by Anne Malcom
We’d called my grandmother, and after making explicitly sure I was okay, she told me it was a good excuse to redecorate.
It took a lot to rattle her.
And after properly looking at her after she yelled at my mother, she looked rattled.
She was still expertly put together, down to her leopard-print heels, but she was coming apart at the seams behind her eyes.
My father stood at my grandmother’s words, likely to start an argument, but someone entered the room and snatched away the oxygen.
My inferno.
He didn’t even glance at my family who all gaped at him—well, apart from Grandma, who did a finger wave—in utter shock.
Sure, he was shocking at the best of times. With his sheer expanse, his cut, his scars, his muscles.
But this was something else. Where my grandmother was coming apart at the seams, there was nothing holding him together. His chaos was etched into every inch of him. His hair was wild around his shoulders, tangled as if he’d been almost ripping it out. The veins atop his scarred arms pulsed. His face was painted in pure violence.
Until his eyes met mine.
He was across the room in two strides. My father actually scuttled from my bedside. He had no idea Gage was mine; all he saw was a biker with death in his eyes striding toward his daughter’s hospital bed. But still he stepped aside. And I didn’t blame my father for that.
The Devil himself would’ve stepped aside.
Gage reached my bed and my body responded to him violently.
But he didn’t touch me.
He just stood there shaking, eyes running over me. No, eyes clinging to me, as if I was the only thing keeping him topside.
“Who is that man? Should we call security?” I heard my mother hiss.
“Probably,” my grandmother said. “If only for the entertainment of seeing Gage snap him in two.” She sighed. “But they need privacy, and as much as I want to ignore that need and watch the show, I’m feeling charitable.”
“What?” my mother demanded. “I’m not leaving my daughter in a room with him.”
Grandma laughed. “You’ll have a hard time with her leaving a room without him. Let’s talk about this over terrible hospital food. Come on now, shoo.”
I didn’t even look to the slight scuffle, imagining my grandmother shooing my parents from the room. There wasn’t much fight. Battle. Not because they were bad parents but because they didn’t fight. Or battle. They just accepted life.
Normal.
“Gage,” I whispered, my voice throaty, echoing in the room my parents had long since left.
He’d spent the time just standing there, fists clenched at his sides, staring at me.
He flinched when I spoke.
Flinched.
“This is ’cause of me,” he said, sounding more hopeless than I’d ever heard him.
“What are you talking about? Because unless you poisoned me, which you wouldn’t because that’s far too subtle for you, then this is not your fault.”
The doctors who’d visited me the second I woke up told me I’d been poisoned. Obviously my mother lost it at that. I’d just nodded.
My grandmother had smiled, but there was a lot of pain in the faux show of happiness. “Only the most fabulous people get poisoned.”
My parents had been demanding to know how I, their safe and logical child, could be poisoned.
Then Gage had come in, explaining everything and nothing.
Likely my grandmother was doing her best to tell them, hopefully the bare minimum.
Pain saturated Gage’s eyes. And guilt. Similar to what laid behind them when he told me about his daughter, but different.
“It fuckin’ is. I did fuckin’ poison you. The second I put you on the back of my bike.”
I narrowed my eyes. “I thought we’d gone over this. It was my choice to get on that bike, and I thank the powers that be every day for that. You’re tarnishing me by loving me, Gage. And you’re not pushing me away again.” It took a lot for me to put strength into those words, considering I was barely recovered enough to stand on my own two feet, but I would’ve used the last of my life to make sure Gage went nowhere.
His fists tightened. “No, babe, I won’t. No matter if it is the best thing for you.”
“Gage, don’t make me get out of this hospital bed and smack you,” I said through my teeth.
He grinned. “Would like to see that, but I’ll fuckin’ smack you if you move while you’re still healin’.” His eyes held promise.
And though I’m sure it wasn’t the intention, my core clenched at that promise.
“Lauren,” Gage bit out. “You’re not allowed to look at me like that not only when I can’t fuck you, but when I’m trying to tell you somethin’ serious.”
I rolled my eyes.
“You were poisoned by a woman named Jade.”
I froze. Because like when he’d told me about Missy, there was a lot more to the words.
“We used to date in LA,” he continued. “No, we used to fuck.”
I flinched at the words and the images that came with them. I already hated Jade, if not for poisoning me then for having me conjure that image.
Gage clenched his jaw at my flinch but continued. “Was a crazy time for me in general. Got caught up with her. ’Cause she was dangerous, and not in the good ways like you. She was gonna destroy me, one way or another, because she was part of a street gang that made me look well-adjusted. I realized that the second I laid eyes on the bitch. Guess she was a suicide wish wrapped in a woman’s body.” He shrugged. “Even though things were as good as they could be with the club, my brothers were still bad. Was a weak moment, a weak collection of moments adding up to ten years. I was tired. So fucking tired of it all. So I toyed with destruction, and I toyed with her. It was toxic. Nasty. She was the human version of heroin, and I got addicted for a while. Not because she made me feel anything, but because she made me feel nothing.”
