by Anne Malcom
I contributed to all birthday cards, made all the birthday cakes, and stayed away from all birthday celebrations out of the office.
I was friendly, but I didn’t make friends. Was nice without being warm.
And I did not ride to work on the back of a motorcycle. Especially not a motorcycle belonging to one of the patched members of the Sons of Templar.
Especially not one as beautiful and menacing as Gage.
So Abagail’s shock was warranted.
Marty’s eyes were fastened on my legs as he nodded. “Wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own two eyes,” he said. “And I did see it. A lot of it.”
His words and the innuendo behind them made my skin crawl.
My stomach swirled with the attention of his sleazy gaze. I had never attracted it before. Not once. There was always a prettier, younger, and bubblier woman in the office for him to prey on. I’d always thought he considered me part of the furniture, like the rest of the men around my age did. And I’d been glad of it.
I wasn’t used to being looked at like he was looking at me right then.
Nothing like the way Gage had gazed at me, sending my hormones into overdrive and my brain into chaos. A much sleazier and emptier way than that.
“Are you dating one of them?” Abagail asked, as if me informing her that I was an alien from outer space was more likely.
I shook my head once, violently, a small lance of pain erupting with the movement. I still wasn’t 100 percent healed from the accident. “No, of course not,” I said, stepping forward in the direction of my desk, eager to escape the conversation. “I wrecked my car. Their garage is fixing it. Gage was giving me a ride since walking is… uncomfortable.”
“Gage!” Abagail almost screamed.
I winced.
She pushed up from her chair, not even noticing the way Marty’s eyes snapped from me to her skintight white dress with a much higher hemline than mine. She walked on her heeled feet to stand in front of me.
“Gage gave you a ride to work so you wouldn’t be uncomfortable?” she clarified.
I nodded.
She continued to gape. “Gage has more of a chance of setting an orphanage on fire to roast marshmallows than doing something like that,” she said, voice full of certainty. And worse, familiarity.
My blood ran cold as I thought of the young, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, tanned, slim, and adventurous receptionist I’d kind of liked up until that point.
Until the moment she talked about Gage with that familiarity.
What was I thinking? I wasn’t jealous. I wasn’t a jealous person. I didn’t believe in jealousy. Nor did I believe in punishing other women because of the actions of men.
“You know him?” I asked, my mouth dry.
She grinned at me, showing off perfectly straight white teeth.
Bet she didn’t even need braces.
I had. For almost two years.
“Everyone knows Gage,” she said. “He’s the most beautiful and insane of all of the guys there. He doesn’t really take many girls to bed.” She screwed up her nose. “But when he does, I hear he does some fucked-up shit. But, like, in a good way.” She gave me a look that was meant to communicate something. “If you know what I mean,” she half whispered.
I had no idea what she meant.
But I did know that my breakfast was about to come up.
And it had nothing to do with ‘fucked-up shit’ and everything to do with the thought of Gage doing it with other women and not me.
I smiled at her, the expression physically painful. “Well, I don’t know anything about him other than he’s fixing my car and gave me a ride instead of setting fire to an orphanage,” I said blandly. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to catch up on work. We’re on deadlines, you know.”
And I turned on my heel and almost sprinted to my desk, hoping Abagail wouldn’t follow me.
She didn’t.
But her words did.
I had been expecting the pounding on the door.
That didn’t mean I didn’t jump when it started. When my whole apartment seemed to rattle at the force of it. It had sparked a small slice of fear inside of me. Until I remembered Abagail’s words and anger chased it away.
So I stomped down my stairs and flung my door open.
And I was presented with an angry biker.
No, a furious biker.
His gaze scanned over my body.
It hit me physically. The silence around it, around him. The fury inside of that silence was enough to make me shrink back into myself.
Almost.
Instead I jutted my chin up, folded my arms and met his stare with one of my own. It wouldn’t have measured up to the menace in his, of course, but I also guessed it might be an anomaly considering he probably didn’t get people staring back at him in such a way.
