My words were calm, even cold. But I was trembling with anger, with adrenaline, as I held myself back. Struggling to keep thinking straight… as every lizard brain impulse in me told me to go ahead and make him hurt for what he’d done to Summer.
For how he’d scared her and made her feel unsafe in her own home, in her own fucking life, when all she’d ever wanted to do was make people happy with her music.
And for whatever he’d been trying to do to her when he climbed the wall of her house and tried to break into her bedroom.
But something was holding me back.
A sense of humanity? Sanity?
Fear of going to prison for the rest of my life for murdering a man with a TV remote in some nasty motel room?
Then I froze. I barely even heard the knock on the door through the pounding in my skull. But my eyes met Maddox’s.
He slipped over to the door and looked out the peephole, and my mind raced…
Motel manager.
Police.
Bloody Bastards?
Then Maddox opened the fucking door faster than I could get to my feet.
Piper was standing outside, and he wasn’t smiling. He walked in, with two of the guys he’d been with at the club tonight. And Blazer.
“You called your fucking club brothers?” I spit out, as Maddox shut the door. I couldn’t fucking believe it, and yet, of course I could. These assholes always stuck together.
When he went to park the van, or maybe before that, Maddox had been on the phone, spilling everything to his fucking VP.
“Hey, now,” Blazer said. “What kinda welcome is that?”
Piper was looking around the room, taking everything in, his cold, serious eyes finally landing on Sanchuk on the floor. And me standing over him with my ridiculous shiv.
There was blood on the floor and the wall. Sanchuk’s blood. His face was beaten, his nose, arm and neck were bleeding, and my knuckles were battered.
I must’ve looked like a fucking psycho.
So maybe I wasn’t so different from any of these guys after all.
Maybe I was just as fucked-up as they all were, and this moment was the hard proof.
It fucking grated me that Piper looked so damn calm. All of them did.
I wasn’t even breathing right.
Piper met my eyes and kinda sighed.
“You gonna waste our time here?” he said. “Make me talk you down from doin’ somethin’ you really don’t wanna do and you’re just gonna regret?”
“Why? ’Cause now you’re the good conscience fairy?”
“I don’t give a fuck about your conscience. But you take this any further, my brother loses a good man on his crew. Your woman loses her bodyguard. And for what? Him?” He glanced at Sanchuk. “That right there is a man who knew the consequences of his actions before he took them, and so do you. So I’m askin’ you. You think this is worth it? Worth losing her over?”
I rubbed a hand over my face. He was talking sense, and I really fucking didn’t like it. He was also talking bullshit. He didn’t give a fuck about me and Summer riding off into the sunset together any more than he cared about my conscience.
He just wanted me to leave him in this room with the dirty little enemy rat who’d burrowed up into his territory.
“Walk away,” Piper said evenly, “and I promise you, I will take care of it.”
“Like you took care of it last time.”
“Last time, he slipped your man, not mine.”
I looked at the five bikers standing in front of me.
Piper walked over to me and I let him take the shiv from my hand. I also let him get in my face. “This isn’t your scene, Sterling.” His words were forceful, but oddly sympathetic. “Take. Off.”
And finally, I backed down. The adrenalin dump was already making me shaky.
I felt sick.
Because Piper was right. I didn’t belong in this situation. I was different than them. I couldn’t follow through with anything worse than I’d already done here.
And that meant the Kings still had a part to play in this whether I liked it or not.
I needed them. Even though I didn’t want to.
Maddox picked up his drill. I saw one of Piper’s guys, wearing gloves, wiping my prints from the remote.
Then Maddox said, “Come on. I’ll drive you home.”
He basically removed me from the room… as Sanchuk begged us not to leave. He wanted to negotiate. He’d promise never to come near Summer. He’d give up every Bloody Bastard he knew and his mama too if we’d just stay and talk.
But Piper was right. He was a man who knew the consequences of every bad decision he’d ever made, and he’d made a hell of a lot of them.
That wasn’t on me.
I still felt fucking sick.
The door shut behind us like a bad omen.
I did not like the way we were leaving this. But I couldn’t see it ending any other way.
I followed Maddox out to his van, and along the way, I texted Andre.
Me: Where are you?
Andre: At the club. What’s the situation?
Me: Neutralized. I’ll talk to Brody and Naveen.
Me: Take Summer home. Now. Wait for me there.
Andre: What do I tell her?
Me: Tell her it’s not negotiable.
We got into the van, and I said, “Take me to Summer’s.”
“You good?” Maddox asked me. Like we were suddenly girlfriends, and he was gonna offer to let me pour out my feelings over a bucket of ice cream.
“Just drive,” I growled. I clawed my hand through my hair and tried to get a hold of myself.
My hands were still shaking from the adrenaline dump. My pulse hammered in my throat.
I felt queasy as shit, and I never got queasy. My chest fucking hurt as my heart pumped with life, with violence, with passion.
For her.
I knew now how very personal this was. All of it. I wasn’t
