Chapter 5
FIVE
TRIXIE
Three days of hiding.
Three days of staying upstairs while Buck drifted in and out of the diner below me at different points throughout the day, his voice drifting up through the floorboards, muffled but unmistakable.
The cadence of it. The warmth he put on for strangers, the easy laugh, the careful way he built a sentence so the person listening felt like the most important one in the room.
I knew every note of that voice. I’d lived inside it for six years.
Rosie told me to stay upstairs or out back where he couldn’t see us, but I could still work.
She’d come in and say “he’s here” and I’d take Ruby up and sit on the bed and wait.
Sometimes twenty minutes whilst he grabbed a takeaway coffee.
Sometimes an hour whilst he had lunch. Ruby would color at the little table by the window, quiet, patient, and I’d sit with my back against the wall and listen to the man I’d run from charm the town I’d run to. It made me feel sick.
The apartment that had felt like safety now felt like a cell. Four walls, a locked door, a window that looked out onto Main Street where I couldn’t stand too close in case he looked up. I’d traded one cage for another, and the only difference was the size.
Duke called on the third evening.
“Come to the compound tonight,” he said. “After he’s gone back to the motel. Rosie says she’ll look after Ruby. Just come, Trixie. Get out of that room.”
Ruby was thrilled at the idea of having a sleepover at Rosie’s house. She loved Rosie’s big chair, loved the pie-making, loved the orange cat that sat on the porch and tolerated her with the patience of something that had seen everything and decided none of it was worth moving for.
I drove out after dark. The road was empty, the mountains black against a sky thick with stars, and with every mile between me and the diner the pressure in my chest loosened. By the time I pulled through the compound gates I could breathe properly for the first time in three days.
Duke was on the lodge porch waiting for me. He stood when my headlights swept across the gravel, came down the steps, opened my car door. The sight of him in the dark, solid, unhurried, real, made something in my chest ache.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
We went inside. The lodge was quiet, the brothers out or in their rooms. He took me upstairs, down the hallway, to his room. Sparse and simple. A bed, a desk and not much else.
He closed the door and the quiet settled around us.
He was watching me. Standing a few feet away with that steady focus, reading my face the way he always did, and I watched the moment he stopped being careful.
It moved across his face like weather. The warmth shifting, deepening, the restraint he’d been holding for weeks finally giving way to something hotter.
He crossed the room. Put his hands on my face, tilted it up, and kissed me.
This was different from the mountain. The mountain had been tentative underneath the heat, both of us testing.
This was a man who’d made a decision. His mouth was firm, hungry, his hands cradling my jaw, his body pressing into mine.
He kissed me like he’d been thinking about nothing else, and the force of it backed me up a step and I grabbed his shirt to stay upright.
“Duke...” His name, breathless.
“I’m done being careful,” he said against my lips. “Tell me to stop and I’ll stop. But I’m done pretending I don’t want you.”
“Don’t stop. Please don’t stop.”
His hands dropped to my waist, gripping, pulling me flush against him. He stripped my shirt over my head, unclasped my bra, let it fall. The old reflex kicked, my arms starting to move, and he caught my hands. Held them at my sides.
“Let me see you,” he said. “All of you.”
His eyes moved over my body. My breasts, full and heavy.
The softness of my stomach. The width of my hips.
He looked at me with a hunger so raw that the shame I’d carried for years loosened its grip.
He wanted me. This body. The one Buck had made me feel was too much.
Duke was looking at it like it was the only thing he wanted to touch.
He pulled his shirt off. I ran my hands over his chest, the hard planes of him, and when he pulled me against him skin to skin the contact went through both of us.
He undid my jeans, pushed them down with my underwear, went to his knees to pull them off my legs.
From that angle, he pressed his mouth to my stomach, the soft full curve of it, and the tenderness of it made my throat close.
He stood, walked me to the bed, laid me down.
Settled between my thighs and put his mouth on me.
The first drag of his tongue had my hips jerking off the bed.
He was thorough, unhurried, and when he pushed two fingers inside me and worked my clit with his tongue I came so hard my fist twisted in his hair and my whole body shook.