“Waited outside your work,” he clipped, eyes stormy. But something had flickered in them when I’d refused to cower underneath his gaze.
I pursed my lips but didn’t reply. What did someone even say to that as a barked greeting?
His entire being seemed to twitch as his eyes darkened. “Don’t like to be kept waiting,” he growled.
“Well I don’t like being ordered around,” I snapped. “Especially by a man who all but hurled me onto the sidewalk the night I was in an accident, stole my wrecked car, and then, without any proper conversation, without even knowing my fricking last name, spouts utter crap about how I belong to him!” I yelled, surprising myself with the volume of my voice. It was addicting, that fury, and nearly impossible to control now that I’d let it out of me.
“And then that man turns up on my doorstep two days later—two days of silence after saying I’m his, mind you—and orders me around some more,” I continued, my voice slightly shrill. “Shakes up the life I’ve been very happy with up until now.” I narrowed my eyes. “I know you’re in a club that doesn’t play by the rules, but I’m not. And that piece of leather on your back does not give you permission to break my rules.”
I sucked in a rough breath at the end of my tirade, anger and arousal mixing together in a brutal marriage.
I’d never been attracted to a man like him before. All the men I’d been slightly interested in were all cookie-cutter versions of each other. The male version of vanilla ice cream.
There was only one version of Gage, and he was standing right in front of me.
And he was definitely not vanilla. In any sense of the word.
So my heart was slamming into my chest with the fear, expectation, and excitement swirling through me, waiting for a reaction.
But he didn’t do anything. Didn’t yell. Didn’t growl. Didn’t curse at me. His body had relaxed somehow during my little screeching session. That didn’t make sense at all, since when I was silent he’d been as taut as a wire.
People were comfortable in silence.
They were irate when they were being yelled at.
But Gage was not people.
A small grin tugged at the corner of his mouth.
“And what, pray tell, Will, are your rules?” he asked, voice light. Teasing almost.
I hadn’t been expecting it, so it took me by surprise. I digested his words, blinking rapidly. “I-I, um,” I stuttered, nothing else coming out.
Didn’t all those women in the movies have witty banter with the man looking at them in such a way?
Wasn’t witty repertoire one of the building blocks of a relationship?
And yet I stumbled over my words like a fool.
“I suspect they’re not too dissimilar to the rules of decency,” I muttered, scrambling for something, anything, to say.
The grin remained but darkened in a way that made me very glad I had my arms crossed against my chest. Because I’d changed into my yoga gear after escaping work before five, intending on chasing some calm in the wake of the chaos that came with anticipating that very moment. My sheer white tee and flimsy sports bra wer
e not enough to hide the way my nipples hardened at his grin. At the darkness in his eyes that once again roused that part of me I’d been pretending didn’t exist.
“Oh, baby, I suspect they’re not at all similar to the rules of decency,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “I’m fuckin’ certain that the rules you have, the rules I’ll fuckin’ break—and you’ll love it when I do—have nothing to do with decency.” He stepped forward, stealing all the oxygen from my lungs. But then I didn’t need oxygen when he was that close, when he had that look in his eyes. “I can see it in you, Will. You might hide it from the world, but an immoral man like me can see the depravity that hides behind this.” His hand went to the frames of my glasses, trailing along the frames in a motion that should not have been sexy at all. But it was.
“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.
It’d been ninety-nine thousand seconds since he’d left her standing on her doorstep in that fuckin’ outfit that hid nothing and showed him exactly what he needed to stain with his soul.
Ninety-nine thousand seconds of the visceral need for a needle. For nothing.
So the meeting Bex needed was probably something Gage needed just as much.
“You seem different,” Bex said as they’d pulled up to the clubhouse.
It was the first time they’d spoken since he picked her up. Neither of them were conversationalists. With him, it wasn’t surprising.
