Chapter 3
Darling
Twenty minutes before Toro’s voice comes through the burner, Lady is bleeding on a phone screen, and I can’t get to her.
That is the first kind of hell.
The second is Diablo’s arm locked around my waist like he can keep guilt from tearing me open if he holds me hard enough. His body is hot behind mine. Solid. Familiar. Violent in the quiet way that scares me more now because I know what men can call love when fear gets in their hands.
“Let me go,” I say.
My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It sounds wrong.
Diablo’s mouth is near my ear. “No.”
The word snaps something ugly inside me.
Vice Ink is too bright for this. Morning light cuts through the stained glass and spills red, blue, and gold across the old church floor like God dropped broken promises over the clubhouse.
Coffee, cigar smoke, leather, and last night’s whiskey hang in the air.
Under all of it, I swear I can still smell hospital soap on my skin.
I hate it.
I hate the bandages around my wrists. I hate the bruise on my cheek. I hate every man in this room looking at me with that careful softness people use on women who survived something ugly and might shatter if spoken to too loud.
I’m not the one tied to a chair.
Lady is.
My Lady.
My best friend with glitter still clinging to her face and blood on her mouth, staring into a camera like she is onstage and not in a nightmare.
Her lip is split. There is red swelling across her cheek.
A white rose lies across her lap, obscene and pretty, like a wedding flower dropped into a crime scene.
Alpha keeps rewinding the video.
I can’t decide if I want him to stop or play it forever.
If it stops, she is gone.
If it plays, she is suffering.
“Darling,” Lady says from the screen, voice rough but still hers, still too brave. “Don’t do the thing where you make this your fault. I swear to God, I will come back just to yell at you.”
A sound breaks out of me. Not a sob. It is too angry for that.
Diablo’s arm tightens.
“Don’t,” I snap, trying to pry his hand off me. “Don’t hold me like I’m the problem.”
“You’re not the problem.”
“Then let me move.”
“No.”
I twist in his hold and face him. The room blurs behind my tears, but his face stays clear. Dark eyes. Hard jaw. President patch on his cut, paid for in blood and silence. He looks wrecked and furious and controlled, which is the scariest version of him.
Rico raged.
Diablo controls.
Both can become a cage if a man loves the sound of his own fear more than a woman’s right to breathe.
“She’s there because of me,” I cry out.
His face tightens. “She’s there because the Miami Mutherfukers MC took her.”
“They took her to hurt me.”
“They took her to hurt us.”
“No.” My laugh scrapes raw coming out. “Don’t make this romantic. She was my friend before she was Shady’s girl, before she was ever Vice Ink’s DJ, before she was anything to your club. She saw me when nobody else did. Now she is tied to a chair because she loved me enough to come back.”
Diablo flinches like I put a blade between his ribs.
Good.
I want him to hurt with me. I want somebody else to stand inside this guilt for one second and understand Lady isn’t collateral.
She isn’t Shady’s weakness first. She isn’t a pressure point in whatever ugly war Carmen thinks she is winning.
She is the girl who sat with me on a bathroom floor when I was sixteen and shaking because some pendeja with a rich daddy decided my shoes were funny.
She is mine in a way no club can patch and no man can claim.
Diablo’s hand opens at his side.
“I ended it with Carmen,” he says quietly.
The room doesn’t hear him.
I do.
My breath catches at the reminder. Carmen Solano has been in the walls of this place since before I had the nerve to walk back into it. Her ring. Her blood. Her father’s chair. Her smile when she used to look at me like I was a stain on marble she owned.
“I ended it in front of the table,” Diablo says.
“Not hidden. Not softened. No loophole for politics. I told the officers, the Solano men still sniffing around her father’s ghost, and every brother who needed to hear it.
There is no engagement. No debt paid with my bed.
No queen beside me because Rafael left a throne empty. ”
My throat tightens.
I wanted that once. Not the throne. God, no. I wanted the truth said where people could hear it. I wanted Carmen to stop being the woman with the official place while I survived Diablo’s war.
“And what did she do?” I ask.
His eyes darken.
“She smiled.”
Women like Carmen don’t break in public.
They sharpen.
“She looked at me,” Diablo says, voice dropping lower, “Like I had not just broken an arrangement. Like I had stolen a life she’d been promised since Rafael taught her to spell power.”
Cono.
The problem.
Diablo didn’t only choose me. He unchose Carmen in front of men who had spent years treating her like Rafael Solano’s living signature.
He took the ring off the table, and Carmen, polished, beautiful, sin vergüenza Carmen, doesn’t know how to punish a man without finding the women he loves and making them pay first.
