Hondo, Texas
Cobra was just about to drop the gavel and end this session of Church when Thor’s phone pinged, letting him know he had a message.
Thor frowned and opened the message and then he appeared to be shocked.
Cobra turned his head and frowned. “What the fuck is going on, Thor?”
Thor looked up and wet his lips nervously. “Umm, you ain’t gonna to believe this.” He turned his phone to show Cobra.
Cobra looked down and his heart stopped. He couldn’t even breathe for a moment. Only when he was on the verge of passing out, did his heart begin to pound in his chest again. He reached for Thor’s phone and studied the photo carefully.
After a few minutes he looked at Thor… “Who and where?”
“Jett sent it to me from Tyler, just now.”
“She’s in Tyler then?” Cobra could barely get the words out.
“She was when he sent this.”
Cobra closed his eyes for a moment then opened them, glaring at his VP. “Get saddled up, we leave in thirty minutes and you text Jett that he’d better keep an eye on her. I finally found my kid and I’ll be damned if I’ll lose her again.” He brought the gavel down on the table and said, “We ride for Tyler in thirty minutes, I’m finally gonna meet my daughter.”
~*~
Four hours later Cobra, Thor and about twelve other bikers rolled into town. The trip usually took almost six hours but Cobra had been in a hurry. This was the closest he’d ever gotten to finding his kid and he wasn’t going to lose her.
When Jett had texted Thor back, he told them the girl had been with another biker. Cobra was about to find out which club the biker belonged to, then take her back from them.
The group of bikers pulled up to a dingy little house with a brown yard and peeling paint.
Cobra, Thor and five others got off their bikes and marched up to the door.
Before they could even knock, Jett opened the door and stepped back to allow them to come in. As soon as they were inside, Jett closed the door and turned to his President.
Cobra looked around the small house and was surprised at what he saw. Everything the grandmother had was neat and tidy. That wasn’t what surprised him, as most people were somewhat neat and those living alone were mostly tidy. He guessed what surprised him the most was that a lot of the items in her little house looked brand new, not run down and worn out.
Jett allowed his president to look to his hearts content. He knew the old woman wasn’t going anywhere and when Cobra began to notice what he’d seen, Jett knew he’d have his own questions.
Cobra turned his head to his brother. “What the everlovin’ fuck is going on here?”
Jett motioned toward the kitchen.
When all six men were in the kitchen, Cobra took note of the fact Jett had bound the old lady to a chair and for the moment, he had stuffed a dish towel in her mouth.
The old lady looked pissed.
Jett introduced her to the group, “Brothers, I would like you meet the most ornery person on the planet, Linnet James. She’s Nora’s mother and Lolannie’s grandmother.”
“Lolannie?” Cobra snapped his head toward Jett.
“Lolannie Ariel James,” Jett announced. He nodded at the old woman. “She isn’t very talkative but I did get that much out of her. Your daughter’s name.” He turned to Cobra and looked at him grimly. “And some of the story. Not all of it I’m sure, but some of it.”
“Tell me,” Cobra ordered in his gravelly voice. Pulling up a chair, he sat down on it, making the wood groan as it took his weight. Cobra wasn’t a small man and most chairs couldn’t hold his weight, he was big all over.
Jett ran his hands over his head and began telling his brothers what he’d learned in the past four hours, “Linnet here, told me that Nora ran away when she was only seventeen. She came back here when she turned twenty-one and she was pregnant with Lolannie and on the run from us. Linnet kicked them both out, told Nora, she didn’t want her troubles. Told her daughter that she made her bed now she could lay in it. Nora begged her for help and finally had to bribe her own mother to keep her hidden until she had her baby.”
Cobra listened and glared at the old woman in the chair.
“The old lady agreed for a price. The day Nora had the baby, Linnet wouldn’t even call an ambulance to take her to the hospital. Nora gave birth and then her mother gave her something to make her sleep, then Linnet took the baby and dumped it behind a dumpster. She didn’t even look back. Told Nora the baby died and she got rid of it. Two days later, Nora saw a news report of an abandoned baby and she knew the baby was hers. They had a big fight than Nora went to the hospital and stole her baby back.”
