Page 55 of Break Me

And I know this isn’t over.

Not for any of us.

The drive home is silent at first.

Not the comfortable kind. The kind that presses in on your ears and makes every breath feel too loud. The headlights carve narrow paths through the dark road, shadows stretching and snapping back as we pass.

My father grips the steering wheel like it’s the only thing keeping him steady.

I sit rigid in the passenger seat, hands folded in my lap. My heart is still somewhere back in that room with Samuel.

“You snuck out,” he says finally.

“I did,” I answer.

“Do you have any idea what could’ve happened to you tonight?”

“I wasn’t alone.”

“That’s not the point,” he snaps, then reins it in. “The club is on edge,” he says, his voice now measured. “Things are moving that shouldn’t be. You don’t wander off right now. You don’t disappear. And you damn sure don’t put yourself in the middle of whatever mess Wolf is caught in.”

I stare straight ahead. “He didn’t put me there. I chose to go.”

“That’s what scares me,” he says quietly.

The words land harder than yelling would have.

“I trusted him,” my father continues. “I trusted him around you your whole life. Trusted him to know where the lines were.”

“He did,” I say immediately. “He did touch me, didn’t even look at me until I was old enough to choose for myself.”

He exhales through his nose, long and slow. “You’re nineteen.”

“I’m not a child.”

“No,” he agrees. “You’re not. And that’s the problem. You’re old enough to get hurt and young enough to think love makes you invincible.”

I finally turn to him. “This isn’t a phase, and it isn’t rebellion. I love him.”

His eyes briefly meet mine before he turns back to the road.

“That man has nothing to lose,” he says. “Men like that love like it’s a war.”

“Then maybe that’s why he understands me,” I say. “Because I know what it’s like to love someone you can’t protect.”

The pickup slows at a stop sign. “You think I don’t see it?” Dad asks quietly. “The way you look at him. The way he looks at you, like the ground shifts when you walk into a room?”

My throat tightens.

“I lost your mother,” he continues. “And when I loved her, it cost me everything I was. That kind of love doesn’t leave you whole when it goes away.”

“I don’t want safe,” I whisper. “I want real.”

He straightens and pulls back onto the road.

“I won’t tell you who to love,” he says after a long moment. “But I also won’t pretend this doesn’t end with blood on the floor if he’s not careful.”

“Samuel would die before letting anything happen to me.”