Lucky pushed off his seat. “I plan on having children, or at least being a huge whore until I’m eighty, so I’m leaving before Cade can do anything about that,” he muttered, then scuttled off.
Unexpectedly, Cade didn’t even glance at Lucky.
“You talked to Crawford today,” he bit out.
I tilted my head, something pooling in my stomach at the knowledge in his gaze. “Um, he was wandering around the halls. It’s a small place, so we conversed. It’s a job hazard.” I went for flippant, casual. “Plus, how would you even know?” I asked with narrowed eyes.
Even though he was twenty-one now—just like Luke—Cade had dropped out and started prospecting the moment he turned sixteen. Not exactly club policy, but an exception was made for the children of founding members and adopted children of current presidents.
Hence the chilled beer sitting in front of me.
Not that Cade would let anyone walk away with all their teeth if they insinuated that Steg was anything more than his president. He hated him with something I didn’t understand. Steg was the only father I knew.
“Are you spying on me?” I accused.
He didn’t blink at the sharpness in my tone. “I’m looking out for you.”
“I can look out for myself,” I snapped, crossing my arms.
Cade raised a brow, silently reminding me of all the trouble I’d landed in so far. Most of which I’d gotten out of without help. “Not when the club has shit going down. And not when you’re talking to the enemy.”
I scoffed. “Luke is hardly an enemy, Cade. Get out of the Middle Ages. Just because you don’t like him doesn’t mean I can’t talk to him. You know, being polite. I know they don’t teach manners in caveman biker badass schools—you’re too busy specializing in grunts, death stares, and waterboarding.”
He didn’t like my humor. “You’re not polite to Crawford, Rosie.”
I rolled my eyes, hopping off my stool and intending to saunter off and get the last of the instructions off Lucky. “Whatever.”
Cade clutched my arm, stopping me from moving, the grip bordering on painful. That in itself shocked me enough to freeze.
Cade was what could be considered a violent man. A fully patched member of the Sons of Templar MC was required to be a violent man.
But never had he put his hands on me. Never.
He yanked me forward so his gaze was all I could see. “I know you like to push the limits, Roe. Break the rules. Trouble is your thing. I get it. Scares the shit out of me since your version of trouble is blowin’ up cars, not sneaking a beer.” He eyed the one at the bar. “But fuck, I approve. It’s you. I’ll never stop you from being you. But this is the limit you aren’t pushing. One rule you can’t break. Crawford is the law.”
“He’s not, Cade. He’s just Luke,” I said on a whisper.
“No he’s not, and you know that,” he clipped. “The second he put that uniform on, he was comin’ for the club. Ain’t worried about that. We can handle that. But anyone who comes for our family, they’re an enemy. We don’t talk to the enemy, we don’t smile, and we don’t be fuckin’ polite. A member would be excommunicated if they were lucky, Roe. Not many lucky Sons.” He gave me a long look. “You get spoiled here. We love you. Steg loves you. You’re not his blood but he considers you so. But even blood won’t matter if he sees betrayal. And that’s what he’ll consider it. It’s my job, first and foremost, to protect you, Roe. I’ll die doing it if I have to, but I can’t protect you from the club. You need to know this isn’t teenage girl bullshit. This is serious.”
Every word had a taste to it. Bitter and ugly and it seeped into my bones. Because he knew somehow. My secret. The one I’d harbored since that day ten years before.
The Luke secret.
And though I wasn’t your normal teenage girl, I still had teenage girl fantasies. Like somehow Luke would see through everything and see me. And it would work.
But here it was, brutal, ugly, and heartbreaking evidence from the one man who would rather die than hurt me. But that’s what his words did, each of them little tiny slices in my fantasy, slices that were making my eyes water they were that painful.
He shook me a little, his eyes softening. “Tell me you get me, Roe.”
I stared at him. At the realization that the life that was meant to revolve around freedom from the prison of society was just another cage. One I would never escape because I loved my captors more than life.
