Making the Break (Beating the Biker 2)

“Vince!” exclaimed her mother.

“No. She’s had enough? I’ve had enough. To have such an ungrateful daughter.” He leveled his gaze at Chrissy. “If you can’t sit and talk like a normal person—go! Out with you!”

“Glad to!” Chrissy stalked out of the library with self-righteous rage. She spotted her bag in the atrium and she dragged it through the living room, the dining room, and finally the kitchen to the side door that led to the garage. She slammed her luggage in the trunk of her car, and opened the car door.

“Chrissy?” said Gloria. She filled the doorway, backlit by the kitchen light. “Where are you going?”

“Away.” She slammed the door. She half-expected some goon to jump out and stop her. Force her to her old bedroom. Except she knew her father wasn’t going to do that. She’d crossed a line; there was no going back. She got into the car, and after starting the engine burned rubber to get out of the Serafini driveway.

She drove crazily until she got to the highway and realized she’d get herself killed on the interstate. She slowed and drove at a sane pace. Her phone rang. Stopped and rang again. She ignored it.

It kept ringing as she drove. Finally she retrieved it from her purse.

“What!” she barked.

“Chrissy,” said Gloria, “what’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I’m tired of our parents running roughshod over my life. What the hell? Bringing my clothes to the house? Did Marcus go and grab them? Did you?”

“Chrissy, it’s not what you think—”

“Really? What is it then?”

“Something happened with the water, we don’t know what. But our apartment and the first-floor apartment got flooded. We’re just staying here until Grandpa can get it fixed.”

Chrissy blinked. “What?” Belatedly, she remembered turning on the water to the tub and not turning it off. What the hell was wrong with her?

“Why are you acting like such a crazy person?”

“Oh, hell,” said Chrissy, tears welling in her eyes again. “It was my fault.”

“What?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ve burned my bridges. Tell Grandpa I’ll send him a check for the damage. Goodbye, Gloria.”

She hung up the phone feeling like the worst sister, daughter, and granddaughter on earth. Hell, the worst person on earth.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Three days after he arrived at his parents’ house he felt better physically, but he was still in the dumps. It cut that Luke walked out on him. Not that Saks didn’t deserve a blow upside the head. He did get stupid about Chrissy. But they were brothers through the Spawn, and that wasn’t just thicker than whiskey, it was thicker than blood.

All this Rob Gibson explained to him when he came to visit. Rob worked with him, that was true, but had just started. Luke hired him just before the stuff with Chrissy started. He didn’t have much time to get to know him. All he really knew about Rob was that he retired from the DEA, and that in a long, strange, and convoluted story he was Luke’s wife’s birth father.

So Saks was surprised when Rob showed up, and his mother didn’t look too thrilled to see the biker with the full gray beard now sporting the leather coat of a Spawn. But when he handed her a bunch of flowers and a gift card to the grocery story, she eased up.

A little.

“You didn’t have to do this, Mr. Gibson,” his mother said.

“Ma’am, I’m sure you don’t think much about us Spawn. But we think a lot of Saks, here. You can do what you want with that, but I’m sure Saks is more than eating his share. I don’t know where he puts it, but he downs more than anybody else in the club. I swear, at the summer barbecue he eats half the pig himself.”

“Barbecue?”

“Sure. We roast a pig, and put corn on the cob in the fire pit, and—”

Good lord, Rob was overdoing it...though he did attend the pig roast last summer.

“Rob, don’t get my mother started on food. It’s her number one passion, after which trail her children and husband.”