I sit on the bed and press the phone against my chest and feel his voice still vibrating in my ear—Bex, what’s wrong—and I think about what Shadow said. He doesn’t do anything halfway.
And I think about the sound Lee made when he kissed me. That broken, hungry sound.
And I think about the first ring.
He answered on the first ring.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Banshee
I haven’t slept in four days.
Not properly. Not the deep, black, dreamless kind that resets you.
I’ve been getting the other kind—the shallow, fitful surface sleep where your body shuts down for an hour and your brain keeps running, replaying the same footage on a loop until you wake up with your jaw clenched and your sheets twisted and the taste of her mouth still on your lips.
I can’t stop feeling it.
The kiss.
Her body against mine in that stall, the rain overhead, the horse trembling in the corner.
Her hand fisted in my shirt.
Her mouth opening under mine.
The sound I made—that sound, the one that came from somewhere I’d bricked over years ago, the sound of a man coming back to life against his will.
The only thing I can do to occupy my mind is ride, so I’ve been riding at night.
After midnight, when the compound is dark and the brothers are asleep and no one’s going to ask where I’m going.
No room for guilt.
No room for the memory of her hip under my hand.
No room for the way her dark eyes looked when I pulled away and the word she threw at me—I know exactly who she was, Lee—which hit harder than a fist because she was right.
She was right about everything.
The roads I ride are the same roads that killed Rose.
I know this.
I know that taking curves at speed on a motorcycle after midnight on rural Texas highways is not the behavior of a man who’s processing his emotions in a healthy way.
Shadow would kill me if he knew. Phantom would pull my patch.
The irony of the Road Captain being reckless with roads is not lost on me.
But the roads don’t scare me. Nothing about dying scares me.
What scares me is the thing that happened in that stall—the moment my body overrode all of the walls I’ve built and I kissed Bex like she was oxygen and I was drowning.
What scares me is that I can’t undo it.
Can’t unfeel her under my hands.
