Page 2 of Mace

The men she knows are fucking vile specimens who trade her body for alcohol and drugs. They would rape her corpse, given half the chance. The men I know are worlds apart, built on the foundations of honour, respect, and loyalty. She would never understand.

I fold my arms over my chest as she rummages through the crap piled inside the cabinet. She’s not going to find what she’s looking for. I tossed the bottle she had stashed there over a week ago, but it won’t matter. She’ll find a way to keep drinking, even if she has to sell her body to do it. My mother is resourceful.

“Where is it?” she snarls, rabid.

“Why don’t you go to bed?” She mutters under her breath, the words mashed together and nonsensical. “Mum, just… stop.” I grab her shoulders, and she rounds on me, spitting fire like a demonic force.

“This is my home, Mason! Mine! You have no right to tell me what to do! You ungrateful little bastard! Tell me where it is!”

My chest tightens, which annoys me. I have heard these words—and worse—a thousand times from her.

“It’s gone.”

Her head snaps up from her searching, and I can feel the knives she is stabbing in my direction. “You cunt! Youhad no right to do that. I bought that with my money.” As she says the last few words, she thumps her fist against her chest.

She’ll unravel fast, and my best option is to get the hell out of her way before she does, but I’m no longer the little boy she can push around and hurt. I might only be fifteen, but I’ve been training with Nicky for months, packing on the muscle and shaping my body into a weapon I can use to protect myself.

“Do you have any money to put the lights back on?” I ask, even though I know the answer.

She waves this off, resuming her search of the drawer as if she thinks I’m lying. This is a game we play over and over, neither of us ever winning. There are no victors in the world of addiction. When she can’t get her hands on booze, she’ll find a dealer and take whatever will numb her mind.

When she finds nothing, she drags the drawer out of its runners and flings it in my direction. The contents spray across the floor, and I step back to avoid being hit as the wood obliterates.

“Fuck!” she screams into the air, dragging her fingers through her hair as if every inch of her is in agony. “I need something, Mason. Why don’t you understand that? I need to forget.”

I wish it were that easy, but we both know there is no amount of alcohol that will numb the pain she feels. It is buried too deep inside her, too rooted in every part of her. There is not enough drink or drugs in the world to fix what is broken in my mother.

Not even I can help her with that.

“Go to a meeting. I’ll find you one?—”

“Do you think talking it out is going to get rid of the demons inside me?”

I hear the torture in her words, and although I’ve seen this many times, for some reason, her rantings tonight leave me feeling uneasy. There is only so much suffering a person can live with before they start to come undone, and my mother is close to whatever her limit is. We’ve been existing on borrowed time for years.

“Getting more drunk is not the answer,” I say, watching as she drops to her knees beneath the debris of the drawer, still searching for the bottle she thinks is there.

“You’re such a fucking smart-ass. Well, you’re not that fucking clever, are you? Do you think I don’t know what you’re doing when I’m not around? Do you think I don’t hear about my son running with those fucking bikers?” She jabs a finger in my direction, the creeping shadows of the room no doubt hiding how wild her eyes are. “They don’t take outsiders, Mason, and they sure as fuck don’t take little boys.”

Her words send a frisson of irritation through me. Those ‘fucking bikers’ are the only thing keeping me from drowning in despair. I may not be a member of the club yet, and it ain’t guaranteed they’ll let me prospect when I turn eighteen, but I know what they value, and it sure as fuck ain’t any of what my mother says.

“You don’t know shit about them,” I spit, unable to tame the words.

“They take whores,” she says, as if I didn’t speak. “Women and girls who sell their cunts for a warm bed every night. Is that what you are, Mason? A warm cunt?”

The urge to hurt her back with words just as vile is almost overwhelming, but I can’t. She’s sick. It might notbe a disease like cancer or Alzheimer’s, but addiction is just as terminal. So, I throw up my Teflon walls and let her words bounce off skin that has already suffered so many scars. I want to believe that in a different life my mother would be horrified at the way she behaves towards me.

“Try to sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

I step over the broken pieces and trash piled on the floor, intending to escape before things get out of control, but she has other ideas.

She flies at me, grabbing my nape with a surprising amount of force. I don’t want to hurt her, but I will defend myself. My instincts are sharp enough that the moment she lays hands on me, I twist, grab her wrists, and shove her back against the wall behind me.

The alcohol on her breath is enough to put out a fucking elephant, and her feral gaze does little to mask the fear as her eyes bounce around. She didn’t expect me to fight back. Before tonight, I would have taken whatever shit she doled out, but I’m done pandering to her.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” I say in a low, menacing voice, “but you won’t ever put your hands on me again. Do you understand?”

For a moment, it seems as if the alcohol haze clears and there is a softness in her eyes that I have not seen for so long, it makes my chest hurt. But it’s gone as fast as it appears, and in its place is the monster that is a servant to her affliction.

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