Cobra listened to the words Jett was saying but for a moment, he couldn’t understand their meaning. She tossed his daughter in a damn dumpster like trash? He glared at the older lady tied to the chair and couldn’t understand why she would do something like this to her daughter and granddaughter. Shaking his head, he motioned for Jett to continue.
“Nora knew they couldn’t come back here so she set up her own place and Linnet didn’t see either of them for four years. Then Nora came back and begged her mother to keep her little girl. She even paid her a hell of a lot of money to hide her daughter until she could give us the slip. She said she would be back for her later but it could be a while before she felt it was safe to return for Lolannie. Her mother agreed to keep her.”
Jett met his president’s gaze with a rage Cobra seldom saw in his eyes. He couldn’t speak for a moment then finished his story, “Linnet called social services the next morning and told them to come get the girl. She didn’t want to keep her.”
Cobra turned his head slowly to glare at the older woman.
Linnet stared back at him for a moment and saw the look in his eyes. That was when she began to be nervous. When he got to his feet and glowered at her, taking a step toward her, she paled and began to sweat. The closer he came the more she sweated.
When he leaned down so he was face to face with her, he pulled the gag from her mouth but held up his finger to silence her oncoming tirade. “I have one question and you better answer it with nothing but the truth. Did my daughter ever come back here after you shoved her out the door the second time?”
Linnet glared at him. She didn’t want to tell him anything but he didn’t look the type she could ignore and get away with it. “She came back this morning and I wouldn’t even let her come in,” the old lady snarled. “She was with a man who looked like a fuckin biker on steroids and I wanted no part of either of them.”
“What did she want when she came here?” Thor asked.
Linnet scoffed. “She claimed she just wanted to see her family. Well, I ain’t no family to her and she ain’t family to me. She was my daughter’s bastard not mine. I raised my mistake and I wasn’t gonna raise hers.”
“My daughter was not a mistake!” Cobra roared. “The mistake Nora made was setting up a brother to be killed and stealing money from the club. She paid for that but my daughter was no mistake.”
Linnet sneered at them. “My daughter was nothing more than a whore. I knew it and so did she. Your daughter will be the same. That biker who brought her here this morning didn’t look the type to be in any other type of relationship with a woman. I told her then and I’m telling you now, get the fuck out of my house!”
Cobra’s lips curled into a cold smile. “Seems I paid for the shit in this house when Nora paid you to keep my kid didn’t I? You took the money didn’t you, you old bitch? You took it knowing Nora might not return and then you turned your back on her kid.”
“Fuck you, you lousy bastard!” Linnet screeched.
Cobra leaned down again and this time Linnet could see the cold rage in his eyes. “You got rid of my daughter twice, no… three times in her short life. You better pray I can find her this time or I’m coming back for you. I won’t care that you’re old and female. I won’t care that you’re Nora’s mother and I won’t care that you are Lolannie’s grandmother. All I’ll care about is killing you for hurting my kid.”
Linnet knew she should keep her mouth shut, she just knew it but did she? Hell no. “She looks just like you, did you know that? She’s got your hair and eye coloring, but she’s got her mother’s morals. Mark my words, she ain’t nothing but a whore.”
Cobra stared coldly at the old woman. “Then she takes right after her grandmother doesn’t she? Her mother was no whore when she came to my bed. I was the only man Nora ever slept with.”
Linnet gasped. “That’s a lie.” She snarled. “I had a man when she was sixteen and she got a little too friendly with him. I caught them together and he told me she seduced him. He told me that wasn’t the first time they’d been together either. She’d been seducing him all along. Of course, Nora denied it, tried telling me he was coming onto her, that he tried to force her to sleep with him but I didn’t believe her. I threw her out of my house for being a whore. So I don’t believe you when you tell me she was only with you.”
Cobra shook his head. “You couldn’t be more wrong old lady. She was pure when I took her to my bed and you were the fool. Then and now.” He turned to his men and Jett. “You need to show us where he took her.” Then he looked over at one of his other men. “Pyro set a charge for this place to burn down in about an hour. Gag the old woman and let her try to get free.” He made a motion with his hand.
