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Malice walked around me, standing before my wife. “Here, honey. Bite down on this,” he said, putting a leather strap between her teeth before he reached up and clasped her hand tightly.
Montana moved around me, wasting no time as he placed the hot branding iron right underneath my brand.
Back in the infirmary, I held her hand as Bane worked on her back. The second he saw the state she was in, he gave her a sedative to knock her out. Her back was a mess.
“You could have said no.”
“I didn’t have a choice, Bane.”
“Fuck, you’re stupid,” my brother stated. “You always have a fucking choice. You are the vice president of this club, Mercy. You are second-in-command. If you said no, the other brothers would have followed. Instead, you let your anger take hold.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Think about it,” he said, looking up from the stitch he was working on. “When Montana is about to make a huge mistake, who talks him out of it?”
“I do.”
“And when the president goes off the rails, whose job is it to talk him down and make him see reason?”
“Mine.”
“Montana looks to you when he’s lost or unsure of what to do. We all know it. This mess with Largo, the prez didn’t want to hurt her. He loves her like a sister. Yeah, he was angry with her. But this,” he said, waving his hand over her back. “This he didn’t want to do.”
“He was going to kill her.”
Bane rolled his eyes and huffed. “Bullshit! You know damn well Montana wouldn’t harm a fucking hair on her head. Oh, he’d yell, scream, even throw shit, but he’d never hurt Largo. He loves her like a sister. Even said it himself. Only you were too fucking angry to hear it. Face it, Mercy, you allowed your anger to override every sensible brain cell you have in your head. And because you couldn’t control your fucking temper, Largo suffered unnecessarily.”
“I tried to stop it.”
“No, you didn’t. You were acting like a scorned husband. Not the fucking vice president of the club. Because if you were thinking like the fucking VP, you would have talked some sense into the prick before this shit happened. Now your wife is going to be in a lot of pain. She had her reasons for doing what she did, but this fucked-up mess is all on you, brother.”
Chapter Nine
Mercy
A palpable heaviness hung over the club in the following weeks, suffocating its atmosphere. The shock and disbelief about what I allowed to happen to my wife quickly became common knowledge. My brothers avoided making eye contact with me, while others hastily exited a room upon my arrival. They stared and sneered in contempt. Silver, the sweet bartender for the club, the one who always had a smile for me, now scowled at me before ignoring me altogether.
They were angry with me.
Pissed.
Disappointed even.
And I didn’t blame them.
I was angry and disappointed with myself too. Bane’s words hit home and rattled around in my head until they took root. He was right. Because I acted like a scorned husband, my wife paid a horrible price. Maybe I could have talked Montana down, maybe not. The fact is, if I had just taken a minute to think about the bigger picture, maybe none of this would have happened, and my wife wouldn’t be upstairs in pain while she recovered.
Bane assured me the minor cuts would heal without scaring. It was the cut Montana gave her he was worried about. When I asked him to look into plastic surgery, he informed me he already had and was waiting to hear from the doctor.
Since that night, I’ve stayed by her side, making sure she had everything she needed. Which wasn’t anything new. I never enjoyed seeing Largo in pain, not even sick.
If I could fix it, I would.
But this time, everything felt different somehow.
It felt like something had shifted in our relationship.
Almost as if we were off-balance, somehow.
