Reaching down, I grabbed her shoulder and gently shook it. “Ama, you don’t like leaving the clubhouse.”
“That Ink?” Martin grunted. “You staked a claim yet, boy?”
Inside, I froze, and somehow, the sixty-nine-year-old biker made this thirty-seven year old feel like I was back at high school, on the brink of asking the future prom queen out.
I wasn’t sure whether to be grateful or not, but Ama’s reaction was so extreme that she didn’t even notice me. The color that blossomed on her cheeks made a plum tomato look pasty white, and she leaped up off the couch like a cat on a hot tin roof—I’d never seen that outside of shows and movies, but the sight had me laughing, especially when she knocked over the tumbler of water she’d placed on the ground beside her. Oh, and the bag of chips that had been on the table went flying too.
Within seconds, my neat living area turned chaotic. Chips soaring through the air, soggy ones clinging to the rug, and Ama making a respectable go of looking like a working stoplight.
“Ama? You still there? Everything okay? What’s all that noise?”
Martin’s questions were the final straw—I couldn’t stop myself from bursting out laughing, and when Ama gasped in outrage, I laughed harder.
“What the hell’s going on there?” Martin growled.
I cleared my throat, forced myself to stop laughing, and told the Prez, “I ain’t claimed her yet, but I’m going to soon.”
Martin snorted. “‘Bout fucking time.”
“She only just turned eighteen,” I reminded him. Her grandfather. Total SMH moment.
“Fuck that. Sometimes, you just know. Sometimes, two people need each other. And sometimes, age ain’t got nothing to do with it. Ama was ready two years ago—”
“Granddad!” Ama squeaked, her mortification apparently complete.
“Yeah, but the United States wasn’t,” I interjected on a short laugh, totally bewildered by the turn this conversation had taken. “Whatever, I’m glad that I’m not going to be serving time for statutory rape.”
Martin grunted. “True.”
Well, this was surreal.
With my eyes on Ama, who looked like she wanted to grab a stick of dynamite to blow up the ground beneath her feet, I murmured, “Thought you’d be pissed.”
“You don’t know me well enough, boy, to know if I’d be pissed. Just know my Ama has loved you since you saved her—”
“Granddad!” Ama choked, and, once again, looked like she wanted the ground to open and swallow her up.
Because I hated that, I held out my hand. She eyed it like it was a rattler just waiting to pounce, but deep in those beautiful eyes of hers? I saw want. Longing. Need.
I sucked in a sharp breath at the sight and wiggled my fingers, silently urging her to take them. With her grandfather grumbling in the background about granddaughters who didn’t know what was what, she took a hesitant step forward and placed her fingers in mine.
“Ama? You listening? I got shit to do, you know?”
Her voice was still choked as, with her gaze locked on mine, she grumbled, “I got shit to do too. I’m apprenticing at the tattoo parlor.”
Martin grunted. “How long’s it been since we last talked?”
She blinked, and that was the only thing that broke our eye contact. Staring down at the phone like he was there in person, she mumbled, “Two days ago.”
“Well, a lot of shit’s happen in two damn days! You’re supposed to keep me informed!”
Wincing, she mumbled, “I got accepted to Rhode.”
Martin released a sharp gasp. “No! No! My baby girl’s going to colle—” The way his words broke off told me he realized that there was nothing normal about Ama.
Not because she was a biker princess, and not because her father was a Prez of an MC that, according to the ATF, ‘terrorized’ this part of Texas, but because of her past.
“It’s okay, Granddad,” she soothed, and it amazed me that she did that.
Nothing about this messed up shit was okay.
Nothing.
She should be going.
Fuck, she should be soaring all the way to RISD. Instead, she was going to be stuck here…
I blew out a breath because the rage welling inside me was something I’d never be able to control.
In another world, another life, I’d have gone to therapy for what I’d seen and done that day.
A little girl, tied to a fucking chair, like she was a hardened criminal. Before I’d hurled myself through the window, I’d seen her. Seen what Aaron had done to her—he’d treated her like he was punishing an MC brother, not their daughter.
As I’d surveilled the bedroom, I’d seen what he’d done to her. Her eyes blindfolded and blood poured down her nose and face, and her ankles and wrists were fastened to the chair with rope, bleeding from where they’d chafed.
The only relief I’d felt coming across that scene? Her PJs were on and hadn’t been disturbed. If he’d messed around with her in that way, I wouldn’t have been able to just blow out his brains. I’d have made him eat his sick fucking cock.
Instead, he’d had a quick end, one that was too fast. One I’d forever regret, especially because I knew how Ama still suffered for that bastard’s actions.
“Ain’t okay,” Martin growled. “Ain’t okay, at all.”
She rolled her eyes at me, like he was wrong, but I shook my head at her and sighed because sometimes, despite her maturity level, she was so blind.
Reaching up, I pinched the bridge of my nose and flopped back onto the sofa. She stared at me with a furrowed brow, but to Martin, inquired, “Are you going to do something about Keys’ sister?”
“The second I saw them together, knew I was going to get this shit,” he groused.
“You shouldn’t have allowed her old man to treat her that way, Granddad. Shame on you!” she growled at him, and I had to hide my laughter again at the eighteen-year-old telling off the hardened Prez who’d served fifteen-to-twenty for armed robbery.
Lucifer had more than lived up to his road name during his years.
“Since when was my MC a—”
“A what? You rule over that place like a kingdom, Granddaddy. You’re the king, and if those plebs do stuff you don’t approve of, you’re supposed to behead them!”
“Okay, this analogy has gotten off track,” I interrupted. “Are you going to do something, Martin?”
She growled at me, but I let her. Ama needed to blow off some steam, and I was more than willing to be in the blast.
“Yeah. I’ll do something. But you know this shit ain’t so easy to sort out, Ink. I mean, fuck. She’s his old lady. That’s sacred territory.”
He wasn’t fucking wrong. It totally was.
And that was the most messed up aspect of this situation.
I reached up and rubbed my eyes, suddenly tired. It had been a long ass day already, and this moral debate wasn’t making the day disappear any faster.
A hand rubbed my shoulder, and I felt the whisper of Ama’s body against my knees. Opening my eyes again, I saw she’d rounded the coffee table and was standing in front of me. Her heart was in her eyes, and my own felt like it was stuttering in my own fucking chest.