“Yeah, Cade. I get you.”
Present Day
Things after Gage finally lowered his commandeered gun and organized chaos resumed—Gage punched Lucian in the nose, of course, and then the rest of the team had to restrain Lucian—were tense.
Gage’s exit was welcomed by everyone except me, especially Lucian.
He slammed the door of my tiny bedroom so hard, I swore the rickety hotel we were staying in shook. I reasoned anything more than a stiff breeze would likely cave in the roof, though the roof coming down on me wouldn’t exactly be the worst thing in the world right now.
“What the fuck was that, Rosie?” he yelled. “More accurately, who the fuck was that?”
I peeled the bottom of my shirt upward to discard the dirty and bloodstained tank on the floor. “An old friend, like I said,” I replied, not reacting to Lucian’s temper. He was somewhat of a hothead.
He snatched my wrist and wrenched me around to face him. “I need more information than an old friend,” he demanded. “Did you used to fuck?” His words, like Lucian himself, were harsh and uncouth.
He could be kind when he wanted to be, or when he needed to be, but he just wasn’t wired for proper human emotion. Which made him perfect for the job and perfect for me. You had to be a little—or more likely a lot—broken to survive this life. And even then it wasn’t a guarantee. In the six months I’d been here, I’d seen the worst of humanity I’d ever experienced. My thirty years living with an outlaw motorcycle club was nothing compared to this.
Sure, my family killed people. But not without cause. It was a twisted code, but it was underpinned by an equally twisted sense of humanity.
That didn’t exist here. Human life worked as a currency. It was a dangerous thing when death became a part of life, made it all too easy to pull the trigger. That should never be easy. No matter how many times you did it.
I’d already made peace with the demons I’d add to my collection from the two lives I’d ended today. It was when you stopped collecting demons that you transitioned into the real monster. I didn’t know whether I was looking forward to or dreading that.
Maybe I was already a monster.
I met Lucian’s empty eyes and laughed. “No, I haven’t fucked Gage. Like I said, he’s an old friend. That’s all I’m telling you, and that’s all you need to know. We don’t do personal, remember?”
He yanked me closer. “I sleep in your fuckin’ bed. That’s pretty personal.”
I didn’t flinch. “No. We fuck. Both for our own reasons that have nothing to do with each other. I’d say that’s the furthest from personal you can get. And the second it becomes different for you, you can sleep somewhere else.”
I wrenched my hands from his grasp to step toward my sleep aid—a half-full whisky bottle. The murky liquid sloshed into the chipped glass sitting on the table beside my bed. I downed the liquid quickly so I couldn’t taste how warm and shitty it was. Once I swallowed, I turned to eye Lucian, who was still glaring at me. “You touch or talk to me like that again, I’ll put my knife through your temple,” I promised, slamming the bathroom door shut.
It wasn’t empty either.
None of my threats were. Not anymore.
Killing was like tattoos: done once, it’s painful and scary, but afterward it’s almost addicting. The scars of it lasted the same amount of time as tattoos too. In other words, forever.
Just like heartbreak.
I couldn’t figure out if it’d started or ended that day in the halls of Amber High fifteen y
ears back. And here, in the middle of Venezuela, in the middle of an argument with another man, in the middle of an escape from these very memories, they came back to me, the halls as vivid and stark as they were had it happened yesterday.
I remembered it. Luke’s fresh uniform, his unlined face. The butterflies smashing at the bottom of my stomach. Laurie’s gentle romantic hope. Cade’s harsh and inescapable reality.
My inescapable reality.
I surfaced from my memories with an audible gasp, clutching at the sides of the dirty sink in my bathroom. My head sank onto my chest that was rapidly rising and falling as if I’d run a marathon. And I had, of sorts. A marathon through the years, visiting my past failures.
