Chapter 1
Austin
Ihate the look in her eyes. I hold it in my head, and I let it hurt because I need to remember this.
I need to keep it somewhere I can reach it, because the next time I start to think I made a mistake I'm going to pull out the memory of Savannah's face in that doorway and I'm going to let it remind me why I did it.
She needs to go. She needs to go and become the doctor she's always talked about being, the life she's had planned since she was a kid.
The life she's worked for all through school while I coasted on charm, a mechanical aptitude and a vague idea that I'd figure it out eventually.
She has a scholarship. She has a future that's bigger than this town and bigger than me.
If I'd just said goodbye like a normal person she’d have spent the next four years looking over her shoulder at what she left behind instead of looking forward at what she was building.
She needed to hate me. So, I gave her something to hate me for.
As soon as Savannah leaves, Raven starts a tirade. She's still on top of me and she's pulled herself upright and she's talking about Savannah in a way that makes the back of my neck go hot with a feeling I don't want to examine. "She's a fucking bitch. She doesn't deserve you, Austin."
"Shut the fuck up and finish the job, Raven. I need a drink."
I don't know why I didn't just pull her off me.
I don't want to be here. I haven't wanted to be here since the second Sav walked through that door.
But I'm so close now and there's something almost punishing about finishing it, like I deserve to feel this hollow.
It doesn't take long. When it's done, I want her out of my sight.
She climbs off me and starts dressing and tries to run her hand along my jaw and I lean my head back away from her touch.
"Get out," I say.
She goes, but not without looking back at me from the doorway with an expression I don't have the energy to deal with right now.
I sit on the edge of the bed in the quiet of my room, and I stare at the wall.
I breathe through it. The pain in my chest is a specific kind of pain, the kind that comes from doing something on purpose that you knew was going to wreck you.
I chose this. I have to keep choosing it.
I have to get up off this bed and go downstairs and be the man I said I was going to be.
I get up.
The main room goes quiet in that particular way rooms go quiet when they've been watching a major fuck up take place and now the person involved has walked in.
Three or four of the men are looking at me while trying not to look like they're looking at me.
I straighten my back and meet their eyes one by one until they go back to what they were doing.
"What the fuck are you all looking at?"
Nobody answers that. Good.
Cam is behind the bar, and she watches me cross the room with that look she gets. The one that means she's already worked out what happened and has thoughts about it that she'll share whether you want them or not. She puts a beer in front of me before I've asked for it and leans on the bar.
"That wasn't a great thing to do, Austin. That's not you. You love that girl."
"I know that." I take a long drink and set the bottle down carefully. "I'm not good enough for her. She needs to go and live her life, and she wasn't going to do that if I just said goodbye to her. She'd have stayed or she'd have come back, and I couldn't let her do either."
Cam looks at me for a long moment with a look on her face that's complicated. The look isn’t quite disagreement, not quite agreement but sits somewhere between the two.
"It was the best thing to do," she says finally, "but you still feel like a fucking asshole."
"Because I am one."
"Yeah." She picks up a glass and starts polishing it. "You're a good one though."
I feel a hard slap on my shoulder and Seb drops onto the stool beside me. He's been a prospect a couple of months longer than me. He's got the look of a man who watched the whole afternoon play out and has a lot to say about it. He points at my beer in a question and Cam puts one in front of him.
"That's because you are a fucking asshole," he says. Not unkindly. Just stating a fact.
"I know. Don't remind me."
"I'm going to remind you every day for the rest of your life. Not about her," he adds, with a sideways look. "About the fact that you thought this was the way to handle it."
"It was the best thing to do for her."
"Yeah, probably." Seb drinks his beer and doesn't elaborate on that. He's not the kind of man who piles on once he's made his point. That's one of the things I like about him. After a while he says, "She's going to be a doctor."
"Yeah."
"Good doctor?"
I think about Savannah, the way she is when something matters to her, the absolute focus she brings to the things she cares about. "Best one anyone's ever seen."
