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The barrel of the gun pointed at me should’ve been what stopped me.
It wasn’t.
It was him.
Carving a figure out of the moonlight, his body a shadow, his soul one too.
I hadn’t seen him since I woke up alone in the morning. My body was bruised, so was everything inside me. Sleeping with him had changed everything and at the same time changed nothing.
The fact he was standing here pointing a gun at me as I tried to escape his club proved that.
I gritted my teeth. “You gonna shoot me?”
The gun didn’t lower.
“You can’t leave. You know fuckin’ better than that.” His voice was a whisper. But whispers in the moonlight were screams. “You know what happens if you try and leave here without our permission.”
I laughed. The sound was cold and ugly. “Without your permission? I’m guessing the only way I leave with your permission is in a body bag.”
The flinch was tiny. I only caught it because I was staring at him so intently. Eating him up, even though he had nothing to offer me but bitter memories and rancid reality.
“Jesus, Caroline,” he gritted out. “Get back inside.”
Something in his tone, the danger in it, the death in it, had something visceral inside me almost instinctively obeying. But I held firm. “No,” I said.
There was a long pause. “Don’t make me throw you over my fuckin’ shoulder.”
It wasn’t a threat.
Another part of me, driven by instinct, a dark carnal instinct craved that. Craved the touch of this familiar stranger. Craved it more than my next breath.
My panties were damp.
My blood was hot.
But I held fast.
“You can drag me back in by my fucking hair, I’ll just find another way to get out,” I told him. And it was the truth. Not just because I wanted him to tug at my hair, hurt me. Like he had last night. Because that pain distracted me from the other, deeper stuff. The stuff that was packed into his midnight stare.
“You got a death wish, Caroline?” he asked. It crawled against my skin, the way he worded that, the promise of death still etched into my presence here, if I put one foot—or more accurately two feet and two arms—out of line, I’d be signing my own death warrant.
I didn’t think that the flimsy friendships I’d made with the men here would change that. Or even the more solid friendships with Macy and (kind of) Scarlett.
Women had a lot more sway than the men in the club liked to admit, but they couldn’t go so far as to stop the club from punishing rats.
Maybe Hansen might hear me out if anyone but Liam found me, maybe not.
Fuck, I didn’t even know if Liam finding me was a good thing. I felt pockets of safety with him, like traveling in a plane with almost constant turbulence. Those fleeting patches of clean air gave you a false sense of safety that you weren’t about to plummet to your death.
Everything with Liam was rough air.
The plummet was inevitable.
“No,” I ground out the response to his question. Because I didn’t have a death wish, not even in my darkest of moments did I wish myself dead. “This is nothing to do with death and everything about life.”
Another pause.
There was a question in it.
I may know nothing about Jagger, apart from the fact he was prone to violence, fits of rage, he fucked like the devil, and was a complete stranger.
But I knew everything about Liam. And that small pause was Liam.
It had irritated me when we were together. The way he’d never actually ask me questions, he’d just wait, stare at me, will me into answering. That had been where I got my most effective interview tactic.
A lot had changed since then.
Everything, in fact.
Apart from this one small thing.
“Kate is pregnant,” I said finally unable to take the silence between us. Unable to breathe around it. I paused, thinking of the phone call I’d gotten while playing poker with Claw. “Well, she’s not pregnant anymore.” I called up the picture in my mind of my wrinkly, tiny nephew, the one I’d looked at after banishing myself to ‘my’ room. After seeing it, it took me about two seconds to decide to risk my life in order to meet my nephew. “She’s a mom now. And I’m an aunt. And he’s just under month premature. He’s okay. Kate’s okay. And for once, unlike with other milestones in my family’s life, I’m not on the other side of the world, causing them all worry. I’m not hiding away from their happiness so I have to fake my own.” I paused. I knew I’d have to fake a lot of things no matter what. My happiness was to be determined.
I sucked in a breath as if an inhale and exhale could banish reality.