My chocolate hair fell around me like a waterfall. I pushed it away and yanked my head up, regarding the stranger in the mirror. She blinked her long lashes at me, cheeks flushed and eyes somehow empty and full at the same time. Without makeup, she looked younger, almost like that girl in high school. But her features were sharper, face almost gaunt due to the unintentional diet she’d been on. It was hard to enjoy crappy food when corpses routinely filled your vision as you chewed.
Corpses she’d created.
She blinked again, that time a lone tear trickling down her face.
I wiped at my cheek furiously, both me and the girl in the mirror glaring at each other, accusing each other of that fatal weakness.
“Get your shit together,” I ordered her.
I stared hard. The mop of hair was the last of what remained of who I had been before. A mess of chocolate curls, sprinkled with honey highlights. Why was I clinging to it?
He looked at me, then lifted his arm to push away some errant hair that was masking my face, as it tended to do at this length.
I held my breath as he did so.
He tucked it behind my ear, pausing at the contact between our skin, eyes locked on mine. Seemingly reluctantly, his hand went back down to his side.
“Like your hair long,” he murmured.
Once again, I yanked myself out of the shark-filled waters known as my memories much the way a lifeguard would snatch a drowning woman from the unyielding ocean.
He liked it long.
My gaze landed on a pair of scissors discarded on the sink.
I didn’t hesitate. I snatched them and began hacking at my locks.
Chapter Four
Rosie
Age Seventeen
I couldn’t put my finger on when things changed for Luke and me. Like really changed. Morphed from a handful of almosts. Almost glances, almost declarations. All the almosts added up to nothing.
Because almost didn’t mean shit.
Almost dying? You’re still living.
Almost living? You’re still dead.
Almost pregnant? You’re not pregnant, go have a cocktail.
I grew into a woman. He noticed. I knew he noticed because I grew into a woman, and a woman knew when a man noticed her.
Once—a time I’d never told someone about, not even Lucy—he caught me and some guy making out in his car on the outskirts of Amber. We’d met at a party, and he didn’t know my family, which meant I had a real chance at finally giving up my V-card. My brother’s promise to kill anyone who touched me seemed to stick with any fuckable guy in town. I took what I could get.
Things were getting to almost sex when a blinding light illuminated the cheap and cliché act. When the door opened and the half-naked guy was wrenched out of the car with a violence I was all too familiar with, I was sure it was my brother. I scrambled out of the back seat, forgetting I was just in a bra and unbuttoned cutoffs.
“Hey! Do you have to—”
But it wasn’t a leather cut and a bike. It was a uniform and a cruiser.
And Luke, beating the shit out of my would-be deflowerer.
The cop, Luke, beating up a minor.
“You”—thump—“little”—thump—“piece”—thump—“of shit,” he grunted, punches enunciating his words.
“Luke.” My voice was soft, though it punctured his violence as if I’d screamed it.
In the headlights of his cruiser, I saw him drop the half-naked teenager to the ground, looking from him to his hands, dazed, as if he was wondering what they’d done when Luke had left the building.
Andy scrambled up, bleeding from the nose. “She was consenting, I swear,” he babbled through the blood. He pointed at me. “Babe, tell him you wanted—”
“Get the fuck in your car and drive off,” Luke growled.
He scrambled to do exactly that.
I was gaping at Luke, all traces of the night’s shots wearing off to see him in stark reality. Though being sober didn’t provide any more sense of logic to the situation.
His eyes moved from his fists to me—more accurately, my exposed chest. “Get your shirt on and get in the car,” he ordered, voice so rough it was barely recognizable.
I blinked. “Luke—”
“Now!” he yelled.
I jumped, as if I wasn’t used to people shouting at me, as if they didn’t do it on an almost daily basis. They did. Luke? Never.
I snatched my shirt, yanking it over my head, most likely ruining whatever was left of my hair and makeup. Andy had already started the car and was regarding me with panic, as if he was considering driving away even though the door was open and half of me was still in the car.
“Get in, Rosie, before he decides to lock us up,” he demanded.
I was about to do as he instructed when the savage version of Luke stopped me.
