Silver Saints MC Volume 2

My bedroom had been my haven in those first couple of months after my dad died, but that was before Chad decided he didn’t need to knock before coming in to see what I was doing. I didn’t think about it too much the first few times it happened, but I got super creeped out when I realized my stepfather felt as though he had the right to come and go from my room whenever he wanted. After that, I started locking the door when I was in my room...and staying away from home as much as possible. But there were only so many places a seventeen-year-old girl could hang out without anyone asking too many questions, and I didn’t want my friends to know how bad things had gotten at home.

My pace slowed the closer I got to the house I’d grown up in, to the point that my feet were practically dragging on the sidewalk. All of my wonderful memories had been replaced with bad ones, and the bitterness had grown inside me to the point that I wasn’t sure I could wait until graduation before I took off. I turned eighteen last week, so nothing was technically forcing me to stay—except for a lack of money.

My dad had always taken care of the finances, and it hadn’t taken long for things to fall apart after he died. If my mom had been expecting Chad to take care of us, she’d picked the wrong guy to marry. My stepfather hadn’t held down a job for more than three weeks since he’d moved in with us. His favorite pastime was knocking back a twelve-pack of beers before stumbling upstairs to sleep off his drunken stupor. Showing up late in wrinkled clothes had apparently not impressed any of the bosses who’d fired him. Go figure.

I heaved a deep sigh of relief when I reached our driveway and saw my mom’s parked car in front of the garage. I hated when it was just my stepfather and me. At least when she was there, my mom acted as a small buffer between us.

But it also irritated me that she was forced to park there. It was just another symbol of how Chad had taken over our home and treated it as though he belonged there more than we did. He’d even sold his old junker, started using the car my dad had meant for me, and somehow came up with enough money to buy himself a motorcycle. He kept both vehicles in the garage and made my mom park outside, even in the rain or snow, instead of manning up and making sure she had space to park in the garage. My stepfather was a selfish jerk who refused to lift a finger to make her life even a tiny bit easier. And the worst part was that there would have been more than enough room if he had spent an hour at most rearranging his tools and a bunch of boxes with his crap so his motorcycle would fit on the other side of the car that should have been mine.

I was tempted to duck into the garage and stuff a potato into the exhaust pipe before heading inside, but I resisted the temptation of digging one up from my mom’s garden—yet another thing my stepfather didn’t help with. Instead, I headed up the stairs to the side door that led into the kitchen. When I got to the landing and saw them standing on opposite sides of the island, I ducked to the side so I was out of their line of vision. It had looked like they were arguing, so I pressed my ear against the door to make it easier to eavesdrop on their conversation.

“What are we going to do?” my mom wailed.

Her tone of voice reminded me of how she’d sounded when the police knocked on the door to tell us about the car accident that had killed my dad. I wanted to offer her comfort, and my hand inched toward the doorknob. But I stopped when she continued, “How did this happen? Michael left me a quarter of a million dollars from his life insurance policy. We couldn’t possibly have gone through all of that in less than two years.”

I covered my mouth to hold in my gasp of shock.

A quarter of a million dollars?

Holy crap! That was a freaking lot of money. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that my mom and Chad had burned through it all so quickly, especially when they’d barely spent anything on me in more than a year. My dad had thrown a huge, blow-out party for my sixteenth birthday, but that was the last time I’d had a celebration. My mom hadn’t even baked a cake when I turned seventeen, and I wasn’t sure she remembered that my eighteenth birthday was last week since she hadn’t said anything about it. I’d basically lost both of my parents the day a drunk driver killed my dad.