Reapers Creed MC: Damon's Salvation Page 4

  Ani appeared and pulled me aside. “This was a big mistake. I think we should go home.”

  I agreed immediately with her and after saying our goodbyes we left.

  We went back a few times, for a couple of other activities but, when I started to show, I stopped going with her. Damon tried to talk to me a couple of times but I avoided him until he stopped trying. I couldn’t understand how he could be so dense.

  I used to lay in bed at night and imagine my baby running behind her daddy, while I was laughing at their antics. Time passed and I started becoming smarter, while my belly started growing bigger. Ani was doing great at school and I was working at a nearby coffee shop. I was a barista and proud of my new job.

  In our neck of the woods things were going steady. As my belly kept growing, I started getting everything ready for the arrival of my daughter. I didn’t allow the doctor to tell me the sex of my baby, but deep down, I knew it was a girl. I was at home when my water broke.

  “Shit! Mom, you have to come quick. Lyra’s water broke and I don’t know what to do!”

  “Girl, calm down. I’m hours away from you, so put your big girl panties on and take her to the hospital. We'll be on our way soon.”

  “Dammit this fucking hurts. Hurry up and take me to the hospital or I’m going to fucking go all Donkey Kong on your ass, woman!” I yelled, holding myself against the dining table.

  “Chill your tits! I know what I’m doing,” Ani shouted while she turned white as a ghost.

  “Ani, she’s coming and I don’t want anybody to make fun of my daughter because she was born on a sidewalk!”

  “Fuck me sideways!” She was running like a chicken with her head cut off. “I’m coming!”

  “That’s what she said.” Great moment for a joke, I know.

  We got to the hospital driving on two wheels. Thank God, I was having contractions and didn’t have time for a heart attack. After twenty hours of labor, I became the proud mama of a beautiful baby girl. Seven pounds and nineteen inches of pure joy, and an exact image of her father. Shit, she even had a birthmark on her neck in the shape of a butterfly. Really, I must have pissed the gods somewhere, because everybody was going to know my secret the minute they laid eyes on her. Damon couldn’t deny his daughter, even if he wanted to.

  Jordan entered the hospital room and walked straight over to the crib. She took a look at my baby girl, and the only words that came out of her mouth were, “Damon, as soon as I see you, I’m killing you!”

  “No! Jordan, please don’t tell him anything. He can’t know. She’s mine.”

  I started crying and shaking. There was no way in hell that I was going to allow that son of a bitch to be close to my beautiful baby.

  “Okay, girl, take it easy. I’m not saying anything.”

  I went to sleep thinking about my sweet, beautiful, Leslie. Promising her that she would always have everything she needed. I couldn’t give her a dad, but I could guarantee she was never going to be short on love.

  The following month went by in a second. While balancing the chaos of having a new baby, I got my GED, and started taking online college classes. I was also still working at the same place.

  There was this handsome guy that came in every day to get his coffee. His name was Kevin, and he was a teller at a bank close by. He asked me out a couple of times, but after turning him down I decided it was time to think about my future and I accepted his invitation. He took me to a very fancy restaurant and we had a good time. When he brought me back home, he kissed me but I didn’t feel anything at all. I went out with him a couple of more times but it felt wrong, so I broke it off. He wasn’t happy and kept insisting. Offering a lot of things, including a last name for my bastard daughter, as he called her. That was it for me and I started avoiding all types of communication with him. I changed my phone number twice but he found a way of getting it. After a while, I started feeling like I was dealing with a stalker. Everywhere I went, he was there. He even offered to adopt my baby and give me the life we deserved. I tried dating other people, but at the end of the day, the reality was my stupid heart belonged to only one person. FUCK love at first sight. FUCK HIM.

  Jordan and Adelaide came once a month to see us, and everything was going well. Jordan’s mom, Adelaide, and her dad, Norbert, decided they were going to move close to us to help me with Leslie. They were all in love with my princess. Jordan kept us informed about the progress the club was doing regarding the ongoing rescue mission. They were keeping an eye on Los Diablos but so far there were no indications they were close to Washington. She told us everything she could about the club but never spoke of Damon and I was grateful for that.

