“Final boarding call for Flight 2847 to LaGuardia. All remaining passengers need to board at this time.”
I should get up. I should walk through that gate, get on that plane, and go back to my life in New York. Back to Joffrey, back to my apartment in Brooklyn Heights, back to the familiar routine I’ve built for myself. Back to the safety of being Emma Armstrong, prima ballerina—not the MC president’s daughter who just got kidnapped and then fucked her self-appointed bodyguard in a clubhouse full of people whodefinitelyheard everything.
God. What was I thinking?
I wasn’t. That’s the problem. I was feeling too much, all at once, and Bones was there, and we’ve been circling each other for thirteen years, and it finally just . . . happened.
The sex wasn’t the mistake.
Running away while he was still sleeping probably was.
But I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t wake up at the clubhouse with everyone knowing—with my dad, Stone, knowing. With Lee ready to murder Bones on sight. I wasn’t ready to face the questions, the conversations, the truth. Bones tracked me for years. First with a GPS necklace. Then with a chip in my body. And I still let him put his mouth on my?—
No. Not thinking about that right now.
Right now, I need to get on this plane.
Except I can’t. I’m frozen.
This is just the kidnapping. Just trauma. My therapist would say it’s a normal response—the body recognizing danger and locking down to protect you. Airport equals where they took me. Plane equals no exits. No control.
That’s all this is.
It’s not about where the plane is headed. It’s not.
My phone is in my other hand. I bought it this morning at a gas station on the way to the airport—a cheap burner, because my regular phone was destroyed by the guys who . . . who took me. My stomach drops. My hands shake.
The only number I’ve typed in is the one I’ve had memorized since I was fifteen, when Bones made me repeat it back to him until I could say it in my sleep.
“Just in case,”he’d said.“You ever need me, you call that number. Day or night. Doesn’t matter where I am or what I’m doing. You call, I come.”
I was fifteen. He was sixteen. Just a scrappy kid hanging around the MC, trying to prove himself.
I’d come home for a couple of weeks during summer break from the National Dance Academy, desperate to let loose after months of strict diet and training. But Dad wouldn’t let me out of his sight unescorted. And since Bones was close to my age and had already shown he could take down grown men in a fistfight, he got assigned as my official shadow.
I was pissed about it then. I’m not sure I’ve ever really stopped being pissed about it.
But I always called him when I got in trouble. Even when it was just rescuing me from a bad date (twice), or bringing me homewhen I couldn’t remember which bar I’d stumbled into (more than that). He always came. And he always acted like it was no big deal, even when it clearly was—the time I sprained my ankle on a dare, the night I got blackout drunk in Vegas, yesterday when I was, you know, abducted at gunpoint.
Every time I’ve gotten myself into trouble over the years, Bones has shown up. Sometimes I wonder if I subconsciously seek it out—the bad dates, the questionable neighborhoods, the reckless choices—just to see if he’ll come.
Which is fucked up.
Because healwaysdoes.
Now I’m twenty-eight, he’s twenty-nine, and my thumb is hovering over the call button. Because apparently over a decade of complicated history and a fresh betrayal still aren’t enough to change the fact that when everything falls apart, he’s the first person I want.
I should be furious about that. Iamfurious about that.
He tracked me. For years. Put a chip in my body without my knowledge. Violated my trust in ways I’m still processing. And last night, after I found out, after I screamed at him, after everything—I still ended up in bed with him. Or technically on the floor. Then against the wall. Then?—
God, I’m an idiot.
But my thumb stays poised over the call button, and I can’t seem to make it move. Can’t seem to do anything except sit here having a panic attack while my flight boards without me. Staring at the number of a man who cares enough to track me across the country but not enough to just . . . stay occasionally.
Or maybe he cares too much. Maybe that’s the problem.
The phone feels heavy in my hand—heavy with the certainty that if I press call, he’ll answer.