Pyro understood what he meant completely. He nodded is agreement with his task.
He turned back to Linnet. “You’ll have one hour to live when we leave here. One hour, then you’ll meet your maker. You better hope you can plead for your soul or you’re on a fast track to hell.”
“You would kill me? Why? I didn’t do anything to the brat.” Linnet snarled. “She was alive and well the last time I saw her.”
“Like I said, you better hope I can find her after all this time.” Cobra nodded. “If she isn’t where Jett followed her to, then you’re dead that much quicker. I’m leaving a man outside to watch the place. All I have to do is make a phone call and he’ll start the fire sooner than an hour. You won’t even know it’s coming and when you do, it will be too late to stop it.”
“You bastard, you can’t burn down my house!” Linnet screamed.
One of the brothers shoved the dish rag back in her mouth and she couldn’t rant and rave anymore.
Cobra nodded at the lack of her voice. He looked over at Cinch. “Make sure you tie that around her mouth good and tight. I don’t want anyone in the neighborhood to hear her before this place goes up in flames. You know how to do it, do it right.”
They all turned and left the kitchen and then left the house.
When they got outside, Thor looked over at Cobra. “You really gonna smoke an old lady like that? I mean she’s a bitch but…”
Cobra snorted. “What? You don’t think she deserves it just because she’s old and female?”
“No.” Thor shook his head. “If anyone deserves dying she does. But I never took you for the kind of man that would do something like that, that’s all.”
Cobra shook his head. “I’m not and Blue isn’t setting her up to burn. That old lady is gonna sit at her kitchen table tied and gagged for a good while. She won’t be able to get free or speak to anyone. I’m giving her time to reflect on the mistakes she’s made in her lifetime. She may not agree with it but it’s fitting, don’t you think? That she have time to reflect on her own mistakes?”
Thor chucked as he pulled on his riding gloves and swung his leg over the belly of his bike. “Cobra, you are a wise old man. You truly are.”
Cobra’s smile faded as he looked over at his man Jett. “Take me to my daughter.”
Jett nodded and started his engine.
Soon, the silence of the neighborhood was shattered as a dozen or more Harleys roared and took off.
Jett, Cobra and Thor were in the lead and the others followed two by two.
~*~
Lola looked out the kitchen window and saw nothing. The kitchen faced the backyard and she could see Harry’s neighborhood if she’d been looking. She wasn’t paying attention to her surroundings but instead she was seeing the past, her past as it played out in her memories. Memories she thought she’d forgotten a long time ago.
Remembering little bits and pieces of her childhood wasn’t something she did very often. It hurt too much to remember what happened. But looking into that bitter old lady’s eyes today triggered something inside her brain. It was like the key that turned a vault in her subconscious and unlocked memories she hadn’t remembered before.
Her eyes were familiar to Lola, well not her grandmother’s eyes but another pair of eyes. Those eyes were filled with love for her. Those other eyes were softer and gentler as they watched over her. They made her feel safe and loved, a feeling she only knew fleeting when she was a kid. Her mother, she was finally remembering her mother!
“What are you thinking about?” Creed asked as he wrapped his arms around her waist and brought her body to lean on his.
“I was trying to remember her eyes,” Lola told him.
“Her eyes?” he questioned. “Why would you remember her eyes?” To him, her eyes were filled with nothing but hate and he didn’t think she needed to remember them.
“No, not my grandmother’s eyes but another pair of eyes. I think they were my mother’s,” Lola whispered.
Creed stiffened. “What about her eyes?”
Lola turned her head and smiled. “If they were my mother’s eyes, they were filled with love, not the hate we saw today. I remember feeling safe in her arms and oh, so very loved. It didn’t last long but I do remember her.”
Creed looked down at her face to see her smiling. “Your mom loved you.”
Lola nodded then turned to stare out the window again. Like before, she didn’t see what was right in front of her, instead she was remembering what she hoped was her mother. “She would hold me and whisper her hopes and dreams to me. I think I was the only one she had to talk to. We didn’t have many friends… at least I can’t remember anyone coming over to visit. It was just mom and me.”
