Jet (Marked Men, #2)(32)

I saw her bottom lip tremble and that pulled at something under all the anger that lived in my chest. I hated that every time I tried to pull her out of this nightmare, I ended up hurting her. She should be thanking me, running as fast as she could away from this place, and yet she stayed rooted so firmly that no matter how hard I dug, I couldn’t get her out. The roots were planted too deep.

“If you can make him happy by sending him back out on the road, maybe you should. It’s not like he really asks that much from you.”

I abruptly stood from where I was kneeling beside her and felt a white hot blaze shoot down my neck. I wanted to shake her. I wanted to shove my fist through the closest wall. I wanted to storm out of that shabby kitchen in this awful house on the wrong side of the interstate and never look back. What I did instead was close my eyes, bend, and kiss her on the top of her head.

“We’ll see, Ma. I have to work with these guys. I don’t know that I want to ask them for that big of a favor. It was good to see you. Take care of yourself.”

I was going to go before I did something stupid, like scream at her, but she grabbed my forearm, her fingers digging into the melting clocks all over my skin. Her eyes were so sad when she looked up at me, that I literally felt a part of my heart die. “Bring your girl by. I would love to meet her.”

This was the last place on earth I wanted to bring Ayden, but I forced out something that had to resemble a grin. “Sure, Ma, maybe someday I can swing that.”

Ayden was the opposite of this woman I loved, in so many ways it almost hurt to think about it. She was so strong and so independent that she would never let another person dictate the direction her life or actions would take, or devalue her worth. I hated the idea that Ayden would see my broken-down mother and wonder why I hadn’t done more to help her or been able to stop this from happening to her in the first place. Those very questions picked me apart from the inside out every day. Looking at my mother now, I remembered every time she had chosen this life and that * over me, and it burned away some of the safeguards I had put into place to protect my heart from the inferno of the rage that lived inside me.

My phone picked that minute to ring, and Memphis May Fire came blasting out of my pocket. I told my mom I had to go and wasted no time in running down the front steps. I felt like I was not only running away from her, but also from every bad thing that had ever happened in that house. Nash’s tattooed head was staring back at me from the face of my phone, so when I poked at it to answer the call I didn’t bother to fake a cheery greeting.

“ ’Sup, dude?”

“Where are you?”

I slid into the car and rested my head on the back of the driver’s seat. “I went to visit my mom. The old man has been on my case about setting him up with Artifice and I thought maybe for once I could just shut it down, but no. As usual, I just don’t understand, and she’s just going to let him run around on her and run her over. It f*cking sucks.”

Nash knew my history with my folks better than the other guys. When I left as a teenager, he had been having his own issues at home with his mom and her richer-than-God new husband. Luckily, for both of us, Nash’s uncle Phil had been bound and determined to keep us out of jail and in school. He scooped us both up and, with a mixture of tough love and simple badassness, made us act right. No one went against Uncle Phil, and to this day he was our go-to grown-up when we couldn’t get our act together on our own.

“One of these days you’re just going to have to give up the ghost, Jet. It doesn’t make any sense to keep trying to pull her away from him if she’s dug in that deep.”

“I know, but she’s my mom and I can’t seem to stop.”

He muttered a swear word and I heard him talking to someone else. “We’re all going bowling. You should meet us at Lucky Strike on Sixteenth.”

“Why bowling?”

“Because football is over and Rule is pacing the apartment like a caged tiger. It’s driving me nuts. Rowdy will be there in twenty, plus they have beer. What else are we going to do on a Sunday?”

I really wasn’t in the mood, but hanging out by myself was sure to be a recipe for disaster in my current mood. “Did you call Cora and see if she wants to go? She’s been acting a little off the last couple days.”

“No answer. I left her a couple messages, though.”

I frowned because she had been home when I left, moping around the kitchen about something. The shop was closed on Sundays, so I knew she didn’t have to work, and it wasn’t like her to blow off a call from any of the guys.

“Let me swing by the house and see what’s going on with her, and then I’ll hit you back.”

“Sure thing. By the way, that was a real shit thing to pull last night at the show. Ayden is a down chick; you’re lucky she didn’t hang you up by your balls afterward.”

“I know. I apologized. We’re working on trying to figure something out.”

“Good, because if Rule doesn’t break you in half for messing with her, I will.”

I didn’t need him to warn me twice. She wasn’t a groupie, a stranger who no one cared if I blew off and forgot about from one heartbeat to the next. She was a girl that was woven into the fabric of our lives, into the pattern of our unit, and if I hurt her on purpose they wouldn’t let it go lightly. The ironic thing was that she was more than capable of taking care of herself and that the threats from the guys were completely unnecessary.