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“I was a small kid. And my ma and I didn’t have a tight relationship. But I always saw myself as the man of the house, and if someone was beating on my mom, I had to do something about it. That was what my grandfather would have done,” I added, knowing that was where most of my morals came from.
“So I grabbed my baseball bat and walked out into the living. To see my mom kneeling on some guy’s thighs. Stabbing him over and over and over in the stomach, chest, and throat. I mean the man was fucking mincemeat.
“The next part is a little blurry. I don’t know if she screamed or I did or what, but a neighbor came bursting in, saw what was going on, grabbed me, and took me across the hall to call the cops.”
“Did you think your mom was going to hurt you?”
“Honestly? I don’t know. She was clearly off her fucking rocker that night. But when the cops showed up, she was long gone. And then I was sucked right back into the system, but this time without my grandparents. My case was ugly and all over the news. I think, to an extent, foster families were worried my psycho mother might come looking for me, so no one wanted to take me in.
“I ended up in a group home. And let’s just say that a bunch of kids without anyone around who loved them or even really gave much of a shit about them… that was an ugly, unpredictable atmosphere. That mixed with my mom’s arrest and trial, and the crazy shit that was going on in my mind, it was creating a darkness inside of me that I knew was fucked up.”
“You were traumatized. Didn’t they get you any counseling?”
“I vaguely remember an occasional head-shrinker. But the system was overworked and underfunded. Most of us slipped through the cracks, no matter how bad our mental health was.
“I was in the group home for about three years before I finally snapped.”
“Snapped?” Morgaine asked.
“I was picked on a lot. Like I said, I was small. I was an easy target. Or so they thought. I was jumped one night by some fucks who wanted nothing from me but to make me suffer. Three of them, bigger and older than me. The only problem was, they underestimated how fucked in the head I was, how much I would enjoy tearing through them.”
I didn’t tell her just how much I loved the screaming, how it was like a soothing balm on the inside. I damn sure didn’t tell her that I took the blood on my hands and raked it over my face and through my hair like a complete fucking psychopath.
“In the end, one of the kids was rushed to the hospital in critical condition. The others weren’t too much better. Everyone lived. And I was sent away for a 5585.”
“5585?” Morgaine asked.
“It’s a 5150 but for minors. Involuntary psych hold. There was a fair amount of attempted head-shrinking then. The problem was, I was completely fucking normal then. The fight allowed my demons to come out to play. And, once satisfied, they burrowed back into the far corners of my brain.
“Since I wasn’t deemed crazy, I knew my next step was juvie. But I managed to slink away when some of my overseers weren’t looking. I’ve been on my own since.”
“At, what, fifteen?” Morgaine asked.
“Right around there, yeah.”
“Where did you go?”
“I had nowhere to go. It wasn’t like I looked like an adult. I had a lot of growing up to do still. But my time with my grandparents gave me a lot of survival skills. Between that and getting good at stealing, I managed to stay fed. Eventually, I came across Slash. That’s the club president. And he took me under his wing. Especially after he saw what I was capable of. Me, him, and Sway were a small crew for a while.
“At some point, he got a tap on the shoulder from the president of the Navesink Bank Henchmen MC. So we took our asses out to Jersey to prospect with them for a while. Once we got the go-ahead, we came back to Shady Valley and set down roots.”
“Can I ask if… if your mom has ever tried to contact you?” Morgaine asked. “You know, to apologize?”
“Ma got a long fucking sentence. From the sounds of it, she fucked around and found out a lot her first few years inside. Then, eventually, she found God or some shit. Full of lectures now. Telling me I’m going to hell and shit. Going to hell,” I scoffed, shaking my head. “I grew up in hell.”
“So,” Morgaine said a moment later when we pulled into Holly Canyon. “That darkness I see in your eyes sometimes…”