“What else do you remember?” he asked reluctantly. Creed wasn’t sure he wanted to hear her childhood memories. What he already knew was too cruel and it pissed him off.
“I remember waking up at night and crawling into her bed. She would hold me and talk to me about someone she loved once upon a time.” Lol wrinkled her nose. “That’s what she called it, she loved him once upon a time. I asked her who she was talking about and she told me it was my daddy. I remember getting excited. I never knew I had a daddy before then. I asked about him and she told me he didn’t know me and she said that was her mistake, one she would regret for the rest of her life but that something bad happened before I was born and she had to run away from my daddy.”
“What else did she say about him?”
“Only that she could never go back there. She was so sorry but I would never know what a good man my daddy was and he would never know me. When I cried and asked her why… she told me there were some things that could never be forgotten or forgiven.”
Silence grew between them.
Creed was intrigued by her words but didn’t want to say anything until he knew more about her dad. “Did she ever tell you his name?”
Lola shook her head. “No she couldn’t. She only told me to stay away from San Antonio. She said if he ever found me, he would never claim me because of what she’d done. She told me that she ran away before she could tell him about me and she didn’t want him to ever know about me. She said she knew that wasn’t fair to me but it was the way things had to be.”
“So if she loved you, why would she ever leave you with her mother?” Creed was beginning to doubt her memories.
Lola shrugged. “I don’t know. My mom must have been desperate at the time. I remember meeting my grandmother for the first time when I was four. I remember them fighting. I listened to them screaming at each other and then I remember my mom counting out a lot of money to her. Then she was gone.”
Creed looked disgusted by this. The cruelty an old woman could inflict just enraged him.
Lola tucked a strand of hair behind her ear then she said, “My grandmother told me to go to bed and not to cry or say anything to her. She said she didn’t want me when I was born and she didn’t want me now. I didn’t understand what was happening or why she didn’t want me. I missed my mom. But I went to bed and cried myself to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, my grandmother yanked me out of bed and dragged me to the living room. Another lady was waiting for me and she took me away with her. She told me I had to be a good girl if I wanted to get by in the foster home I was going too.”
Creed hugged her tighter as he listened to her story. When she didn’t go on, he urged her. “What happened next?”
“I was so scared. I wanted my mother back. The house she took me to was bad. There were kids all over the place. The woman who lived there looked mean but her husband was worse. He smelled bad and when he said shut up, you had to shut up and disappear or you caught his temper. I soon leaned the rules to avoid the punishments. I was only there for about a year.”
“Why? Didn’t things get better after you settled in?”
Lola bit her lower lip. Shaking her head she whispered, “No, it got worse. The man used to drink a lot and he smacked his wife around a lot. If we didn’t mind her, she used to smack us around. One night they began to fight and he lost his temper. Of all the kids in their house, three were their own kids, then they had four foster kids. I was the youngest one at five years old. When he started beating her that night, his ten year old boy tried to stand up to him but the old man threw him against the wall and he hit a shelf. The shelf broke and a shard of wood went into his head. The woman began screaming and the man just lost it. He beat her until she stopped screaming and the rest of us kids were scared. We ran to hide but he found us one by one.”
Creed held her tighter, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“When the police got there, they had to shoot him to stop him. He’d completely trashed the house, there were two dead bodies, and everyone else was hurt. Social services collected us kids and we were placed in another home.”
“How many homes were you placed in over the years?”
“Ten altogether,” she whispered tiredly. “Some of them weren’t so terrible.”
When she didn’t say anything he had to ask, “Which one of them left the marks on your back?” He’d seen his family gather in the kitchen as she told him her story. They were quietly listening to her and didn’t want her to stop.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” Lola whispered.
“Why? I want to know who hurt you,” Creed insisted.
“I can’t talk about it.” She shook her head. “They made me swear to never tell anyone or they would come back and finish what they started.”
“You don’t have to protect them, whoever they are. They certainly don’t deserve you keeping your word.”