He kissed his way up. I grabbed for him, got my hand around him through his jeans, felt how hard he was. The sound he made was guttural, wrecked. He stripped off the rest of his clothes while I watched, and I wanted him so badly my hands were shaking.
He settled over me, the head of him pressing against me, and looked at my face.
He pushed in slow. The stretch of him, the fullness. I gripped his arms and my mouth fell open on a sound that was small and helpless and honest. He bottomed out and stayed there, both of us breathing hard, but his eyes were locked on mine.
He started to move. Deep, steady strokes that I felt everywhere.
His hands gripped my hips, fingers sinking into the soft flesh, pulling me into each thrust. The wet sound of him sliding in and out of me filled the room.
I couldn’t care because every stroke pushed a sound out of me I couldn’t control.
“God, you feel good,” he breathed against my neck. “So fucking good, Trixie.”
I wrapped my legs around his waist and the angle changed and we both groaned because he was deeper, hitting a place that made my vision blur. He fucked me there, steady, relentless, his mouth on my throat, my jaw, coming back to my lips to kiss me deep while his hips drove into mine.
He pulled out. Flipped me over, pulled my hips up, pushed back in from behind. The new angle was tighter, deeper, and the moan that came out of me was obscene. His hand splayed across my lower back, the other gripping my hip as he drove into me with long, hard strokes.
“Been losing my mind over you,” he said, his voice ragged. “Every time you look at me. Every goddamn day, Trixie.”
I pushed back against him, meeting every thrust. He leaned over me, his chest against my back, his hand sliding under me to find my clit.
The first stroke of his thumb made me cry out.
He worked me while he fucked me, his rhythm deliberate, devastating, and the orgasm built from somewhere deep, tightening, pulling everything toward a single point.
“Let go,” he murmured against my ear. “I’ve got you.”
I came apart. My whole body seized around him, his name torn out of me in a sound that echoed off the walls. He drove into me through it, then followed with a rough groan, his hips jerking, his face buried against my shoulder, his body shuddering.
We collapsed together. His weight on me, warm, heavy, both of us wrecked. He rolled onto his back and pulled me with him. I settled against his chest, his arm around my waist, his hand finding mine.
“He used to tell me I was lucky,” I said. Into the quiet of his room, the safety of his body behind mine. “Lucky to have him. Lucky that someone like him wanted someone like me. He said it so often I believed it.”
Duke’s arm tightened around me.
I told him the rest. The money, the receipts, the cash allowance.
The isolation, the slow dismantling of every friendship, every opinion, every decision I’d ever made on my own.
The way he’d grip my arm and leave bruises under my sleeves.
The shove into the counter. The hand around my throat for three seconds, just enough to show me he could.
“I left for Ruby,” I said. “She was starting to watch. Starting to learn the same things I’d learned. How to be quiet. How to be small. I couldn’t let her grow up thinking that was love.”
He pressed his mouth to the back of my neck. Said nothing. His body said it for him.
I fell asleep in his arms.
When I woke, morning light was coming through the window and he was pulling on his boots. He saw me stir.
“Church,” he said. Quiet. “I’m taking what you told me to Angel. The brothers need to hear it. Stay here as long as you want.”
He kissed me. Slow, warm, the kiss of a man who meant to come back.
I drove to the diner mid-morning. Ruby was settled in the back room with her crayons while I helped Rosie with the lunch prep in the kitchen. Buck hadn’t come in yet and I let myself breathe.
After the lunch rush died down, I took the bins out back.
Ruby came with me because she liked sitting on the back step and talking to the stray cat that lived behind the dumpster who she was still trying to entice.
It was a nothing errand. Two minutes to put everything in the dumpster, then back inside.
Buck was leaning against the wall by the back door.
He’d come around the side of the building, not through the diner. Rosie hadn’t seen him. Nobody had seen him. He was just there, and the sight of him stopped me dead.
He looked different. The warmth was gone.
The concerned husband, the caring father, the man who’d charmed half of Forsaken.
All of it stripped away. The man standing in the alley was the one I’d lived with for six years.
Cold, still, his eyes flat and patient in a way that made the air feel thinner.
“We need to talk, Trixie,” he said. Quiet. Conversational. The voice he used when the doors were closed.
