Saviour: A Devil's Spawn MC Novel (Savior Book 3) (27 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Max

“Some need therapy, I have my bike.” – Anonymous

              Jesus fucking Christ save me from assholes…There are some days I wished I hadn’t got out of bed, and others that I really wished I hadn’t got out of bed. Today was the latter.

As a tattoo artist you get some of the most ridiculous fucking questions known to mankind. Will this hurt? Uh…Abso-fucking-lutely. It’s thousands of needles piercing your skin over and over again, what do you fucking think? How long will this take? However fucking long it takes. Do you want me to do it well, or scratch it on with a stone, and rub some pen ink in it? Do you like your job? Well I fucking did until some asshole came in asking me a million stupid ass questions.

I figured with the scowl I permanently wear, unless I’m holding my grandbabies, and the cut I wear on my back the people coming in to get tattooed by me would’ve clued on to the fact that I don’t like making idle conversation, I don’t put up with complaining, or bitching and moaning while you’re sitting in my chair, and I definitely don’t take payment in the form of sexual favours from eighteen-nineteen year old girls wanting to score a biker, and a free tattoo. But no, sadly these people do
not
know any of that if today was anything to go by, and tonight wasn’t shaping up to be much better.

With two artists on full-time, and my niece Kendall working at the shop part-time we’re turning over a good number of clients, and I’m not having to spend as much time slinging ink as I did only two years ago. It’s not a bad thing, but it isn’t ideal either.

I love my job, shit, I wouldn’t have opened the place if I didn’t, but things just aren’t as uncomplicated as they used to be, and that’s becoming a problem. A big problem. I've been sketching, drawing, and spray painting abandoned buildings, finally graduating to laying ink down on skin for the last thirty-two years.

When I turned fourteen I needed an outlet, something to keep my mind occupied, my hands busy, and the ability to create something beautiful from something plain and ordinary. Creative inspiration used to come to me at the most inopportune times, and whatever was close by, it didn’t much matter the surface, I’d use to assuage the inspiration until it was literally drained from my body, leaving me exhausted and free. I’d like to say I was an average middle-American teenager that didn’t leave home with a childhood any worse than every other normal high school graduate, but that would be bullshit. And also a story for another time.

My brother Sampson and I grew up in Blackwater with our parents, and the MC. We’d both been groomed to join Devil’s Spawn when we were old enough to prospect at eighteen, but while I wanted to follow in my dads’ footsteps, my brother had a different path planned out. To say dad was unhappy Sam wasn’t going to prospect is the understatement of the year, the two of them didn’t speak for three years after Sam told him his plans.

It’s not like he wanted to run away and join the fucking circus, which to be honest isn’t far from what being in an MC is like most days, my brother aspired to be a custom carpenter, specifically dealing in unique furniture. Where I was good at working with pens, pencils, paint, and charcoal to create unique designs, Sam was fucking gifted at shaping unassuming logs of wood into masterpieces.

My dad didn’t get it. He didn’t understand why either of us wanted to be artists in our own right, and he still doesn’t fully comprehend my brothers need to work a hands-on job thirteen hours a day like he does. The only reason he’s accepted what I do for a living is because he can see value in it for the club. Because we all know what’s most important to him.

Dad was never unsupportive, but he didn’t openly praise us for anything we did, or encourage us to follow our passion either. Mom on the other hand did, and still does, tell us we can do anything we put our minds to. She even owns several of Sam’s pieces, which was an unpopular discussion seeing how dad feels about Sam’s craft to begin with. But in moms easy, patient way she guided the old man to the right decision, and even made him move the furniture around when Sam dropped it off until it was exactly where she wanted it.

All three of them live in Clearwater, my brother moving out that way five years before my parents, about a twenty minute drive away since dad became an inactive member of the MC ten years ago. At only sixty-eight now, he was young when he decided to take a backseat in the life he’d all but allowed to consume him. Mom couldn’t be happier now they’re finally out of Blackwater, and away from the club that nearly took her husband from her. Not literally, but there were times he couldn’t focus on anything other than MC business, and that was his choice not what was required of him.

