Adler (The Henchmen MC 14)

Andres.

That was who I had been for three years.

Andres Adler from Venezuela, born to a woman named Josephine who had been merely twenty-two at the time.

Father unlisted.

Father not present at the time of birth.

Of course he wasn't.

He'd been doing a bid at Vista Hermosa, one of Venezuela's most brutal prisons.

I would learn later that he had been serving time for rape.

I'd done the math once, figuring out he'd gone to jail just a month after I must have been conceived, leaving me to wonder if that was how I had come into the world - by force, by blood and pain and screaming, if that was what had formed me, just pure brutality.

It would make sense in a way.

As awful as that was even to think.

I had no idea how I came to fall in my father's grasps, never to see my mother again, assuming she'd been killed since that was the type of man my father was.

All I knew was he was all I knew.

He was who threw food at me, told me to quit my bitchin' if I cried over something, expected me to man-up at the tender age of five.

We didn't stay in Venezuela.

It wasn't my father's country after all.

He'd been born in Scotland, raised there for a decade or so before he was carted off to Russia by his own father who, by all accounts, was every bit as cold as my own old man.

When he told me stories about his own past, there was never a mention of a mother, of a love, of anything soft and feminine, anything warm and homey.

When I was young, I thought little of this, never having known such a thing existed, so not knowing to question the lack of it.

I would later learn, however, that my father was not a man who romanticized women, their sweet, their soft, their goodness.

He was simply a man who liked to exert his power over the fairer sex.

It was one of the reasons - I was sure - we skipped countries so often. Not because my father had a wicked case of wanderlust, but because he was running from charges, from more prison terms, from more women pointing to him in a courtroom, condemning him to years behind bars. His pride wouldn't have been able to handle that; having women decide his fate, being at their mercy.

Even if he earned every sad, sick, torturous day he would have gotten.

As for me, I grew up fast, grew up without ever having really been allowed to be a child.

I knew no home, just places we stayed, cold, dirty, smelling of must and mold. Freezing in the winter. Because if we had any heat at all, it came from a small fire my father sometimes remembered to build, other times just let me huddle under blankets, rocking, rubbing my legs together, my arms together, desperate to stave off the threat of frostbite and gangrenous limbs, parts of me falling off, being cut off. I'd seen it more than I cared to admit, enough that I knew to be terrified of it.

In the summers, I sweated through my clothes. As soon as they dried, they would soak through again, leaving me listless, lethargic, causing an anger to well up inside me, uncontrollable, making me lash out at anyone who bothered me - the kids in the town who mocked my rags, my accent, my boozing father who always quickly became known as a drunk, a lech, a predator, a man to be pitied and feared in equal turns. I would throw myself at my little tormentors, the feel of fist hitting flesh triggering something primal in me, something ugly and mean, making me thirst for it, seek it out. Until I quickly had the same reputation as the father I saw some days and not others, the one who sometimes remembered to feed me, but just as often left me to starve, to beg for food if my hunger was enough to fight my pride. But, the older I got, the more I wizened up, realized there were ways to save my pride while filling my stomach.

I was eight-years-old when I learned how to steal, slipping an apple into my pocket from an open market in London.

And when no one caught me, I got bolder.

Vegetables, bread, jerky, cans of beans, soup, enough to sustain me.

My father never asked.

But he seemed to understand.

"It's good for a man to find his own way in life," he had agreed when I once told him what I'd been doing, feeling near to bursting with guilt about it. "Maybe try stealing some vodka for yer old man next."

Because everyone watched him when he came in a store, knowing a man with sticky fingers when they saw one.

They were less likely to suspect me.