Page 6 of Seizing Control: Part One

With Carter and Benedict, I’d worked my arse off to make Cherub’s bedroom perfect.

Blue. Airy. Safe.

It’s her sanctuary.

My sanctuary.

Cherub’s scent envelops my senses when I slip inside her dark room and quietly close the door behind me. It’s a fruity vanilla perfume that reminds me that she’s growing up too fast. No more Impulse body spray for Lilianna Mayberry, nowadays she wears the expensive perfume Scarlett helped her select as her “signature scent.” It was a major milestone apparently, one that had ended with me acting as her test dummy in the middle of the department store, so that she could start high school early next year smelling like a woman and not a kid.

A woman.

Fuck me, she’s only twelve.

I’m already conscious of the ticking timebomb brewing between us. I don’t need everyone around us harping on the speed with which she’s growing up. Logically, I know that the fuss with the perfume was just another way for them to drive home the approaching end date of mine and Cherub’s friendship.

They think I’m stupid.

Maybe, I am.

But, not about this.

I know that Cherub will be grown within a few years.

She’ll head off to university, and I’ll be relegated to the shadows where I belong.

The future is clear.

Lilianna is a shooting star.

I’m a black hole.

The prospect who pounds heads. The son who dropped out of school. The biker who works with his hands while the rest of the club completes the jobs that require actual skills and intelligence.

The useless one.

The stupid one.

Reality is worse than a knife to the chest.

Losing her is my worst nightmare.

With shaky hands, I scrape my hands through my hair, then attempt to breathe, deep and slow, to settle the urge to tear the heads off every person who wants me to step back from little Cherub. It’s a problem for another day—one that won’t come to a head for years if I have any say in it. Right now, she wants me in her life, so the matter’s settled as far as I’m concerned.

“Get a grip, fuckface,” I berate myself when my bouncing leg refuses to die down. “Breathe in, breathe out.”

The calming technique is a little Cherub brainchild.

She swears it stops her from murdering her brothers.

I’m not quite as sold on it.

Still, for her, I try…

For my sweet girl, I’ll always try.

With deliberately precise movements, I pull off my prospect cut and hang it over the back of her desk chair. Toeing off my boots, I line them up next to the wall, then grab the spare blanket from the end of Cherub’s bed and the extra pillow she keeps on the top of her wardrobe. The pallet I make on the hard floor is basic, yet I know the sleep I’ll get on it will be better than I can manage anywhere else.

The sound of Cherub’s breathing is my peace.

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