Her, it was.
Because every other old lady—save maybe Lily—never fucking shut up. The bitches were always talking, always arguing, always seeing something they shouldn’t see.
And it didn’t annoy Gage like it should. Because they were all decent women. Good women. Women who could handle this life, even if it didn’t look like it at first glance.
He was happy for his brothers.
But he needed respite from that shit. From their sweet and soft voices. The happiness that melted into the air from them. From them finding whatever fucked-up happily-ever-after landed them there.
He had landed there because he was fucked up. And because there were no happily-ever-afters for him. He’d been fine with that. Because there was nothing left of him to want that shit. The only thing he wanted was blood and pain.
It didn’t stop those bitches from teasing him with something he would never have. Had never wanted.
Lauren’s eyes surged into his mind.
“I’m not different,” he barked.
He felt Bex’s gaze on him, knew she was giving him an eyebrow raise. His hand clenched on the steering wheel, the other still encircling Bex’s tattooed one.
“So it has nothing to do with the woman Lucky said was screaming, ‘all up in your business’ and threatening to have you arrested before you dragged her off?” she asked sweetly.
Gage glared at her. The bitch didn’t do sweet. Not when every inch of her was hardened by the world. Her arms were covered in tattoos that she’d started getting since they’d yanked her out of her Hell.
She’d used them like Gage had, to try to cover up the crumbling and decaying skin underneath. With her, it actually kind of worked. Because she had other shit to heal that crumbling
and decaying skin—though not completely, as she’d always have it. The black diamond on her ring finger. The name ‘Gabriel’ on angel wings in the crook of her right elbow.
The light in her eyes that shone a little brighter than the stare of her demons.
But sweet wasn’t something she gave often. She couldn’t. There was only so much sweet left in a girl who had the bitterness of the world shoved down her throat.
“Your dipshit husband doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talkin’ about,” Gage snapped, forgetting how he’d told himself to handle Bex with care, today of all days.
She grinned. “Oh, that reaction tells me something else entirely.” She didn’t blanch at his harsh tone; it took a lot more than that to bruise this woman, even on her worst day.
Her grin disappeared as some true light, true sweetness flickered on her face. She squeezed Gage’s hand. “You know I’m never going to ask you what gave you those scars.” She looked down to the fabric of his henley, covering the ruined skin.
It burned with just her gaze.
Every single time a pair of eyes fastened on his arms, the pain intensified. Because there was always pain. He lived with it. Just like he lived with the ugly and ruined skin that the world gaped at when they got a look. And people stared. Because even though everyone was ugly on the inside, they tried to trick themselves into horror at seeing someone who wore their ugliness on the outside. Tried to use his pain to pretend they were somehow better than him. He didn’t give a fuck about whatever lay behind the stares—it was the attention to them that made them burn. Because the more you fed a demon, the more it grew. The uglier it got. And eyes on his skin fed his demons. Hands on it was a feast for them.
Which was one of the reasons no bitch touched him there.
That was a hard fucking limit.
His only hard limit.
Bex had never mentioned his scars before. She was one of the few people who understood. Who knew you needed to starve the demons lest they take over.
Her eyes met his. “I know those gave you other scars that only certain people can see,” she said, eyes on his arms. “I know that shit is locked up tight for a reason. I know it ’cause I’m using the same locksmith for my own shit. I also know there’s only one person in the world with the key.” Her eyes moved toward the windows of the clubhouse as they pulled up, softening at the edges. “The only one that doesn’t create more scars when he opens that shit. And he was also the man I was sure I was going to damn. That I didn’t deserve to have because I was too ruined for him.” She gave him one last glimpse of that sweetness she reserved for her husband and her best friend. “Just remember that no one’s too ruined for the right person.” She paused, grinning slightly. “Or the wrong one. Because sometimes the wrong one is exactly who you need. We fucked-up people need the wrong ones to keep us on the right side of mental depravity.”