“I can see it in you, little bird. You might hide it from the world, but an immoral man like me can see the depravity that hides behind your eyes the longing to be broken open and freed.” He moved his fingers up and trails them along my cheek.
“I’m not hiding behind anything,” I whisper my voice dry, my heart a hammer in my chest, my cheeks flushing. Not just because of the dangerousI wanna eat youglint in his eyes, not his proximity, his scent, his presence yanking me in.
No, it is how he sees me in a way that terrifies me more than his soulless eyes, his muscles, his ink, his leather jacket, and the patch, as he calls it, ever can.
“Oh, baby, everyone’s hiding behind something,” he murmurs “You’re just doing it better than most. And you’re hiding a fuck of a lot more than most.” His eyes swim with something I recognized. A darkness. A sorrow.
“So are you,” I say, forcing my eyes to search his.
“What are you hiding, 81, under all that leather and bad biker looks?” I don'tknow what possesses me to be so brazen as to taunt the man in front of me, who can break my body he’d been hungrily staring at. The body that sings for him to do with it what he wished. Even if that means becoming more broken than I already am.
His body shudders with my words as his eyes light up with a deep orange fire and desire swims through them. It's an instant and unnerving process, to see everything in him shut down, harden, freeze into something cold. Foreign. A killer. He steps back the moment I shiver with fear as well as something more than fear. It'slike a depraved kind of excitement. A little part of me that needs that cold and cruelness he is sending off in the stillness between us.
“Oh, you wanna find out what I’m hiding, little bird? I’m unsure if you could cope,” he clips, the words structured like a threat.
“And when, or if you do, little bird, it’ll be too late. For the both of us.”
He doesn'tsay anything, doesn't move for a handful of moments, the words hanging in the air, tattooing themselves into it with a promise. They seep down into my mind’s eye sending a shiver down my spine.
“Is that a promise, biker?” I question him, feeling heat pool around me, making me feel stronger than I am.
“I always keep my promises, little bird. Especially ones that can cause pain.”Then he turns on his dirty black leather boot and walks away. Leaving me there with a cold wind of sensual threats leading to an inky black torment.
Knowing that he can hurt me, doesn'tscare me half as much as it should. Knowing that he is out there watching me was far more terrifying than 81 and his promises.
Chapter Fourteen
81
This was a hard week. I knew it would hit me fast with a pain like no other.
I tried with everything I had to avoid the feeling, the memory and the knowing that it had been two years to the day since she made that one shattering decision to leave, that set us both on fire with flames so hot that I should have died along with her and our baby boy.
Two years since she was strung out on the junk she’d previously tried to kick. She had told me over and over again, with tears streaming down her face, stating with a force so fake that she was clean, but she never was.
She could never lose the sweet taste for it with him still feeding her like a strung-out whore that he liked to play with. He did it knowing well that it would ebb inside the walls of my mind like a spider laying a toxic web.
For three fucking weeks. I have walked inside a suffocating fog of knowing I would have to sit and feel today. Three weeks I had to fight my biggest demon. The drug.
She’s my hardest drug to kick.
That taste.
And no matter how many years went by, those three weeks would be the longest period of time I had experienced in my life. It was three weeks that I was in a coma for.
Three weeks that I had to sit awake inside a plastic bubble.
Three weeks in the ICU receiving care and covered in creams for burns that were as deep as the bone.
Three weeks out of that bubble before I could start therapy.
Three weeks of siting in a chair watching out of a hospital window while a woman dressed in a tight black pencil skirt and blood red blouse with killer heels that I thought over and over how I could stab myself in the temple with the heel and end all the fucking suffering.
But she just sat there tapping her heel and talked to me about how I felt, how waking up knowing they were gone affected me. How I felt about this and how it would define me and my life from here on out. Not as a victim though, I was not a victim. She was a victim to the world and the harsh fake love that it seeps out.
I was strong, she was strong once too. Not a victim, a warrior. But when you look at all that had occurred over a brutal lifetime there was only so much a human could take. Especially with demons at their back. I seemed to have survived that period of trauma, so the lady with the too tight clothing and killer heels had said to me while I sat and stared out the window with my skin still on fire.
It was always tingling with a charred burning that never ever left. It was a lifetime of hell packed inside a cage and I was pacing. I was clawing at the corners of my scarred and burnt mind looking for a weak spot so I could rip free and shed the broken man and return to the monster I was. Slip from this burnt, scarred, red and angry skin and slip back into the dangerous, calculated, mechanical man.