Seb nods like this is satisfying rather than painful. "Then you did the right thing, even if you did it the wrong way." He holds up his bottle. "To doing the right thing the wrong way."
I touch my bottle to his. "To being an asshole for the right reasons."
We drink.
Cam shakes her head at both of us. "You boys know nothing about women."
We sit there drinking for a few hours. The clubhouse settles back into itself around us, the music, the voices, the ordinary noise of men at the end of a working day, and I drink steadily.
I don't let myself think about Savannah in her bedroom crying, because if I do that I'll go to her, and going to her would undo everything.
The pain in my chest is going to stay there for a while. That's the deal I made.
I breathe through it. I drink my beer.
I let her go.
Razor calls me into his office at nine the next morning.
I'm already in the garage when Brick comes to get me, and there's a warning in the way Brick walks over and says, "Prez wants you." That tells me this is more than a casual conversation. I wipe my hands on a rag and follow him across the yard.
Razor's office is at the back of the main building, away from the noise. He's behind his desk when I come in and he doesn't look up straight away, just finishes what he's writing, caps the pen, and sets it down. Then he looks at me.
I've been around Razor enough by now to know that he doesn't waste words and he doesn't inflate situations.
When he speaks he means exactly what he says.
No more, no less. That clarity is one of the things that makes him easy to respect and uncomfortable to be in front of when you've done something worth discussing.
"Shut the door," he says.
I shut it and stay standing. He hasn't offered me a chair, and I won't take one uninvited.
"Brick has vouched for you for this club," he says.
"That means something. Brick doesn't put his name behind men he isn't sure of, and I've known him long enough to trust his judgement.
But vouching gets you in the door. It doesn't keep you here.
" He folds his hands on the desk. "What happened yesterday in this clubhouse with your girl? "
"It won't happen again, Prez."
"I know it won't, because I'm telling you now that it won't." He holds my eyes and his are level, flat and clear.
"I don't know why you did it and I don't need to know.
A man's reasons are his own business. But what happens inside this clubhouse is my business, and I won't have female drama and scenes with women crying in my yard.
This club doesn't run on that kind of energy. "
"Understood, Prez."
"Your personal life stays outside that gate. Whatever's going on with you and whoever, it doesn't come inside. Not the emotion of it, not the fallout of it, not the women involved in it. When you're in here you're a Black Saint first and everything else second. Can you do that?"
My jaw is tight and I keep it tight deliberately. "Yes, Prez."
He looks at me for another moment. The kind of looking that takes inventory. Then he nods, once, and picks up his pen again. "Good. Now get back to the garage. There's a Harley Sportster in bay three that needs the primary chain sorted before noon."
"Yes, Prez."
I turn to go.
"Austin."
I stop with my hand on the door handle.
"What you're feeling right now," Razor says, and his voice has shifted just slightly, not softer exactly, but less formal. "It doesn't go away fast. Don't expect it to. And don't do anything else stupid while you're waiting for it to ease up."
I don't turn around. "No, Prez."
"Good lad. Get out of my office."
I close the door behind me and stand in the corridor for a second with my eyes closed. Through the wall I can hear the garage, the air compressor cycling, the clang of a ratchet on concrete, someone's radio playing something country and scratchy. Real sounds. Present tense sounds. The life I chose.
I push off the wall and go back to work.
I'm in the bay working on the Sportster when Seb appears and crouches down beside me with two bottles of water. He passes one through and I take it without stopping what I'm doing.
"How'd it go with Razor?"
"Fine."
"Fine like he gave you a lecture and sent you back to work, or fine like he had Knuckles rough you up a bit first?"
"First one."
"Good." Seb settles against the side of the bay with his water balanced on his knee. "He do that thing where he doesn't raise his voice and somehow it's worse than if he did?"
"Every word of it."
Seb nods like this is exactly what he expected. "He did that to me when I put a prospect from the Eastside chapter through a wall at a party. Didn't shout once. I felt about an inch tall."
I look up from the chain. "What'd you put him through a wall for?"