Chapter 24
Gage
My whole fucking chest caves in. For a second, I can’t breathe or think.
I can’t do a damn thing but stare at the papers she’s just put in my hand like they’re a knife and she’s asking me to turn the blade into myself.
I thought we’d moved past this. I thought we’d finally made a connection and got over all the shit between us.
Sign these.
I heard her. I know I heard her. I just don’t understand how we got here.
I was on my knees in front of her. Still am.
Like some bastard begging at an altar he has no right approaching.
Her hand was just in mine. Her tears are still on her face.
Her breath is still catching in her chest. She looked at me like maybe she finally understood.
I told her I’d do whatever she asked, and I meant every damn word. That’s the worst fucking part. I meant it before I knew the ask would gut me.
My fingers curl around the stack of papers. The edges bite into my palm. Good. I need the pain. I need something sharp and real to keep me from doing the thing every selfish part of me wants to do.
Refuse.
Tell her no.
Tell her she’s mine. That she’s been mine since the first time she looked at me like she hated me and I still wanted to stand between her and the whole goddamn world.
Tell her that after last night, after her skin under my hands and her trust in my chest and her mouth shaping my name like it wasn’t a curse, she can’t hand me divorce papers and expect me to bleed quietly.
And me giving her the one thing I never thought I’d have the strength to give.
Freedom.
My throat burns like I swallowed glass. I can’t do this anymore. If she doesn’t want me now, then I have to walk away.
“Okay,” I say.
Her eyes widen.
One word. That’s all I can get out. It sounds like gravel dragged over jagged bone, but it’s there. It’s done. I said it. I’ll sign away the only thing that ever made me believe I might not be my father’s son after all.
Her lips part and she looks so wrecked that it nearly kills me all over again. “Okay?”
I force myself to nod. It feels mechanical. “Yeah.”
My hand is shaking now. Fucking shaking. I hate it. Hate that she can see it. Hate that I’m not strong enough to keep this clean for her. If I’m going to lose her, I should at least lose her like a man. Like someone who can stand up and take the bullet without making her watch him bleed.
I reach for a pen and stop as Ami makes a soft sound. I don’t want to look up because I think if I do, I might start fucking crying.
But I do. I look up and what I see isn’t what I expect. She’s looking at me, but instead of hatred, there’s a look of confusion. Her eyes still glistening with tears, but also something else.
“I told you,” I say, staring back down at the top page because looking at her might ruin me. “Whatever you ask.”
“Gage—”
“No.” I shake my head once. “Don’t. You don’t have to explain. You don’t owe me that. You don’t owe me a damn thing.”
“I do,” she whispers.
My eyes flick up.
She’s crying again, but there’s something else under it. Something fierce. That thing in her I’ve seen before, buried beneath all the fear and grief and rage. A woman who bent for years and never fucking broke.
“I do owe you an explanation,” she says, and her fingers twist together in her lap now that she doesn’t have the papers to hold. “Because you’re standing there thinking I’m leaving you.”
Standing.
I’m not standing. I’m still on my knees.
Somehow, it feels right.
“I’m not thinking it,” I rasp. “You just handed me divorce papers, darlin’.”
The endearment slips out before I can stop it. I almost hate myself for it, but I can’t take it back. I don’t want to. If these are the last minutes I get with her, she can have every truth I’ve got left.
Her face crumples and then steadies. “Yes.”
The pen digs into my fingers.
“Yes,” she repeats, stronger this time. “Because I want this marriage over.”
There it is.
The kill shot.
I nod like I’m not dying. Like my ribs aren’t folding around the empty place where my heart used to be.
“Okay,” I say again.
“Would you stop saying that like I’m asking you to walk into your own grave?”
I laugh once. It’s ugly. Barely a laugh at all. “Aren’t you?”
“No.”
Ami leans forward. Her hair falls around her face, messy and soft, and fuck me, she’s the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
Not because she’s untouched. Not because she’s clean of pain.
Because she’s here with all of it. Every scar.
Every sharp edge. Every trembling breath.
And she’s looking at me like I need to listen.
“I want the marriage over,” she says. “Not us.”
And it’s like the whole damn ground just opened up and sent me plummeting to my fate. I’m trying to make sense of what she’s saying. I don’t move. I don’t trust myself to. “Ami.”
“No. Let me say it. Please. If I don’t say it now, I might lose my nerve, and I can’t lose my nerve. Not with this. Not with you.”
She swipes at her cheeks, angry with the tears, like she can order them to stop by force. “This marriage was never ours. It was my father’s. It was Steel’s. It was a truce and a threat, and a bargain written down by men who thought they could move us around like pieces on a board.”
Her voice shakes, but she keeps going.
“We didn’t choose each other. We didn’t even know each other. I came into this hating you for things you hadn’t done. I accused you of being violent. Of being cruel. Of being like every other man I was afraid of. I hurt you.”
“No,” I growl, because that one I can’t let stand. “You were scared, you did it because Tracker forced you.”
“But I still hurt you. I should have told the truth long ago.”
I don’t have an answer for that. Because she did, and I let her. Though I understood why, even if she didn’t tell me.
“That marriage did that,” she says, pointing at the papers with a trembling finger.
