“He was worse. He hadn’t bathed in weeks. At least, it didn’t look like it and it didn’t smell like it. He was out of his mind. His eyes were totally vacant. I could tell he was on something because his pupils were totally blown. He told methat he was going to hurt me. That if I didn’t say it was you, then he would kill you. He promised me he wouldn’t kill me. Just leave enough bruises that it would be believable and that he’d drop me off at The Riders clubhouse after so that Steel and Edge could find me. I didn’t know what else to do. I did what he told me to do. I didn’t even know who he was. I didn’t know that my father had double-crossed him or that he had a vendetta against The Riders or that he’d betrayed his own club to my father before you both joined forces and they became a second chapter. I didn’t know any of it. All I knew was that some deranged lunatic beat me and then dumped me. I believed him when he said he would kill you.”
I want to say something else, something to ease the terrible pain in those wicked, dark eyes, but I have no way to untangle the terrible puzzle of my thoughts. They’re like a knot inside my head, inside my heart, inside my throat, a knot that is never going to be untangled.
His eyes scrape like something abrasive over my skin. They trace the outline of my body, leaving nothing unscathed, until I feel raw and aching like he’s physically wounded me, like he’s taken sandpaper to my skin and scrubbed until I’m nothing but messy pulp on the outside. Like maybe he’s done the same thing to my insides, too.
Finally, those burning coals that are his eyes come to rest on my face. His features are hard, without softness or mercy. The late evening light drifts through the blinds at the windows at just the right angles to illuminate the hard set of his jaw, the sharp cheekbones, the strong brow. He looks every inch the wicked, dangerous biker that I know he is.
“You could have told someone,” he finally grinds out, and I can see what the words cost him. He wants to condemn me anyway he can, like he has for the past year. In this story, I’m the villain, and he doesn’t want that to change. “You could have told Steel the truth. Edge. Me. Someone. Anyone.”
Anger, rage at my own helplessness, wells up in me. I feel the same fear I did that night, like a tide sucking me under, plunging me into blackness and despair. I didn’t see a way out. Even after it was over and I was free, I was still little more than a prisoner. If only Gage knew what came before that, so many years before, how it’s haunted me and dogged me my entire life.
“How did I know? How did I know who I could trust? I didn’t know any of you. I’d only met you that morning. Steel, Edge, all of them. I could have turned to my father, but he showed me such bland indifference my entire life, I honestly didn’t think he’d help me. Or even believe me. He’d just think that I was making everything up to try and get the hell out of a marriage that I never wanted. That’s what everyone thought. They knew I was lying, but they all thought that it was for some self-serving purpose.”
Gage’s brows knit together harder, like someone stitched a string through the center of his forehead and pulled hard, until it collapsed on itself.
“Even after Tracker took your sisters. After it was all over and your father put a bullet in his chest, after he survived it and Steel and Edge took him and got him help, got him off the drugs that made him absolutely fucking deranged, even after everyone knew that it was him, for years after, you never bothered to come back. You never offered your side of the truth. You never openly told any of my brothers that it wasn’t me who did that to you.”
“They knew! My sisters said that they knew. Tracker confessed everything. You already know all of this!”
“They might know, but it’s not the same.Imight know, but it’s not the same. You should have come back here. By staying gone, you made it look like I was guilty anyway. Maybe not of hitting you, but of something else. Of everything else. Every single one of my brothers knows that I wasn’t man enough or good enough for you to even bother getting to know. You never came back. You didn’t bother to think about how I felt for the past year and now you’re here, asking me to sign papers that set you free. Free from me. A man you don’t even know the first thing about. A man you never wanted. Never bothered with. Probably never thought of once in all these years.”
I’m slayed by the pain dripping from every word. By Gage’s horrible dark eyes which pierce right through me. By the way his features harden, closing himself off from me after he flayed himself bare right before me with words that sear and scar me from the inside out. He tenses suddenly, leaning forward, his hands on his knees, a picture of casualness that I know he’s not.
