by Anne Malcom
Battles of the Broken
Sons of Templar #6
Anne Malcom
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Anne Malcom
To the woman I used to be.
To the woman I am now.
To the woman I am becoming.
Prologue
“You can’t leave me, I love you.”
Her tears did nothing to him. Nor did the pain in her voice. It was music to his broken soul.
“I love heroin,” he replied, yanking his arm out of her poisonous grasp. “Doesn’t mean it’s good for me. Doesn’t mean it won’t destroy me. If I let it.”
He stepped back and she tried to scuttle forward but he raised his gun to her forehead. She stopped immediately because she might’ve been crazy, but she knew him well enough to know that he didn’t raise his piece unless he planned on using it.
“I’m not lettin’ you destroy me,” he said.
He was doing a fine job of that himself.
“I won’t let you leave me, you can’t,” she hissed, straightening her spine, the words a meager threat.
He laughed. The sound was empty and cold. “I can and I am. You try to follow me, I’ll kill you,” he promised. “Just like I did your fucked-up family.”
Then he turned on his heel and walked away.
His steps were measured, even, and didn’t even pause at the screeches, threats, and pleads hurled at his back.
It might’ve looked like he was walking away, but he was fucking running.
He didn’t run from shit.
Shit ran from him.
He made sure of that.
Physically, at least.
If you wanted to get into all that emotional, psychobabble bullshit, then yeah, he ran. From himself. From those fucking demons knocking at his skull, licking at his heels.
They weren’t literal, those demons.
Couldn’t tear through his flesh like a bullet, break bones like a fist, or nick an artery like a blade.
But they could kill him.
Though only if he stopped running.
So he didn’t.
To make up for being a pussy in his own mind, he didn’t run from shit in the real world. Or whatever this was where he lived now.
No, he didn’t run from a thing. Not danger. Fuck, he chased that shit, craved it like he used to crave the needle. Like he still craved the needle. He wasn’t a recovering addict, if you wanted to get technical—he’d just traded one substance for another. Poison in a syringe for death, pain, blood, violence. His cut. His brothers. The ones he’d die for. The ones he’d kill for. And though they didn’t know it, the ones who kept him alive—if that’s what he was.
But something changed in LA when shit went down.
He did run.
From a fucking woman.
Because she was batshit crazy.
Even crazier than him.
He had a code—he didn’t kill women, not if he could avoid it, at least. But this one was gunning to kill him if he stayed in LA. So he didn’t.
And then he found her.
The woman who might just kill him.
Not literally.
No, the woman who would make him stop running, in more ways than one.
And maybe his demons wouldn’t catch him.
But they’d catch her.
One
Gage
He didn’t save damsels.
He was likely to fuck them, then go on his not-so-merry way—if he was feeling like dipping his candle in that particular wick. He usually wasn’t. Damsels were innocent, and he didn’t do innocence. He fucked woman who were too far gone for redemption so he only damned them further. Made sure he wasn’t the reason their soul was tarnished.
He was fucked up. Some might say cold, calculating, and some might even call him a psychopath—and fuck, maybe they were right—but he wasn’t about to wreck something that wasn’t already broken.
Hence the reason he didn’t save damsels.
His brothers did. Though you wouldn’t say a lot of those women needed saving. Not if you liked your balls attached to your body. Gage quite liked the location of his balls, so he kept quiet on that score.
Even if they didn’t need saving, the women his brothers ended up with—who they happily handed their balls over to—were something special. Some of them were a little broken—he thought of Bex—and some of them were a lot broken, but none of them were beyond redemption.
Gage had made his peace with the fact that he wasn’t going to get what those men had a long time ago. Fuck, he didn’t want it. He’d had it once. A version of it, anyway. The most beauty he’d ever hold in his hands. Then he’d turned himself into… whatever he was now after it broke him. After he broke her.
And every single one of his days was tainted, blackened and bloodied because of that.
No fucking way he’d invite any human—any fucking woman—into that wasteland.
So he found the ones who’d already experienced a brutal reality of one form or another. Ones who were so jaded that even he couldn’t hurt them anymore.
He fucked them. Hard. Brutal. In ways only a certain kind of woman—a broken one—could handle. Then he left before the rubber even hit the trash can.
Not exactly decent of him, but he wasn’t decent, so he didn’t give a fuck.
So his thoughts on damsels were what crossed his mind the second he saw one stumbling down a deserted road outside of Amber in the middle of the night.
He barely slowed his bike when she squinted at the headlight—not even trying to wave him down—illuminating the blood from her forehead.
It was trouble, saving damsels.
