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Taking it by the neck, I lifted it over my head and brought it down hard, aiming for Liam’s arm.
“Jesus Christ!” he cursed, snatching his limb away and stumbling back into a couple of his friends. The body of the guitar barely grazed his hand before connecting with the dirty linoleum floor with force. The rounded edge crumbled, leaving a gaping, jagged hole. “Bitch, are you fucking crazy!”
The rest of the room was deadly silent.
I looked up, my eyes meeting with Liam’s horrified gaze.
And I smiled.
“Contrary to popular opinion,” I announced, dropping the mangled instrument to the floor, the fact that I’d just destroyed someone’s prized possession not entirely sinking in just yet. “You don’t have the right to fucking grab anyone.”
“Stella Weston!” Mrs. Calder gasped, stepping inside the room as Liam and every other kid in the class stared at me in silent horror. “The principal’s office, now!”
Tate, now collecting herself, tried to protest. “But Mrs. Cald?—”
“It’s fine,” I interrupted, throwing her a pointed look to just leave it alone. Tears still settled on her lower lashes, and her hands shook despite the way she forced her shoulders back and lifted her chin defiantly.
I grabbed the guitar off the floor and turned, placing it back on the table of the kid I’d snatched it from. “I’m really sorry. I’ll get you a new one,” I told him, but he shrugged and cracked a smile, which he quickly hid with the back of his hand, no doubt not wanting Liam to see the delight on his face.
Most of the class just stared on with their mouths hanging open as I made my way toward the door, but I couldn’t help myself, stopping beside a still horrified Liam and looking him directly in the eye.
“You touch my friend again…” I murmured quietly so only he could hear. “Next time, I won’t miss.”
“Miss Weston,” the teacher snapped again, pointing sharply toward the door. “Out. Now.”
I complied, walking out with a smile on my face, which only grew wider as I thought about my parents and how they’d been scared Jaxon’s outlaw lifestyle would rub off on me.
Maybe they’d been right.
And for the first time in my life, I was glad they were.
CHAPTER 2
JAXON
“You did what?” I hurried out the front of the Montana clubhouse, stepping around the side of the building and out of the brisk breeze.
“He grabbed Tate’s ass. She just froze. I could practically see her past playing over again right in front of her eyes,” Stella rambled, the tone of her voice firm but also panicky. “So I picked up this guitar, and I swung.”
The smile tugging at the corner of my mouth came naturally with the image of Stella—all five foot three of her—attacking the fullback of their football team with a fucking guitar. “But you didn’t actually hit him.”
She let out a disappointed sigh, making my smile only grow bigger. “No. He moved his arm out of the way, but Principal Graft gave me this lecture on how Liam could file assault charges if he wanted to because assault is?—”
“The threat of harm, not necessarily the act of physically hurting someone,” I finished, repeating the words I’d heard several times before from my father and the club’s lawyer.
“Damn,” she said, huffing out a laugh that sounded forced at best. “I thought she was just trying to scare me.”
“She probably was. I doubt he’ll try to file charges against you. Your parents are going to be furious, but there’s no way in hell they would allow an assault charge on your record, and he knows it.” It was hard to reassure her while I was nearly two thousand miles away, unable to look her in the eye and promise everything would be okay. This was new territory for her, and I could hear the fear and confusion in her voice. She was wondering how she’d let herself react that way and lost control so easily.
But I knew why.
She did it because someone was hurting a person she cared about.
And I was proud as hell of her.
I may not have been raised in a way the world considered normal, but if there was one thing I could say about my family that rivaled that of the rest of society—we did what we had to do to protect the ones we loved.
“Is Tate okay?” I asked, laying my head back against the building and closing my eyes, imagining I was home rather than holed up in bumfuck Montana. Our club VP, Blizzard, and I had been here for over a week thanks to a storm that rolled in the same day we did—a freak event that caused downpours and historic flooding as the rain melted the snow on the mountains. The rain and the roads had finally cleared a couple of days ago, but Blizzard and I decided to stick around to help some of the club families whose houses were damaged.
