Page 26 of Sinner’s Torment

But I couldn’t remember a single moment when I hadn’t wrapped up.

Not one.

Every time we’d been together, I’d been careful. Every single time. I replayed each encounter in my mind, searching for gaps in my memory, for moments of recklessness or poor judgment.

My mind kept circling back to that, over and over, like a broken record stuck on the same verse.

I was careful. I was always careful. That was who I was. That was how I operated.

So how the fuck did this happen?

“Torment.”

Montana’s voice cut through my thoughts like a knife, sharp and deliberate, pulling me back from the dark spiral I’d been falling into.

I looked up, meeting his gaze reluctantly.

His eyes were hard, unforgiving, like chips of blue ice that could freeze you solid if you stared too long. There was no sympathy there, no softness. Just cold, brutal truth. “You need to get your head straight. Because when that DNA test comes back, you’re going to have to make a decision. And whatever you decide, it’s going to affect this club. Every single member. Every prospect. Every old lady. So figure out what you want. Fast.”

I nodded slowly, feeling the weight of his words settle on my shoulders like a lead blanket. “Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Montana repeated, his tone dripping with disbelief and frustration. “That’s all you’ve got? After everything we’ve been through together, after all the times this club has had your back, all you can give me is ‘yeah’?”

“What do you want me to say?” I asked, my voice tight, barely controlled. I could feel the anger bubbling up inside me, mixing with the fear and confusion until I didn’t know which emotion was winning. “I don’t know if it’s mine. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know anything right now except that my entire life just got turned upside down. Everything I thought I knew, everything I thought I had figured out—it’s all gone. Just like that.”

Montana stared at me for a long moment, his jaw working like he was chewing on words he wanted to say but couldn’t quite spit out.

Then he sighed, a long, heavy exhale that seemed to come from somewhere deep in his chest, and some of the anger drained out of him. His shoulders dropped slightly, and for just a second, I saw a flicker of understanding in those hard eyes. “Welcome to the club, brother. Life’s a bitch, and she doesn’t play fair.”

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “It really fucking is.”

Mercy cleared his throat. “Alright. Let’s table this for now. Bane will run the DNA test when the sample arrives. He’s been trying to trace corrupted files in the DNA database, but every time he fixes one issue, another appears. Let’s hope this doesn’t delay things, but it’s worth noting. Until then, there’s nothing we can do. Torment, you need to think about what you want. Montana, you need to focus on recovering and figuring out the patch-over situation. Everyone else, stay ready. We’ve still got the Death Dogs to deal with.”

The brothers nodded, murmuring their agreement.

But I barely heard them.

Because all I could think about was Brandy.

And the fact that somewhere out there, she was carrying a child that might be mine.

A child I hadn’t planned for. Hadn’t wanted. Hadn’t even known existed until five minutes ago.

And now it was club business.

Which meant it was everyone’s problem.

Including mine.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Bane

The clubhouse was quiet in the early morning hours, that dead time between three and five AM when even the most dedicated delinquents had finally stumbled to bed. I sat hunched over my workstation, the glow of the monitors casting my face in shades of blue and silver, my fingers flying across the keyboard with practiced efficiency.

The corrupted files had been bothering me for days. Not in an urgent way—nothing that compromised the immediate integrity of the DNA database—but in a persistent, nagging way that made the back of my neck itch every time I thought about it. Like an itch you couldn’t quite reach. I’d been running diagnostics since midnight, expecting to find the usual suspects: degraded code, overwritten sectors, fragmentation from repeated access and deletion cycles.

What I found instead made me pause.