Page 3 of Sinner’s Torment

Like losing something I never really had in the first place.

CHAPTER ONE

Torment

Three weeks after the Death Dogs attacked. Soulless Sinners’ clubhouse, New York City...

The silence in the boardroom was fucking deafening.

I had sat through hundreds of these meetings over the years. Loud, raucous affairs where voices competed to be heard, where fists slammed on the table and laughter echoed off the walls. Where life pulsed through every word, every gesture, every goddamn breath.

This wasn’t that.

This was a tomb.

I leaned back in my chair, and the leather creaked beneath my weight as I let my gaze drift around the table. Every face told a story, and I was trained to read them all. Body language, micro-expressions, the tension held in shoulders and jaws. It was all data. Information. A window into the human psyche that most people didn’t even realize they were leaving wide open.

Right now? Every single one of my brothers was screaming without making a sound.

Mercy sat to my left, his massive frame hunched forward, elbows on the table, hands clasped so tight his knuckles had gone white. His jaw worked constantly, grinding his teeth in a rhythm that was going to give him one hell of a headache if he didn’t stop. But he wouldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. It was the only thing keeping him from exploding, from putting his fist through the wall or flipping this entire fucking table.

Our vice president was holding on by a thread.

Across from him, Fury stared at nothing. His dark eyes were fixed on some point in the middle distance, unfocused, seeing something the rest of us couldn’t. Or maybe seeing nothing at all. His hands rested flat on the table, perfectly still, but there was a tremor running through his left index finger. Subtle. Most people wouldn’t have noticed. But I did.

Fury had always been the most controlled among us, the one who kept his rage locked down tight until it was time to unleash it. Watching him unravel, even incrementally, was unsettling as hell.

Storm sat beside him, one leg bouncing under the table in a rapid staccato that made his chair vibrate. Nervous energy. The man couldn’t sit still on a good day, but this was different. This was anxiety manifesting in physical form. His body was trying to burn off the adrenaline that had been coursing through his system since Diamond Creek. Since we watched Malice take his last breath.

My chest tightened at the memory, as I forced myself to breathe through the pain. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Controlled. Measured. The same technique I taught my patients when they were on the edge of a panic attack.

Physician, heal thyself.

Payne sat at the far end of the table, his expression carved from granite. The former SEAL looked exactly like what he was. A weapon waiting to be aimed. His hands rested on the table, relaxed, but I could see the coiled tension in his shoulders, the way his eyes tracked every movement in the room. He was in tactical mode, assessing threats and calculating responses. It was how he coped. How he survived.

We all had our mechanisms.

Rage leaned against the wall, refusing to sit down. His body taut, ready for what came next. Our brother dropped everything when shit started to heat up with the Golden Skulls and Bane, then he traveled with all of us to Nebraska days before the Death Dogs attacked. Rage left everything behind: his demolition company, his life away from the clubhouse, and flew across the world to help us.

Shame was standing in the corner, laptop open on the table, fingers flying across the keys in a blur of motion. Click-clack-click-clack. The sound was almost soothing in its consistency, a metronome of normalcy in a world that had gone completely sideways. He hadn’t looked up once since we sat down. He hadn’t acknowledged any of us. Instead, he’d retreated into the digital world where he had control, where he could find answers, where things made sense.

I didn’t blame him.

Vicious sat to my right, and out of everyone here, he was the one I was most worried about. The road captain had always been intense, but there was something hollow in his eyes now. Something broken. He had his phone on the table in front of him, screen dark, but his thumb kept moving toward it before stopping. He wanted to call Linsey. Wanted to hear his wife’s voice, to know his kids were safe. But not wanting to worry her more than she already was.

The duality was tearing him apart.

Bane sat beside Vicious, and the club doctor looked like he had aged ten years in the past week. His face was drawn and exhausted. The lines around his eyes were deeper than I remembered. He was the one who worked on Montana in the field, who kept our president alive long enough to get him to a hospital. He was the one who watched Malice die and couldn’t do a goddamn thing to stop it.

That kind of helplessness left scars.

And then there was the head of the table.

Montana’s chair sat empty.

It was never empty.

In all the years I had been a Soulless Sinner, I never saw that chair vacant during church. Montana was always there, commanding the room with his presence, his authority, his absolute certainty about the path forward. He was the anchor. The foundation. The reason we all believed this club could weather any storm.