Chapter Forty-Five
I RAN OUT of the motel room, ignoring Zach when he called my name from behind me.
“Lark, wait.”
I barely made it down the stairs before my knees started to shake, my breath turning shallow and uneven like my body hadn’t caught up to what had just happened. The night air hit my face, humid and suffocating.
Chain was gone.
Not just from the motel. From me.
The truth settled heavy in my chest, a slow, spreading ache that made it hard to stand still.
I could still see the way his eyes had gone flat when he looked at me, the exact moment something precious shut down behind them.
I knew that look. I’d worn it myself once, back when survival meant locking everything away and never looking back.
Footsteps sounded behind me, too close.
“Lark,” Zach said again, reaching for my arm like it was natural, like he still had a right. “Come back inside. You’re not thinking straight. We need to talk.”
His fingers closed around my wrist.
Heat flared there instantly, sharp and unwanted, my skin crawling like my body remembered something my mind didn’t want to touch. My stomach turned hard enough to make me dizzy.
I yanked free, the motion quick and instinctive. “Don’t,” I said. “I just want to be alone.”
He frowned, not angry. Confused. Like my reaction hadn’t factored into whatever version of this moment he’d already decided was happening.
“You’re overreacting,” he said. “Chain doesn’t understand. I can explain it to him.”
The casual way he said Chain’s name lit something cold under my ribs.
“You don’t get to explain anything,” I said, already backing away. “Not to him. Not to me.”
I wrapped my arms around myself and walked.
I didn’t look back, but I could feel him standing there, no longer calling after me. Just watching. The awareness followed me down the sidewalk like a weight between my shoulder blades.
At first I didn’t know where I was going, only that I couldn’t stay there.
The bar felt poisoned now, like the walls had soaked up everything that went wrong and were just waiting to feed it back to me.
I passed flickering streetlights and closed storefronts, my shoes scuffing against cracked pavement while my thoughts circled the same impossible truth.
I had lost him.
Not because I didn’t care. Not because I’d chosen Zach. But because the timing had been cruel, fear had made me stupid, and silence had done what silence always does.
My phone felt heavy in my hand when I finally pulled it out.
There was only one name I could think of.
Briar.
She wasn’t part of the club, and somehow I knew that mattered. She felt safe in the way neutral ground is safe, and right now that was all I could manage. We’d exchanged numbers the morning we met, something casual that hadn’t seemed important then.
My fingers trembled as I hit call.
She answered on the second ring. “Lark?”
The sound of her voice cracked something open in me.
“Hey,” I said, but it came out thin and unsteady. “I’m sorry to call so late.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she said immediately. “What’s wrong?”
I closed my eyes and leaned my forehead against the cool brick wall beside me. “I… I can’t go back to the bar tonight. Or the clubhouse.”
There was a pause. Not judgment. Just listening.
“Okay,” Briar said gently. “Where are you?”
I gave her the address, my voice steadier now that the decision had been made. Saying it out loud made it real. Made it final.
“I can be there in ten minutes,” she said. “Don’t move.”
“Thank you,” I whispered. “Briar… thank you.”
The line went dead, and I slid down to sit on the curb, pulling my knees up to my chest. The city hummed around me, indifferent and loud, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d left something unfinished behind me.
Chain thought I’d betrayed him.
That hurt worse than the misunderstanding itself. I could survive anger. Rage. Even hatred.
But disappointment?
Disappointment meant he’d already let go.
Headlights swept across the street a few minutes later, and Briar’s car pulled up to the curb. Relief washed through me so hard it nearly knocked me over. She was out before I could stand, wrapping me in a hug that smelled like laundry detergent and home.
“Oh, Lark,” she murmured into my hair. “You’re shakin’.”
I clung to her a second longer than I meant to, then pulled back, embarrassed by how close I was to falling apart.
“I didn’t know who else to call,” I admitted.
“You called the right person,” she said simply, opening the passenger door. “Get in.”
The car was warm and quiet, the kind of silence that didn’t ask anything of me. Briar didn’t press for answers as she drove, just reached over at a red light and squeezed my hand once, grounding me in the present.
I watched the city blur past the window and tried not to think about the bar, the clubhouse, the man I loved riding somewhere out there with a heart full of poison he thought I’d put there. Or the man I’d walked away from, who hadn’t chased me when I said no.
I didn’t know how to fix this.
I only knew I couldn’t go back yet.
And for the first time since I’d escaped the Flame, I felt truly homeless again.