Page 4 of The Broken Beginning: Part One

“I don’t want to hear it. All the years we’ve been together, I’ve never stepped out on you. Never even let a club whore look at me sideways, let alone touched one. Never in a million years would I have disrespected you that way. Not only did you disrespect me, and what we had, but you did it in front of my club brothers. Hell, you did it with one of my club brothers.” He grinned then, an evil look that I would have never associated with my father because all I had ever known of him was the good man that he was to me and my mom.

“You know the punishment for fucking another brother’s old lady?” He asked my mom and whatever color she still held in her face under the mascara-laden tear tracks drained away.

“You can’t!” Her insistence broke my father a little more. I could see it in the bend of his shoulders. The bow of his head. The way he seemed to curl in on himself spoke volumes.

“Pack your shit and go.” He finally told my mother.

“Where am I supposed to go?” She asked him.

“Don’t fuckin’ care, but you’re not staying here.”

My mother stood, her long blond hair a waterfall coming down on either side of her face, hiding some of the sadness I knew she felt. She waited, watching my father with absolute devastation swimming in her eyes. I had no doubt, seeing her in that moment, that she regretted her actions. It was too late though. There was also no doubt of that when my father wouldn’t even look at her.

“You’re banned from the clubhouse.”

“I figured,” she answered meekly.

“And Whisper will be gone by morning.”

“Please, if you ever loved me, don’t kill him because of this.”

My father stood right in her face then. “If you ever loved me, it would have never happened. This is on you. And him. Don’t appeal to my love when you betrayed it.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Not my fuckin’ problem anymore, Mary.”

“So, your daughter isn’t your problem now?” She asked snidely.

“My daughter ain’t going nowhere. She’s safe and sound in her bed, in my house, where she belongs.”

“You can’t take my daughter from me too!”

“Bitch! I didn’t take shit from you! You are fuckin’ lucky that I have to answer to that girl upstairs or you’d be suffering the same fate as Whisper. Instead, you get to live with the fact that you killed that man and lost everything you ever had too.” He turned to walk away from her then. “Now, get the fuck out of my house and don’t you ever come back here.”

My mom picked up her purse and walked out the door with her head hung low, shoulders slumped, and not one single other possession to her name. There wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it either. My father had spared her life and that was all she was allowed to walk away with. It was the price of her betrayal.

In a way, I understood it because my father was hurting, and she did that to him. On the other hand, I knew there were plenty of married men in the club who cheated on their old ladies with club whores or even other women who came out to the clubhouse to party with the bikers. They never suffered any punishment for their disloyalty to their women. It didn’t seem fair to me, but then again, I couldn’t fathom cheating on someone I loved.

My mind flashed to the other drama of the night, to being with Damon, and then to him so coldly walking away from me. I couldn’t deal with that at the moment, so I quietly made my way down the stairs and into the kitchen instead.

As soon as my father caught sight of me, he winced, probably knowing he would have to explain my mom’s absence now.

“Whatcha doin’ out of bed darlin’?”

“Couldn’t sleep when things started breaking,” I explained as I looked around at the broken dishes in the kitchen. Those must have been the noise that woke me to begin with, since I only saw him throw and break the one coaster in the living room.

“Yeah,” he hemmed and hawed while drawing a hand across the back of his neck. Finally, eyes that matched my own came back up to look at me. “How much did you hear?”

“Pretty much all of it. Enough, I suppose.” There was no point in lying to the man. We were going to be on the rest of our path together without my mom from here on out. Better to start out on the right foot.

“I don’t doubt that you’re my daughter. Even if you weren’t biologically, you would still be mine!” His vehemence damn near stopped my heart. “You will always be my little girl, Lily. I need you to understand that.” He stepped closer and then tucked a finger under my chin, bringing my head up taller so our eyes met. “Those are my eyes in your pretty little head,” he told me as he also bopped my chin dimple with his finger. “That’s all me too.”

“What’s going to happen now?”

If a sigh could be soul-shattering, then that’s what my father’s sounded like as he tried to figure out the answer to my question. “One day at a time, baby girl. We’re going to get through this.”

“Do you not want me to see Mom anymore?”

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