Total pages in book: 162
Estimated words: 156796 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 784(@200wpm)___ 627(@250wpm)___ 523(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 156796 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 784(@200wpm)___ 627(@250wpm)___ 523(@300wpm)
“I’m not hiding behind anything,” I whispered, my voice dry and croaky, my heart a hammer at my chest. Not just because of the dangerous erotic glint in his eyes, not his proximity, his scent, his presence yanking me in.
No, it was how he saw into me in a way that terrified me more than his soulless eyes, his muscles, his ink, his leather cut ever could.
“Oh, baby, everyone’s hiding behind something,” he murmured. “You’re just doin’ it better than most. And you’re hiding a fuck of a lot more than most.”
His eyes swam with something I recognized. A darkness. A sorrow.
“So are you,” I said, my eyes searching his. “What are you hiding, Gage?”
I didn’t know what possessed me to be so brash, so brazen as to taunt the man in front of me who could smash the glasses he was so carefully caressing.
Just like he could break the body he’d been so hungrily gazing at. The body that sang for him to do with it what he wished. Even if that meant becoming more broken than I already was.
His body jerked with my words, his eyes glazing over, shuttering. It was an instant and unnerving process, to see everything in him shut down, harden, freeze into something cold. Foreign.
A killer.
He stepped back the moment I shivered with fear. And something more than fear. A depraved kind of excitement. A little part of me that needed that cold and cruelness. That wanted to see more of it.
“Oh you’ll find out what I’m hiding soon enough, Will,” he clipped, the words structured like a threat. “And it’ll be too late. For the both of us.”
He didn’t say anything, didn’t move for a handful of moments, the words hanging in the air, tattooing themselves into it with a promise.
“And don’t think I haven’t forgotten what I said I was gonna do to you if you walked anywhere you didn’t need to,” he said, his voice melting slightly. “I always keep my promises, Will. Especially ones that cause pain.”
Then he turned on his heel and walked away.
Gage
“Okay, smoke break,” Brock said as he pushed up from his chair on Cade’s right at the table.
“Thank fuck,” Lucky muttered, following suit.
The shithead didn’t smoke, but he also had his woman waiting for him outside. Gage knew because he’d arrived at the clubhouse with her.
They’d been at a meeting.
They went every week.
Sometimes more if Bex was having a hard week.
This was a hard week.
It had been two years to the day since she’d been taken by the Tuckers. Two years since she was strung out on the junk she’d previously kicked, chained to a bed. Raped. Beaten. For three fucking weeks.
Three weeks.
And no matter how many years went by, those three weeks would be the longest period of time Bex had experienced in her life. It would define her. Not as a victim—she would shoot anyone who called her that—but as a warrior.
She was strong.
One of the strongest people he knew.
But there was only so much a human could take. Especially with demons at their back.
And when things got intense, someone who’d survived a period of trauma that was lifetimes of Hell packaged into a cage called time, those lifetimes came back with a vengeance, clawed at the corners of a scarred mind, looking for the weak spots. Gage’s mind was more scarred than most, the ruined skin on his arms only the tip of the iceberg.
Years had gone by without it being this bad.
But Lauren had changed everything. Because she was pure, she teased him with those moments he shouldn’t have. Moments he never fucking deserved.
Moments that thrust the past back at him so his ruined skin rippled with that agony, so visceral he had to check to make sure it wasn’t charred and blackened.
Hence them going to the meeting.
Hence Bex, the woman who abhorred physical contact, holding his fucking hand the entire drive to the meeting.
Holding his hand.
Gage wasn’t about physical contact unless he was fucking some club whore. Even then he made sure all the contact was rough, brutal, painful for the both of them. He didn’t do tender with bitches. Especially not with one of his brother’s wives. But this was different. Gage knew she needed it, knew something was chasing her that day.
So he gave it to her.
And he fuckin’ needed it too.
Because he’d nearly lost it at Lauren’s door the day before.
Nearly taken her over his shoulder, gone up the stairs and done what he’d been waiting to do since he’d seen her on the side of the road, bleeding and beautiful.
Fuck her senseless. Fuck her into the Hell he was living in, so she was stuck there for however long he wanted her there. Until he ruined her.
And because he’d fought off that need, he was battling with a stronger one.