Page 54 of Monk

Her eyes were wet now, tears streaming down her face, but her voice was steady. Cold.

“So fuck you, fuck your tramp, and fuck this club,” she spat, her voice dropping to a deadly whisper. “I’m done.”

She turned away from me, her shoulders rigid, her head held high and then she looked at Kali. The fire drained from her expression, replaced by something calm. Controlled. Professional. “I’m sorry, Kaliope,” Lina said, taking a deep breath. “I won’t allow this club to become involved in my family business. I will figure out something else.” With that, she turned on her heels and walked out the fucking door. The door slammed shut behind her.

The silence was heavy and suffocating as I stood there, frozen, my mind struggling to process what had just happened.

I found out the day of the massacre.

I showed up here, praying you were alive.

I thought you were dead.

You told me to run and never look back.

Her words echoed in my head, over and over, each one hitting me like a physical blow. She hadn’t betrayed me. She hadn’t fucked another man. She’d been pregnant with my daughter when she’d come to the clubhouse and seen the bodies. She thought I was dead, and then she had done exactly what I told her to do.

She ran. She protected herself. Protected our daughter. She’d started over, alone, believing I was dead, and I just let Ruby slap her in front of the entire club. I accused her of betrayal. I used another woman to hurt her. I had chosen my pride over family. I had chosen cruelty over truth.

My chest tightened, the air in the room suddenly too thick to breathe.

I turned my head slowly, my gaze sweeping across the gathering room.

Kansas was staring at me, his expression unreadable.

Blackjack’s eyes were wide, his mouth slightly open.

Whisper had gone completely still, his arms crossed over his chest.

Kali was looking at me as if I had just committed murder and every single brother in the clubhouse had heard it.

Every. Single. One.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Lina

I didn’t wait for questions.

I needed to get out of there. Needed distance. Air. Space. Needed to get back to the farm, back to Tatum, back to the only part of my life that still made sense when everything else started bleeding together. My little girl was waiting for me, probably asking Mrs. Patterson too many questions, probably curled up with one of those oatmeal cookies she loved, trusting without hesitation that I would come back to her. That trust was sacred. It was the one thing in my world I refused to break.

The air hit my face the second I stepped outside, and I dragged in a deep breath like I had been underwater too long. Gravel crunched beneath my heels. Somewhere nearby, an engine ticked as it cooled, metal settling with soft pings into the dark. The sky above the lot was velvet-black and endless, the kind of night that used to make me feel small in a comforting way. Now it only made me feel exposed. My hands were trembling, so I tightened them around the handle of my briefcase and told myself to keep moving. One foot in front of the other.Don’t think. Don’t feel. Just go.

My car sat near the gate, exactly where I had left it, dark and waiting under the wash of a security light. Close enough that I could be gone in under a minute. Close enough that if I didn’t stop walking, if I didn’t let myself look back, I could put this whole night behind me before it had the chance to sink its teethany deeper. I wanted that more than I wanted my next breath. I wanted distance between me and John, between me and the clubhouse, between me and the past that kept rising up like a ghost with my name on its lips.

I was halfway across the gravel lot when I heard his voice behind me.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

I stopped so abruptly that the gravel shifted beneath my heels. My whole body went rigid, every muscle locking tight. For one dizzy second, I was twenty-three again, heart in my throat, every nerve in my body tuned to the sound of him. It made me angry—how quickly my body remembered what my mind had spent years trying to bury. I closed my eyes for the briefest moment, forcing the ache down, forcing the old weakness back into the dark where it belonged.

I didn’t turn around. “Home,” I said, and my voice came out clipped, cool, maddeningly steady. “I have a daughter to get back to.” Saying the words grounded me. Daughter. Tatum. Mine. Real. A whole life that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with the woman I’d forced myself to become.

His boots crunched against the gravel as he closed the distance between us, each step deliberate, each one scraping against my already frayed nerves. I could feel him before he touched me—feel the heat of him at my back, feel the force of his presence like something physical pressing against my skin. God, I hated that I still knew him like that. Hated that some part of me could pick him out in the dark by sound alone, by the shift in the air, by the way my pulse stumbled and then kicked hard against my ribs.

“We need to talk,” he growled.

I turned slowly, because if I moved too fast, I was afraid all that fury and grief and old love would spill out where he could see it. The security light cut across his face, sharpening everyhard line of him, and for one brutal second, all I could think was that he was real. Alive. Standing in front of me after years of mourning a ghost. It should have felt like a miracle. Instead it felt like being split open.