Page 7 of The Heir

“Disciples… I give you my nephew, Blaze Anthony Aviston!” Easy roared to the crowd.

The tiny circle that the crowd had afforded them collapsed. People rushed them, shoving into me and pushing past those gathered between us. All the Disciples wanted to meet Anthony Aviston’s son. Who could blame them? His father was a fucking biker legend. I vaguely remembered him. He had died a veteran amongst outlaws in the Steel Disciple’s war with the Valentino mafia. His father gave his life avenging my mother, as far as I was concerned.

I wanted to meet him, too, but I wasn’t going to fight that crowd to do it.

“You okay?” my brother’s familiar voice greeted me, long before I noticed him.

My attention snapped around until it landed on his hazel eyes. He was only thirty-two, but his eyes were so much older. There was a hardness about them that was different from our father’s, but similar. It was pain, I’d learned that long ago, but people weren’t wrong when they identified it as dangerous, either. The type of hurt that haunted them was the type that festered.

“I could ask you the same thing,” I blurted out, my tongue moving faster than my good sense could filter.

His glare told me to fuck off a dozen times, but I didn’t. He was my brother. The rest of the world could cower, I’d stare the monster down and wait for the storm to pass.

“I’m fine. I just need to learn to leave that bitch alone,” he quietly mumbled, before turning toward the house.

I stayed on his heel, catching the screen door, and following him into the kitchen. He grabbed Izzy’s rum-tainted drink andswigged. When it proved positive for liquor, he drank a bit deeper.

“Megan?” I guessed.

He whirled, and that glass went flying. I instinctively drew my leg up, bending my knee and drawing my top half down to make myself as small a target for the glass shards as possible. It wasn’t my first rodeo between him and my father, I could usually predict such things even amongst a bar full of strangers.

“Fuck that stupid bitch!” he roared. “Fuck her. How dare she.”

A hand planted on my chest and half spun me. My body was propelled back toward the column that separated Daisy and Montana’s living room from the kitchen with the momentum of the contact and I landed hard against it.

Glass crunched beneath boots and bone crunched against bone in a second explosion.

“The fuck is wrong with you?” our father roared, standing over Mackie, and shaking his fist.

Mackie’s eyes were wild with rage and locked on the old man. His left cheek was stained red where Dad’s punch landed. My feet anchored to the floor. My heart raced. The air was sucked out of the room as was always the case when I was left waiting for the pair to lock horns.

“What… the fuck…?” Trista slowly began, her gaze hesitantly lifting from the glass and mess on Daisy’s floor to the site of my father and my brother nose to nose.

“Whoa!” The word rushed out of her mouth, followed by a screeched name that caused me to flinch a second time, “Easy!”

Her husband came flying inside like he was ready to take on the world, his nephew right behind him.

“What the fuck is going on?” Easy asked, instantly moving to my father and brother.

I watched Blaze take in the broken glass. His head slowly tilted my way, and his gaze climbed halfway up my torso before he frowned and shot toward me. I sucked in a wild breath, but it didn’t stop his arm from curling around my shoulder. He herded me in the opposite direction like he knew exactly where he was going.

“What’s going on in here?” Daisy blurted out. “What the fuck is this?”

“It’s okay.” Blaze quietly assured me, even as he reached out to bump the door of the master bedroom open. “There is a bathroom back here you can clean up in.”

“Huh?” I mumbled glancing down at my clean scrubs.

They were still clean, but there was a tiny chunk of glass sticking out of my arm that was leaking blood.

“Shit.” I whispered, raising my arm up to inspect it. The glass was lodged about two inches beneath my elbow. It was about as wide as my thumbnail and half as long.

Blaze steered me toward the edge of the vanity tub, and I sat down on it while he fetched a pair of tweezers and doused them in alcohol.

“You okay?” he quietly asked while dabbing my arm with a wash rag.

“Uh- yeah. Mackie, he just…”

“He’s an asshole,” Blaze offered.

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