  Leslie was growing like a sprout. She was such a happy baby. In no time at all, she was walking and talking. When she was two, she started complaining about earaches pretty often, so I took her to an ENT specialist. He did a lot of tests and told me that she was suffering from a condition known as otosclerosis. She was losing her hearing and eventually she was going to be deaf. I was grief-stricken. My poor little girl. I got home that night and after putting my baby in her crib, I went to bed and cried myself to sleep. I woke up the next day with puffy eyes. I was pouring myself a glass of Coke, or how I like to call it, my morning coffee, when Ani walked in.

  “What has your panties in a bunch now, girl?” She grabbed a cup of coffee and sat in front of me.

  “Leslie was diagnosed yesterday with otosclerosis.”

  “OTOWHAT?” she asked with concern.

  “One of the tiny bones inside of her ear is fusing.” I was staring at my soda like I could find the solution to world hunger at the bottom of the glass.

  “And what does that mean? I don’t get it.” Ani was getting more anxious by the minute; she adores my baby girl.

  “It means that soon she is going to lose all of her hearing.” As I said it, I still couldn’t believe it.

  “Okay, so what do we do?” she asked. It meant so much that she was so concerned. She was determined to move mountains with me.

  “Well, first we change our sad faces and deal with this like we always do. Second we start taking sign language classes and teach her all the vocabulary we can, so that means no baby talk shit. Cat is cat and not meowmeow.”

  “Is this permanent?” she asked with tears in her eyes.

  “She can always go for a surgery, but it has to be done after she turns four, and it’s not a guaranteed thing.” I took a long breath. “Besides, I don’t have insurance and the surgery is very expensive.”

  “Okay. We’ll do that.” She stood up and knowing her the way I do, I knew she was already making a plan in her head. “About the money, we will figure it out. Anything for our baby girl.”

  After that day, we spent every waking moment teaching Leslie how to communicate. She was such a smart cookie. She learned to talk and to sign and after her third birthday, she became completely deaf. But that didn’t stop her from being one of the happiest kids in the world. Until the day I came home from work and found her crying and Ani pulling her own hair out trying to find what to do.

  “What’s going on?” I freaked out.

  “I want a papa!” My baby girl cried as she looked at me with big fat tears in her eyes. For a while now, she’d talked everything out loud while we had to sign everything to her.

  I went to my knees in front of my beautiful baby and asked her, “What are you talking about, Baby Girl?”

  “I want a papa, Momma.” Then she dried her tears and went running to her room.

  I took that moment to look over at Ani and asked, “Can you explain to me what this is all about?”

  “Okay. So today when we were at the park, Lily was there for their daily play date but instead of her mom, her dad was the one that took her. Leslie asked me who he was and stupid me, I told her that he was Lily’s dad.” Ani stopped doing whatever she was doing on her computer and looked at me with tears in her eyes.

  It was then that my girl came out of her room wi
th her shoes in one hand and her tiny butterfly purse in the other. “Momma, go.”

  “Where are we going, Baby Girl?”

  “To Tawget to me buy a papa,” she said looking at me like I was the dumbest person in the world for not thinking about that first.

  I knelt down trying to think of a way to explain to my three-year-old that we couldn’t buy a daddy in Target, when out of the blue Ani jumped from her seat and grabbed Leslie.

  “Okay. Let’s go,” she told her.

  My baby girl was on her way to the door when I grabbed Ani by her shirt and stopped her in her tracks. “Are you stupid or what?” I asked angrily. I was furious with her. “This is only going to make it worse.”

  “Move your ass, my friend, and you’ll see. But I will suggest that while we are on our way, you start thinking about how to explain to that little girl why her daddy is not here with her.”

  I followed them to Ani’s car. Fuck my life.

