The Road Back (The Unknowns Motorcycle Club Book 3) Read Online Free PDF

rooms, the noises from their bedroom mingled with the darkness of the hallway, and it all felt like something out of one of the horror movies that he sometimes watched with Paul. Of course, they weren’t supposed to watch those movies, but it was one of their favorite pastimes once they knew that Paul’s folks had gone to bed.
     
    He thought of those movies then and found that it was easy to hear the noises his mom was making and assume that she was being mauled by a maniac in a hockey mask. It was almost enough to make Alex stop, turn back around, and retreat to his pillow again. But there was steel inside of him that most eleven year old boys didn’t possess. It was supported by the new anger that was cascading through him, and as he reached his parents’ bedroom door, he took hold of it and let it consume him.
     
    He’d quietly opened his parents’ bedroom door and saw his father on top of his mother, pinning her down to the bed. He knew it wasn’t a sex thing; he had seen a few magazines to know that there was nothing sexy or intimate about what was happening. His father was wearing his boxers, and his mom was wearing the flannel pajamas she wore almost every night.
     
    Alex saw the belt come up into the air over his father’s shoulder and then come down in a whipping arc. It made its horrible snapping sound, and then his mother cried out. Up close, the noise was too real. It broke Alex’s heart and pulled him into the room.
     
    He came up behind his father at the foot of the bed and said, simply, “Dad.”
     
    When his father turned around, Alex punched him hard in the chest. More surprised than anything, his father lost his balance and fell to the floor with a yelp of surprise. Before he could even try getting to his feet, Alex was at his side. He kicked his father hard in the face and then reached down to grab the belt. The surprise and shock of it all had his father reeling, so taking the belt from him was not hard.
     
    Alex delivered two more kicks, the second crushing his father’s nose. From the bed, his mother said, “Alex…,” but she seemed too horrified to move.
     
    Alex drove a knee into his father’s chest and wrapped the belt around his neck. He wrapped it tightly and then pulled. When Alex sensed his father’s anger flaring and a fight rising up in him, he punched his father in the nose where he was already bleeding. He did so with no remorse, but something eerily like duty. He punched him again and again and again until all of the fight was gone from his body and his eyes. It was an amazing feeling to know that he had this sort of control and power of an adult. While he knew that what he was doing was wrong, there was an allure to it that not a single nerve in his body could resist.
     
    It was a moment he looked back on thousands of times in his life, and not once would he have gone so far as to say that he had enjoyed doing it. But there had been a sense of accomplishment in it. It was a moment that had defined him for most of the rest of his life. He assumed it was what a great artist felt when they looked back over their lives and recalled the first picture they had ever sketched or painted.
     
    On that night, as his mother sat frozen on the bed behind him, Alex continued to pull on the belt and after a while, the fight left his father.
     
    When it was done, Alex slowly removed himself. He knew what he had done and knew that there should be regret in his heart. There was none. He stood over his father and looked down at him as if the motionless shape was nothing more than a rug.
     
    But you know this is wrong, some other part of him had said.
     
    Is it? came a response from a more primal part of his brain. He thought that the sounds of his mother being beaten at least twice a month was somehow much worse than the sight of the dead man at his feet.
     
    Over time, that’s how Alex had come to think of him—not as his father, but the dead man that he had saved his mother