Chapter 33
Gabriella
Now
The walk back should have felt like escape.
Instead, it felt like the slow, inevitable closing of a door I had no right to have opened in the first place.
Every step carried me further from Vienna and deeper into something colder, something heavier, something that pressed down on my chest until breathing felt like effort rather than instinct.
My body hadn’t caught up yet. It was still too aware, too alive, every nerve lit in a way that made the night air feel sharper against my skin.
The memory of his hands lingering against my skin, the way his voice made every part of me tingle, the feelings he made me feel… it was all I could think about.
And the jacket.
God, the jacket.
My fingers kept tightening against the front of it, holding it closed like that might somehow dull the significance of what I was wearing, like I could reduce it to something practical instead of what it actually was.
He had given me his cut. He could be kicked out of the club for that. He couldn’t attend Church without it. And yet he had given it to me.
And that claimed me in a way nothing else ever had.
That thought had circled endlessly on the walk back, growing louder the closer I got to the Riders’ compound.
I should have folded it carefully and left it on his bed, or draped it over the chair, or shoved it at him and walked out before I could weaken.
But I hadn’t been able to do it. Leaving it behind would have meant leaving him properly, and I didn’t think I had it in me to do that and still make it back here in one piece.
So I had kept it.
Besides, I’m sure this was his spare. Every biker had a spare, just in case. He would have another somewhere.
My mind was so occupied as I walked back, that I didn’t even register the cameras. I barely noticed anything. I was so focused on getting back unseen by the human eye, that it failed to register that humans had more than one way of looking, seeing, and gathering their information.
The back door closed softly behind me, and I barely had time to turn before the room exploded into light.
“Here she comes. The street walker. What the fuck are you wearing?” Nico was already on his feet.
The bottle in his hand shattered against the wall as he crossed the room, glass breaking in a sharp, violent burst that echoed too loudly in the silence.
The smell of alcohol hit the air, sharp and bitter, but it barely registered over the sudden, suffocating weight of his attention locking onto me.
My heart slammed into my throat. “I—”
“Don’t,” he snapped, closing the distance between us before I could take a step back. “Don’t open that stupid fucking mouth and insult me with a lie.”
His hand caught the front of the jacket and wrenched me forward hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs, my body jolting with the force of it as I stumbled into him.
The leather twisted between his fingers, the Devils patch dragging under his grip, and something in his expression darkened further at the sight of it on me.
“Whose is it?”
All he had to do was turn the jacket over and look at the patch. The Vice President patch that told him exactly where I had been and who I had been with.
I wasn’t going to open my mouth and make this easier for him. I just had to hope his rage was strong enough that he would discard the jacket and focus on me.
Not the owner.
Because all I had ever done was try to keep Vienna safe. Every sacrifice I made was to ensure he lived. And one stupid decision might have undone years of pain and longing in one second.
The slap came without warning, cracking across my face with enough force to send me sideways into the table.
Pain burst hot and immediate, my vision blurring at the edges as the impact jarred through me, but before I could even process it, he was there again, dragging me upright by the collar of the jacket.
“Don’t fucking insult me,” he said, his voice lower now, more controlled—but infinitely more dangerous for it. “You think I don’t know what this is?”
My cheek throbbed. My ears rang.
Still, I said nothing.
“You think I don’t recognise a Devil’s cut?” he continued, his gaze raking over me with something that bordered on disgust. “You think I don’t know exactly who this belongs to?”
His eyes dragged over me again, slower this time, more deliberate. Taking in the state of me. The way I was breathing. The way I was standing. The way the jacket sat on my body like it belonged there.
“You’ve looked different,” he said. “For days,” he added, quieter now, as though he were piecing it together out loud. “Ever since that night.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“That fucking night!” he hissed, his spit hitting my cheek.
My chest tightened painfully as a flicker of a memory, a brief moment in time, flashed before me.
The hallway.
The shadow beneath the door.
The footsteps that had slowed.
The moment I had stopped breathing entirely.
“I heard you,” he said. “I didn’t need to hear everything. Just enough to know you were up to something you shouldn’t have been. I’ve had you screaming in pleasure enough times to know what it sounds like. And that’s exactly what was happening in that room, wasn’t it, Gabby?”
