Chapter 13 #2
He's turned his wheelchair toward me. His face is doing something I've never seen it do before: coming apart, very quietly, behind his eyes. The shuttered blankness has cracked just enough to let the desperation through.
"Valentina." His voice cuts through the chaos the way a sharp thing cuts — clean and sudden and total. "Look at me."
I make myself look. God, I make myself.
"Tell me he's lying." And there it is — the thing underneath the hardness, the thing he almost never lets out: the plea. Raw and visible and already bleeding at the edges. "Tell me this is bullshit. That you didn't—that you couldn't—"
I open my mouth. My body is ice from the inside out. The words that would fix this — he's lying, he's making it up, I never touched Marcus — line up behind my teeth and dissolve before I can speak them.
"Oh my God," someone breathes from the crowd — a woman's voice, horrified and certain. "She did it. Look at her face. She fucking did it."
"Valentina," Xavier says again, louder now, my name carrying all the weight of everything we are, everything we've built in these weeks together, everything that is about to shatter. "Did you kill Marcus?"
Seventy faces pointed at mine like seventy accusations.
Asher's jaw clenched so tight the muscle jumps.
Zay's hands balled into fists at his sides.
Xavier, in his wheelchair, with that desperate terrible wound opening in his eyes that I have been running from for weeks — that I caused, that I have been lying about causing, every single day.
The lie is right there. Waiting. It would be so easy. It would buy me another week, another month, another stretch of borrowed time living inside something that felt more like home than anywhere I'd ever been.
But I'm so tired. I am so unutterably, bone-deep tired of carrying this.
"Yes," I whisper.
The word is barely sound. But it hits the room like a physical blow.
What follows is chaos I register in fragments: shouting, bodies surging forward, Zay and Asher immediately flanking me with the reflexive precision of men who've protected each other in tighter spots than this.
I'm talking — I can hear myself talking — words spilling out like water through a broken dam, self-defense, cornered, no choice, didn't mean to, the pipe, just the pipe—
But Xavier is not hearing any of it.
Xavier is staring at me with his face completely shut down.
Not in the catastrophic-information stillness from earlier.
This is different. This is the other kind — the kind where everything human goes somewhere deep inside and nothing gets in or out.
Like someone reached into his chest and turned off a light.
"You lied to me." His voice is very quiet.
More frightening for the quiet. "For six months.
Six fucking months you let me think the Vipers killed him.
Let me plan retaliation. Let me—" Something moves through him, through his jaw, his throat.
"You've been sleeping in my bed. Letting me touch you. Telling me you love me. While knowing—"
"Xavier, please, I didn’t remember that night until—"
"When did you remember?" His voice sharpens suddenly, a hot wire under the cold. "When did you know?"
The truth comes out of me because I have no lies left and nothing left to protect. "That night at the Vipers. When I went to get Talia. She said something that made it come back. Made everything—" I can't finish. "Come back."
"Weeks." He says the word like he's tasting something poisonous. "You've known for weeks."
"I was scared—" My voice breaks on it, the word cracking down the middle. "I didn't know how to—I tried to find a way to—"
"You lied!" The roar tears out of him — the sound of a man whose grief has finally found a shape, and the shape is fury. It silences every other voice in the room. "You looked me in the eye every single day and lied!"
"I'm sorry." The tears have been falling for I don't know how long; my face is wet, my voice is barely functional. "I'm so sorry. I didn't know what to do. I was terrified you'd—"
"What?" The bitterness in his laugh is the most devastating sound I've ever heard from a human being. "Hate you? Leave you?" He holds my gaze for a long, terrible moment. "Yeah, Valentina. That's exactly what's going to happen."
The words don't land like words. They land like the loss of gravity — like stepping off the edge of something and discovering the fall.
"Xavier—" Zay tries.
"No." Xavier's voice closes like a door. "Don't. Don't defend her. She killed Marcus. My brother. And she has been lying about it since before I was awake enough to ask questions."
"He was going to rape her." Asher's voice is flat. Clinical. Like if he says it plainly enough it will cut through the grief and reach the man underneath it. "She defended herself. That's not murder."