“The forced part. The ugly part. The part where neither of us had a say. Everything bad grew out of that. The lies. The resentment. The vendetta with Tracker. Me running. You thinking you had to hold on and let go at the same time. All of it started because everyone else made a choice for us.”
My chest is tight. Too tight.
“And I don’t want that to be our story,” she whispers.
Our story.
Fuck.
My hand closes harder around the pen until I’m surprised it doesn’t snap.
“I don’t want to look back and remember that I stayed because my father signed something. Or because Steel ordered it. Or because some alliance needed protecting. I don’t want you to wonder if I’m here because I had nowhere else to go or because the papers were never signed.”
She takes a breath that shudders through her whole body. “I want to be here because I chose you.”
I forget how to breathe. She reaches out, slow and careful. Like I’m the wounded one.
Maybe I am?
Her fingers touch the back of my hand where I’m still crushing the papers.
“And I want you to choose me. Not as your arranged wife. Not as the woman your club handed you. Not as the damaged girl you feel responsible for saving. Me. Ami. A mess. A coward sometimes. Stubborn. Terrible at trusting. Worse at talking. But trying.”
My eyes burn.
I drop my head before she can see too much, but she sees anyway. She always fucking sees me.
“I want to end this sham marriage,” she says softly, “so we can start something real.”
Something breaks in me then. Not the bad kind. Not the kind my old man put there with fists and fear. Not the kind life carved into me with blood and loyalty and all the shit a man does to survive.
This break lets air in. It’s like my whole damn body is cracking open. I look up at her. “You’re saying you want me to sign these so I can marry you again?”
A watery laugh slips out of her. It’s small and cracked and perfect. “No.”
My stomach drops again.
She squeezes my hand fast. “No, I’m saying I want you to sign them so we can be free to decide what comes next. Without the clubs. Without our families. Without a bargain hanging over us.”
I stare at her.
She blushes then, pink climbing up her throat. “But… yes. Eventually. If you ask me properly. And if I say yes properly. And if we do it because we want to. Because we’re in love.”
In love.
The words hit like a hammer. I’ve heard men talk about love like it’s weakness.
Like it’s a leash. Like it’s a soft thing that makes a man stupid.
I used to think maybe they were right. My mother loved my father, or thought she did, and it destroyed her.
My father loved nothing but control and his own rage, and that destroyed everyone around him.
I never wanted love. Then this woman walked into my life with hate in her eyes and fear under her skin, and somehow, wanting her became the easiest and hardest thing I’ve ever done.
“You love me?” I ask, and I hate how raw it comes out.
Ami’s eyes shine. “Yes.”
My heart stops.
“I don’t know how to do it right,” she says quickly. “I don’t know how to be normal. I might panic. I might get scared. I don’t know. I’m not promising it will be easy. But I’m choosing you.”
“I don’t need easy.”
“No,” she whispers. “You never did.”
I set the pen down. Then the papers. Careful and deliberate like they might explode.
Maybe they already have.
I take her face in my hands. She sucks in a breath, but she doesn’t pull away. Her skin is damp under my thumbs. Warm. Real. Mine only if she wants to be.
Always only if she wants to be.
“I love you, Ami. All of you, the good and the bad. And even when you accused me, I still wanted you. Always you. I want to date you properly,” I keep going, because now that the words are coming, I can’t stop them.
“I want to take you to dinner where nobody bleeds. I want to sit beside you at family shit and let you decide when my hand goes on your back and when it doesn’t.
I want to learn what makes you smile when you’re not trying to hide it.
I want to know what kind of coffee you drink.
What side of the bed you actually like when you’re not trying to escape me. ”
“I wasn’t trying to escape you last night,” she whispers.
My thumb stills on her cheek.
No. She wasn’t. That memory rolls through me, hot and tender and dangerous, but I keep my hands gentle.
“I want to build something with you,” I say.
“Something that’s ours. And if that starts with signing those papers, I’ll sign them.
If it starts with me sleeping on the couch for a month, I’ll do that too.
If it starts with you going home and me showing up tomorrow with flowers like some idiot who doesn’t know what to do with his hands, I’ll do that. ”
“You’d bring me flowers?”
“I’d bring you a whole fucking garden if you wanted it.”
Her face softens in a way that steals every hard thing out of me.
“I don’t need a garden,” she says. “All I need is for you to always be honest with me. No deciding what’s best for me behind my back. My father did that, and while I’ve forgiven him. I don’t want us to have that kind of relationship.”
“I won’t.”
“And I need you to understand that choosing me means choosing all of me. Even the broken parts.”
I lean in until my forehead touches hers. “Those parts aren’t separate from you. They’re not something I get to cut around. I love all of you or I don’t love you right.”
Her breath breaks.
My own isn’t much better.
“I do,” I tell her, because she deserves the words. She deserves every word I’ve been too scared or too stupid to say. “I love you, Ami. I’m in love with you. So fucking in love with you I don’t know what to do with it half the time.”
Her hands come up and close around my wrists, holding me there. “I love you too.”
For a second, I let myself have it.
Just that.
Her hands on me. Her breath against my mouth. Those words between us. No club. No past. No monster waiting in the dark. Just Ami and me and something fragile we’re both choosing not to crush.
Then I pull back enough to look at the papers.
“Give me the pen,” I say.