Chapter 46
Vienna
Now
I had always thought grief would feel louder.
I had imagined screaming, maybe. Rage. The kind of agony that split the sky open and brought the world down around your ears.
I had imagined it as something wild and uncontainable, something that would have me tearing through walls and snapping necks and putting bullets in every bastard stupid enough to still be breathing while she wasn’t.
Instead, it was quiet.
It hollowed me out so completely that by the time I found myself standing outside the Rough Riders’ Church, helmet dangling from my hand, blood already dried beneath my nails from men who had tried and failed to stop me getting there, I felt almost calm. Not peaceful, exactly.
There was nothing peaceful about the ache lodged behind my ribs, or the way every breath scraped like broken glass through my chest. But there was a stillness to me that hadn’t existed in years.
A dead sort of stillness. The kind a man got when the one thing anchoring him to the earth had been ripped away, leaving nothing behind but an empty shell and a body too stubborn to lie down.
The guard at the gate looked at me, then at the cuts across my knuckles, the bruise blooming along my jaw, the gun strapped openly at my side, and sneered as though he thought I’d come to posture.
I almost laughed.
“Tell Nico I’m here,” I said.
He frowned. “You alone?”
I lifted my gaze to his and let him see it. Let him see there was nothing in me worth bargaining with anymore. “Does it look like I brought an army?”
He hesitated. I watched the moment he realised something was off. Men like him were used to fury. Used to threats and chest-beating and stupid bravado. They knew how to handle men who still had something to lose.
Eventually, he stepped aside.
The door opened.
And I walked in.
No grand entrance. No weapon drawn. No snarling threats.
Just me, my boots crunching over gravel, my heartbeat steady and wrong, and the eyes of every Rough Rider who turned to look.
Some of them smirked when they recognised me.
Some of them looked wary. Most looked confused, because even they knew this made no sense.
A Vice President didn’t stroll into enemy territory alone unless he had a death wish or a plan.
I had no plan.
Just the death wish.
Nico was waiting at the table like he’d been expecting entertainment, one hand resting lazily at his belt, his other on the table, drumming his fingers, a smile on his face that made my skin crawl.
He looked too comfortable. Too pleased with himself.
There was still blood under his nails from the last time I’d seen him, and for one fractured second I imagined it was hers.
My stomach turned, but even that didn’t spark the rage I knew should have been there.
Just that terrible emptiness. That numb, ugly hole where my future had been.
“Well,” he drawled, voice carrying across the yard. “Would you look at that. Vienna himself.”
I said nothing.
Nico tilted his head. “You look like shit.”
“It’s been a hard day.”
A few of his men laughed. Nico’s smile widened, shark-slick and cruel. “You come to beg, or did you finally realise she was never worth all this trouble?”
That should have done it. That should have had me lunging for him, consequences be damned. Instead, I just stood there and stared at him, wondering distantly how a man could keep talking when his tongue should already have been cut from his head.
Then I unholstered my gun, let the room tense around me, and dropped it to the ground.
The silence that followed was instant.
Nico’s brows rose.
“I’m here,” I said, and my voice sounded as dead as I felt. “You wanted to hurt me. You wanted to make a point. Fine. Here I am.”
A murmur moved through the crowd. Nico didn’t move, but his eyes sharpened.
“You’re surrendering?”
I shrugged one shoulder. “Call it what you want. Surrender. Foolishness. The outcome is the same.”
He studied me for a long moment, as if trying to figure out where the trick was. There wasn’t one. That was the thing. There was no hidden blade, no ambush waiting in the wings, no brothers about to crash through the gates. I had come alone because none of that mattered now.
None of it. Not the club, not the war, not revenge, not tomorrow. There had only ever been one thing in this world that could make me want to survive it.
And she was gone.
“Search him,” Nico ordered. Hands hit me from both sides. Somebody slammed me to my knees hard enough to jar my teeth together, then yanked my arms behind my back. I didn’t fight it. Didn’t even tense.
They stripped the knife from my boot, the second blade from my jacket, the lighter in my pocket, and all the while the room watched with a kind of delighted disbelief, like they couldn’t quite believe the club clown had finally turned up to die.
One of them drove a fist into my ribs just because he could and pain flared bright beneath his fist. But then it dulled as quickly as it came, until there was nothing.
