AllFreeNovel
Share Us
We creep along, me fighting with my silence, wondering how much I can tell her. Nothing would be best, but she already knows something.
“Dad told me right after I got home today. He just stood there and gave me this catch-up speech, like he’d been rehearsing it for weeks. It was weird. I hated it. It’s almost Christmas, our second one without Raiden, and they still won’t talk about him. I hate how they’ve cut him out of this family like he’s dead.”
“He’s not. Raiden is fine.”
“I know he’s not dead I know. But he’s notfine. And neither are you. He’s not safe and you’re not safe. Not if what my dad said is true.”
Her dad doesn’t know everything. Whatever he’s gleaned from people around town, he couldn’t know. I’m the only one who knows, and my own father has no idea that I have the information that could ruin him. I would never have betrayed my own flesh and blood. My own father. Thinking about harming him is akin to patricide, even if I were never to take things that far. Ousting him from the club would kill him. I’d be responsible for his death. Telling any of my club brothers what I know would seal his fate. Keeping it a secret makes me a traitor to them and my best friend. The hatred and bitterness is cutting holes and festering inside of me.
I let us creep along, the car plunged into silence. The heater pumps and ticks. Ticks, ticks, ticks. It’s going to start to squeal soon. I know I should bring it into the garage and work on it.
It’s pitch black out here. I’m not even sure if Lark can make out any details. I’m not sure she’s trying. I won’t take my eyes off the road, afraid if I look at her that I’ll startle her into opening the door and fleeing into the vast night, knowing all the while she’d never do anything that stupid, but she seems flighty and afraid.
Not of me. She never would have called me otherwise.
It’s not fear for me that made her send that text. It’s something else.
I wait until we’ve parked, surrounded by the tall shelter belt planted to ring the yard, the woods to our left. My hand stays on the key in the ignition even though I’m not going to shut it off. “You’re out here with me at past three in the morning because you want to know about club business?”
She lets out the longest, most painful sigh. It cuts straight through me. Her hands cover her face, her hair swooping forward to hide her like a privacy curtain. I freeze, undone. Right now, I’m not the legacy project of our club. I’m not a patched in one percenter. I’m no big, tough biker. Instead, I feel like a boy, lost for words. I don’t know what to do. Don’t know how to fix this or comfort her. If she’s crying, it’s going to tear the soul from my body.
She’s not. When she lifts her face and stares at me in the dark, all the shadows highlighting her delicate cheekbones, the swell of her lips, her black and fiery eyes, I see that her face is dry.
“I wanted to go to Seattle. I thought if I left here, put a little bit of distance between myself and Hart, it would change who I am.”
But you’re perfect. You always have been.
Her expression, the intensity of her eyes on my face, strip me down to nothing. I’m not the one who is twice her size. I feel small and nearly frantic. Girls have been staring at me all my life.
No one has ever looked at me like Lark is now.
Like she can see through skin and bone down to the essence that no woman has ever wanted to touch, let alone harness and own. She’s looking at me the way one person looks at another when they already know that you’re in ownership of their soul.
Stupidly, I turn my grease-stained, calloused palms up on my knees, expecting to see the ghostly outline of the very essence of her being residing there.
She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “I used to think of you as a brother, but then it was more. It was so much more.”
Her pale throat juts above the collar of her coat, my hand aching to brush against her soft skin just to see the vast difference between my rough inked fingers and that milky cream. I want to press my thumb to her pulse point and feel her life hammering beneath my touch.
“It’s been more for years. I didn’t just worry about you. I missed you. Wanting you is a weapon that would obliterate our lives. I never wanted to tell you this, to turn you into a dirty secret. You kept me safe, you and Raiden. I thought if you let me go, I could move on. That I could stop being so desperate and pathetic. I was so stupid.”
I can’t accept this. Can’t process.
“What happened?” I sound like a feral beast. I’m barely in control of myself. I know what she’s just said and hearing it is the most taboo, unimaginable expression in the world, but her tone changed. There’s something that hurt her and it’s not me.
“I was so desperate to try and move on. That’s what they look for. For stupid, vulnerable people like me who are naïve and all alone.”
I want to smash my fist through the window. “Who? What’s his name? Who hurt you? I’ll—”
She laughs, the sound sending a shiver up my spine. “Find him and kill him and put him a shallow grave so that you’ll go to prison for the rest of your life? No. That’s not why I’m here.”
“I wouldn’t put him in a shallow grave. The fucker would never be found. I’ll find him and cut off his hands for daring to touch you. Give me his name.”
She frowns, but there’s a new, strange serenity about her. “Jordan Thatche. He took me to his house, and it felt like he wouldn’t let me leave. He cornered me. Kissed me. Groped me. I kept telling him I wanted to go, but he wouldn’t stop. I kneed him in the nuts and grabbed a knife out of the knife block—he was stupid enough to trap me in the kitchen—and swore I’d cut his throat. I let myself out. He never bothered me again. Guys like that don’t appreciate girls who can fight back. He wasn’t the type to rape me. Just wanted to feel me up. He would have stopped. He was a coward.”
I doubt that very much. He seems exactly the type.
“I wasn’t there. Raiden—”