Because that’s what got his brothers married and fucked.
And that’s what Gage could never have.
So that’s why he drove past the bleeding woman walking alone on a highway in the middle of the night. Because whatever had happened to her wouldn’t be as bad as whatever would follow if Gage inserted himself into the situation.
But then that face, lit up for a shadow of second, entered his mind. Haunted it though her ghost was mere moments old.
And on that thought, on that fucking face, he wrenched the handlebars on his bike and roared back in the direction he had come.
To save the fucking damsel.
Or, more accurately, to damn her.
Lauren
“You should be wearing a helmet.”
That’s what I said the second the roar of the motorcycle was snatched away into the eerie quiet of the night and the man—who wasn’t eerie, just plain menacing—hopped off his bike and stared at me.
Didn’t rush toward me, catch me in his arms as I stumbled from the pain and slight delirium—plus hefty amount of fear—I was struggling with. Didn’t speak. Ask if I was okay. Ask what happened to have me bleeding and stumbling down a deserted road in the middle of the night.
No, he just dismounted, kicked the stand down, leaned against the bike, crossed his arms, and stared.
Stared.
Somehow his stare was more intense than the inky blackness of the night itself. It was darker. And I suspected—no, I knew it was a heck of a lot more dangerous.
Because even through the dim light, I could see his leather vest. His leather cut. And I knew what the patch would say if there was enough light to see it.
The Sons of Templar MC.
Amber’s resident motorcycle club.
The previously outlaw gang, who had now cleaned up their act and were only skirting the law, not breaking it. Technically. Though throughout the last handful of years, there had been kidnappings, drive-by shootings, bombs and oh, weddings. Apparently that’s how they did things.
I didn’t have anything to do with them, of course. But one didn’t need to have anything to do with them to know everything about them.
They ran the town.
You weren’t a resident of Amber if you didn’t know who they were. And I also wasn’t blind. Almost every single member of that godforsaken club was hotter than Hades himself.
And the one in front of me seemed to be darker and much more dangerous than the dark prince.
I sensed it in the air. In my bones.
Which was ridiculous, because I didn’t believe in that stuff. It wasn’t logical, and I worked with logic. Because only people who hadn’t had the cruel awakening from a little thing called reality believed in fantasies such as a ‘sense’ of someone’s evil.
But there I was believing it.
Because when you were presented with a man like the one in front of me, there was nothing to believe, to hold onto anymore. He ripped everything away and stomped over it with his motorcycle boot. Yanked away the very air in my lungs and stared into me with an intensity I didn’t think existed outside of horror movies and Stephen King novels.
Yet the first thing I said to him was “You should be wearing a helmet.”
I must’ve been concussed.
Because me, the logical and previously dependable me, wouldn’t’ve said this to a man who was staring at me while I was injured, alone and vulnerable in the middle of the night with no one else around. No man on a white horse to come and save the day. Because I wasn’t under any illusions that this was him. This was most definitely the man I’d need saving from.
The villain.
Yet I didn’t run.
Didn’t move, actually.
“It’s not safe riding a motorcycle on the open roads, at speeds in excess of fifty miles per hour, without a helmet.” My mouth continued without any input from my logic- and fear-ridden brain. “Let’s just forget that, in general, motorcycles are less stable and visible than cars. It is estimated by the federal government that per mile traveled, the number of deaths on motorcycles was 29 times the number in cars,” I continued to babble, waiting for him to speak and stop me. Or shoot me.
Or kiss me.
Wait. Where the heck did that come from?
It was the middle of the night. I was injured and bleeding—almost certainly concussed—and I was thinking about the menacing and dark stranger, who was a member of a motorcycle club, kissing me?
Me.
No. No matter how hot I knew he would be in daylight—and I knew he would be because what the thin shadows masked was already something so beautiful it had to be sinful—he wasn’t my type.
No way.
And more importantly, I wasn’t his.
But he continued to stare.
And hurt, scared, and somehow turned on, I couldn’t weather that stare.
Not in silence, at least.
So I continued talking.
“Helmets are approximately 37 percent effective in preventing motorcycle deaths and 67 percent effective in preventing brain injuries,” I said, my voice somehow clear and logical, as if I was discussing this in my offices in the middle of the day. I swallowed thickly. “And that means you’re 63 percent more likely to die if you crashed, and if you didn’t—die, that is,” I corrected, somehow finding enough sass to raise my brow at him, regardless of the fact that he couldn’t see me doing so in the low light, “you’ll most likely have serious brain trauma since I would say you’re the kind of guy who wouldn’t be driving the speed limit.”