Humiliation burned hot beneath my skin, sharp enough to make my fingers curl into my palms.
“Were you touching yourself? Were you imagining all the punishments I’d be giving you when I found out?
Did you get off to the thought of the pain…
or was it something else? Because surely you wouldn’t have been stupid enough to have another man in your bedroom, would you?
” he asked, reaching out to twirl a strand of my hair around his index finger.
I said nothing. Panic was flooding through me, and I knew it was better to remain silent and be accused of something than to open my mouth and admit to anything.
“I thought maybe I was wrong,” he continued. “That maybe you weren’t screaming the place down, begging for cock. Especially as I wasn’t around. But then I saw you after. That flush to your skin you get after an orgasm. That glassy, almost wondrous look in your eyes. So I paid attention.”
My pulse began to pound harder.
“I watched you in the hall,” he continued, his voice almost conversational now. “Watched you at your door. Watched you staring out of that window like you were waiting for something. And if I wasn’t watching, my men sure as hell were.”
My skin prickled.
“And tonight…” His grip tightened again, dragging me closer, his face dangerously close to mine. “I watched you leave.”
The room seemed to tilt, closing in on itself. And it was then that I realised exactly what had happened.
I hadn’t got lucky. I hadn’t left undetected. There were no gaps in his control. He had seen me, and let me go anyway. This was another one of his tests.
“You dare to walk back into my house wearing his jacket,” he said, his voice dropping lower with every word. “And you thought I wouldn’t notice?”
My hands came up before I could stop them, shoving at his chest in a useless attempt to create space.
“Fuck off, Nico,” I hissed, regretting it almost immediately.
“What was that?”
His voice was deadly low. Alarm bells were ringing, warning me that I was playing with the devil.
But I couldn’t stop. Everything that had been building inside me these past few weeks, the old, buried feelings Vienna had forced back to the surface, the injustice of it all…
it all came out in a flurry of anger, directed at the one person who I should have avoided.
“I said fuck off, Nico. You can force me to stay here, you can force yourself on my body, hell, you can even force an orgasm or two out of me. But you can’t force yourself in here,” I snapped, tapping my temple. “So yes, you can go and fuck yourself. You don’t fucking own me!”
His hand moved from the jacket to my throat in one swift motion, fingers closing just enough to cut the next breath from my lungs as he drove me backwards into the wall. The impact rattled through me, my head knocking back hard enough to blur my vision, but he didn’t let me fall.
“There it is,” he said, almost satisfied. He brought his face to my neck, inhaling deeply, muttering his words against my skin. “That’s what I’ve been waiting for. Oh, but how I love it when you fight me, sweet girl.”
He licked up my neck, stopping at my jawline and then pressed a quick, hard kiss to my lips.
“You’re wrong,” he whispered against my mouth. I tried to turn my head away, but he had my jaw in a vice grip, refusing to allow me to escape. “I do fucking own you. And I’ll show you what happens to useless property when it no longer serves its purpose.”
Pain came quickly after that. His fist hit my stomach, knocking the air out of me. He grabbed hold of my hair and threw me from the wall, sending me flying to the floor hard enough that the air left my lungs in a broken gasp, my ribs taking the brunt of it as I hit.
“You’re fucking nothing, Gabby,” he hissed at me, immediately followed by a kick to my side. I curled instinctively around the pain, my arms wrapping tight around my middle as though that might protect me from the next one.
It didn’t.
Nothing did.
“Who was it?” he demanded, kicking me again. “Say his fucking name!”
I cried out as he brought his foot to my head, pressing his weight down on me. The pressure in my skull was mind-numbing, but still I said nothing.
“I know who it was, whore,” he spat. “I just want to hear you say his name one last time.”
He pressed his foot down harder, until I was whimpering beneath his boot.
And then he was gone. But before I had a chance to celebrate, he kicked me again, this time sending me flying onto my back with the force of it. My heart stuttered in my chest, seeming to stop for a second, the world blackening around the edges.
You’re just winded, Gabby. You’re okay, I chanted to myself, struggling to draw in a breath.