Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Demi
The streetlight flickered overhead and buzzed like an insect ready to fry itself on the bulb. The echo of Werewolf’s engine still lingered in the air, and left me with nothing but silence and the pounding of my heart.
He’d walked away.
Correction, he’d ridden away. Left me standing in the middle of a cracked parking lot like some fool who thought she could demand answers from the devil himself.
I wrapped my arms around my stomach and willed myself not to shake. Not because of fear, though. God knew he was terrifying, but I refused to let him get under my skin.
“Sweetheart,” he’d called me like it was some kind of insult.
I hated that the word lingered.
I hated even more that I wanted to hear it again.
My phone buzzed in my bag and the screen lit up with my best friend’s name. I ignored it. I couldn’t explain this to anyone, not without sounding crazy. Who in their right mind chased down the Enforcer of the Broken Sons MC with nothing but stubbornness and grief as weapons?
Maybe I wasn’t in my right mind. Maybe I hadn’t been since the night Tyler died.
I dragged myself back to my apartment a few blocks away.
The city was different after midnight. Fewer people, more shadows.
I used to love walking at night. Tyler and I would do it all the time when we were kids to sneak out to watch the trains roll by.
He’d tease me for clutching my jacket tight and always promised he’d keep me safe.
Now every shadow looked like a threat. Every corner whispered with ghosts.
Inside my apartment, I tossed my bag onto the couch and sank into the worn cushions.
The place was small—one bedroom, mismatched furniture, and a stubbornly dripping faucet in the kitchen—but it was mine.
Tyler had helped me move in three years ago.
He’d carried the heavy boxes, made dumb jokes about my taste in throw pillows, and promised to fix the faucet but never did.
I opened my laptop and pulled up the folder I’d built like a shrine to him: articles, police reports, screenshots of forum threads, anything with his name or the Broken Sons. The cops said Tyler was just in the wrong place at the wrong time—a mugging gone bad. Case closed.
But his phone records told a different story.
The last call he made before he died? To a number tied to someone who ran with the Sons. The cops brushed it off. Coincidence, they said.
I didn’t believe in coincidences.
I clicked through the files until my eyes burned. Tyler’s smile stared back at me from a photo on his twenty-first birthday with cake crumbs on his chin. My throat tightened.
“I’ll find out what happened to you,” I whispered to the screen. “I swear it.”
Werewolf knew something. I could see it in his eyes when I said Tyler’s name—the flicker he couldn’t hide fast enough.
He thought he could scare me off. He thought he could growl and loom and make me run.
But he didn’t know me.
I wasn’t going anywhere.