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My eyelids fluttered open as my system struggled to process the changes.
There was Niro, back pressed close to the shower curtain, breathing as ragged, as uneven as my own, the heat I felt in my core reflected in the flicker of his eyes.
For one moment.
It was gone so fast I would spend the rest of the night wondering if it had ever been there at all, if it was a figment of my overactive imagination.
Soon, all I saw there in front of me was a cold, hard, impenetrable mask.
"There? You got what you need from me now?" he asked, words sharp, shredding through my paltry defenses, ripping me apart.
"What?" I asked, my voice an unsure, airless sound.
"Rubbing your hands all over me. Figured that was what you wanted. And that is all you're getting," he added, hacking away at the strings inside that had always tied us together. "I let you do your nursemaid shit. You can head out now."
He was dismissing me.
He was rejecting and dismissing me as though I had been the one to initiate the kiss.
There was a stunned, horrified moment where I questioned if that was true. But it wasn't. I knew it wasn't. He had kissed me.
But he was acting like it was all my idea.
He was acting like he'd done me a favor.
Hell, maybe he had.
Just not in the way he intended.
New sensations smoldered, flickered and danced to life, a fiery inferno inside.
I couldn't claim to have much experience with rage, with betrayal, but the two of them mingled together, a Molotov Cocktail to the flames inside. I feared when it all burned through, there would be nothing left in its wake.
"For the record," I said, my jaw shaking, but my words came out even, clear,. They were cold flames sparking off my tongue, "I have never wanted that. And thank you, Niro," I added, taking a small step forward, swiping the back of my arm across my lips, wiping away his blood, "for showing me that I never will."
With that, I turned and walked out of his room, out of his clubhouse, out of his life.
Done.
I was so incredibly done with him.
I almost made it all the way inside my childhood home before I collapsed down on the floor, a sob tearing through me.
I cried with fervor, with actual grief.
Alone, then in my father's arms when my cries drew him downstairs.
Because I knew what this was.
This was mourning.
Because there had been so much death that night.
Death of a beloved friendship.
Death of my love for him.
Death of the part of me that had even been capable of loving him.
Nothing would ever, ever be the same again.
Coming home was the biggest mistake of my life.
It was cowardly of me, but I would have chosen blissful ignorance over painful knowledge any day.
But there was no going back now.
I would have to get up and move on with my life.
Without my best friend.
Chapter Nine
Niro
"What did you do to her?" a voice said from behind me in the yard, making me sigh as I turned my head to wipe my sweat on the sleeve of my shirt.
Reign and Fallon had made the executive decision that the gym was now out of the question, that Jax needed to be taught a lesson, that his biggest cash cow could no longer fight for him.
Which meant I had very few outlets for my anger.
And I had more of it than ever before.
At myself, of course.
But it was there. Black and ugly.
So when Fallon had casually mentioned that a section of the security fence was getting wobbly and needed to be re-dug and secured, I'd volunteered for the job, stabbing the shovel into the dirt with as much force as I could put behind it, feeling the shooting pain down my back and leg, then doing it again, intensifying it. It was damn near enough to bring me to my knees.
I needed it, the pain.
The physical kind.
It dulled the other kind, the kind I didn't want to think about, didn't want to let bubble up to the surface after all the work I'd done to bury it over the past week.
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said to Hope, shrugging, not bothering to look at her because I wasn't sure if my face had its usually closed-down mask.
"Bullshit," she snapped, yanking the shovel out from under me just as I was jumping up to put my weight on it with my foot, making me stumble forward, slam into the fence that swayed for a second before I righted myself, turning to face her. "You should know you can't bullshit me," she added, stabbing the tip of the shovel—dirt and all—into the center of my chest, pushing until I had no choice but to lean back against the fence again, or it would press in deep enough to start cutting.
