Page 60 of The Heir

“You come down here by yourself?”

“No. My mom and Oak are– Somewhere. I don’t know. She doesn’t do well with Illinois or– The Disciples. She has anxiety attacks just speaking about that time in our lives. She didn’t want to come, and she had– I don’t know– A nervous breakdown or something when we arrived at my uncle’s house. I haven’t seen them since. Everything just happened so fast, and it keeps happening.”

He gave a knowing nod.

“That's the way they live, son.” Donovan quietly acknowledged, “I tried to tell my daughter for years. She should have left. If she had, she’d still be here, but she thought her kids needed a father in their home with them. They could have had both of them here to raise them, now they got— Well none. Michael Miller doesn’t look out for anything but himself. He’s a stain on my grandchildren’s birth certificate. A menace to the community, and a danger to anyone who lets him linger too close. He wasn’t a parent. My grandkids raised themselves after my daughter died. Me and their grandmother did what we could by them, but—”

He sniffed and shook his head.

I clung to his every word, soaking up the history like a sponge. The monster he spoke of, the one I had met, was my father’s best friend. Makaveli and my father were inseparable, it was obvious in the pictures Mom kept hidden away. If he wasn’t with me or her in them, he was arm and arm with Mak.

“You didn’t do too bad, Sir. She’s a survivor, a beautiful soul, with a tender heart and a pretty face. Don’t discount or ever doubt that you helped forge whatever armor she has in this life.” I reminded him.

The preacher sat up a bit, and his eyes softened.

“I’m sorry about your daughter. I went to the cemetery with my uncle. He showed me my father’s grave, Marchella’s mother’s grave, all of them.” I shook my head, unable to grasp losing that many people at one time. It was such a small community. They must have been terrified.

I was so stunned by the loss of my father that I really don’t remember much of the other loss, beyond the occasional blips of information I’d picked up over the years. That wasn’t really remembering, though, it was recounting the tales of others.Sometimes, it happened well enough I could conjure images, and it made it hard to determine what was memory and what wasn’t.

Like Aunt Joplin.

“Do you love her?” he quietly asked, without taking his gaze off me.

“Sir?” I almost didn’t hear myself say it.

Donovan blinked, tearing up despite his visible efforts not to.

“I need to know if your interest in my granddaughter extends beyond the twitch of her backside.”

I winced, and he relaxed the minute he noticed I’d taken insult to his wording.

“I shouldn’t say such things.” I finally managed. “I don’t know if it is possible to love someone when you’ve only known them for a handful of days. Then again, I’ve known her my whole life, I just– lost her for eighteen years. I mean— I didn’t have her then. We were children. We were friends. We shared the same nightmare, we hid from the same demons, we both lost a parent to the same fucking–”

My eyes widened when I realized I’d lost myself to my thoughts and forgotten I was addressing a preacher. Donovan didn’t seem to mind; he was nodding sagely to every word.

“It is crazy. What we have is something that was twisted together by violence, and death, and a level of grief that most people are fortunate enough to never know. We were stripped of our childhoods and taught to survive when most people our age were still under the illusion that their life was safe, that Mommy and Daddy could protect them from everything, and that people are ultimately good by nature. We share so many understandingsabout life, and each other. Things we don’t have to talk about. I don’t have to explain myself to her. She gets it. And I get her.”

He sighed like I’d lifted a weight off his shoulder.

“Yes, I love her. I told her father she was mine, and I meant it.”

He snapped up in his seat and stared at the monitor, “You say that like it was something he didn’t care for?”

“He didn’t. He tried to come at me over it. My uncle got between us.”

“Yeah?” The preacher sounded too pleased by what he was hearing.

I shrugged, “Doesn’t matter. Me and him are both headed to prison now. Habitual criminal style. Your granddaughter is too good to be sitting around waiting on some dumbass to get out of a cage.”

I rubbed my face, realizing I’d gone to cussing again. I didn’t look up until Donovan cleared his throat.

“I’m an old-fashioned man, Blaze,” he announced, leaving me raising one brow and trying to decipher what the fuck he was on about.

When he realized he had my attention, he continued, “There was a time when men came to agreements over things like this.”

“Things like what?” I laughed, not following a bit.

“Unions.”