Because I had nothing left in me.
Nico crouched in front of me, close enough that I could smell stale smoke on him. “This is disappointing,” he said softly. “I thought there’d be more of a show.”
I looked at him through the hair hanging in my face. “Maybe I’m saving my energy.”
He smiled. “For what?”
“For hell,” I said with a grin, though there was nothing to be smiling about. But it didn’t matter. Because I was planning on following Gabriella to wherever it was she had ended up after leaving this shitty place.
Nico’s expression hardened. He stood, then nodded once to the men behind me. “Tie him up.”
They hauled me out of the building and across the yard, into one of the outbuildings. The room they dragged me into smelled of damp concrete, old blood, petrol, and rot. A single bulb buzzed overhead, flickering just enough to make everything feel unreal.
My wrists were lashed high to a hook fixed into a support beam, my shoulders wrenching with the strain. My boots barely touched the floor. Every breath dragged through my chest was sharper now, not because I was afraid, but because this was it.
This was how it ended. I wasn’t going out in fire, or in a blaze of glory. It was just me, in a dirty yard, at the hands of my enemies. The worst way for a respected biker to go, but when the world had already been emptied of colour, I couldn’t find it in me to care.
Nico took his time, circling me slowly, speaking to his men more than to me, making sure they were watching. Making sure I knew this was theatre to him.
“This is the boy she risked everything for?” he sneered. “This the great fucking love story?”
I kept my mouth shut.
“This is the pathetic piece of shit she was willing to throw her entire life away over?”
He didn’t let me answer that time. His fist came swinging, splitting my lip with one punch. The second fist knocked my head sideways.
By the fifth, I tasted blood thick and metallic on my tongue, and someone behind Nico laughed when my knees buckled under the force of it. He hit me with the kind of methodical cruelty only cowards enjoyed, never enough to end it, always enough to keep it going.
His fists hit anywhere they could reach—my face, my ribs, my chest. At one point, he pulled out a blade and traced it over my skin, drawing blood, deep enough to make me wince, but not enough to cause any lasting damage.
Still, I didn’t fight. And that seemed to bother all of them more than if I had come in here with an entire army.
“Nothing to say?” Nico asked after a while, breath barely altered.
I spat blood onto the floor near his boot. “Not to you.”
He hit me again for that, open-handed this time, hard enough to snap my head back, making my vision blur at the edges.
It would have been easy to drift. Easier, maybe, to let go completely and follow the pain down into the dark where her face was waiting for me. I thought of her more clearly in that yard than I had in years gone by when she’d been right there in front of me.
Gabriella at eleven, with fire in her eyes and dirt on her shoes, calling me an idiot like it was a term of endearment.
Gabriella at eighteen, with her fingers tangled in my shirt as if she already knew I’d spend the rest of my life trying to hold on to her.
Gabriella laughing. Gabriella crying. Gabriella flicking that bedroom light on and off in the dark, telling me without words that she was still there, still alive, still mine in all the ways the world didn’t allow.
Gabriella dead.
The thought landed like a blade between my ribs, deeper than all the rest.
Good, I thought dimly. Let it finish me.
Nico brought the knife to my throat, looking at me with hatred and malice, and I finally thought he was going to send me back to the woman I belonged to. Until a voice rang out, making us all look in the direction it came.
Natalie stood there, chest heaving, rainwater clinging to her coat, eyes wide with something that looked too close to panic. “Stop.”
Nico frowned. “What the fuck are you doing?”
She ignored him, looking straight at me first, and something in her face shifted. Horror. Guilt. Maybe both. I didn’t care. Not until I saw the wetness in her eyes and realised, she looked like someone who had run headfirst into a nightmare she hadn’t thought through.
“Nico,” she said again, more urgently now. “Stop.”
His expression darkened. “You don’t come in here and tell me what to do.”
Her hands were shaking. “She’s dead, alright? You’ve both fucking lost. Now call them off.”
A heavy silence settled over the crowd.
I lifted my head slowly, the blood dripping from my mouth onto my shirt.
“What?” My voice came out wrecked, little more than a rasp. She wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know, but I needed to hear her say it. I needed to hear Gabriella’s name coming from her lips as she announced to all of us that she was dead.