Page 60 of Sinner’s Torment

I thought about Brandy—about the way she’d looked that last night in Diamond Creek, her body pressed against mine, her eyes holding something I hadn’t wanted to name. I thought about the baby growing inside her, the child I’d never planned for but couldn’t imagine not wanting now. I thought about the impossible situation we were in, the institutional rules and power dynamics and legendary violence that surrounded us on all sides.

And I thought about Elise, and the shame I carried, and the fear that I’d fuck this up the same way I’d fucked up everything else.

But Mercy was right.

I had to fight for this. Had to fight for her.

Even if it meant facing down a man who made Sandman look like a teddy bear.

Even if it meant risking everything.

“There,” Mercy said, pointing ahead.

I looked up and saw it—a farmhouse set back from the road, surrounded by trees. It was nice. Normal. The kind of place where families lived quiet, peaceful lives far away from the chaos of the MC world.

Mercy pulled into the driveway and put the SUV in park.

And that was when I saw him.

Standing on the front porch, arms crossed over his massive chest, was a man who could only be Hex.

He was tall—at least six-three—and built like a fucking tank despite his age. Broad shoulders that seemed to span the entire doorway, thick arms corded with muscle that hadn’t softened with time, a barrel chest that spoke of decades of hard labor and even harder living. His hair was gray, cut short and military-style, precise and unforgiving. His face was weathered and deeply lined, carved with age and experience like the bark of an ancient oak. But his eyes—Jesus Christ, his eyes were sharp and cold and utterly unforgiving as they locked onto us through the windshield.

He didn’t move.

Didn’t speak.

Didn’t even blink.

Just stood there in the shadow of the porch overhang, glaring at us with an intensity that made my blood run cold. Even from this distance, I could feel the weight of his stare, the barely contained rage simmering just beneath that stoic surface.

This was the man who’d nearly killed Stone with his bare hands and had become club legend.

This was the man who’d spent five long years rotting in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, five years of his life stolen by a corrupt system.

This was the man whose daughter—his pride and joy, the one of the few good things in his complicated, violent life—I’d gotten pregnant.

And he looked like he was ready to tear me apart with those same hands that had nearly ended Stone’s life.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Torment

“Remember what I said,” Mercy murmured beside me, his voice low and urgent as he gripped the steering wheel so hard his knuckles had gone white. The leather creaked under the pressure of his grip. “Don’t posture. Don’t challenge him. And for fuck’s sake, don’t lie to him. He’ll know.”

All I could do was nod, my throat suddenly too tight to form words.

“And, Torment?” Mercy added, his tone deadly serious as he turned to look at me with those sharp, calculating eyes that had seen more violence than most people could imagine. “If this goes sideways, you let me handle it. You don’t fight back. You understand me? You do not fight back.”

“Got it,” I said, though every instinct I had was screaming at me to do the exact opposite. My hands were already curling into fists in my lap, adrenaline starting to pump through my veins like it always did before trouble.

Mercy killed the engine and opened the door. The sudden silence felt deafening after the rumble of the engine that had accompanied us for the last two hours. I stepped out into the cool autumn air, my boots crunching on the gravel driveway. The air smelled like cut grass and woodsmoke, clean and fresh in a way that felt almost foreign after years of breathing in city exhaust and clubhouse cigarette smoke. Birds chirped somewhere in the trees overhead. A breeze rustled through the leaves, carrying with it the faint scent of autumn.

It was peaceful. Idyllic, even—the kind of place you’d expect to find soccer moms and Little League practices, not the kind of meeting that could end with me in a shallow grave. And yet I felt like I was walking toward my own execution, each step bringing me closer to a man whose reputation preceded him like a dark shadow.

Mercy fell into step beside me as we made our way up the gravel drive toward the house, his presence a quiet comfort in the tension that hung thick in the air. My boots crunched against the stones with each deliberate step, the sound impossibly loud in the silence between us, each step feeling heavier than the last, as though the weight of what waited ahead was physically pressing down on my shoulders. The porch loomed ahead of us like a gallows, its weathered boards and peeling paint suddenly menacing in the midmorning light, and Hex stood at the top of the steps like a sentinel guarding the gates of hell itself, his arms crossed over his massive chest, his stance wide and unmovable, his expression carved from granite and just as unyielding.

He didn’t move as we approached, didn’t shift his weight or adjust his posture even slightly. He didn’t acknowledge us with so much as a nod or a flicker of recognition in those hard-set features. He just watched with cold, calculating eyes that seemed to see straight through me, past the carefully constructed walls I’d built around myself over years of living this life, stripping away every layer of bullshit and bravado until there was nothing left but the raw, vulnerable truth I’d spent years trying to hide from the world—and from myself.