We roll out of the gates in a tight line, the feeling of something tearing lights up my chest.
I need to focus., I need to get Four and get back here as fast as I can.
The night air tears past my face as the road opens up ahead of us, black and empty under a washed-out moon. The compound drops behind us fast. Fencing. gravel. rusted signage. The illusion of control disappearing in the mirrors.
The bike should clear my head, but it doesn’t, because all I can see is Bex.
Not just tonight, but everything that got us here.
My fucking sadistic brain chooses this moment to show me everything I missed. Like my wife telling me she treated someone from a club party and wasn’t in the mood while I stood there smelling like whiskey and entitlement. The way she looked at me when I said I had options. She fucking flinched when I told her if she didn’t want to fuck me I could go somewhere else… Like I had just proven something ugly she already feared was true.
How the look on her face has slowly shifted from love, trust and even lust to the look on her face tonight when she told me she didn’t trust me.
Fuck.
The wind is cool against my skin. But I still feel like I am burning up. I don’t know if it's the sheer exhaustion from barely sleeping over the past weeks or if it’s simply the way my brain is trying to sort through information.
I see the hospital parking lot when I went to drag information out of a staff that didn’t owe me a goddamn thing. The old club we stopped at after that. The Crimson Vultures, in a half rotten building, mean old men still living like it was the eighties and women were bartering chips with long hair and bruised knees.
They remembered the trafficking ring, or said they did, but not enough to help. Just enough to make us prove ourselves first.
Punch for punch, that was their price. Torch called it primitive and then took the longest to knock his fucker out. I called it necessary because at the time all I could think was that if there was even a chanceany of this led back to Bex, I wanted to be the one hearing it first. So I knocked the asshole who stepped up to me out in one punch.
It had to be me to get the information.
Me.
Because I know my wife… or I thought I did. That’s the part sitting like broken glass behind my ribs right now.
I know she would never hurt anyone.
I know she would never sell people out.
I know she would never work with men like Preacher.
But when Angel stood there in front of the whole club, peeling apart the holes in her past, all I had was instinct and faith in him and a fistful of rage.
Because he’s right, I don’t know where she came from. I don’t know who she was before nursing school or what put the scar on her leg, the marks that litter her body or the look in her eyes when certain things get said in passing. I don’t know why she sleeps lightly some nights, twitching at every sound or reaches for the knife in the drawer before she reaches for me.
And hearing Angel say it out loud in front of everyone, hearing the holes listed one by one, hearing the room take that silence and make it into suspicion…
Fuck.
I grip the handlebars harder.
It should have been a private conversation… It should of…
The bike vibrates under me as we hit a long stretch of highway. Desert-dark on both sides. Cold air coming off the low ridges.I need the road to stay clear tonight or I’m going to put us into a guardrail.
“You alright?” Axel’s voice crackles through the helmet comms.
No. Not even close.
“Fine.”
It comes out flat, a lie no one believes. But no one calls me on it.
For a few miles there’s nothing but road noise and engine hum and the sound of my own thoughts trying to tear me apart.