He was still as he spoke, didn’t move, didn’t touch me as I ached for him to do. He just kept talking.
“I realized I might’ve been tired of the shitshow that was my life, but I wasn’t ready for it to be over. To stop battlin’.” His eyes glittered. “So I scraped her off. She didn’t take it well. Shit went down. People died. There was a small gang war.” He shrugged. “Thought it was over. Had an inkling to watch out for her comin’ back into my life, though I didn’t think I’d need to watch carefully because if she did, I’d notice it. Bitch is too crazy to do anything but blow up a building to show me a new pair of shoes or some shit.” He shook his head. “Near-fatal mistake babe. It almost cost me you.”
Then he wasn’t still anymore, moving to kneel beside the bed, clasping my hand in-between his as if he was in prayer. “Never would’ve been able to live with myself had you not woken up. Had—”
“I did wake up,” I interrupted, unable to hear the utter agony, the pure blame in his voice. “So we’re going to stop all the self-deprecating shit right now.”
His eyes flared at my curse.
I smiled. “Yes, I’m cussing to get your attention.”
“Will, ‘shit’ isn’t cussing, and you’ve already got my attention. You’ve always got my attention,” he growled, laying a kiss on the fingers he clutched in his hands.
I sucked in a breath at the small contact. “Okay, well then hopefully you’ll hear me when I say this is not your fault. We are not beholden to the actions of others. And we definitely do not take on sins they commit in our name. This woman had you. She lost you. As someone who has you, and has lost you, I know how tenuous that grip on reality can get. I’m not making an excuse for this vile woman. But it’s part of my point. There’s a reason they call love a disease, Gage. Because it turns foul and fatal when it dies in one person while the other still suffers.”
“I never fuckin’ loved her,” he interrupted. “Never loved anyone or anything but my baby girl and you. She never fucking had me, babe. Beca
use there was nothing to have… until you.”
“Have you found her?” I asked.
“We will.”
“And what will you do when you find her?”
“Oh, I’m gonna kill her.”
The words were ugly and hard and should’ve sickened me. But they didn’t.
Because I was already sick.
With that disease they called love.
My recovery didn’t happen overnight. I was close to complete organ failure. To death. I knew just how close because I saw the shadow of the grave in Gage’s eyes. Felt it in how lightly he touched me, as if he were afraid a tight grip would be the nail in my coffin.
Someone might hold tighter when they thought someone was going to float away, to the point of pain. But Gage’s way was pain. That was his normal.
My grandmother stayed for as long as it took me to get out of hospital—which was almost three weeks in all—by which time my room looked like her New York loft and her LA townhouse had had a baby. Pretty much the second I’d woken up—once Gage had let anyone near me—after she’d scolded me for “giving her the scare of her young life,” she’d began decorating. She refused to let me “wither in this depressing room full of death and polyester—which are one and the same, if you ask me.” And of course, she’d had me out of the hospital gown and into silk pajamas as soon as I was well enough to stand for long enough.
Well, it was Gage who’d put me in the pajamas, and though I was well enough to stand—for short periods of time, at least—he refused such a thing to happen, carrying me to the bathroom and changing me. His jaw had been hard during the process. And he’d been silent. His mouth, at least. His demons spoke louder than any words.
His eyes were hard and intense on my stomach, brushing it with his hands before he cradled the flat skin—I had lost a lot of weight, there being a reason they called it ‘dead weight,’ after all—with his palm. His eyes stayed there for the longest time. I was afraid to move, to breathe, because there was something in that gaze. Something precious and painful.
“Thought you were pregnant,” he murmured, eyes meeting mine, hand still on my stomach. “I noticed it, you getting sick, because I notice everything when it comes to you.” He paused. “You hadn’t had your period, so I thought…”
My stomach clenched.
I had been skipping my period on my birth control because I’d been greedy and selfish and didn’t want anything to interrupt what Gage and I had.
“I was terrified at the thought,” he continued, voice a low rasp. “Terrified enough that I itched for a needle to take the fear away. But instead I gripped on to you swelling with my baby. Giving me a light I didn’t know was left in the world for me.”
Tears streamed down my face. Gage’s hand left my stomach and brushed them with his thumb.
“That’s why I didn’t fuckin’ do shit,” he clipped. “I was too busy being fucking happy that I didn’t know my world was eating away at you from the inside out.”
I couldn’t take anymore.
“Stop,” I choked. “You are not allowed to do that, Gage. Blame yourself, punish yourself for being happy about that. She’s not taking that.” My voice was feral, as was my soul at that point. I needed her dead at my feet, for making Gage hope for something that scared him more than anything.
And for taking that away.
“She’s going to die,” I promised, and his eyes flared. “But that hope won’t. I won’t let it.”
I took his hand and placed it on my stomach again.
“One day,” I promised.
“After we make her bleed.”
I nodded. “After we bury her.”
My grandmother was decorating because she couldn’t do anything else to chase away the reality that she might’ve lost another grandchild, the last one she had.