  Two hours later we were on our way home with a very excited girl holding her papa in a form of an eight-by-ten laminated picture of Damon. I have to say, my friend is brilliant. That night, I explained to my baby that her daddy wasn’t here because he was working very far away. But he loved her with all his heart. She drifted off to sleep that night holding her daddy’s picture close to her heart. Damn him, where ever he was.

  Everything was falling into place, little by little. While Ani and I were working during the day, our neighbor Mia was taking care of Leslie whenever Adelaide couldn’t. Then at night, we were all home.

  Ani found out that a lot of deaf people danced to the vibrations of the music. She bought Leslie a boom box and asked a friend of hers to build a little table with speakers in the middle of it. She decided the fact that our girl couldn’t hear the music anymore wasn’t going to change her life. Leslie loved to dance. She spent hours twirling around the room listening to all kinds of music.

  It was Ani’s turn to cook, and while she was making spaghetti, I was doing laundry. Leslie was dancing like a maniac in the living room, like she did every night. Suddenly, I heard the door bell, but didn’t pay attention to it. Most likely it was Mia, and Ani was closer to answer it. I kept folding the clothes when suddenly I realized that besides the music, there was no other sound coming from the living room. I raced into the room to see what was going on while asking who was there and what I found turned my blood into ice. Holy shit! I was officially screwed.

  Damon

  I couldn’t believe that it’s been almost four years since the night I met my woman and lost her. After she disappeared on me, I have seen her six times, but who's counting. Every time has been at different club events and after the first time I talked to her, she has been avoiding me and I have let her be. I wasn’t going to force her into talking to me if she didn’t want to because I wasn’t going to make an ass out of myself. I knew they were okay because we keep tabs on them through Jordan. For a while, I thought she was meant for me but in the end, I let it go. We got word that the human traffickers were planning to move some of the women through our territory. So we were hiding close to one of the warehouses we knew they were using to hide guns, in Portland.

  Between our other businesses and this, we hardly had time to breathe. We had a contact inside a club affiliated with Los Diablos that usually called when they had a new shipment and a location. He made the first call about the girls and gave us a date, but never called back with the exact location. So, we were shooting blanks in the dark. The only thing that we knew was the drop-off is in Portland, and it was usually the place where they do their transactions when they were in the area. Suddenly, my phone went off. When I looked at it and saw it was my dad calling, I knew immediately something was wrong.

  “Pops, what’s going on? Is everything okay?” I asked, even though I knew it wasn’t. When we are doing this type of run, we go on radio silence. It was a precaution we took to keep the brothers safe.

  “You need to come back home, now. We're going on lockdown. Ghost’s girlfriend was kidnapped and they left her outside the gate. They beat the hell out of her and raped her. She’s a fucking mess. I need you here now.”

  “On my way!” I turned around to Leigh and Alex and made a signal to let them know it was time to go. They didn’t ask anything; they just followed.

  We made record time to the clubhouse. As soon as we walked in, we went directly to church.

  “Okay, listen up. I need all the families here as soon as possible. No matter if they are close or not. If you care about them then you bring them in.” My dad was already making the arrangements with our other chapters for backup.

  “When did they get hold of her?” I asked. I hadn’t seen Ghost's girl in a while and I couldn’t wrap my head around it. “I thought she was off at college.”

  “She was,” Ghost said as he walked through the door. “They snatched her when she was getting into her car in the campus parking lot.”

  “I’m sorry, brother. Whatever you need or she needs you ask.” It was obvious he was destroyed. I could only imagine. She was a sweet kid.

  “I just need those fuckers’ dead. I’m on my way to the hospital now. Need to be with her.” He looked me in the eyes and said, “Let me know. Don’t ride without me, brother”.

  “Will do. You got it.”

  As soon as he left the room, we got down to business. The sooner we could make the connections, the better. I stayed with pops and Leigh, making some calls. Alex went to get the guns from the basement. I didn’t have to go look for anybody. My whole family was here in the clubhouse. While we were checking on something, one of the prospects came knocking on the door. He wanted my dad to know there was somebody here that needed to talk to him. It was Jordan.