Lola turned in his arms and looked up at him with tears on the verge of spilling down her cheeks. “But don’t you understand? I gave them my word and if you don’t keep your word, you have no honor. At least no one can say that about me. I gave them my word and I will not break it.” She planted her face in his chest and whispered, “My honor is all I ever had. Please don’t make me give it away. I made a promise and I have to keep it.”
Creed held her in his arms and looked over at his shoulder to find his grandfather’s eyes on him. When the old man shook his head slightly, Creed got his message. “Ok, baby girl, you keep your word to them. They don’t deserve it but I won’t ask again.”
Lola looked up at him again. This time the tears were rolling down her face. “You see, there was one thing my mom taught me before she left me, I remember it now. She said if you really believe in something you have to stand your ground, no matter what. She said she couldn’t keep her word to my dad and she knew that he thought she betrayed him and she would never forgive herself for what she did. She made a mistake and didn’t stand up for herself and she would never do that again. She lost her way but she told me I couldn’t lose mine. She told me no matter what the future held that I should always keep my word and to never forget that.”
“What did she do that was so bad?” Creed asked.
“She would never tell me but it was bad. She said it would always haunt her.” Lola licked her lips and turned to look out the window again. Shrugging she said, “I don’t think she was a horrible person, she wasn’t a bad mother, but she made some mistakes. We all make mistakes, but I think she paid for her mistakes. She was all I had in the world when I was a kid and when I lost her, I had no one I could count on. I grew up and maybe it wasn’t an ideal childhood, but I survived. People survive more than I did every single day.”
“Maybe but kids shouldn’t have to,” Creed stated.
“Not everyone has what you had.” She shrugged. “That’s just life sometimes.”
Creed exhaled and shook his head. For a long time he couldn’t say anything, then he changed the subject, “You’ve had a busy and upsetting day and it’s your birthday. I only wish it could have been a better day for you.”
Lola shook her head. “No, you were right. I had to try to connect with my grandmother. She’s the only family member I know about. I had to know if she would see me or not. She doesn’t want anything to do with me and that’s fine. I grew up without her around and I will live without her in my life. My father is out there somewhere.” She shrugged. “If he doesn’t want to know me that’s on him, not me. I know at least one person loved me and that’s enough for me. I may never see her again but I know my mom wanted me. That will have to be enough. She did what she did to protect me and for that I’ll never forget her again. When I was a kid it was just too hard to remember her but now—now I don’t think I can forget her again.”
“And you shouldn’t,” Creed agreed. “I believe she did love you and everyone should know that kind of love. However fleeting it is.”
Just then the silence outside was shattered by the sound of motorcycle engines driving right up to Harry’s door.
Silas, Harry and Jack ran to look out the front window. “Holy fuck!” Silas swore as he looked out at the dozen bikers in the driveway.
Creed dragged Lola behind him to the window as he looked out at the bikers. He only recognized one of the many bikers sitting on their bikes. The one that had been at Lola’s Grandmother’s house. He wrapped his arms around her shoulders. Turning his head he asked, “Do you know them?”
Lola shivered in fear. “No, I don’t know them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of them before.” She peeked out at the bikers and asked, “Who are they and what do they want here?”
“I have a feeling we’re about to find out sweetheart.” Silas growled.
They all watched as three of them got off their bikes.
When the older man took off his helmet, Lola gasped as she could see his hair. Liberally streaked with grey strands, his hair color was the same unique shade as hers. She began to shake inside as she searched his face. She couldn’t see his eyes but she could see his figure. He was tall and she could see he was someone she wouldn’t want to mess with. His t shirt was tight under his vest and his arms were bulging with muscles. His legs were taut and big and the boots on his feet were huge.
The other two men were nothing to sneer at either. In fact, none of the men sitting out there was scrawny or fat. They all looked buff and ready to do what they had to do.
“I-I think my father is out there?” Lola stated with fear in her voice.
As they got closer to the front door, Silas swore. He turned and looked at Lola. “Did you know they were Soldiers of Hades MC?”
Lola shook her head. “All my mom told me was I couldn’t go near San Antonio. She never said why.”
“Well, darlin, I think we’re about to find out,” Silas grumbled as they heard a loud knock on the front door.
