Chapter 9 Dead and Gone
DEAD AND GONE
PIERCE
Si couldn’t have put us in a more awkward situation if he’d actually tried.
I listened to her soft footsteps move down the hall an hour after I said goodnight.
Then the thud of cabinets closing about the kitchen.
I hope she ate the food I made. It was probably the first home-cooked meal she’d had in a long time.
I don’t know what I expected when she got home last night, but her red-rimmed eyes and the tear streaks tracking down her cheeks weren’t it. I wanted nothing more than to pull her into my arms and hold her, while trying to figure out what the hell happened, but that’s not us anymore.
My eyes catch the clock as the hand ticks past the three.
Ten-fifteen in the morning. I have no clue if she’s still home past the closed bedroom door that gives me an illusion of normalcy.
I waited until the house turned quiet last night.
Got up and double checked everything was locked up before finally calling it.
It took me forever to fall asleep, though.
The house is too damn quiet. There’s no loud music until all hours of the early morning.
No fights breaking out or clatters of bottles breaking as they’re drunkenly dropped to a concrete floor.
Definitely no sounds of obnoxious sex through the thin walls like I’m used to at the clubhouse.
Our unexpected hook-up must have been a moment of insanity on her part. I don’t anticipate a repeat from the cold shoulder she’s been throwing my way. At least not anytime soon.
I need time to wear her down. She might not realize it yet, but the last six years apart mean fuck all in our story. She’s within reach, and I have every intention of getting her back.
Fuck whatever her reasons were before. Fuck the fact that she’s pregnant with some other man’s baby. Lexi has always been mine, and I think it’s time she remembers.
I breathe out a deep sigh and finally get out of the way too comfortable bed I’m not used to sleeping in.
The club pays, but since I live there, it’s not typically more than pocket change to upkeep my bike.
Certainly not enough to go out and get myself something like this to sleep on.
At least now that I’ve moved out, my cut will go up.
It’s Lexi’s day off, which she typically spends sitting around the house, not doing much of anything, other than the few chores she keeps up on to not live in a complete pig sty. But when I make it to the kitchen in search of some caffeine, she’s not here.
Her bedroom door was wide open, not something I think she’d do if she was still in there, and the house is so quiet you could hear a pin drop. That’s going to take some getting used to.
While the coffee brews a fresh pot, I grab my phone, ready to put my question to bed.
Where are you?
The text disappears into the ether, marked as delivered, but she doesn’t respond. That’s fine. I might not be at the same level Branson was when it comes to all things tech, but he did show me a few helpful tricks.
Being close enough to her phone, I was able to get in through the Wi-Fi connection and download a tracker. Si stole his back from her car and replanted it on Harlow’s bike. After everything that happened, I don’t think she fought him on it the second time around.
Ahh, there she is. Across town at an address I don’t recognize. When I do a quick search, it pops up as a medical clinic. All the air evacuates my lungs.
Forgetting about the coffee, I pull the plug and rush back to my room to throw some clean clothes on. I refuse to let her go through whatever she’s choosing on her own.
Maybe it’s not my place. Maybe I have no right. But either way, when she walks out the door, I’ll be there if she needs me. If she doesn’t, I’ll stay away and keep my eye on her from afar. It’s not like I had any plans for today anyway.
The winter sun hides behind low-hanging gray clouds, heavy with the promise of rain. I pull back on the throttle, racing down the blacktop toward the clinic, hoping I get there before she finishes and heads out.
Lexi strides out of the clinic’s front doors, chin lifted and those oversized sunglasses shielding whatever reality is brewing behind them.
She pauses at the curb, pulling out her phone.
I know exactly what she sees—my message, sitting there like a dare.
A quiet reminder that I’m still around. That it wasn’t just a bad dream or hallucination last night.
She stares for a beat, her thoughts unreadable behind those dark lenses, then shakes her head with a sigh I can’t hear and slips the phone into her bag.
No buzz in my pocket. No reply. Just silence. I’m not surprised that she’s chosen to ignore me, but the sting is still there. We have so much that’s been left unsaid between us, and until we stop dancing around it, things won’t change.
She crosses the lot to her car with that familiar confident sway, every step a silent statement. A piece of her is tied neatly back up in the facade she portrays for the world.
I sit motionless on the bike, the engine quiet beneath me. She’d hear it the second I fire it up. So I wait and watch. Only when her car reaches the exit and turns onto the main road do I move, the low growl of the engine breaking up the mess in my mind, as I slip behind her.
She veers away from the road that would take her home, heading toward the far edge of town instead. There’s not much out this way, just a lonely stretch of two-lane cracked cement and the on-ramp that leads to the next town over.
Maybe she’s got other business to handle today.
I scan the horizon, watching the eerie clouds roll in like a slow threat. The wind bites at my cheeks, sharp and relentless, and I brace myself for the downpour that feels inevitable. Hopefully, I don’t end this day soaked to the bone, looking like some sad, drowned mutt trailing behind her.
Another ten minutes pass with the icy air whipping against my face, and the sparse traffic fades into silence. Then she turns beneath the rusted iron archway of Rosenfeld Cemetery.
The cobblestone drive that winds through the graves is too narrow for her compact car, but she pulls off into the grass without hesitation and climbs out.
She doesn’t look back, but there’s no question in my mind she knows I’m here now.
Out here, flanked by nothing but open fields and the hum of the highway, there’s nowhere to hide.
The headstones stretch in tidy rows, a grim grid that marks generations of stories long ended. It’s five deep, at least, back to the first families who carved a life into this soil. But Lexi doesn’t need to go that far.
She walks with purpose, and I don’t need to see where she stops to know who she’s here for. I haven’t been back since her father’s untimely funeral. That day still feels like a fault line in the middle of everything—the beginning of the end.
His death hit her like a freight train. He was everything to her.
The one who kept the peace between a spiteful mother and a misplaced older brother.
The piece that held the family together when emotions ran high.
He was the buffer between Lexi and the toxicity between two of the people she loved most in the world.
Her father was an amazing man who gave her brother a safe landing to come home to occasionally.
And then, just like that, because of a drunk driver, he was gone.
I was there for her. Stood by her and tried to carry what weight she’d hand over. I would’ve done anything to take the edge off her pain.
But she didn’t lean on me. She shut me out before long. Kicked me to the curb like we hadn’t spent years together. Like she wasn’t my everything or the girl who promised me forever the night we took each other’s virginity. I became some disposable thing she didn’t need anymore.
We graduated a year later, and her mother left without a look back. She fled the town that took her husband, leaving Lexi to grieve alone in the aftermath.
All I ever wanted was to be the one she leaned on. The steady shoulder. The safe place. But that day at the cemetery, she buried more than her father.
She buried us, too.