Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Brandy
I couldn’t call him.
The thought circled through my head like a vulture as I sat on my bed in the clubhouse, staring at the piece of paper with Torment’s number on it.
My hands trembled as I held the worn scrap, the edges soft from how many times I’d folded and unfolded it over the past three days.
The digits blurred together until they stopped looking like numbers at all—just meaningless shapes that represented everything I couldn’t have.
Everything I’d never been meant to have.
I couldn’t call him because he was an officer in the Soulless Sinners MC.
Not just a member. Not just a brother. An officer.
Someone important. Someone with responsibilities and power and a reputation to uphold.
Someone who sat at the table when decisions were made, who had a voice that mattered, who commanded respect from every man who wore that patch.
And I was a club whore.
That was what I was. That was all I’d ever been in this world. No matter how much I wanted to pretend otherwise, no matter how many times I told myself I was more than that, the truth always came crashing back down on me.
A warm body. A willing participant. Someone who existed to serve the brothers’ needs without asking for anything in return.
Without expecting anything more than a good fuck and maybe a kind word afterward if I was lucky.
Someone who knew her place, who understood the rules, who never crossed lines that weren’t meant to be crossed.
That was the deal. That was the life I’d chosen when I walked into the Silver Shadows’ clubhouse five years ago with nowhere else to go. Just a girl running from a past that wanted to swallow her whole. The club had given me shelter, safety, a roof over my head. And in return, I gave them my body.
It seemed like a fair trade at the time.
And now I was pregnant.
With his baby.
The baby of a man who lived in a completely different world than I did.
A man who’d looked at me with something more than just lust that night two months ago.
A man whose touch had felt different—tender, careful, almost reverent.
A man whose name alone made my heart race and my stomach flip in ways that terrified me.
Torment was educated. He had a degree—probably multiple degrees, if I had to guess.
He was a therapist, for fuck’s sake. A licensed professional who helped people work through their trauma, their pain, their darkest secrets, the kind of stuff that kept them up at night and haunted their waking hours.
He was smart and articulate and controlled in a way I’d never be.
He probably read thick books for fun and could hold conversations about philosophy and psychology and all those other complicated topics I barely understood.
And me?
I’d dropped out of community college after my first semester because I hated school.
I hated the lectures and the papers. The only reason I’d gone was to get away from my hometown.
I’d heard about the party at the clubhouse and when King made the offer to stay, I left school with nothing but a backpack and a few hundred bucks I’d saved from waitressing at the diner, the one with the faded red booths and the jukebox that only played country songs from the ‘80s.
I barely had a few hundred bucks to my name now. Hell, most days I was counting change just to make sure I could afford gas.
What the hell was I supposed to say to him? “Hey, Torment, remember me? The club whore you fucked a few times in Diamond Creek when you were visiting? Yeah, well, surprise—I’m pregnant, and it’s yours. Want to play house and pretend we’re a normal family?”
He’d feel obligated. That was what would happen. I knew it in my bones.
He was a good man—I knew that much from the brief time we’d spent together.
He had that quiet strength about him, that sense of honor and responsibility that seemed to radiate from him.
He wouldn’t abandon his kid. He wouldn’t walk away from his responsibility, wouldn’t leave me to deal with this alone.
But that was all it would be. Responsibility. A duty he felt compelled to fulfill because of his moral code.
Not love. Not desire. Not genuine want. Not any of the things that actually mattered in a relationship.
Just obligation. Just a sense of “the right thing to do.”
And I couldn’t live like that. I couldn’t be someone’s burden, someone they had to take care of out of some sense of duty.
I couldn’t be the person he looked at every day and remembered as his mistake.
A mistake that needed to be managed and handled and dealt with, like a problem that required a solution.
I couldn’t be the reason he resented his life, the reason he looked back in ten years and wondered what could have been if he’d never met me.
Besides, he lived in New York City. The biggest, loudest, most overwhelming city in the world.
A place with millions of people crammed onto a tiny island, where the buildings scraped the sky and the subway never stopped running and everything moved at a pace that made my head spin just thinking about it.
A place where people like me didn’t belong, where I’d never fit in no matter how hard I tried.
I’d probably get lost on the subway within five minutes.
I wouldn’t know which neighborhoods were safe or how to hail a cab or any of the thousand little things that city people just knew instinctively.
And I was from Bethlehem, Connecticut. A town so small you could drive through it in five minutes and not even realize you’d been there if you blinked at the wrong time.
A place nestled in central Connecticut where everyone knew everyone else’s business and what you did on Saturday night was the talk of the town by Monday morning.
A place where Sunday church was the social event of the week and missing it meant facing questions and concerned looks from well-meaning neighbors who wanted to know if everything was alright with your soul.
We were from different worlds. He was a biker, in one of the most notorious motorcycle clubs on the East Coast. I was just a girl trying to make ends meet in a small Nebraska town, trying to forget my past and build something resembling a normal life.
Our paths should never have crossed. Our lives should never have intertwined the way they did.
And then there was the war.
The biker war that was still raging, still threatening, still hanging over all of us like a storm cloud that refused to break.
The violence had escalated beyond anything I could have imagined when I first got tangled up in this mess.
Bodies were dropping. Blood was being spilled on both sides.
Innocent people were getting caught in the crossfire.
The clubhouse was on high alert. Brothers walked around with guns at the ready, eyes constantly scanning for threats.
Every car that drove by was suspicious. Every stranger who walked through town was a potential enemy.
The tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife.
Women and children had been evacuated once already, sent to safe houses scattered across three states.
The Death Dogs were still out there, licking their wounds, planning their next move.
Planning their revenge. And revenge in the biker world was never swift or merciful—it was brutal, bloody, and designed to send a message.
And I was supposed to bring a baby into that?
I was supposed to fly to New York and put myself and my unborn child directly in the line of fire? I was supposed to walk into a war zone with a target on my back, and just hope that everything would work out fine?
No.
No, I couldn’t do that.
I couldn’t call him.
I couldn’t go to New York.
I couldn’t be part of this anymore. Not with a baby growing inside me. Not when every decision I made now affected someone other than myself.
The decision solidified in my chest like concrete, heavy and immovable.
Painful, even. Because part of me—a stupid, reckless part of me—wanted to go to him.
Wanted to fall into his arms and let him tell me everything would be okay.
Wanted to believe that love could somehow conquer the violence and chaos that surrounded his life.
But I wasn’t that na?ve anymore.
I had to leave.
I had to go somewhere safe. Somewhere far away from the war and the club and the life I’d built here.
Somewhere I could figure out what the hell I was going to do next without everyone watching, without everyone having an opinion, without King and Grace and the old ladies making decisions for me.
Without well-meaning bikers offering unsolicited advice about motherhood and relationships.
Without the constant reminder that the man I loved lived a life that could get me—and now our baby—killed.
I needed to go home.
Even if home was the last place I wanted to be.
Even if going back meant facing the disappointment of my mother and father.
Even if it meant admitting that I’d failed, that I’d made yet another mistake, that I’d gotten myself into another situation I couldn’t handle.
Even if it meant swallowing my pride and asking for help from the people I’d spent years trying to prove wrong.
Home was safe. Home was boring. Home was suffocating.
But home wouldn’t get my baby killed.
I packed in the dead of night, moving as quietly as I could through the darkened clubhouse. Every creak of the floorboards beneath my feet sounded like a gunshot in the silence. I froze at each one, holding my breath, waiting to see if anyone would come investigating. But no one did.