Chapter 45
Gabriella
Before
The room was too quiet.
It had been quiet ever since I got back, but now that the house had settled into the dead of night and the last of the footsteps had disappeared down the corridor, the silence had become something else entirely.
It wasn’t peace. It wasn’t calm. It was the kind of silence that pressed against the skull and made every thought sound louder than it should.
The kind that forced a person to sit with themselves, with what they had done, with what could never be undone.
I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at nothing.
My eyes burned. My throat ached. There was a heaviness in my chest that no amount of crying could relieve, as though grief had settled somewhere beneath my ribs and decided it would make a home there.
I had cried until there was nothing left in me but exhaustion. And still, somehow, tears continued to come.
My fingers tightened around the scan picture in my lap, crumpling the edge before I quickly smoothed it out again, panic lancing through me at the thought of damaging it.
It was ridiculous, really. There was no future where I would be tucking this into a baby book, no future where I would be pulling it out years from now, smiling at how tiny our child had once been…
no future where I got to keep any of this.
And yet I still couldn’t bear the thought of ruining it.
The image blurred as fresh tears welled. I blinked them away, but another escaped anyway, sliding hot down my cheek and dropping onto the paper. I cursed softly under my breath and dabbed it away with the sleeve of my jumper, my vision swimming once more as I looked at the little shape on the scan.
Our baby.
I pressed my lips together so tightly they hurt.
For one stupid, reckless moment at the clinic, I had let myself believe in him again.
Not just in us—in him. In Luke. In the boy who had once kissed my knuckles and sworn he’d never let me go.
In Vienna, who had sat beside me so still and watchful, his hand on my thigh, his eyes fixed on the screen with a look so raw and unguarded that I’d had to look away before it broke me.
He had looked at that tiny flicker like it already belonged to him.
And perhaps that had been my real mistake. Not getting pregnant. Not falling in love with him all those years ago. Not even meeting him.
No, my mistake had been allowing myself, just for a second, to imagine that the universe might be kind enough to let me keep something.
It wasn’t.
It never had been.
Dragging in a shaky breath, I lowered the scan picture to my lap and scrubbed both hands over my face, trying to steady myself before I was sick all over the floor.
I felt hollowed out. Flayed open. Every thought I had seemed to come back to him, to the look on his face as my father tossed that bag at his chest, to the way he had stood there so still, as though if he moved even an inch, he would shatter in front of everyone.
Vienna had not fought back.
That was the part I couldn’t stop replaying.
Any other man in his position would have launched himself across the room.
Any other biker would have met humiliation with violence.
But not him. He had just stood there, looking at me as though he no longer recognised the shape of the world, and somehow that had been infinitely worse.
I think I would have preferred him screaming.
I would have preferred hatred. I would have preferred him calling me every filthy name he could drag up from his soul, because then at least I would know where I stood.
But Vienna had looked at me like I was something he still couldn’t quite let himself believe in. Like some part of him was still waiting for me to say it wasn’t real.
A sound left my throat then, small and broken, and I folded over myself, pressing the heel of my hand hard against my mouth to stop the sob from escaping and carrying through the house.
I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t think about him and the baby and the bag and the look in his eyes all in the same breath, or I really would choke on it.
Forcing myself upright again, I reached for the glass of water on my bedside table, only to realise it wasn’t there. My gaze caught instead on the desk across the room, on the pale envelope sitting in the middle of the wood.
For a moment I just stared at it, too tired to make sense of what I was seeing. Then my stomach tightened. I got to my feet too quickly, dizziness sweeping through me hard enough that I had to grab the bedpost to steady myself before crossing the room.
There was no name written on the front. Nothing to identify it at all. Just a plain cream envelope, sealed neatly and placed so deliberately in the centre of the desk.
My fingers shook as I picked it up.
Inside, I found another scan picture.
The one I had watched him slide into the inside pocket of his cut before we left the clinic. The one I had known, somehow, he would keep on him.
My breath caught.
Tucked behind it was a small silver charm, delicate and bright even in the dim light of my room. It was a pram. Tiny, detailed, ridiculous in how sweet it was. The sort of thing that should have made me laugh through my tears if the ache in my chest wasn’t so severe.
A baby charm.
For the bracelet of “us”.
The sight of it undid me more efficiently than anything else that night had managed. My knees weakened, and I sank down into the desk chair before they could give out completely, clutching the scan picture in one hand and the charm in the other like I might somehow anchor myself with them.
There was one more thing in the envelope.
A folded piece of paper.
I knew it was his before I opened it. Of course I did. Vienna’s presence clung to everything he touched. Even now, even after what I had done, I could almost imagine the warmth of his hands in the crease of the note, the pressure of the pen where he had written too hard.
I unfolded it carefully.
And then I read.
Gabriella,
I don’t know who found a way into your room, and I don’t want to know. I gave it to Dante, and he assured me it would reach you.
