Chapter Nineteen
Buried up to my elbows in cabinet guts at the complex, the absolute last thing I see coming is a call that my woman’s been assaulted.
In broad daylight.
In our city.
Wood glue clings to my fingers, gritty with drywall dust, as I crush the phone in my fist. Some idiot just signed his death warrant. No one touches what’s mine and lives to inhale another breath.
Is it connected to Damon? Was it Damon himself?
The questions are a swarm of hornets in my skull as I fly through the asphalt grid of Coral Cay, tearing toward the coordinates where Snow said she found her.
The pipes of my bike roar a guttural scream, matching the raw, volatile poison bleeding through my veins and into my soul.
Storefront windows rattle and blur as I blow past, pedestrians jerking their heads around to stare.
In this town, they know the only reason a Saint’s Outlaw tears up the pavement like a bat out of hell is because blood has already hit the ground.
Please let her be okay. Just breathe, little shadow.
Fuck.
I never wanted to feel this kind of paralyzing, heavy shit.
Feelings are a liability. They soften the edges.
Vulnerability is a target on your back that gets you killed, or worse, gets them killed.
Whichever weapon your enemies think will tear the deepest hole in your chest. And anyway, what the hell do I know about love?
It’s a foreign language to a guy like me.
I’m the good-time guy. The placeholder. The dangerous distraction women seek out when they want to misbehave for a weekend.
Sure, they always try to dig for something deeper, but I’ve always been the hazard they know better than to stick around for.
With Marigold, the rules don’t apply. She’s the jagged piece of my soul I didn’t even realize had been ripped out.
Hell, before she started trailing after me, I’d seriously begun to wonder if I even possessed one.
Then she crashed into my orbit and proved it, showing me I was just an empty husk missing the one vital component required to keep the clock ticking.
She rewrote the entire game, and I’m left scrambling on the field, desperate to learn the rules before I ruin us both.
One truth is carved into my bones. I love her, and I’d slaughter for her. I’d bleed myself empty, set the world ablaze without a flicker of regret, all for her.
My chest tightens, heart twisting into a brutal knot at the certainty she’s suffering. Snow’s words were sparse, but the ragged panic in her voice screamed every detail she couldn’t say.
I fish-tail into the mouth of the alleyway, the iron scent of old garbage and sudden copper hitting my nose as my eyes lock straight onto the two figures crumpled near the brick wall at the far end.
The thunder of my exhaust magnifies tenfold between the narrow concrete walls, the sound reverberating off the masonry with a deafening crack that makes Snow snap her head toward me.
Marigold doesn’t move. Not a twitch.
My pulse explodes, pounding my ribs like a caged beast as I rip my phone from my kutte. I dial a number none of us have touched since he patched over from the Sadistic Sinners MC.
“Yeah?” The gruff, gravel-scraped voice answers on the second ring.
“Patch. We’re gonna need you, brother. Don’t know how bad my woman is yet, but she’s down, and she’s bleeding,” I growl, the words taste like ash as I swing my heavy boot over the seat, barely waiting for the kickstand to catch.
“Right. I’m moving. Meet you at the clubhouse.”
Patch is still an unwritten book to most of us, one of the newer transfers to our chapter.
He put in years with the Florida chapter of the Sadistic Sinners before doing a solo patch-over.
The transition was handled cleanly, with no blood spilled between clubs.
I don’t know his personal metrics for choosing Coral Cay or why he wanted the Saint’s Outlaws colors on his back, but right now, I’m just profoundly fucking grateful he’s one of ours.
He might be the new guy in the room, but he’s shown his loyalty where it counts, so I’m putting the highest stakes of my life in his hands.
My woman. My life. My little shadow.
I’d hate to spill the blood of a brother just because he failed to guard what’s mine.
That’s the brutal truth none of them understand.
This club is my life, my anchor, but Marigold…
she’s the goddamn air in my lungs. She’s my soul.
The reason I even open my eyes in the mornings and force that first breath into my chest. Without her, I’m fucking nothing.
Not a club brother. Not a lethal secretary.
Not a damn thing. I cease to exist without the woman who makes me whole.
As soon as I cut the engine, the thunder of my brothers charging in behind me fills the alley. My chest clenches, fear and rage battling as I race to Snow, who’s kneeling over Marigold. Snow’s shirt is gone, her hands pressing the bundled fabric against Marigold’s thigh, her composure ironclad.
