Chapter 32
I’ve been hurt before.
That’s not exactly groundbreaking.
Anybody who grows up the way I did, loses what I lost, and then spends enough years in this life with a patch on his back and violence in his hands learns how to take a hit.
You take it. You bleed if you have to. You keep moving.
Simple.
What I’m learning, though, is that there’s a whole different kind of hurt that comes from a woman looking at you like she knows you’re safe and still flinching anyway because her body hasn’t caught up yet.
That one doesn’t land on skin. It lands somewhere much uglier. Somewhere you can’t stitch shut with whiskey, blood, or bad decisions.
I leave the kitchen after the fight because staying would’ve made it worse. Not because I wanted distance.
Because she did. Because the last thing I ever want is to become another wall she has to push against just to breathe.
That thought sits like glass under my ribs while I walk the downstairs hall, boots heavy on the floorboards, every instinct in me screaming to turn around and go back and pull her into my arms until the fear in her face settles into something I know how to handle.
I don’t. I keep moving.
Past her room. Past mine. Out the back door and into the late-afternoon heat where the air feels too bright and too open and not nearly violent enough for what’s happening inside my head.
I stop at the edge of the side lot and brace both hands on the hood of the nearest truck just to have something solid under them while I get my breathing under control.
Not because I’m losing it. Because I’m closer than I’d like to admit. The words replay anyway.
Sometimes this feels too close.
I know what she meant. That’s the problem.
I know she wasn’t calling me Cal. Know she wasn’t saying I’m him. Know she was talking about the way trauma grabs at the shape of things and distorts them until safety starts looking too much like control if it comes wrapped in enough rules and too many eyes.
I know all that.
Still hurt. Still landed. Still cut me open in a place I didn’t think she could reach yet.
Maybe didn’t think anyone could.
I drag a hand over my face and stare out toward the gate where two prospects are posted, one inside the booth, one pacing the line like he’s pretending this is a normal day and not one where my entire body feels like a live wire wrapped in skin.
If I let myself sit still long enough, I can admit exactly why it hurt this bad.
It’s not just what she said.
It’s that I’ve spent the last few weeks rearranging the way I move through this world around her and Lexi without asking myself too many questions about it, because answering them honestly would’ve meant admitting I was already halfway gone before she ever crawled into my bed.
And then today, in one ugly, painful burst of fear, she put me close enough to that man to make my whole body reject the comparison before my brain could catch up.
Not because she meant it. Because she didn’t. Not because she believes I’m him. Because she doesn’t. But because trauma doesn’t always ask permission before it turns the room into something old and ugly.
I know that.
Still doesn’t make it hurt less. It also doesn’t solve the actual problem in front of me, which is that she wasn’t wrong about what this is doing to her.
That’s the part nobody’s saying out loud because nobody wants to touch it.
The increased protection is necessary.
It’s also scraping over every place in her that learned being watched means being owned. That’s not her fault. It’s not mine either. Doesn’t change the fact that I’m standing between a rock and a hard place with a woman I love and no clear way through it.
Love.
There it is.
The word I’ve been dodging like a coward because saying it in my own head makes it too real. Too final. Too big.
I laugh once under my breath, no humor in it at all. “Outstanding,” I mutter.
Because of course that’s where this landed. Of course that’s where she got me. Of course the woman with amber eyes and enough ghosts to fill a graveyard was going to be the one who made me finally admit something I’d been sidestepping with all the grace of a drunk man on black ice.
I love her.
I love the way she laughs when she forgets herself long enough not to be careful.
I love the way she brushes Lexi’s hair back without even looking, like her hands have memorized motherhood so deeply they don’t need instruction anymore.
I love the way she says my real name only in my room, like it belongs behind that locked door and nowhere else.
I love the way she still softens when she sees me, even after everything that’s happened, even after the fight.
And that last one hurts too.
Because she’ll still soften for me and I still managed to put enough pressure on her nervous system to make her body remember a cage.
That’s a hell of a thing to sit with.
So I do what I always do when I don’t know where else to put the hurt.
I turn it into work.
***
By the time the sun starts dropping, I’ve walked the perimeter three times.
Then again.
