Chapter 2 #3
I woke with a start, my heart pounding violently against my ribs, my hand outstretched toward empty air, grasping at nothing but shadows and fading memories.
The room was dark.
Cold.
Silent except for the sound of my own ragged breathing.
I was alone.
Always alone.
I let my arm fall back to the bed with a heavy thud as I stared at the ceiling, my chest tight with grief and longing, my throat raw like I’d been screaming in my sleep.
A dream.
Just a fucking dream.
The same one I’d been having for seven years, night after night, like some kind of cruel punishment designed specifically to break me down piece by piece.
Different variations. Different moments. Different settings and scenarios. But always the same woman with those impossibly kind eyes. Always the same soul-crushing feeling of loss when I woke up and realized she was gone.
That she’d never been there at all.
That she existed only in the twisted landscape of my subconscious mind, a phantom of what might have been.
I sat up slowly, ran my hands through my hair, and tried desperately to shake off the oppressive weight pressing down on my chest like a boulder.
It didn’t work.
It never fucking did.
I grabbed my phone from the nightstand, the screen’s blue light harsh against my eyes, and checked the time.
2:47 AM.
Perfect. Another sleepless night stretching ahead of me like an endless highway to nowhere.
The clubhouse was quiet now. Everyone else was either passed out drunk in various states of undress or fucking enthusiastically in their own rooms, the walls barely thick enough to contain the sounds.
The party had died down hours ago, the music silenced, the laughter faded, the empty beer bottles and whiskey glasses scattered like evidence of a crime scene.
I should have gone back to sleep.
Tried to rest.
But I knew I wouldn’t.
Not after that dream.
Not after feeling her soft skin against mine, hearing her infectious laugh echo in my ears, smelling that intoxicating scent that seemed to be vanilla and something else I could never quite identify—only to wake up in this cold, empty bed and remember with brutal clarity that she was gone.
That I’d lost her before I ever really had her.
That I’d never even had the chance to tell her how I felt, what she meant to me, how she’d somehow become the center of my entire world—
I stopped that thought before it could finish, slamming the door on those dangerous memories.
No point in going down that road again.
No point in torturing myself endlessly with what-ifs and might-have-beens and all the possibilities that died along with her.
She was gone.
I was here.
And that was the brutal, unchangeable end of it.
I stood on unsteady legs, pulled on a faded T-shirt that smelled faintly of motor oil and cigarette smoke, and walked slowly to the window. The parking lot below was filled with rows of bikes gleaming like metallic beasts under the harsh security lights that never turned off.
The Diamondback clubhouse.
My home. My prison. My carefully constructed lie.
The place I had rebuilt from the ashes of a massacre that had torn my world apart. The place I had helped Kansas transform into something legitimate, something the community actually respected instead of feared. And I hated every fucking second of it.
Every conversation. Every handshake. Every forced smile.
Because it wasn’t real. None of it was real.
None of it meant anything.
I was John Smith. WITSEC participant. Professional liar. Informant for the U.S. Marshals, feeding them carefully curated information while pretending to be someone I wasn’t.
A ghost wearing a dead man’s name like an ill-fitting suit.
And the only thing keeping me here—the only thing anchoring me to this miserable existence, the only thing that mattered in this hollow shell of a life—was Abigail.
My little sister.
The only family I had left in this world.
She was safe.
And as long as I kept feeding them intel on the club and the Biker Federation, as long as I played my part convincingly and didn’t fuck up this delicate balancing act, she’d stay that way.
Safe.
Alive.
That was the deal I’d made.
That was my life now.
I pressed my forehead against the cool glass of the window and closed my eyes, willing my racing thoughts to slow down.
Tried desperately not to think about the woman in my dreams, the one who haunted me every single night.
Tried not to remember the way she’d looked at me like I was worth something, like I mattered, like I was more than just a broken collection of scars and regrets.
Tried not to feel the crushing, suffocating weight of loneliness that had become as familiar as breathing, as constant as my own heartbeat.
But it was there.
Always there, lurking just beneath the surface.
A hollow ache in my chest that no amount of fighting or fucking or drinking could ever hope to fill, no matter how hard I tried.
I was dead inside.
Emotionally gutted.
Ruby had been absolutely right about that, even if hearing it from her lips had stung like a knife between the ribs.
I’d died seven years ago in that massacre.
I just hadn’t had the decency to stop breathing.