A flicker of worry about how Butcher will handle his girl exposed in an alley flashes through me, but Marigold snatches all my attention. Her eyelids flutter, sluggish and unfocused, as she struggles to follow the movement around her.
“How bad?” I ask Snow, my knees slamming hard onto the gritty concrete as I crouch beside them.
“I can’t tell,” Snow breathes, her face pale. “I didn’t think he got her at first, but once she slid down the wall, the blood started pooling. She’s lost a lot, but I don't think it's enough to kill her. Just enough to make her loopy. I’m not a doctor, though, Tomcat.”
Tires squeal violently at the mouth of the alley, a screech of rubber that snaps my reflexes into overdrive. I jump to my feet, my hand instinctively wrenching my pistol from the holster at my hip, the weight of the steel cold and comforting in my palm. Thankfully, the headlights are ours.
Devious leaps from the driver’s seat of the cage, leaving the door swinging as he rushes over to us. “Can she be carried out of here?” he demands, his voice tight.
He keeps his gaze locked away from Snow’s bare skin. If things weren’t so dire, I’d almost laugh at how everyone but Butcher knows exactly who the princess belongs to.
“Let me take over so I can check her out,” I tell Snow, my voice dropping an octave to keep it gentle for her sake.
She nods, hands lifting so mine can take over, plunging my palms into the hot, sticky pool of Marigold’s blood. Only a faint tremor in Snow’s fingers betrays her terror. Otherwise, she’s pure steel. She’ll need that backbone when Butcher finally steps up to claim her.
I peel the soaked shirt back, inspecting Marigold’s thigh. A jagged puncture, an inch or two deep, oozes crimson in a relentless, pulsing stream as soon as I ease the pressure.
“Doesn’t look like it hit anything vital,” I mutter, more for my own sanity, “but I hate how much blood’s already soaking the pavement.” I snap my gaze to Devious. “Back the cage up. Get it as close as possible.”
Behind him, Pope, Savior, Malice, and Butcher come tearing into the alley. Their heavy leather boots slap hard against the concrete, the heavy metal chains from their wallets creating a sharp, rhythmic tinkling sound that echoes off the brick walls.
That sound is familiar, thawing the icy panic in my veins. When the world goes to hell, and trust is scarce, I can always count on my brothers. Except for how they treated her in the chapel, they’ve never failed me.
Marigold has flat-out refused to set foot back in the clubhouse since that afternoon.
I feel the cold distance between her and my brothers every time they walk into Nauti Nibbles.
The wall isn’t theirs this time. They’ve apologized to me, but I’m not the one they owe a goddamn thing to.
They tore away the fragile sense of family she thought she’d finally found in them.
I feared she’d use their betrayal to shove me away, too. Her fierce, defensive words before fleeing the clubhouse rattled me to my core. But later, curled in my arms, she promised she wouldn’t run. It’s us, always.
What haunts me now is the fear that my brothers can’t make it right with her.
If she shuts them out for good, will it tear us apart?
Will I have to choose? Because as much as I fucking love and need my brothers, as much as they are my blood and my family, I won’t survive this life without my little shadow.
Just the same, without my club and the men at my back, I’ll never be completely whole either.
Butcher moves straight to Snow the moment his boots hit the alley floor.
The moment his cold eyes confirm she’s unharmed, he rips his kutte off, shoving the heavy leather into Savior’s hands while he pulls his T-shirt over his head.
His big, scarred hands are unexpectedly gentle as he slides the dark cotton over Snow’s head to cover her bare skin.
From the stunned, completely paralyzed expression on her face, I don’t think he’s ever let her see this fiercely protective, quiet side of him before.
He turns to me the second his kutte is back on his shoulders, his voice flat and lethal. “She good?”
“Mmm, hmm. Perfect. Just a scratch,” Marigold murmurs, one of her eyes popping open, glazed and unfocused. “Did you bring my tacos?”
Snow lets out a soft, wet laugh next to me.
I glance up at her with a lifted brow, and she quickly relays the ridiculous shit Marigold mumbled before she went under.
A sharp, involuntary smile flirts with my mouth as I shake my head.
I shouldn't be surprised. At this point, the unhinged shit that spills from my woman’s mouth is just par for the course.
“I’ll buy you a thousand fucking tacos, as long as you don’t die on me,” I tell her, my voice thick as I lean closer.
“I’d haunt you so hard.”