AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I think I recognize Addie’s giggling among the girls, as well as Jax’s amused baritone, but I could be wrong. I don’t remember Jax ever finding anything funny except his wife’s rather bland jokes, but maybe she cracked one of those. I even think I hear Declan’s voice join the cacophony and laughter. I never dreamed I’d see a day when these three men become friends, but here it is, forming the most powerful Triad in New York.
Everybody seems to be having a fantastic time. Even Vernon, my trusted concierge, and Mariana, Zayne’s fake-sweet granny housekeeper, seemed to hit it off as we passed them by downstairs. But as Zayne approaches this woman now, I start wringing my hands and chewing on my lip, sweat breaking out all over me as I wonder if bringing her here was as good a decision as introducing Vernon and Mariana. But Zayne doesn’t stop walking. Something pulls him to her, as if he knows, senses who she is.
And when she turns around, a face so much like his own staring into his, he freezes.
She does too, but only for a few seconds before she breaks out into tears. Tears glisten in her perfectly blue eyes as she takes in the sight of her son, now a grown man, her features full of an emotion that shatters my heart. She holds out her arms for him, trembling, but Zayne doesn’t move. I can’t see his face to gauge what he’s feeling, but I guess it must be shock.
“My son,” the woman breathes, barely finding her voice. Then, as if reading reproach all over him, she shakes her head, tears streaming down her young face. I remember she’s just fourteen years older than him, which would put her at about forty-four now. Her face is too pretty and too young for the thick two-piece suit she’s wearing, her raven black hair tied back in a ponytail. This is a woman who feels much older than she is. A woman who’s done penance all her life.
“I tried to find you. I swear to God that I did. But they never let me see you at the orphanage and beat me up whenever I snuck in to find you. By the time you left I was, I wasn’t able, I was–” She stumbles over her own words, her arms shaking but refusing to close.
Her knees buckle and she’s about to collapse, but I realize she won’t close her arms then either. They will be forever open for her boy who got tortured with a flat iron in that orphanage because she couldn’t protect him. My eyes filling with tears, I’m ready to lunge over and catch her, but Zayne does it ahead of me.
She collapses in his arms, crying so hard that her body convulses, and I’m sure she’d come apart if it weren’t for him holding her together. And when he turns his head to me, I see tears shimmering in his beautiful blue eyes, too.
They are a sight to behold, the first tears shed by a fallen angel who has found redemption. He holds out an arm, silently inviting me to join him and his mother.
There must be so much he wants to tell her. Probably words that would fill entire books. And yet he wants me there with him when he does it. Putting one sand-flecked foot in front of the other, I wonder what he’ll tell her first when they finally sit down together–that he nearly killed his biological father with his fists; that he made Sister Garlic suffer dearly for everything she did; that he punished all of the bullies before he became the genius that built BioThorn and that now rules networks broader than she can ever imagine in the entire world.
That he dreams of us having a daughter who would have my fiery temperament.
But what he does say when I melt into the warm bundle of love and hurt is, “Thank you, wild flame. Thank you so much for this.”
––––––––
THE END