  “Hey, darling, come on in. Can I help you with anything?” my dad asked while hugging her.

  “I just heard what happened to Kristal. I need to bring Ani back.” She was very agitated and nervous.

  “I’ll send Leigh to go and get her,” my dad said while looking at my best friend.

  “No, it needs to be Damon,” she sighed. “He needs to be the one.”

  “Is there something there that I need to know?”

  “I can’t tell you any more than that. But you’ll know soon enough,” she whispered in his ear.

  He looked at her and then at me, “Okay, Damon, go. Take Alex with you.”

  “She’s not going to want to come,” I told Jordan. Before she could answer back Leigh was out of his chair and walking out fuming. I knew Ani didn’t want to see or be close to Leigh, but in situations like these, it didn’t matter. They’re going to have to suck it up.

  I went to the bar looking for Alex. He was sitting in a corner getting sucked off by one of the Ravens. I told him we were leaving in thirty and went to my room to get my extra gun. On my way out, Gina was waiting for me in the hall. She had a bag in her hand.

  “What do you need now, Gina? I’m on my way out.” I didn’t have time for her shit.

  “They told me we were in lockdown. Going to put my things in your room.”

  “The hell you are. Put your shit somewhere else. I’ve got to go, and I know I’m going to need more than five minutes to explain to you why that is not going to happen.” She looked at me like I was an alien. “Why not? We are together. Been together for almost four years. Why do I have to sleep somewhere else?” She was huffing and puffing and I was losing it.

  “We are not fucking together and never will be. You are here to serve the brothers and only for that. Get out of my way, gotta go.” I closed and locked my door and left her in the middle of the hallway having one of her many tantrums.

  “Nice, brother. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when we come back. Told you to cut her loose a long time ago,” Alex said while laughing out loud.

  “I have told her a thousand times we're not together. I fuck whatever I want, whenever I want and she knows it,” I answered, glaring at him as I mounted my baby.

  “Yeah, yeah,
but you keep sticking your dick in her.” The asshole was having a blast with this. I revved my Springer Softail to life and left the clubhouse with him smirking and following me.

  We rode for hours until we reached our destination. Ani was living in a nice area close to the college. I hadn’t seen her in months. Only talked to her a couple of times over the phone lately, but missed her a lot. My sister hadn’t been the same since she left. I knew they talked almost every day, but haven’t seen each other since my sister went to New York for her treatment. Kat had been fighting a brain tumor.

  Once I parked my bike, I went directly to her door with Alex behind me. The music was blasting inside, so I knocked very hard hoping she could hear it. I wondered how come the neighbors haven’t called the police on her. I waited for a while and then Ani opened the door. As soon as she saw me, the blood drained from her face. She held the door close to her body, blocking my entrance. I didn’t like that. It gave me a weird feeling.

  “Are you going to let me in, babe, or do I have to force myself?” When I looked in her eyes I could see the panic in them. “Are you okay? Ani, what the fuck is going on?”

  She didn’t say anything; she just took a long breath and opened the door wide. As soon as I entered, the first thing I saw was the back of a little girl with long dark hair moving her tiny hips to the music.

  “What the fuck? Are you babysitting?” I asked, but before she could answer, I heard a voice I recognized coming from the back of the house. I froze. It couldn’t be. What was Lyra doing here? Last time I asked, they told me she went to live with a relative in Canada.

  “Ani, who’s at the door?” she asked as she walked into the room. When she found me standing there, she halted and put her hands on her chest. She stood there frozen, looking from me to the little girl and back to me again. The girl kept dancing like nothing.

  Then, she raised her head to look at Lyra and asked, “Momma, you dance?”

  What the fuck? Did she just call her momma? Lyra couldn’t take her eyes off me and that made the little girl turn around and look at me.