Chapter Ten #2
My boots hit the cracked asphalt with purpose, each step bringing me closer to whatever was waiting for me in that building. The pull in my chest intensified, tightening like a fist around my ribs, making it hard to breathe, making it impossible to think about anything else.
“Slaughter!”
Shadow’s voice cut through the noise, sharp and commanding, the kind of tone that usually stopped me dead in my tracks. The voice of authority, of brotherhood, of someone who had saved my life more times than I could count.
Yet, I didn’t stop.
“Slaughter, what the hell are you doing?”
Footsteps pounded behind me. Heavy. Fast. Multiple sets, closing the distance between us in seconds. A hand grabbed my shoulder with bruising force, spinning me around before I could wrench the door open.
Kansas stood in front of me, his massive frame blocking my path, his expression hard but controlled.
His eyes, usually warm, usually laughing, were deadly serious now.
Shadow was beside him, his jaw tight, his eyes searching my face for answers I didn’t have.
Behind them, I could see other members of the club watching, confused, concerned, hands hovering near their weapons.
“Brother,” Kansas said carefully, his voice low and steady, each word measured. “You need to calm down. Take a breath. Tell us what’s going on.”
I opened my mouth to answer, to tell him that I didn’t know, that I couldn’t explain, that something was pulling me and I had to follow it, that my body was moving on autopilot and my mind was somewhere else entirely when the wind shifted.
Jasmine.
Sweet and floral and achingly, impossibly familiar.
The scent hit me like a physical blow, stealing whatever words I had been about to say, replacing them with memories I had buried deep.
Memories of soft skin and softer laughter, of promises made in the dark, of a life I had lost and never thought I would find again.
It hit me like a freight train, stealing the breath from my lungs and the words from my throat.
Julie.
No. Not Julie. Julie was dead. Julie was buried in Tennessee. The scent wrapped around me, thick and undeniable, and I couldn’t think. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t do anything but follow it.
“Move,” I growled, my voice rough and desperate.
“Slaughter, you need to calm down, brother.”
“Move!”
I shoved past them, past Shadow, past Kansas, past the wall of Diamondback brothers who were still trying to figure out what the hell was happening. My boots hit the dirt behind the garage, and I rounded the corner at a dead run.
And then I saw them.
She was pressed against the wall, her white, flowy top bright in the fading sunlight, her dark hair spilling out of its ponytail and cascading over her shoulders.
A man stood in front of her, tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a Diamondback cut with patches I recognized even from this distance.
His hands were on her waist, gripping her like he owned her.
His mouth was on hers, claiming her with a possessiveness that made my vision blur red.
And the world stopped. Everything stopped. My heart. My breath. The blood in my veins.
Time itself seemed to freeze while my brain struggled to process what my eyes were seeing, as a memory, flashes of an alcohol-induced hallucination, reared its ugly head in my mind.
Because it wasn’t Julie I was with that night.
It had never been Julie. It was her. The woman from the pond.
The woman I held, kissed, made love to under the stars while whispering my dead wife’s name like a prayer and a curse.
The woman who smelled like jasmine and tasted like honey and felt like salvation in my arms when I had been drowning in grief for so long.
The woman whose body I memorized in the darkness, whose soft moans still echoed in my ears, whose touch had made me feel alive again for the first time in months.
She wasn’t a ghost. She wasn’t a hallucination.
She wasn’t some whiskey-soaked dream conjured by grief and desperation, and too many sleepless nights.
She was real. Flesh and blood and standing right there in front of me.
And some soon-to-be-dead motherfucker had his hands on her.
The rage that tore through me was instant and absolute, like a lightning strike straight to my core.
It burned through every nerve ending, every muscle, every cell in my body until there was nothing left but pure, unadulterated fury.
I didn’t think. Didn’t hesitate. Didn’t give a single fuck I was on Diamondback territory or that this could start a war that would leave bodies piled up on both sides.
None of that mattered. The only thing that mattered was getting his filthy hands off her.
I crossed the distance in three strides, my boots pounding against the gravel, grabbed the bastard by the back of his cut, and ripped him away from her with enough force to nearly lift him off his feet.
He stumbled backward, his arms windmilling as he fought for balance, his eyes going wide with shock as he spun to face me.
“What the—”
I didn’t let him finish as my fist connected with his jaw in a sickening crack that echoed across the parking lot and sent him sprawling into the dirt like the piece of trash he was. He hit the ground hard, dust billowing up around him, and then I turned to her.
She was staring at me, her eyes wide, her lips parted in shock.
Her chest heaved with rapid, shallow breaths, and I could see the pulse hammering wildly in her throat like a trapped bird trying to escape.
Her hair had come loose from whatever she’d used to pin it up, dark waves tumbling down her back and around her shoulders.
There was a red mark on her wrist where he had grabbed her, and seeing it made me want to turn around and beat him until he couldn’t stand.
Up close, I could see everything I had missed that night at the pond.
Every detail I had been too far away to catch.
She wasn’t Julie. Her eyes were the wrong color.
Green instead of brown, like spring leaves catching the sunlight.
Her face was softer, rounder, with fuller cheeks and a delicate chin.
Her body was different, too. Curvier, fuller, with generous hips and thighs that her jeans hugged like a second skin. But the scent...
God, the scent was the same. Jasmine and honey and something uniquely, devastatingly her. Something that called to every primal instinct I had and made my soul howl with recognition.
“You,” I breathed, the word barely more than a whisper, rough and raw with emotion I couldn’t name.
She took a step back, her hand coming up to her mouth, her eyes wide as she took me in.
“Who are you?” My voice came out rough and broken. “Who the hell are you?”
Before she could answer, Shadow was there, his hand on my chest, pushing me back.
“Brother, you need to calm the fuck down right now.”
I didn’t take my eyes off her. I couldn’t.
“Who is she?” I demanded, my voice rising. “Shadow, who the hell is she?”
Shadow’s expression shifted, confusion giving way to understanding, then something that looked almost like pity. “Slaughter,” he said quietly. “That’s Hope. My sister.”
His words hit me like a sledgehammer to the chest, knocking the air from my lungs and leaving me gasping.
Hope. Shadow’s sister. The woman from the pond.
The woman I had called Julie. The woman I had made love to while believing she was my dead wife, my Julie, my everything.
And I had just knocked out the man who had been kissing her.
The man who actually had a right to kiss her, to hold her, to call her his own.
“Oh God,” I whispered, my hands shaking uncontrollably as the full weight of what I had done crashed down on me like a tidal wave of shame and horror.
My knees felt weak, threatening to buckle beneath me.
I looked at her again, really looked at her this time, and saw the truth written all over her face.
It was there in the curve of her cheekbone, the shape of her eyes, the way she held herself.
How had I not seen it before? How had I been so blind, so desperate, so willing to see only what I wanted to see?
She’d known. That night at the pond, she had known I thought she was someone else. She had known I was calling her by another woman’s name, touching her like she was a ghost made flesh. And she had let me believe it anyway. She had let me continue living in my delusion, my beautiful, terrible lie.
“Hope,” I said, her name foreign and familiar all at once on my tongue, like a word I had spoken a thousand times in another language.
She was crying now, silent tears streaming down her cheeks as she stared at me with an expression I couldn’t read. Was it pity? Guilt? Regret? Maybe all three, tangled together in a knot too complicated to unravel.
And all I could think was... I’m a dead man walking.