“Not with him. With me,” he ordered.
I froze for a split second, fear and joy mixing in my stomach even worse than tequila and red wine.
On autopilot, I leaned back and shut the car door. Andy didn’t hesitate in roaring backward the second I did so, blowing up dust with his hasty escape. Good thing I didn’t give him anything I couldn’t get back. Guy was a douche.
“Not a word. In the car,” Luke said, reading my mind as I glanced up at him to ask him what the fuck was going on.
I blinked again. “Front or back?”
He ran his hand through his hair in frustration. With himself or me, I wasn’t quite sure. “Jesus, Rosie, the front.”
I quickly darted to the door he opened. It slammed as soon as my butt was in the seat. I regarded the radio and police paraphernalia like an alien on a foreign planet.
The air thickened as Luke got in and slammed his door shut. The moment of silence between us, the first time we’d been truly alone, was both beautiful and terrifying.
“Seat belt,” he barked.
I glanced at him. “Seriously?”
He clenched the steering wheel in answer.
I did as requested, something extremely rare for me.
He reversed out of what was known as the second-best make-out spot in Amber. I didn’t go to the first because it was closer to town and had a higher chance of getting me caught by whoever Cade had gotten to stalk me tonight.
We didn’t speak for the longest time, the car too full of quiet for one of us to add words to it. Too full of questions and answers and almosts. The radio wasn’t even on: there wasn’t the space for music.
I watched Luke’s profile the entire drive through Amber, the lights illuminating his stiff jaw and granite features every now and then. I didn’t even realize he was taking me right back to the party before we were almost there.
“Why are you taking me back here?” I asked, tearing through the air in the car.
He didn’t answer.
He didn’t need to.
Of course he couldn’t exactly drop me off at home, saying, “I just beat the shit out of the guy sucking face with Rosie and stopped her from having her first time in the back of a car with a douchebag like so many other girls.”
If it was anyone else, they literally could’ve dropped me off and said that, verbatim. They would’ve gotten a pat on the back and a beer for their troubles.
Anyone but Luke.
> There would be no pat, certainly no beer. Just a lot of fucking questions as to why the man who considers the law to be set in stone would so easily break it for the first daughter of a club he was intent on bringing down.
That’s what I was asking myself. Too afraid to ask him. Too afraid of the answer.
He pulled over a block away from the party. Even through the closed windows, I could hear the thumping base and screams of inebriated girls.
“Breakin’ this up in fifteen. You’ll want to move on before then,” he said, his voice both rough and flat at the same time as he stared straight ahead.
“Why?” I whispered, deciding to conquer my fear.
He wrenched his eyes to me. “Because you’re better than that, Rosie.”
It was meant to be soft, but it hit me like a punch in the chest. I unbuckled my seat belt, glaring. “Thing is, Luke, I’m not,” I spat. “You’re so intent on making me good, even if it’s just in your mind. Especially if it’s just in your mind. Maybe that makes you sleep better at night, I don’t know, but stop trying to make me into something I’m not so it suits you better. It’s fucking bullshit!” I narrowed my eyes at him as well as I could in the dim light. “I’ll tell you a secret. My brother and all those men with rap sheets as long as my Sephora receipt… all those criminals. Those outlaws?” I paused, letting the venom in my voice penetrate. “They’ve got nothing on me.”
I spat the last part out, jamming all my bitterness and sadness into it, before jumping out of the car and slamming the door shut. I didn’t look back as I stomped back to the party, where I would drink five more tequila shots and wouldn’t be gone by the time the cops showed up.
Luke was not among them.
I hated that I let myself wait long enough to look for him.
To hope.
Hope was deadly.
Rosie
Present Day
Four months passed after Gage left and things went back to whatever version of normal I’d constructed. Not that I’d ever, since birth, experienced something close to normal. I had convinced myself that it was good, great. The only thing worse than death was normalcy. Nine-to-five, white picket fence, two-point-five kids and a golden retriever.