Much like my parents were doing everything they could to chase away the fact that they’d almost lost their last remaining child. So where my grandmother was flitting in and out, trying to convince the doctors that “a coat of paint would be me doing you a favor instead of the other way around,” my mother hovered. Like didn’t leave my bedside. She fussed with my pillows, my water, my heart rate.
It got frustrating.
Especially the better I got.
But I knew I had to let her.
My father was different. Distant. Almost cold. But I knew he cared, considering he barely left either, sitting in the corner of the room, reading the paper, then a book, then another book.
I knew that meant it’d hit him, because my father was not a man to sit and read a book. To sit for long periods of time. My dad ‘puttered.’ There was always something to fix, a man to see, a job to be done. He was barely stationary. Increasingly so after David’s death. Like if he made sure the taps were never dripping, the lawn was always mowed and the gutters were always clear, it might mean he didn’t have to face the death of his only son.
But he didn’t leave to fix a thing. Barely spoke to anyone, as was his way. He barely blinked at Gage—who was as constant as my mother, but he slept here too, with me tucked in his arms, though I wasn’t sure how much he slept—which was not his way. My father was straitlaced. Sensible. Where my grandmother had abhorred all of my beige boyfriends, my father had adored them. Well, in the way he adored people, which was nodding and telling them their investments were “sound.”
And it had been in the back of my mind—before I almost died, of course—what would happen when he met Gage. There would be no nods, or comments on investments. There would be drama. Or at least his version of drama, which would’ve been a furrowing of his brows and a request for a “private word” with me.
None of those things had happened.
But I was finally out of the hospital and would make a full recovery with the proviso that I took it easy for the next month.
My parents had left.
I was glad of it. I loved them both dearly, but it was suffocating, especially since my mother had decided to resurrect David’s ghost. She never said his name, but he lingered in the hospital room with her sorrow. I needed to get better, and I couldn’t get better around their pain.
We were in my living room. I didn’t know how it was almost fully repaired; Gage had obviously stood over the contractors with a gun to get it done.
“Wanted you to come home to your sanctuary,” he murmured in my ear as he carried me over the threshold. “And I needed mine back.”
And he gave it to me.
For a time.
Gage
Two Months Later
He was uneasy.
It had been almost three fucking months and they hadn’t found Jade. She was smoke, had melted into the air as if she knew it was the one thing that would drive Gage to the edge of insanity.
Lauren was the only thing that held him back.
Barely.
And that was because she was breathing. Healed. Smiling.
Radiating fucking light.
And he had her in his arms.
They were going to find Jade eventually.
And they would kill her.
He needed to find solace in that.
For now, he found solace in the magical creature in front of him.
“Happy birthday,” he murmured, hand outstretched
“It’s not my birthday,” she said, eyeing the envelope suspiciously. Gage was sure she would’ve treated it like a bomb had it been slightly larger. Though she was getting fuckin’ better at handling them than he was. His glasses-wearing, logic-driven woman excelled at making bombs.
He grinned inwardly. “Well of course. It wouldn’t have been a surprise otherwise.”
She sighed and his dick hardened. With her just fucking breathing on him. He wondered if that would ever change, if he would one day stop being so affected by her to the point of madness.
He didn’t think so.
She bit her lip. “Gage, my birthday isn’t for eight months.”
No, he knew he’d neve
r stop being affected by her.
He clenched his fists to the sides, mainly to stop himself from forgetting the envelope altogether and fucking her on the kitchen island.
Her eyes flared as she sensed his need. She always did that. Saw right through him, even though he knew for sure there was no emotion on his face. Not an ounce. Didn’t matter though, not with his Will.
“Open the fucking envelope,” he demanded.
The sooner she did, the sooner he’d bend her over the counter and sink into her hot and greedy cunt. He was getting better. Once she was well enough to take him—really fucking take him—things were bad. And for him to say it, it was bad. He needed to be inside her constantly, with a need that surpassed his normal violence. Because fucking her was when he felt the grave the least. When the images of her fucking headstone sitting right beside his daughter’s didn’t yank fire from the pits of Hell and lay it on his soul.
She took it.
Every time.
Matched his hunger. His violence.
And just when he thought she couldn’t take more, she took more.
Fucking perfection.
The longer she stayed flush, healthy, the more weight she put on, the more she was able to do without needing to rest, the more she painted, he was able to relax.
Slightly.
As much as was possible for him, at least.
It was hard. He itched for junk, for nothing if not a relief from feeling so fucking terrified all the time. But Bex had picked him up for meetings. Every single day. Only now they were back to once a week, because she seemed to sense that he wasn’t as bad.
And it had been bad.
In an effort to stave off the bad, he tried something new. He tried doing something good. Something that lay inside that envelope.
Lauren gave him a gut-punching smile and then did as he asked. He didn’t breathe as she read the envelope.
He knew it was a risk.
But his existence—including Lauren—was built on risks.
“Gage,” she breathed, her eyes wide, still staring at the envelope. She stared for a long time.
Gage waited. The view was fuckin’ worth it.