Page 28 of Pain

To my surprise, though, she got up and walked toward me, her face full of pain and fear, and stopped right in front of me. She didn’t look angry. She didn’t even look like she blamed me.

“They’ve already left,” she whispered. “If... if you were looking for Knight.”

I opened my mouth but found that I didn’t have anything to say to that. Instead, I pulled her into a rough hug, letting her press her wet face against my neck as she cried quietly. And everything I’d thought earlier, about how I didn’t know Mandy and didn’t know how she’d react to such a thing, flew right out the window.

It turned out I knew everything I needed to know about her.

And it turned out that I felt the exact same way she did right now. Our men were out there on the road, ready to put their lives on the line. While we were left behind, with nothing to do but wait.

Wait and, it turned out, bond over the pain of not knowing what was going to happen.

CHAPTER 13

KNIGHT

It took us an hour to get to Devil’s headquarters.

An hour too long, in my opinion. I’d left our own clubhouse exhausted from a night of very little sleep but feeling like I knew exactly what I was doing. I had the smell of Saraya on my skin and the memory of her body pressed against me. The sound of her soft breathing in my ears, the feel of her eyes meeting mine in the semi-darkness of the room.

The memory of her asking me to stay.

The truth was Devil had been a thorn in my side for far too long. He’d been asking for this fight for longer than I cared to remember, and as far as the club felt, he had it coming. Having him out of our way would open up a number of possibilities and end the constant dread of an attack from just over the county border.

But when it came right down to it, I was starting this fight for Saraya, not the club. I was starting it because the man we were about to go challenge had done the unspeakable. He’d told a girl he loved her—or at least I presumed he had—and then turned on her and beat her to within an inch of her life. He’d let his entire crew use her and beat her in the same way, and as far as I was concerned, there was no excuse for that.

You didn’t abuse a woman and then try to keep her so you could keep doing it. But he’d done that to Saraya like she deserved the punishment or something, and then she’d fallen onto the sidewalk at my feet and looked up at me with those green eyes of hers and something had twisted inside of me.

Something that twisted even further every time I saw her.

That something had snapped into place last night, somewhere between her asking me to stay and me waking up this morning and creeping out of her bedroom, hoping no one was there to see me. The twisting, creaking something that she’d opened up inside of me had suddenly...

Hell, I didn’t even know what to call it. All I knew was that I’d felt broken, and now I somehow felt whole again, like she was there to fill a space I’d always had inside of me.

And thoughts like those were exactly why this long ride was a problem. If we’d gotten to Devil’s more quickly, I wouldn’t be riding along the highway having such bizarre thoughts just because some girl had let me share her bed for a night.

We didn’t even have sex, for fuck’s sake, and I was acting like some lovestruck fool over the girl.

By the time we pulled into the driveway of the Devil’s Steed clubhouse, I was wound so tightly I thought I might come apart at the seams and soon. The action of pulling into enemy territory, though, sharpened my focus immediately. I didn’t have time to dream about Saraya right now.

I had business to attend to, and that business might just cost me my life, or the lives of my men.

This was a building I’d never been to before, and for good reason. It was where the enemy lived. A place that almost inevitably meant an attempt on my life.

This was a place I’d spent years avoiding like the plague.

Now that I was here, I saw that it was less a clubhouse and more an entire compound, which made sense as it sat out in the middle of the Arizona desert. Our clubhouse was in a well-populated town, which meant we had everything at our beck and call, from restaurants to gas stations. Here, they were so isolated that they’d had to build everything for themselves just to have it within easy reach. It had taken a ton of money, and that had been Devil’s reason for reaching into the less-legal aspects of transporting and selling.

Drugs and guns. I grunted. We ran guns when the opportunity came up, but we’d never dealt in drugs. I’d forbidden it. Guns were dangerous. Drugs got you killed—or hooked, which was just as bad.

Still, it had evidently given Devil quite a bit of money to play with. They had what looked like a small village out here. A grocery store, a gas station, and even something that might have been a small chapel. That made me snort again, because there was no way any of his guys went to church. Maybe some of the women did, though.

Women.

Saraya.

Fuck, she’d been stuck out here on her own for who knew how long. This was one of the places he’d kept her. She’d been in the middle of nowhere with no way to escape. No place to run. No one around to hear her when she screamed.

Well. No one who cared to help, at least, if the rest of the crew was in on the beating.