I might’ve joined, but I refused to let myself end up like him. I swore that if I had kids I’d be there, not just physically present, but active in their lives. Luckily I was able to keep that promise when my son Billy was born, even more so when I realised his mother wasn’t going to be a mother to our boy at all.

Carly wasn’t always a selfish cunt. I met her at a rally when we were both twenty, looking for some company, and a night of sensational no-strings sex. It ended up being a night of mediocre sex, one broken condom, a pregnancy, and eventually a marriage that was doomed for failure from the start. Carly told me she was carrying my baby when she was three months along after tracking me down by the rockers on my cut. We hadn’t exchanged numbers, and I hadn’t told her where I lived, it was just supposed to be one night after all, but somehow she managed to find me, and the rest is unfortunate history.

I married her because it was the right thing to do. I didn’t love her, I never loved her, but we made a baby together, and because the crazy bitch was a flight risk, and there was no way in fuck she was taking off with my kid I tied her to me making her put down roots in Blackwater. It might have been a shitty thing to do, but in the end it was me that got the raw end of the deal, so I can’t bring myself to feel bad about it.

We knew fuck all about each other, a fact that didn’t change for the entire duration of our marriage, and neither of us could be bothered enough with the other to try. I’ll admit I was at fault for some of the deterioration of our relationship, but I draw the line at accepting blame when my wife turned into a common whore, and decided to open her legs for any man with a pulse that wasn’t me.

Getting married at twenty-one, and divorced at thirty-six wasn’t something I wanted to put on my resume. I knew we wouldn’t have lasted for the long haul, but regardless that it’s been ten years, and my sons’ fully grown, it’s not something I advertise. In fact, I don’t think Toby or Adelyn even
know
I was ever married.

I’ve seen Carly a few times since the divorce, none of them by choice, and none of them pleasant. She’s let herself go, and while she’s only forty-six, the same age as I am, she looks a good fifteen years older. Her attitude hasn’t changed, she’s still the same spiteful bitch she’s always been. Billy claims he wants nothing to do with her when she visits, but I know my son, and in the back of his mind he holds out hope his mother will pull out some grand gesture, do something to make up for not being part of his life for so long. It’s not going to happen I already know it, I just don’t have the heart to disillusion the kid any more than I have to. Any more than he already has been.

So after my fucked up day answering stupid fucking questions, being propositioned by what equates to a kid, she was eighteen, with the offer to suck my cock in my office as a substitute for payment of her tattoo, busting Toby doing that exact thing in the break room with the client whose nipple he just pierced, and having yet another run in with Adelyn I think I’m entitled to a drink or fifty.

This shit with Adelyn, what I’ve been saying to her, the way I’ve treated her is one hundred and ten percent all me. She hasn’t done anything to deserve the sort of treatment I’ve been dishing out, and there’s no excuse for my fucked up attitude toward her other than…

EPILOGUE

Adelyn

If I Die Young – The Band Perry

              I wasn’t supposed to survive. Not while my mother was pregnant with me. Not the day I was born, and not the day I arrived at the hospital when I was four days old brought in by a lady that had heard me crying in a dumpster, cold, starving, filthy, and alone where my mother left me. That theme continued for years, until I was fifteen, when I could no longer stand being held captive, and I escaped the prison that had been created for me.

A persons fight or flight instinct has the capability to override even the strongest desire to give up, and give in to the pain they’re suffering. I can attest to that because I’ve been there. I’ve been in that place where you don’t want to wake up in the morning because you know, you just know, today isn’t going to be better than the days that came before it. I’ve felt the overwhelming sense of desperation for all of it to end that can only come from your soul being crushed. And I’ve also experienced pain the likes of which I can’t even begin to describe, which proves only proves one thing…that I fought.

From before I can remember I’ve always loved to draw. When I was young it was rainbows, sunshine, happy families playing together, as I got older I turned to drawing animals, sea, land, and sky, and when I became a teenager I drew places. Places I could escape to. Where I’d go if I ever found myself free. I think somewhere in the bottom of my suitcase I still have a few of those drawings, I’m not sure why I kept them, but I did, and one day when I know I’ll be strong enough to survive the emotional turmoil I’ll be thrown into I’ll unpack them.