Just read this and listen to me for once in your bloody life.
I haven’t retaliated. Not properly. Not in the way everyone expected me to.
Crash is holding the club back because I asked him to, and Dante is standing beside me in that.
There’s anger, of course there is, but I have not called church on your family for what happened, and I have not told the brothers to ride.
That is not weakness, and it sure as fuck isn’t forgiveness for your father.
It is me refusing to make this worse for you when I know exactly what men like him do when they feel cornered.
I know what this looks like. I know what you made it look like. But I also know you, Gabriella, and I know what I saw before your father walked in that room. If there is even one part of you left that belongs to me, then you already know I’m telling the truth.
I’m not letting you go.
Read that again if you need to. I am not letting you go.
You can call me every name under the sun, you can stand in front of both clubs and twist the knife until there’s nothing left in my chest but the handle, and I will still not let you go.
Not because I want to trap you. Not because I want to own you.
But because I know what we are, and I know what you are to me.
That didn’t die in that room just because you tried to kill it.
My plans haven’t changed.
If anything, I’m more certain now than I was before.
I meant everything I said to you. About us.
About leaving. About our baby. About making a life that belonged to us and not our clubs.
I meant all of it, and I mean it still. You come to me, and I will take care of the rest. I don’t care if you come tonight, tomorrow, or three months from now with every bridge in flames behind you.
Come to me, and I’ll deal with it. We will work through it.
We will figure it out. I’m not scared of the mess, Gabriella. I’m only scared of losing you to it.
If you’ve done this because you’re frightened, I understand.
If you’ve done it to protect me, I understand that too, even if I hate the way you’ve gone about it.
If you’ve done it because you truly mean every word you said to me, then I suppose this letter makes me look like the biggest bastard fool in England.
I can live with that. I cannot live with doing nothing.
You once asked me if I would still come for you if the whole world stood in the way. You know my answer to that. It hasn’t changed. Neither have I, no matter what name you use when you say goodbye—Vienna, Luke. I’m yours in all my forms.
All you have to do is come to me.
Luke
I didn’t realise I was crying again until the ink blurred.
A drop landed on the page, then another, and another after that, until I had to lower the letter to the desk because I could no longer see the words properly through the tears. My chest hurt so much I genuinely thought something inside it might be tearing.
He hadn’t retaliated.
That was the line that kept circling my mind, cutting deeper each time it returned.
He should have hated me. He should have dragged the club to war. He should have told Crash everything, told Dante everything, told every Devil in that room to burn my world to the ground the way mine had just burned his.
Instead, he had done the exact opposite.
He had protected me.
Protected me from my father. Protected me from his club.
Protected me even now, in the privacy of this room, by refusing to lay the blame at my feet in his letter.
He had left me a path back to him so open, so gentle, so painfully unlike anything I deserved, that it made me feel more monstrous than my father ever could.
A sob broke free then, sharp enough to make me fold over the desk, my forehead pressing against the wood as I cried in earnest. The scan picture crumpled beneath my hand. The little silver pram charm dug into my palm so hard I knew it would leave a mark.
He still wanted me.
After everything, he still wanted me.
And that was the cruellest part of all, because if he had hated me, this would have been easier.
If he had threatened me, if he had sworn revenge, if he had become every terrible thing the clubs always said men would become when they were crossed, then I could have tucked this grief away beneath anger and called it survival.
But he had been good to me.
Better than good.
He had been Luke.
And I knew, with the cold certainty that only misery can bring, that was exactly why I could never go to him.
Because if I did, my father would never stop. Because if I did, the clubs would tear each other apart. Because if I did, Vienna would bleed for me until there was nothing left of him but loyalty and bones. He believed he could work through it. He believed love made us bigger than this world.
He was wrong.
This world was bigger and more cruel than either of us could have expected.
It was hungrier, taking and taking, until there was nothing left to give. It took what it was owed, and then some.
I sat up slowly, wiping at my face with trembling fingers before reading the note once more from beginning to end, even though I knew it would only make the hurt worse. This time I traced the last line with my thumb.
All you have to do is come to me.
It sounded so easy when he wrote it like that.
As though I could simply open my bedroom door, walk out into the night, and choose him. As though there weren’t a thousand chains wrapped around my throat and wrists and heart.
I looked at the charm in my hand again, at the tiny pram and its useless sweetness, and let out a laugh that turned ugly halfway through.
Very carefully, because I could not bear to damage it, I fastened it onto my bracelet with shaking fingers.
It sat there between the others, bright and new and innocent, as though it had every right in the world to be there.
Then I picked up the scan picture, smoothed it flat, and held it against my chest.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered into the empty room, though I didn’t know whether I was speaking to him, the baby, or myself. “I’m so sorry.”
But sorry had never once been enough to save anyone in our world. And as I sat there crying with his letter in my lap and his future hanging from my wrist, I knew with a certainty that would haunt me for the rest of my life that I was not going to him.