Her voice keeps surfacing in pieces, like shards.
“This culture lets you treat women like possessions.”
Then her blue eyes that used to hold so much love and adorationturned cold when she looked at me and said,“You weaponize their presence to keep your ol’ ladies in line.”
I was angry when she said it… at first. Angry because it felt like she was throwing everything I’ve ever bled for back in my face.
The club.
The patch.
The life.
Me.
But anger doesn’t survive very long when it’s sitting on top of truth and fuck, what she said was true.
That’s the part I can’t outrun. I did weaponize those girls that night, maybe not with intent. Maybe not because I wanted them. But I said it. I stood there in our room after she came off a shift treating a woman who’d been assaulted, and I told her I hadfuckingoptions. Like some stupid, pride-drunk asshole trying to get the upper hand with the only woman who ever mattered.
I never touched anyone else, I never would. But that doesn’t change what I handed her in that moment. A reminder of a piece of the culture she hates.
Bex has always been brutally clear about her lines, from the start, if I cheated, if I stepped out, if I betrayed her in that way… She was gone.
I would not get a second chance, she wouldn’t look past it… She’d leave without looking back.
She told me that years ago, sitting on the back of my bike with her arms around me, voice calm like she was just explaining something mundane. I’d laughed then, not because I didn’t believe her. But, because I thought I’d never be stupid enough to test it.
Now all I can think is maybe betrayal doesn’t always have to look like another woman. Maybe sometimes it looks like standing in a room full of men and sayingact like itwhile your wife is being cornered.
Maybe sometimes it looks like silence.
A long stretch of dark highway disappears under us.
“You shouldn’t need permission to protect your wife.”
She’d had her blood dripping down her chin when she delivered that one.
I shifted in the seat, jaw clenched.
Torch cuts in through the comms. “She looked at you like you were dead to her.”
I go cold. The words don’t even settle all at once, they keep echoing, along with hers.
I don’t respond and Axel mutters, “Not helping, Torch.”
“I’m not trying to help,Axel.”
No one says anything after that and it’s good because if Torch says one more thing right now, I’ll put him into the ditch and leave him there. But the truth of it sticks, because he’s right.
That look on her face…
It wasn’t anger, not even heartbreak by the end. It was something worse, recognition. Like she saw exactly what I was, where she ranked in that room. Exactly what I would and would not do. And once she saw it, something in her shut off for good.
The way she held the cut out toward me is burned into my brain. Steady hand, blood on her chin, voice calm.
Take it.
I should have stepped forward. I should have told Angel to go to hell and thrown Razor through the fucking bar. I should have…