branded (phantoms mc #2)

twenty-five: in which she tries to play nice

"Words are very unnecessary, they can only do harm" –Foushée, enjoy the silence

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The car was quiet.

Normally, that wouldn't have bothered me, but it did today. For obvious reasons. I flicked the radio on, settling on a music station that was playing some annoying pop music. Much better.

Dana was in the passenger seat, clutching a transparent bag of her feeble belongings to her chest like I was going to rob her. She looked better than the last time I'd seen her, but only slightly. She looked like a scarecrow, and a scarecrow had more meat on it than she did. The black-and-white flannel shirt and jeans she was wearing were hanging on her bony frame. These clothes were probably what she'd been wearing when she'd been picked up years and years ago.

Someone honked at me, yanking me out of the sludge of thoughts in my head. Shit, for a second I'd forgotten that I was the driver here. There was just so damn much to think about. It still hadn't hit me that my mother was out. That she was sitting right fucking next to me.

Of course, Camila was ecstatic. Beyond ecstatic. She and Eve had been cooking all the foods that she'd somehow remembered our mother had once loved. Dana hadn't been much of a cook, but her mother? My abuela? God, that woman could make a mean meal. I hadn't known her that well – she'd passed away when I was nine – but being her primary food taster was the one thing I remembered so vividly. I wondered what she'd say about what had become of her only child.

"Can you take me to the cemetery?"

Dana hadn't said one word, hadn't uttered so much as a syllable, since the moment she'd left the prison and gotten into my car. I didn't know what I'd expected her first words to me to be, but these weren't it.

"The cemetery?" I glanced at her. She was staring at the road ahead of us. "Why?"

"I want to see his grave."

I raised a brow. "Whose?"

"Zeus's."

The last time we'd talked about my father, she'd been in total denial about his death. Delusional, if I had to put a name to it.

"Zeus doesn't come to visit me. Doesn't answer my calls. Can you tell your daddy that I'm sorry? Look at me. Don't I look nice for him?"

It had hurt to listen to her behave as if he were still alive, but for some reason, it hurt even more to hear her finally accept that he was gone. Fuck, were my emotions all over the place today.

"Please, Lina," Dana murmured.

I had to think. The Phantoms had purchased their own burial site decades and decades ago. They laid their own to rest on additional land beside the forest behind the clubhouse. It was an honor to be buried there. Only fully-patched members had the privilege of being buried there.

So that meant taking a detour to the Phantoms' clubhouse. Ghost wouldn't be there, and for that, I was glad. He was the last person I would've wanted to see Dana in this moment, and Dana truly did not need to do a meet-and-greet. Probably ever.

"Okay," I conceded, taking a turn that would take us to see my mother's dead ex-husband. "Let's go."

***

I hadn't been to my father's grave in a couple of years, but that didn't really matter. The grass was perfectly manicured, no doubt by overeager prospects, and the headstones were in immaculate condition. There was no neglect here.