beaten. Grandfather, you have to stop him!”
There was such entreaty in her voice that I knew, point blank, Martin would find it impossible to deny her.
Ama wasn’t all good, even if that was the image she presented. Even in all the years I’d known her, I couldn’t say if even she knew the depths of her personality that Aaron Sanchez had plumbed out of her.
People thought she was good because she was quiet and she followed orders well. They mistook compliance for behaving appropriately. I even thought Ama believed that.
But being biddable because something made sense wasn’t the same thing as being good.
Ama had a streak of fire in her, a vein of independence that she’d probably learned at her mother’s breast. Lucie wouldn’t, couldn’t rear a child who was an angel. I didn’t give a fuck about Ama’s past, about how it had forged her—I knew, point blank, that there was more to Ama than met the eye.
And I couldn’t wait to meet every different facet of her.
Because, seeing her here, like this, fighting for a woman who—if memory served—hadn’t particularly liked Ama, made me inordinately grateful that I had her daddies’ permission to pursue this.
Rubbing a hand over my face to shake myself out of that line of thought, I tuned back into the conversation and instantly stiffened when she growled, “…do I need to come down there?”
Martin snorted. “Is that supposed to be a threat? I ain’t seen you in a few months.”
Her lips curved into a pout. “And whose fault is that?”
He grunted. “Mine.” That was probably one of the few admissions of guilt the Prez of the notorious MC had ever made. Had to love how a woman could have you in knots. “I can’t always go down there, girlie. You know that.”