Chapter 5 #2
Before me, then. Before us, if there was ever an us. That should help.
It doesn’t.
“She didn’t tell me at first,” he says. “I found her in the bathroom at Vice Ink when she was losing it. She was scared. Bleeding. Half out of her head. I took her to a clinic. Sat with her. Paid. Brought her back.”
“Did you love her?”
“No.”
Too fast.
My eyes narrow.
He sees it and curses under his breath. “Fuck. Not like that. Not the way she wanted. Not the way I should’ve been honest about.”
“Did she love you?”
His jaw goes hard.
“That’s a yes,” I say.
“She thought she did.”
“Don’t make her stupid because it’s easier for you.”
His eyes flash.
There he is. The rough man under the guilt. The one who hates being cornered because he is usually the one doing it.
“I’m not making her anything,” he says. “I fucked her. She got pregnant. She lost the baby. I stayed because she said it was mine, but I know she lies. But I stayed because leaving her alone after that would make me lower than the shit we scrape off our boots.”
The words hit brutal and plain.
Pretty would have made me hate him more.
“And after?” I ask.
His silence isn’t empty now. It is full of things he doesn’t want to hand me.
I smile without humor. “Careful, Shady. You already used your pause for the day.”
His mouth tightens. “After, she stayed close. I let her.”
“Why?”
“Guilt.”
“That’s lazy.”
His eyes cut. “Yeah.”
I wait.
He drags a hand over his mouth, leaving a smear of blood near his jaw.
“Because if I let her hate me, then I had to admit there was something to hate. If I shut the door, then I had to stand there and look at the fucking grave. So I left it cracked. Not enough to promise her anything. Enough that she could pretend.”
My chest hurts.
Not for him.
Maybe a little for her.
I hate that.
Cherry’s grief had hands on my kidnapping. Her pain became a key code, a text message, an elevator door opening with sorry on her face. But before she was a weapon, she was a woman bleeding on a bathroom floor while Shady held a loss neither of them knew what to do with.
That doesn’t make what she did forgivable.
It makes it worse.
Because real pain does more damage than fake pain ever could.
“And after you were with me?” I ask. “Did you still see her?”
Darling sucks in a breath behind me.
Shady’s face changes.
The thing Boca didn’t say but the room already knows.
I hate rooms full of men and their secrets. I hate how silence can be louder than a confession.
“When?” I ask, softer.
Shady looks at Diablo once.
Diablo gives him nothing.
Lets him stand alone.
“After one night at Eclipse,” Shady says. “The night you left with that promoter.”
My laugh comes out sharp enough to cut me. “I left with a promoter because you were standing by the bar looking at me like you wanted to drag me out by my hair but hadn’t earned the right to tell me not to go. And it was business, not pleasure.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
His nostrils flare. “I was jealous. Pissed. Drunk enough to be stupid and sober enough that it’s still on me. I went to check on Cherry because she’d been spiraling, and she kissed me.”
I lift one brow.
He curses. “And I kissed her back.”
My face goes numb.
There it is.
The tiny ugly piece that makes the whole picture bleed.
“Did you fuck her?”
His silence answers.
I nod slowly.
“Mira, qué lindo. You kept one woman warm with guilt, hot with jealousy, and somehow I’m the one who ended up chained to a chair.”
I want the words to hurt. I want them to cut through leather and bone and whatever part of him thinks bleeding for me fixes lying by omission.
He flinches.
“I didn’t lie to you,” he says.
I step closer, ignoring the way my body protests. “Don’t insult me.”
His jaw clenches. “I didn’t. We weren’t serious then.”
“You let me walk into this with another woman’s grief sitting between us like a loaded gun.”
His voice drops. “I didn’t know they knew.”
“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“No.”
“They knew about her sister. They knew about the baby. They knew you stopped answering. They knew she could get into my garage. They knew exactly which wound to press and which woman to throw at me.” My throat tightens, but I refuse to cry in front of all these men.
He looks wrecked.
I hate that too.
I wanted clean anger. Easy anger. The kind I could wear like red lipstick and not smudge.
But Shady standing in front of me, bloody and silent and finally telling the truth, makes everything messier.
The chemistry is still there, sick and pulsing under my skin.
My body remembers his hands. My mouth remembers his.
Some dark, exhausted part of me still wants him to drag me into a room, lock the world out, and make me feel alive in a way that doesn’t taste like fear.
That is exactly why I need space.
Because wanting him has never been the problem.
Trusting him is.
Shady takes one step closer. “Lady, I should’ve told you.”
“Yes.”
“I should’ve shut Cherry down.”
“Yes.”
“I should’ve done a lot of shit different.”
“Finally, something we agree on.”
His mouth almost twitches. It dies fast.
“I’ll fix what I broke.”
“No, you can’t.”
His eyes harden. “Watch me.”
There is the biker. Rough. Stubborn. Used to taking roads no one gives him.