“She isn’t just mad you chose me,” I whisper.
“No.”
“She wants every woman who stays to bleed.”
He doesn’t answer.
He doesn’t need to.
I look back at Lady’s bloody mouth on the screen.
“Then stop holding me like I’m something she can take from you,” I say. “Because that is what she wants. She wants you scared enough to cage me. Because she knows I won’t stay your prisoner.”
Diablo’s jaw tightens.
Then, slowly, he steps back.
The space between us is small.
It feels like a door opening.
Across the room, Shady stands near the bar with blood drying down his side and one hand curled around the back of a chair like he is seconds from snapping it in half.
Magic already tried to make him sit. Vice already told him twice to let someone stitch him.
Six is posted by the front like death with a pulse.
Cosmo is muttering prayers under his breath, not soft prayers either.
The kind that sound like he is asking God to look away for a few hours.
Shady doesn’t move.
That is the terrifying part.
He isn’t pacing. Not shouting. Not smashing bottles just to hear himself sound dangerous. He stands there, ice-blue eyes fixed on the video, face carved from something colder than anger.
Lady used to tease me about him. Pretend it was only sex. Pretend she liked him because he was pretty and mean and didn’t ask stupid questions.
But I saw her around him.
Lady Nyx, who could make a room bow with one hand on a DJ board, softened around that man when she thought no one was watching.
And now he is watching her bleed on a phone screen.
My gaze cuts to Cherry.
She is sitting in a chair near the pool table with Magic behind her and Six by the door like she might grow wings and fly.
Her red hair is tangled, mascara streaked down her cheeks, Saints tank stretched tight over her chest like she thought wearing the name would protect her from what she did. Her hands shake in her lap.
I should feel bad.
I don’t.
Cherry lifts her face, eyes red. “I didn’t know they were going to take her.”
The room goes still.
Shady doesn’t look at her.
That is worse than if he did.
Magic’s mouth twists. “You keep saying that like we’ll believe it if you repeat it.”
Cherry swallows. “They said they just wanted a scare. They said if I got them into the garage, they would leave me alone.”
“Who is they?” Vice asks.
“I don’t know names.”
Six laughs once from the door.
Nobody else does.
Cherry flinches.
“You knew enough to text him,” I say.
Her eyes snap to mine.
“She texted Shady before they hit the garage,” I say, stepping away from Diablo. “That’s what Shady said.”
Cherry’s face crumples, but her voice sharpens under the tears. “They made me.”
The words land messy and small.
Shady’s grip tightens on the chair.
Cherry sees it and keeps digging because some people can’t stop even when the grave is their own.
“Lady came in all famous and shiny, and suddenly he forgot the women who were already here. The ones who licked his wounds before she decided bikers were cute.”
Lady’s blood on the screen pulses behind my eyes.
“You helped them take her because you were jealous?”
“No,” Cherry says, too fast. “No, they threatened me. They knew where my sister lived. They sent pictures of her job, her car, her kid’s school. I didn’t have a fucking choice.”
“Everybody’s got a choice,” Shady says.
His voice is quiet.
The room shifts toward him.
Cherry breaks at the sound. Her hands fly to her mouth, and fresh tears spill down her face.
“You didn’t answer me.”
That confession drops into the room like a dirty glass.
Shady finally looks at her.
There is nothing warm in his eyes.
Cherry folds in on herself, but she keeps talking, like pain is a faucet she can’t turn off. “You didn’t answer. You let me think, Shady. You let me think maybe she was just another girl. You let me think I still had somewhere to go.”
“I never promised you a place,” Shady says.
Cherry’s mouth trembles.
“Didn’t you?”
The room changes.
Not loud.
Worse.
Every man in it goes still because Cherry says it like she isn’t talking about a bed anymore. She says it like she is dragging a body into the light.
“You found me on the bathroom floor,” she whispers. “You remember that?”
Shady’s face doesn’t change.
His hand falls from the chair.
Cherry looks at him like the whole room has disappeared and left only the wound. “Everybody else was outside drinking. I was bleeding through a towel, scared out of my mind, and you picked me up. You wrapped me in your hoodie. You took me to the clinic because I was too scared to go alone.”
My stomach drops.
Diablo goes completely still beside me.
Cherry’s voice cracks. “You sat there while I lost your baby.”
Silence.
Awful, ugly silence.
Not a clubhouse girl inventing promises out of kindness. Not a jealous woman turning a flirtation into a love story. Not an almost.
A baby.
Shady’s baby.
My eyes go to him before I can stop myself.