PROLOGUE
BETH STARED AT the face in the mirror—the barely recognizable face with desolate eyes, wet with tears, and six raised welts in the shape of a man’s palm and fingers.
The skin burned, with heat spreading out from the handprint like a brand. Her throat felt too tight to draw in air, and her chest too small to hold it. A tear slid off her jaw and hit the porcelain sink, then another, and she watched it like she was witnessing someone else fall apart. Someone else trying to process their bruised face and crumbling emotions.
Shame hit her hard as it always did, rushing over her in a wave of embarrassment that heated her skin to unbearable levels and made her want to disappear off the face of the planet. If she could crawl out of her own body and into someone else’s, she would.
She could still see sixteen-year-old Beth rolling her eyes so hard they nearly got stuck, arms crossed over her chest as Maverick and Zach flanked a nervous boy named Tyler on her parents’ front porch. Tyler had come to pick her up for a movie, just a movie, and they’d made him stand there for ten whole minutes answering questions about his grades, his car’s safety rating, and whether he understood that Beth had approximately forty uncles who owned shovels and knew how to dig holes. She’d called them ridiculous. Dramatic. Embarrassing. She’d told her dad if they kept this up, they were going to scare off every guy in town, and Copper had just smiled and said, “Good.”
That Beth, the one who’d stomped her foot and told Maverick he was being a psycho, felt like a stranger now. A girl from a movie she’d watched once and barely remembered. That Beth had no idea how lucky she was to have men who cared enough to be psychos, and who would never in a million years leave a handprint on a woman’s face.
All she wanted was to crawl, maybe sprint, back into their comforting embraces. To let her big, crazy, outlaw family wrap her up, shield her from her mistakes, and erase the last year like it was nothing more than a bad dream.
But she lived in reality.
Going home meant admitting something she was too ashamed to acknowledge, even to herself, for more than a few seconds at a time. Saying the words out loud would make this real, and she was barely holding it together as it was.
Some nights, the humiliation of her situation was so thick she choked on it as she lay there rigid and silent, listening for every change in Jason’s breathing, every hitch in his snore that might mean he was waking up. The sour smell of beer on his breath drifted across the pillow, mixing with the Irish Spring soap he used every night in the shower. She used to love that scent, but now it made her stomach turn. Now it meant danger.
She’d huddle into the fetal position as close to the edge of the bed as possible without falling off, her shoulder aching, her hip going numb against the mattress. She never rolled over, never adjusted, no matter how badly her body screamed for relief. Movement might brush against him. Movement might wake him.
Hitting the floor would wake him.
Jason didn’t like to be woken in the middle of the night.
She’d made that mistake exactly one time. Her ribs still ached when she thought too hard about it.
Worse than failing the men who’d shown her exactly what a good man should be was the way she’d let down the women. If the guys had been incredible, the women she’d spent her childhood worshiping had been perfect, and they were still perfect. Each one had overcome tremendous odds and found happiness with the MC and in their relationships, including her mother.
Her mom, Shell, was the most incredible woman Beth had ever met, no exaggeration.
When her mom was only a teenager, a man named Rusty raped her, resulting in her pregnancy with Beth. As if that wasn’t traumatic enough, Rusty, may he rot in hell, had been Copper’s brother. Copper, the man Shell had loved since before she knew what romantic love was. Her mom had spent years suffering in silence with a deep, unrequited love for a man she’d feared would never love her back if he discovered the truth.
Luckily, she’d been wrong. Copper was the best maneverto walk the planet. He fell hard for both Shell and Beth, marrying her mother and becoming the best father a girl could have asked for. Another person Beth had taken for granted. He was her father in every way that mattered. Beth couldn’t say her parents’ journey to each other had been an easy road, but they’d made it and had been joined at the hip for more than fifteen years. Never once, not even for a second, had Copper treated Beth as anything other than his daughter, full stop.
Throughout her life, Beth had witnessed not only healthy, enviable relationships but also people who maintained their individuality while being part of a tremendously close pairing. Everyone she’d grown up with was complete ‘couple goals.’
Why on earth had she turned her back and walked away from it all as though better existed somewhere in the world and she could find it? Was it young, dumb hubris, or did she have something fundamentally wrong inside her?
She wasn’t happy with her life and hadn’t been for a long time. The realization sat heavy in her chest, like a stone she couldn’t cough up.
“Yo, B, where the fuck’s the beer I bought last night?”
Right in the fridge, where you watched me put it yesterday, you piece of shit.
Her shoulders slumped, and her skin paled in the mirror. Even expecting it, the sound of his voice still made her muscles clench, and her hands tremble. She gripped the edge of the sink to still them. As much as she might want to, she’d never sass Jason out loud. Not unless she wanted a night of screaming, berating, and possibly another handprint on her cheek. Though when he hit her, the fighting typically ended. A few times, she’d been tempted to goad him into getting physical to stop the screaming.
Wow, that’s the saddest thought you’ve ever had.
This was what her life had become.
She’d need a mountain of therapy to undo the twisted mess this relationship had caused to her psyche. Of course, she’d have to attend therapy first, and that meant admitting out loud that she had a serious problem. That she was the kind of woman who stayed.
For the past week, a statistic she’d stumbled across in some magazine at the dentist’s office had been eating her alive. On average, women went back to their abusers seven times before finally leaving for good.
Seven times.
She’d done the math on herself more times than she could count. Had she already ‘left’ when she’d slept at Megan’s for three days after Jason shoved her into the wall? Did it count as leaving if she’d only thought about it,really, seriously thought about it,while he was at work? How many of her seven had she already used up?
