I hate the bandages around my wrists. I hate the bruise on my cheek. I hate every man in this room looking at me with that careful softness people use on women who survived something ugly and might shatter if spoken to too loud.
I’m not the one tied to a chair.
Lady is.
My Lady.
My best friend with glitter still clinging to her face and blood on her mouth, staring into a camera like she is onstage and not in a nightmare. Her lip is split. There is red swelling across her cheek. A white rose lies across her lap, obscene and pretty, like a wedding flower dropped into a crime scene.
Alpha keeps rewinding the video.
I can’t decide if I want him to stop or play it forever.
If it stops, she is gone.
If it plays, she is suffering.
“Darling,” Lady says from the screen, voice rough but still hers, still too brave. “Don’t do the thing where you make this your fault. I swear to God, I will come back just to yell at you.”
A sound breaks out of me. Not a sob. It is too angry for that.
Diablo’s arm tightens.
“Don’t,” I snap, trying to pry his hand off me. “Don’t hold me like I’m the problem.”
“You’re not the problem.”
“Then let me move.”
“No.”
I twist in his hold and face him. The room blurs behind my tears, but his face stays clear. Dark eyes. Hard jaw. President patch on his cut, paid for in blood and silence. He looks wrecked and furious and controlled, which is the scariest version of him.
Rico raged.
Diablo controls.
Both can become a cage if a man loves the sound of his own fear more than a woman’s right to breathe.
“She’s there because of me,” I cry out.
His face tightens. “She’s there because the Miami Mutherfukers MC took her.”
“They took her to hurt me.”
“They took her to hurt us.”
“No.” My laugh scrapes raw coming out. “Don’t make this romantic. She was my friend before she was Shady’s girl, before she was ever Vice Ink’s DJ, before she was anything to your club. She saw me when nobody else did. Now she is tied to a chair because she loved me enough to come back.”
Diablo flinches like I put a blade between his ribs.
Good.
I want him to hurt with me. I want somebody else to stand inside this guilt for one second and understand Lady isn’t collateral. She isn’t Shady’s weakness first. She isn’t a pressure point in whatever ugly war Carmen thinks she is winning. She is the girl who sat with me on a bathroom floor when I was sixteen and shaking because some pendeja with a rich daddy decided my shoes were funny.
She is mine in a way no club can patch and no man can claim.
Diablo’s hand opens at his side.