Not because it changed between the second and third pass. Because movement keeps me from doing something useless like standing outside her door and waiting for some sign that she’s okay enough for me to go in.
I check the gate schedule and make Cain shift it tighter. No gaps longer than ten minutes between eyes on the main road, and nobody works a post solo if I can help it.
I have Dom widen the outside camera sweep by six degrees on the east corner because there’s too much dead space near the brush line and I’m not interested in finding out the hard way that I was right.
I make Blaze rerun the town routes with me, not because he forgot them, but because I need somebody with a bike and half a brain to tell me if there’s anywhere else somebody could sit and watch without being obvious.
He doesn’t complain.
That alone tells me how bad I look.
Shadow joins the second route without being asked, which also tells me enough.
Neither of them says anything for the first twenty minutes.
They know better.
We take the outer road past the diner, the gas station, the little grocery store where the picture was taken, then cut back around the service road that runs parallel to the tree line.
Bikes rumble under us the whole way, late-day heat baking off the asphalt, wind cutting just enough through my cut to keep me from boiling alive.
Normal ride. Abnormal silence.
By the time we pull back onto club property, I’ve got two more potential observation points in my head, one new blind spot I don’t like, and exactly zero improvement in my mood.
I kill the engine beside the row of bikes and swing off mine in one smooth movement, stripping off my gloves and shoving them in my back pocket before I even fully straighten.
Blaze pulls his helmet off and studies me for one second too long. “You look worse.”
“Thanks.”
“Wasn’t a compliment.”
Shadow kills his bike too and plants both boots on the gravel, arms draped over the handlebars while he watches me with that same steady, infuriatingly perceptive look he’s had since we were fourteen and one bad foster placement away from becoming statistics.
“You going to keep doing laps till the whole county’s secure or you want to actually think for a minute?” he asks.
I turn toward him. “I am thinking.”
“No,” Blaze says, tossing his gloves onto the seat. “You’re punishing the property because you can’t punch the problem in the face.”
I stare at him flatly. That bastard has gotten entirely too perceptive in his old age.
Shadow’s mouth twitches once, then smooths right back out. “He’s got a point.”
“Of course I do,” Blaze mutters. “I’m beautiful and right all the time.”
“Careful,” I tell him. “I’m in the mood to become your problem.”
He grins, which is a mistake, but not one I’ve got the patience to correct right now.
Shadow pushes off his bike and jerks his chin toward the back of the garage. “Come on.”
I almost tell him no. Then decide I’m outnumbered and not in the mood to fight the two men most likely to stand there until sunrise waiting me out.
So I follow them.
The back of the garage is cooler than the yard, oil and steel and old concrete giving the place that familiar smell I’ve associated with work and blood and brotherhood for most of my adult life.
There’s a small workbench along one wall, spare parts in labeled bins, a fan in the corner that’s making a whole lot of noise and not nearly enough difference.
Shadow leans against the workbench. Blaze drops onto an overturned crate. I stay standing because I don’t trust myself to settle.
For a minute, nobody says anything.
Then Shadow cuts straight through the middle of it. “You love her.”
There’s no dramatic pause after that. No build. No softening. Just the truth thrown into the room like a wrench.
I look at him.
Then Blaze.
Blaze lifts both hands. “I was going to go with ‘obsessed in a concerningly competent way,’ but yeah, what he said.”
I should deny it. Should laugh. Threaten. Turn it into a joke. Pick a fight. Do literally anything other than stand there in silence with the answer written all over my face. Instead, I do the thing that apparently I’m doing a lot lately.
I tell the truth. “Yeah,” I say.
Blaze blinks. Actually fucking blinks.
Shadow, to his credit, only nods once like he already knew and was just waiting for me to catch up to what had been obvious to everybody else for a while now. “That’s your woman,” he says quietly.
And there it is. Not a question. Not a guess. Not teasing.
A fact.
Something in me settles when he says it. Not because it’s new. Because it isn’t. Because he’s just putting words to something that’s already been living under my skin long enough to leave marks.
I look toward the doorway, toward the clubhouse beyond it, toward the place where Raven is probably trying to hold herself together after cutting me and being cut right back by the aftermath of it.
Then I say the only thing that feels true enough to stand on. “Then I better make sure she survives long enough to hate me later.”