Every time I imagined myself free, I imagined myself wrapped up in front of a fire in a log cabin far away from civilisation with my watercolour pencils, and a brand new sketch book making fresh memories. I would draw places I wanted to go, things I wanted to see, and instead of somewhere to escape I’d draw somewhere I wanted to belong. And most of all, I’d be safe. Safe from the cruelty of people stronger than me. Safe from pain and suffering. Safe from…him.

He was my worst nightmare. He was my only nightmare. It’s been fifteen years, and I can still remember every single miniscule detail of what he did to me, the scars he caused, both emotional and physical, I can picture what he looks like in my mind, and the thought repulses me.

There were years I couldn’t bear to look at myself in the mirror, years. I kept expecting to see the ugliness I felt inside reflected back at me. Taunting me. Reminding me of everything I fought to get away from. It took four years, a lot of coaxing, and the firm guiding hand of Emily Matthews, the woman who has saved me twice in this lifetime, in order to get me to uncover all of the mirrors that were permanently blacked out by sheets, or posters.

I’d love to say that when I finally saw myself I had a break through, that I had an epiphany, sorry to disappoint you, but no such luck. All I saw looking back at me was a too thin, pale, blonde nineteen-year-old girl that was still scared of her own shadow. It wasn’t completely anti-climactic though, that day I realised I wasn’t living, and the only thing that could possibly be worse than still being held captive by him, was holding myself captive by not living the life I fought to save. Because if I stayed like that, the way I was, I would be letting him win, and that simply wasn’t an option.

Like I told Priss, it’s not why, or how far you fall that matters. It’s how quickly you get back up, dust yourself off, and smack the bitch that knocked you down that counts, and I’d been down for far too long, it was time to get back up and take back my life.

I can’t expect everyone to agree with my choices of late, and to be honest I’m not proud of myself for some of them either, but I’m doing the best I can given the set of circumstances I’ve yet again found myself in. And that’s the best I can hope for right now. I learnt another valuable lesson during my recovery, take every day for what it is; just a day. One day out of many. Twenty-four short hours. A single day in a whole lifetime worth of them. That lesson has helped get me through some of the tougher days where instead of fighting to keep my head above water I wanted to let it take me under with the current, let it pull me along for the ride.

There aren’t a lot of things I regret, many of my horrific memories weren’t things I could’ve prevented, but there is one, and it’s the one that’s capable of being the most toxic, the most damaging, the one that might just bring me low. It’s also the one that quite possibly could bring the biggest reward if I’m only brave enough to take a chance on it.

When I moved to Blackwater, Colorado it was for several reasons, the important being a fresh start. Up until the move I’d been working with my friend from my junior and senior years at high school, Amy, in her tattoo shop in Denver, Inkamy. Boss, the president of Vengeance MC, and best friends with the man whose mom saved me, Diesel weren’t happy about my living situation there, and having connections to MC’s all over the country they made the executive decision, between them with no input from me mind you, to move me to Blackwater where their friends in Devil’s Spawn MC, an allied club, could keep an eye on me.

If they honestly didn’t think I saw the move for what it was they’re insane. Of course I did, I was just resigned to the knowledge that Amy, the woman I thought was my friend had sold me out. Her business was struggling, and at the time she couldn’t see a way clear of her situation, so she traded on the only thing she had to dig herself out of the shit storm she’d created for herself; information. Information about me. Where I was living. What I was doing. My schedule, where I ate, which gas station I filled my car up at, the grocery store I bought my food at, anything and everything she could gather she did, and she handed it all over in a neat tidy package wrapped up tight with a bow to the one person that
never
should’ve had access to it…Him.

I didn’t find any of this out until recently, but needless to say when I did, I didn’t know whether to cry or go directly into hiding, which in hindsight is why Boss and Diesel put me here in the first place I suppose.

So here I am three and a half hours from the only place I’ve ever called home, Furnace the town home to the mother chapter of Vengeance MC, with people that have accepted me as one of their own, but who have made it clear that if my shit bleeds into their town I’ll be escorted outside city limits faster than I can blink, and working for a man that Boss unceremoniously dumped me on who couldn’t hate me more if he tried. That just about sums it up except for the little matter of my one biggest regret…