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Liam finally spoke. Though his voice was Jagger’s. “You’re gonna have to be in it, like it or not, I told you I’d protect you.”
“Protecting me is leaving me, Liam,” I whispered. Why was I still calling him that? He kept giving me all the evidence I needed to bury Liam once and for all.
But I wasn’t strong enough.
It was that simple. I was holding onto a dream, a memory, a lie.
I couldn’t see his face in the darkness but I imagined it hardening, his features tightening.
“I’m not leaving you, Caroline,” he said, voice throaty. He cleared it. “So it’s walking or the bike, you decide.”
I bit the inside of my lip. Walk three miles in the middle of the night even though my feet were killing me. Or get on a bike with Liam for the two-minute ride.
It wasn’t a choice, really.
I started walking.
Motorcycle boots thumped against concrete as Liam fell into step with me.
“What if someone steals your bike?” I asked only so I didn’t have to suffer the silence that wasn’t really silence between us.
“No one’s gonna steal my bike,” he replied.
“Because everyone fears the wrath of the Sons of Templar?” I asked sarcastically.
He paused. It was only the thump of his boots for a moment, I thought that might be his only answer. He’d given me enough evidence of the wrath of the Sons of Templar after all. “Sure, some people won’t steal it ‘cause they fear us, rightfully so. The rest of them won’t because they respect us. The club. I know you won’t believe this, but the club’s not all bad.” Another pause. A longer one. “Fuck, maybe we are. No one comes out good in the middle of a war.”
“No,” I agreed.
The silence continued.
For three miles.
Scarlett’s words haunted me with every step. But I didn’t have the strength to do anything but put one foot in front of the other.
We reached the clubhouse and it was eerily silent. I watched the building as we approached and it seemed that it watched me back. With the deaths it held inside its walls, I wondered if it was a living thing now.
It felt like it.
Did enough death create life?
The man beside me was the embodiment of that.
Whoever he was.
As we approached the perimeter, floodlights switched on and I squinted with the harshness of the light.
“Jesus, Blake!” Jagger yelled. “It’s fuckin’ me. Put the weapon down before I shove it up your ass.”
I squinted past the offensive light, following Liam’s gaze upward to the man perched in a small watchtower structure above us. Sure enough, he was holding an automatic rifle, quickly moving the barrel so it was no longer pointed in our direction.
Blake was one of the youngest patched members. He wasn’t even old enough to drink, but he managed to make sure he replaced his blood with alcohol in all the parties I’d seen him at. Though there was youth in his face, there was none of it behind his eyes. Though he was easy to laugh, to joke, it was all empty.
“Jagger? Dude, what the fuck are you walkin’ for? Your health?” His voice was scratchy, appealing, like the rest of him. Distracting enough for most of the female population not to notice the danger he wore underneath it all.
“Yeah, for my fuckin’ health,” Jagger muttered. “You know what’s good for yours, kid, you’ll open the fuckin’ gate, rouse a prospect and get them to get my bike.”
I could tell Blake itched to ask a lot of questions. But Liam’s voice didn’t really broker such questions. So instead, the gate opened.
We walked to the clubhouse in the same silence we’d adopted for three miles. It was the silence between two people who were pretending there was nothing to say between them, two people who knew each other too well to have such a thing as silence.
The common room wasn’t empty, a handful of club girls were scattered around, in varying states of undress, tangled up with men, also in different states of undress.
My eyes ran over them without reaction.
Even if this wasn’t a nightly occurrence in the place that was my prison, I wouldn’t have a reaction. Sex was the least shocking to me out of all the things humans could do with an audience.
We both came to a stop outside Liam’s room.
As before, when I’d been too afraid to cross the threshold outside, now I found myself terrified to go inside, to close the door and be suffocated by my loneliness.
Liam didn’t say anything. Didn’t make a move to leave, just stood across from me, staring at the door.
“I feel like I need to thank you,” I said finally, moving to meet his eyes with whatever strength I had left.
He blinked. “Thank me?”
I nodded. “I used to think that having you, us being together, it meant I would never be alone, never be lonely. Even with you halfway across the world, even though I didn’t see your face, hear your voice for weeks at a time, I knew you were still there. I knew we were still there. We were okay. I was okay. Never alone.”