I want to disappear again. Shame washes over me, coating me like a thick, stifling blanket.
I lift my eyes and stare back at the stranger in front of me. I’ll never be enough. I’ve always known it. I knew it the day I was forced to marry. That my new husband would find me wanting in every way. That he’d find out soon enough that I was little more than a shell. That I’d never be the wife he probably deserved.
Running was the only option. Even if Tracker hadn’t found me, taken me, beat me, forced me to lie to try and bring my father and The Riders to war so he’d finally have his revenge against them both, I know I would have gone. Not because I needed to, but because Gage deserved to have a good life. Awhole life. A whole wife and someone who could truly be a partner.
“I thought about you,” I whisper, before I can stop myself. The words float around us, shimmering, dancing in the air, unseen, but felt by both of us.
“Before or after you fucked other men?”
The question is so crude, so harsh, it takes me completely by surprise. I let out a pained gasp and my lips part to deny it, but no sound comes out.
“You humiliated me. You caused me unspeakable pain. You’ve never once reached out to try and repair the damage. You came into my life like a virus. You’ve plagued me for one year—”
I stand, unable to hear anymore of it. A shudder rips through me, tearing at my lungs, my chest, my throat, and I have to convince myself it’s not a sob. “If you hate me so much, if I’m a virus for you, a parasite, a plague, then sign the papers and I’ll be gone.”
I tear my bag up from the floor and thrust my hand in, exhaling in broken relief when my fingers tangle with the crisp pages. I tear them from my tote and shove them into the space in front of me, as if it’s enough to shield me from the wrath rolling off the dangerous man coiled on the couch like a snake ready to spring and devour me whole.
He stares at me, unblinking. The air thickens between us, becoming charged, like a telephone pole just fell on the house and the live, split wires are snapping and humming and sparking in the room.
Something heady and ridiculous, something that isn’t even close to fear, unfurls in the pit of my stomach. Itblooms like a flower spreading its petals for the first time. I’ve felt it before. With him. That unknown sensation that is so disconcerting and confusing.
I watch as Gage rises to his full height. He’s impressive. His body a work of masculine art. His pulse point hums at his throat even as his jaw clenches with an audible tick. I watch in terrible fascination as a vein throbs in his forehead, pulsing with life, just below the skin. My eyes flick back down to his neck and my mouth floods with saliva. I tell myself it’s just a reaction of fear, that seeing him before me, standing so close, is just doing strange things to my fight or flight response. I tell myself it’s not because I want to flick my tongue over that pulsing point at his neck and taste his skin. I imagine inhaling his spicy scent there, at the juncture of his neck and shoulder. Sinking my teeth into his flesh just to find out how velvety and firm it is, in turns.
Gage’s eyes flash to my face like he knows what I’m thinking, and my body heats up with the new fires of mortification.
I haven’t wanted to touch a man for a very long time. Not sincehim.
I thrust the papers out again, rustling them loudly to distract both of us. I force myself to meet his eyes and find them dark and storm tossed, an angry swollen sea in the black of night ready to drown me.
His jaw clenches hard again, the tick audible as he grinds his teeth into the silence. He steps towards me, filling up all the space in the room, sucking the oxygen right out of it. He’s huge and powerful as he looms over me and fear climbs up the base of my spine. It spreads its cold fingers over my back until it claws its way at my shoulders, threatening to jump into my chest.
I won’t give way to the panic. I stand my ground and keep my eyes locked on his, even when his massive palm snakes out to snatch the papers from me. I should have known better to hope that this would work, because he crumples them without a second thought. The pages litter the floor as they fall from his hands and still, he holds me rapt, drowning in his black, soulless gaze.
I suck in a deep breath to try and steady myself, but instead, I get a lungful of his spicy, leathery, masculine scent and my head swims. My stomach tightens and this time, oddly, it’s not from fear.
