CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Dylan
He wasn’t dead.
He couldn’t be dead.
Not like this.
Not before I got to tell him that the shivery feeling I was getting around him—I was pretty sure that was something a lot like love.
I could barely even focus on the hands grabbing me, bruising into me, as I was dragged into the clubhouse.
All I could see was Colter with a belt around his throat, the way his face had gone red, how his eyes were huge and bloodshot. How he (the giant, hulking, strong-as-fuck man he was) got dragged backward by someone else.
He couldn’t be dead.
I wouldn’t accept that possible reality.
I was so focused on him that I barely even clocked the clubhouse as I was dragged through it.
It was the same as I remembered.
Dark.
Furnished in leather.
It had that same funk I remembered from my childhood: old liquor, unwashed bodies, the stink of a garbage pail that was several days past needing to be taken out.
But there wasn’t much time to take it in as I was pulled through.
Not to a basement.
The building was slab-on-grade because, I imagined, costs and the worries about the risk of basements with earthquakes.
But there was a small room attached to the back.
Small.
Windowless.
Reinforced with cinderblock walls.
A prison of sorts.
I knew from hearing the screams of men locked inside and desperate for escape that there was no way out of it but through the door.
So as I was pulled through, my fight came back with a fury.
Because I wasn’t one of those men.
Who were beaten, sure. Killed eventually.
I was a woman.
And there were far worse things these men would do to me before they killed me.
If that door closed with me inside it, even with the knife scratching down my leg, I knew it wouldn’t be long before I was begging for death.