Ruby was behind me on the step. I felt her go rigid.
“Go inside, Ruby.”
“Stay right there, Ruby.” Buck’s voice was gentle. Fatherly. The performance was flawless even now, aimed at his daughter even when nobody else was watching. “Daddy just wants to talk to Mommy.”
“Go inside, baby. Find Rosie.”
Ruby didn’t move. She was frozen on the step, her eyes wide, her body small and tight, reading the air between her parents with the fluency of a child who’d grown up bilingual in love and fear.
“You’ve had your adventure,” Buck said. His eyes were on me. “You’ve made your point. Now it’s time to come home with our daughter.”
“We’re not coming home.”
His jaw shifted. A fraction of an inch. The only tell he had. That jaw meant the patience was ending.
“Don’t make this difficult.” Low, controlled, the voice that lived in my nightmares. “You know how this goes when you make things difficult.”
He stepped forward. One step. Just one. And my body reacted the way it always had. The flinch, the step back, the automatic surrender of ground. Six years of conditioning firing through my nervous system.
He was between me and the back door now.
Between me and Rosie, between me and the diner, between me and everything safe.
The alley was narrow, the walls close, and he filled the space the way he’d always filled every space.
Not with size, but with certainty. The absolute, immovable certainty of a man who believed he owned the room and everyone in it.
Ruby started crying. Quiet at first, soundless, the kind she’d learned to do. Then louder, the dam breaking.
“Don’t hurt Mommy,” she said. “Please don’t hurt Mommy.”
Buck’s face changed. Just for a second, the mask slipping as his daughter’s words landed somewhere he couldn’t control.
He hadn’t touched me. Hadn’t raised his hand.
But Ruby knew. She’d been watching her whole life, reading his face, hearing the temperature drop in his voice, and she knew what came after the quiet.
Ruby ran.
She bolted off the step, past me, past her father. He grabbed for her and missed. She tore down the alley toward Main Street, her feet slapping the concrete, no teddy, no shoes, just a five-year-old running blind toward the only place she knew was safe.
I lunged after her. Buck caught my arm. His grip was hard, his fingers digging into the muscle above my elbow, the grip I knew, the grip that left marks under sleeves. He didn’t pull me back. He just held me there. Stationary. Contained.
“Let go of me.”
“She’ll come back,” he said. Calm. Reasonable. Like a child running terrified down an alley was a minor inconvenience in an otherwise productive conversation. “She’s five. She won’t get far.”
“Let go of me, Buck.”
“When we’ve finished talking.”
I watched my daughter disappear around the corner of the building onto Main Street. Gone. Out of my sight, out of my reach, running and crying, and I was standing in an alley with my ex-husband’s hand on my arm and I was completely helpless to stop her.
The panic was a living thing. It filled my chest, my throat, my eyes. I didn’t know who was on Main Street. I didn’t know if anyone would see her. I didn’t know if Duke was in town, if anyone from the Forsaken Angels were nearby, if my daughter was running into empty street or traffic or…nothing.
I just didn’t know and panic hit me hard.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Buck said. His grip didn’t tighten, didn’t loosen. It just held. “You’re going to come back to the car with me. We’re going to pick up Ruby. And we’re going to drive home, and by tomorrow this whole embarrassing episode will be behind us.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“Yes you are.” Patient. Certain. The voice of a man who had never been told no by anyone who mattered. “You think these people care about you, Trixie? You’re a waitress in a diner in a town you’ve been in for three weeks. You think that biker is going to fight for you? You think any of them will?”
“They already have.”
“They’ve been entertained by you. You serve them coffee.
There’s a difference.” He leaned closer.
His breath was warm against my face, his voice dropping to the register he saved for when he wanted me to understand exactly how small I was.
“You have no money. No lawyer. No family. I am a county commissioner with a clean record and a community behind me. If you make me go to court, I will take Ruby, and you will never see her again. That is not a threat. That is what will happen. It’s a fact. ”
The words landed where he wanted them to land. In the place he’d hollowed out years ago, the place where my confidence used to live before he’d scraped it clean and filled it with his version of the truth.
I stood there and every part of me was around the corner with my daughter.