I kicked my feet in the air as the man I was told was my father lifted me up off the ground. King’s nostrils flared as the man who’d just put King in cuffs, wrestled him into the back seat of the car.
“Mr. King, this is Detective Lyons. You’re being arrested for the abduction of my daughter,” the senator said, all the while maintaining his hold on me.
“But he didn’t kidnap me! He didn’t do anything. He saved me. He SAVED me!” I shouted, biting at his arm as I tried to break free of his grip.
And I meant it. King had saved me. In every way. He’d saved me from myself, from a life of standing still. Because of him, I was moving forward.
I wanted to move forward with him.
“You motherfucker!” King shouted. Detective Lyons closed the car door, and I lost sight of King behind the heavy tint of the windows.
“No!” I called out. The car took off and disappeared under the trees. “Let me fucking go!”
The senator turned me around to face him and grabbed me roughly by the shoulders. “Calm down, Ramie, or you’re going to scare him,” he warned.
“Who? What the fuck are you talking about?”
Tanner walked over to the car and opened the door. A little boy with curls like Tanner’s and hair as white as mine tumbled out of the back seat.
The little boy saw me and opened his arms. He came bounding up to me and crashed into my thigh.
The senator released his hold on me. The little boy nuzzled his face into my leg.
I looked down at him, puzzled.
Because it wasn’t the way his eyes were as icy-blue as mine, or how the dimple on his chin matched mine that alarmed me the most.
It was what he shouted that made my heart stop.
“Mommy!”
TYRANT
For my Popop.
And for everyone who has to live each day
without the love of their lives by their side.
When the love of your life passes on,
the person may be gone,
but the love rages on.
–T.M. FRAZIER
Prologue
King
The average time spent between incarcerations for a career criminal is six months.
I’d only been out three.
I’d expected to find Max in that car. Instead, cold metal clinked around my wrists, and the asshole pig had the audacity to laugh when he tightened the cuffs to the point of pain.
I didn’t wince, though. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. He pressed down on my head roughly and shoved me hard into the back of the old police cruiser. I landed on my side, and my cheek slammed against the sticky seat. It smelled like vomit and bad decisions. My hands tingled from the loss of blood flow.
The motherfucker was lucky I was in cuffs.
Three years. They already had me for three fucking years, and they were going to have me for a whole lot longer.
Kidnapping wasn’t exactly rewarded with a light slap on the wrist, especially for someone whose record was as long as mine. I promised I was never going back, but keeping my promises is just another thing I was never very good at.
I was all out of fucks to give though. The system could have me. I belonged to them, but they didn’t fucking own me. They would NEVER fucking own me.
She owned me.
Heart and black fucking soul.
I will walk to the fucking chow line with a shit-eating grin on my face wearing my scratchy orange jumpsuit every motherfucking day. I will play cards with the worst of the worst and make nice with the guards who are willing to cut me some slack. At night, when I’m alone in my windowless cell with my dick in my hand, I will remember what it was like to have her in my bed; how her innocent wide eyes stared up at me as I moved inside her. The way she arched her back into me as I made her come over and over again.
I kept telling myself I didn’t have anything to offer her, but that wasn’t true.
I had love.
Pup. Doe. Ray. Whatever the fuck her name was. I loved her more than what was normal, rational, or sane, and I would gladly rot in fucking prison with a smile on my face if I knew my girl was going to be okay.
But I didn’t know that. I couldn’t know that.
I should have known that motherfucker was going to fucking cross me.
“The notorious Brantley King,” the pig said with a smirk as he got into the front seat. The plastic-like leather squeaked against his belt as he closed his door and started the engine. “You’d think you’d have learned your lesson by now, boy.”
He laughed and shook his head. It was obvious this guy was getting some sort of sick pleasure out of being the one to put me in cuffs.
“King,” I corrected him defiantly. Nobody called me Brantley but her.