"You should have told me." He looks down at me, and the deadness in his eyes is worse than hatred. Hatred at least contains heat, and heat means you still matter. This is something past that. Something sealed and final. "The second you remembered, you should have told me. Instead you—" His jaw tightens. "Instead you let me fall in love with you. Let me share you with—" A laugh that has no humor in it at all. "Christ, what a joke."
"It wasn't a joke." My voice breaks open. "Everything between us was real. It is real. I love you. I love all of you. That'swhyI was so scared to?—"
"Get out," he says.
The words are soft. That's what I'll remember later — how soft they were. Like he no longer needed to put force behind them, because they were already done.
"Xavier—"
"Get. Out." Each word a door closing. Each word irrevocable. "Out of this clubhouse. Out of the safe house. Out of my life. I don't want to see you. Don't want to hear from you." He stops. Swallows something that tries to surface in him and forces it back down with visible effort. "Just go. Please. Before I say something I can't take back."
Before I say something I can't take back.As though what he has already said can be taken back. As though I am not already shattered on this floor.
"Zay—" He doesn't wait for Zay to speak. "If you defend her right now, I will never forgive you." He still won't look at any of us — looking at his own hands where they grip the chair, at the floor, at the middle distance. Anywhere but me. "She killed Marcus. She lied about it. Those are facts. Everything else — everything wehad— was built on those lies. So it's over. She goes. That's not up for debate."
"I'm the president of this club," he says finally, into my silence. "I absolutely can. And I am. You're out. Officially. No longer affiliated with the Raiders. No longer welcome on any club property." He lifts his eyes then — just for a second, just enough to slay me completely. "No longer mine."
The clubhouse is dead quiet.
I stand on legs that don't feel like mine. I look at Zay — who looks like a man watching a car crash he can't stop, devastated in a way that holds him perfectly still. I look at Asher — whose jaw could cut glass, whose silence is a held back dam. I look at Xavier one last time, and he is looking somewhere else, somewhere I cannot follow.
"I'm sorry," I say, to all of them, to none of them, to the room. "I'm so sorry."
I walk through the crowd and they part for me, but the parting feels nothing like deference. I hear the words as I pass —murderer, liar, traitor— spat in low voices, not even bothering to be quiet. They're not wrong, and that's the thing that makes it hardest to keep walking. That they're not wrong.
The afternoon air outside hits me cold and wrong after the packed heat of the clubhouse. I make it around the side of the building before my legs quit entirely, and then I'm sliding down the concrete wall to sit on the ground with my knees pulled in, and I let everything inside me collapse.
I cry with my whole body — the kind of crying that is less about tears and more about the physical release of something enormous that has been lodged in the chest too long. Grief for the club, yes. For the life I'd built inside it. But mostly for them — for the three men who looked at me like I mattered, like I was worth staying for, before I proved I'd been lying from the beginning.
I can still hear shouting inside. I recognize Xavier's voice through the walls, raised again. Others arguing back. The specific chaos of seventy people who have just had their worldview detonated.
It doesn't matter now. None of the words matter.
I don't know how long I've been sitting on the concrete when the door opens and Asher steps out. He doesn't call for me, doesn't scan the parking lot — he looks directly at the wall where I am crumpled, like he already knew exactly where I'd be.
He crouches down to my eye level. "Is that what Talia knew?" he asks quietly. No preamble. No softening.
"Yes."
He nods, processing it with the quiet efficiency that is entirely, specifically him. "That's why she stayed with the Vipers. She has leverage on you."
"Yes."
"And you've been carrying this alone for weeks."
"Yes." My voice splinters on the word. "I didn't know how to tell you. Any of you. I was so scared?—"
"Of this," he finishes, and the gesture he makes back toward the clubhouse contains multitudes. "Of exactly what just happened."
"Yeah."
The silence between us has texture — it isn't comfortable, but it isn't cruel either. It's just real, which is more than I deserve.
"For what it's worth," he says finally, "I believe you. About the self-defense. Marcus was—" He stops, and I watch something move through his face, some old knowledge finally allowed to be said aloud. "He was a predator. Everyone knew it. Xavier just couldn't afford to see it."
"Doesn't matter now." I say it flat, because the flatness is the only way I can say it without breaking again. "It's over. He'll never forgive me."
"He might. Given time."