"She still lied!" Xavier's voice breaks on the last syllable — a small, catastrophic sound that is somehow worse than the roar.
"She still kept it from me for months! How am I supposed to trust anything she says?
How am I supposed to—" He stops. Jaw working.
Hands gripping the wheels of the chair like he needs something to hold onto. "Get her out of my sight."
And so I kneel. I don't decide to — my legs simply give in to the inevitable, and I'm on the concrete floor in front of his wheelchair with my hands braced against my thighs, looking up at him. Begging without pride, without strategy, without anything left but the truth of what I feel.
"Please. Just listen. Let me explain—I love you. I never wanted to hurt you. I just—"
"You should have told me." He looks down at me, and the deadness in his eyes is worse than hatred.
Hatred at least contains heat, and heat means you still matter.
This is something past that. Something sealed and final.
"The second you remembered, you should have told me.
Instead you—" His jaw tightens. "Instead you let me fall in love with you.
Let me share you with—" A laugh that has no humor in it at all. "Christ, what a joke."
"It wasn't a joke." My voice breaks open. "Everything between us was real. It is real. I love you. I love all of you. That's why I was so scared to—"
"Get out," he says.
The words are soft. That's what I'll remember later — how soft they were. Like he no longer needed to put force behind them, because they were already done.
"Xavier—"
"Get. Out." Each word a door closing. Each word irrevocable.
"Out of this clubhouse. Out of the safe house.
Out of my life. I don't want to see you.
Don't want to hear from you." He stops. Swallows something that tries to surface in him and forces it back down with visible effort.
"Just go. Please. Before I say something I can't take back. "
Before I say something I can't take back. As though what he has already said can be taken back. As though I am not already shattered on this floor.
"Zay—" He doesn't wait for Zay to speak.
"If you defend her right now, I will never forgive you.
" He still won't look at any of us — looking at his own hands where they grip the chair, at the floor, at the middle distance.
Anywhere but me. "She killed Marcus. She lied about it.
Those are facts. Everything else — everything we had — was built on those lies.
So it's over. She goes. That's not up for debate. "
"I'm the president of this club," he says finally, into my silence. "I absolutely can. And I am. You're out. Officially. No longer affiliated with the Raiders. No longer welcome on any club property." He lifts his eyes then — just for a second, just enough to slay me completely. "No longer mine."
The clubhouse is dead quiet.
I stand on legs that don't feel like mine.
I look at Zay — who looks like a man watching a car crash he can't stop, devastated in a way that holds him perfectly still.
I look at Asher — whose jaw could cut glass, whose silence is a held back dam.
I look at Xavier one last time, and he is looking somewhere else, somewhere I cannot follow.
"I'm sorry," I say, to all of them, to none of them, to the room. "I'm so sorry."
I walk through the crowd and they part for me, but the parting feels nothing like deference.
I hear the words as I pass — murderer, liar, traitor — spat in low voices, not even bothering to be quiet.
They're not wrong, and that's the thing that makes it hardest to keep walking. That they're not wrong.
The afternoon air outside hits me cold and wrong after the packed heat of the clubhouse. I make it around the side of the building before my legs quit entirely, and then I'm sliding down the concrete wall to sit on the ground with my knees pulled in, and I let everything inside me collapse.
I cry with my whole body — the kind of crying that is less about tears and more about the physical release of something enormous that has been lodged in the chest too long.
Grief for the club, yes. For the life I'd built inside it.
But mostly for them — for the three men who looked at me like I mattered, like I was worth staying for, before I proved I'd been lying from the beginning.
I can still hear shouting inside. I recognize Xavier's voice through the walls, raised again. Others arguing back. The specific chaos of seventy people who have just had their worldview detonated.
It doesn't matter now. None of the words matter.
I don't know how long I've been sitting on the concrete when the door opens and Asher steps out. He doesn't call for me, doesn't scan the parking lot — he looks directly at the wall where I am crumpled, like he already knew exactly where I'd be.
He crouches down to my eye level. "Is that what Talia knew?" he asks quietly. No preamble. No softening.
"Yes."