Atonement (Angel's Halo MC 5)

I waited, however, letting it ring and ring, knowing he would get pissed at being kept waiting. Even if it was for only a few extra seconds.

I counted the rings, taking just a smidge of pleasure in what little sign of defiance I could.

Pretending to be as careless as I wished I could be, I finally pulled my phone from my back pocket and swiped my thumb across the screen as the words “Unknown Caller” seemed to glower up at me. It wasn’t that this particular number was unlisted, but a damn burner phone.

He never contacted me on anything but, too scared it would leak to the public about who—but more importantly, why—he was talking to me. The press would have a fun little field day with all that hellfire if they dug deeper into his life, past and present.

“Yeah?” I said by way of greeting, unable to say the words I wanted to speak.

If I pissed him off too much, then my mother would be the one to suffer, not me. I couldn’t let that happen. This piece of shit was the only thing standing between my mother and total desolation. Maybe I had never accepted my mother’s lifestyle, but I loved her more than any other person on the planet. She was all I had left in the world, and I would have sold my soul to the Devil himself to keep her safe and cared for.

Oh, wait. I already did that.

I couldn’t fight the grimace that twisted my lips at that mental reminder.

“What can you tell me?”

No, “hello.” No, “how have you been?” Not even a, “happy birthday, my darling daughter.” Like that would ever happen.

I was twenty-two years old as of the stroke of midnight, yet the man who had helped my mother give me life didn’t give two shits about me. I would never be anything more to him than the mistake he had made with his mistress.

Kevin, on the other hand, had been his pride and joy. His only son. The legitimate Samson who could do no wrong.

The fact that I shared DNA with either of those two men still made me want to gag. One was a narcissistic asshole; the other a drugged-out rapist who was now six feet under. Fuck, I wished the same could have been said for the former of the two men, even as I hoped the latter was burning in the deepest, darkest part of Hell where his charred body had gone when he had burned down the Hannigans’ bar.

Senator Calvin Samson made an impatient noise when I didn’t answer him fast enough. “Kellianne, I asked you a question,” he barked into the receiver.

I hated that name just as much as I hated him. Mostly because he had talked my mother into giving it to me, even as he denied me the sanctuary of his last name.

Using my free hand to rub at the pressure that was starting to build behind my eyes, I leaned my head back against the side of the clubhouse and wished myself anywhere but there. “I have nothing new for you.”

The impatient noise he had just made became one of disbelief.

I didn’t care enough to make him believe that I was telling the truth. I was nothing more than his minion, had been from the day my mother was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s three years before. Without him, Leslie Murdock would have wasted away in some state run nursing home and probably would have died by now. Calvin had set her up in a top notch, full-care facility that cost an obscene amount of money each month, but it gave her around the clock care by professionals.

He didn’t do it out of the goodness of his heart, though. Fuck, I was pretty sure he didn’t have one.

I had to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it done, or he would stop the cash flow that kept my mother in the lap of luxury she had become used to over the twenty-five years she had been Calvin’s mistress. A role she could no longer preform, and one I was sure had been filled by some eighteen-year-old model wannabe. At least that was what my mother’s old friends had let slip the last time I had gone to visit.

At first, I hadn’t cared about doing my father’s dirty work. It had been simple, stupid things that mostly involved keeping an eye on my older half-brother. Kevin was the reason I had come to Creswell Springs in the first place. I had gotten a job that would help me keep an eye on him and still give me enough money to live off of.

Stripping was not the Julliard ballet my mother had always dreamed of me doing, but it paid my bills and had been the place to scope out what my idiot brother was up to the majority of the time.

Then he had pissed off the local MC, and they had burned down his frat house.

Typical trouble for the notorious son of California’s most vocal senator, Kevin had been kicked out of one college after another. Each time, Calvin had swept the trouble his son had caused as far under the rug as he possible could. I had been sent in to try to minimize the blow up of any and all trouble he was likely to make at his newest college.

Easy, right?

Oh, how wrong I had been.

Kevin had started fucking with the dangerous, one-percenter MC. Petty stuff at first, like slashing the tires of the enforcer’s wife’s car. Then he had moved on to bigger things and used one of the club’s own to get inside intel on them.

That was when he had burned down the Hannigans’ bar, a place that the MC had considered their most holiest of places. Then the stupid fuck had gotten himself trapped in the fire and had more or less killed himself with his final act of revenge.

With the death of my half-brother, I had thought my work was done and I could go home to be closer to my mother.

Wrong again.