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I sucked in a breath, waiting for him to say something, to tell me I was wrong, anything.
The words didn’t come.
“La douleur exquise,” I whispered, almost to myself, in the moments that came afterward. “The heart-wrenching pain of loving someone completely unattainable.” My eyes met Luke’s.
And then I walked out of my own house, barefoot and bruised.
Hotwired my own car and drove around for hours.
I was hurting, hungry and exhausted when I got home.
To an empty house.
Though it wasn’t empty. The emotional muscle memory of the past twenty-four hours pulsated from the walls.
So I packed a bag.
And left.
And ran.
Again.
Luke
He let her leave.
It would haunt him for two hundred and forty-four days.
That knowledge.
Knowing that while he stood paralyzed by her words, shocked at the pain in them, he’d missed the pause. That moment, that lingering moment every woman gave the man she loved before she left him. Truly left him.
That chance.
That pause in the middle of the storm to give him a chance to grasp on to them, to her, fight for what they had before it was all too late.
Now it was.
Hindsight being 20/20, that pause lasted a lifetime, the memory of it taunting him with his failure.
He tapped at a thick file sitting on his desk in front of him. The one he’d been staring at, unopened, since the moment he got there at 7:00 a.m.
There was something beside that file.
His resignation letter.
He’d hand it in, but he’d given himself a few months leeway to train a replacement. Really, it was to utilize whatever meager resources he had to find Rosie. Hopefully it wouldn’t take a few months.
He’d written the letter at 7:15 a.m.
Then he’d stared at them both, not really seeing them. No, instead he was staring at the memories that were both trapping him and out of his grasp at the same time.
“La douleur exquise. The heart-wrenching pain of loving someone completely unattainable.”
At the time, he’d missed the moment, the pause. Barely saw it pass him by because he’d been blindsided by her words. The passion in them. The fucking pain and heartbreak.
All of that, he’d caused.
He would’ve utilized that fucking pause, fought until his last breath for them. That was, of course, if he hadn’t been so blind.
It would haunt him, that last moment. Because it cost him a year. A year that had a thousand lost lifetimes crammed into it.
Not that he could know that while sitting in an office that felt cold and foreign, tapping at a file that contained his life’s work.
He glanced down at it.
Opened it.
A black-and-white image of Lucky and Bex coming out of a warehouse. There were dark stains of blood on both of them. The next photo showed who the blood belonged to.
The man he’d later learned had abused Bex as a child.
He clenched his fist.
Turned another page.
Brock and Bull leaving the flaming remains of a mansion in New Mexico. The mansion where Amy had been held captive and tortured for a week. The home of one of the most ruthless and notorious criminals in the world.
He turned another page.
A sworn statement from the inmate who had stabbed Jimmy O’Fallhan, saying that Cade Fletcher had ordered the hit.
The same Jimmy O’Fallhan known for raping and murdering women. Brutally. The same Jimmy O’Fallhan who had nearly raped and murdered Gwen. Brutally.
He sucked in a rough breath, slamming the folder shut and pushing back in his chair.
The folder he’d been collecting since the second he got on the force. Waiting. Biding his time for an airtight case. It had been airtight for years now, but something had stopped him from doing anything with it.
The very thought of it felt wrong.
Because of the someone he’d be destroying, completely and utterly, if he did anything with that file.
Rosie.
But not just her.
The lives of all those broken and brutalized women who had been put back together gently and with care by members of one of the most ruthless outlaw motorcycle gangs in the country.
Luke rubbed at his jaw.
He’d be setting flames not to a handful of families, but to whatever chance remained for his future.
For his happiness.
With her.
That thought had him acting without hesitation. The file was flaming in the garbage before he even blinked.
He watched his years of work burn away in seconds.
He’d never felt like he was doing the right thing that whole time. Not really. He’d convinced himself that he was. Made himself think that so he could sleep at night. But this was the only time in all those years that he knew he was doing the right thing.
He wasn’t happy as he watched his misguided and fucked-up form of righteousness burn up in flames. He couldn’t be happy knowing that Rosie was somewhere hurting, nursing both physical and emotional wounds alone.
No way he could be happy with that knowledge.
But something settled inside him as the smoke dissipated and the flames started to disappear, revealing only ashes.