The air snatched away all that foreign sass in my voice and my body in the seconds after I’d spoken my words. The man in front of me seemed to suck it all up, even the night itself.
And then he wasn’t leaning against his bike. He was in front of me. Like right in front of me.
“You’re right, darlin’,” he murmured, his voice raspy and rough and somehow pouring desire into my bloodstream. “I don’t drive the speed limit.” His body almost pressing into mine, only the smallest sliver of air separating us. His breath hot and intoxicating on my face, smelled faintly of tobacco and whisky.
“I don’t do limits,” he continued as I forced myself to breathe and reminded my legs of their job to keep me upright. “But I don’t crash.” He said the words with a certainty that made me forget that a man couldn’t control all the variables on the road to speak with that kind of certainty. Somehow he gave me the impression that if I were in a plane about to crash with him sitting beside me, somehow he’d make sure he’d control the outcome, and stop us from being bodies among the wreckage. He had so much power radiating off him, there was no way he could be bested by anything.
He’d keep me safe.
But there was no logic here.
Because I had a feeling my safety went out the window the second he stopped and dismounted.
Still peering at me, into me, his body almost brushed mine. “And it’s mighty interesting that you’re talkin’ to me about my safety, or the perceived lack of it, focused on numbers and shit that don’t have anything to do with me—”
“They have everything to do with you. Because statistics are made from people. You’re a person, which means you’re included.”
The air changed and there was no longer so much as a hair separating our bodies. “Oh, baby, I’m not a person,” he rasped, his voice a knife through the night. “And I’m never gonna be included in something made by the people who hold the keys to society’s prison. But this isn’t about me.” He stepped back, and once more I could breathe without his… whatever was stopping me.
Still, I found myself craving it.
Grossly illogical.
“But we’re not talking about me,” he said, folding his arms. His head moved, and though I couldn’t see his eyes clearly, I knew he looked me up and down. I felt his eyes on every inch of my body, making me feel like naked on the side of the road instead of in jeans and a sensible sweater.
“We’re talking about the woman who is spouting safety statistics at me while she’s walking down a highway, alone in the middle of the fucking night, and bleeding.” His voice was mild. Casual even. But something rumbled underneath it. Something I couldn’t catch, or couldn’t understand.
He kept speaking so I didn’t have the opportunity to do either.
“You want to know the statistics on that, Good Will Hunting?” he asked, stepping forward again.
That time I managed to have some kind of control over my motor functions, stepping back on an unsteady foot. The gravel crunched under my feet, my ankles rolling slightly, but I managed to keep myself upright.
“The chances of a beautiful woman, a fucking injured one at that, getting even more fucking injured while stumbling alone along a highway in the middle of the night are a fuck of a lot higher than me crashing a bike.” He stopped advancing before our bodies touched.
The air thickened between us.
“Is this the part of the conversation where you say I’m lucky it was you who stopped and not someone who’s going to hurt me?” I asked, my voice shaking slightly. I jutted my chin up to counteract it.
Which was a bad move because it made him all the more able to grab my chin between his thumb and forefinger. His grip was tight. Painful almost.
But I didn’t flinch away from it. D
idn’t try to run. No, if anything I melted into that grip, into the pain.
He paused at my reaction. It was less than a moment, but I could tell my lack of resistance to his touch surprised him. “And who says I’m not gonna hurt you?” he challenged with more menace than before, as if to counteract his small pause.
My stomach curdled with a toxic mixture of fear and… something else.
Fear at the true promise behind his words, his eyes. This man would hurt me. I knew that. It was something even the most naive would see while looking into the abyss that was his eyes. The abyss that roused the intrinsic human fight or flight instinct.
I didn’t fight.
Or take flight.
I just stayed, frozen in his grasp. Because of the something else.
Because of my body’s other intrinsic reaction to his hands on me, eyes on me—gaze inside me.
Arousal.
Something that was insane.
The man grabbing me, without my permission, in the middle of the night, after he’d threatened me, basically ignored all my rather obvious injuries was turning me on.
I didn’t get turned on by men like that. By villains.
I barely even got turned on. But when I did, it was by clean-cut, well-groomed, all-American men who radiated safety, or more accurately, dependability.
This man was not clean-cut. From what the dim light showed me, he had a beard, which looked somehow wild and yet well-groomed at the same time. His hair was long, though I couldn’t tell specifically where it stopped, but it touched his shoulders for sure.
He was big.
Like big.
He towered over me; his sheer size and muscle mass seemed to have the ability to swallow up the night behind him. It was a presence of a man. And not a man who radiated safety and dependability.