Chapter 14 Love As A Weapon
FOURTEEN
LOVE AS A WEAPON
STEEL
Three days.
That’s how long it’s been since I walked out of Aria’s ruined office with her scent on my shirt and fear in my hands. Three days since I told myself pushing her away would keep her safe. Three days since I lied to her, to the club, to myself.
And in those three days, I’ve learned one thing. Distance doesn’t protect a damn thing. It just makes the guilt louder. It makes the nights longer. It makes the place where Tama’s ring should be burn like a bruise I can’t touch.
I’ve survived cartel ambushes, prison standoffs, and my father’s ghost breathing down my neck, but nothing has wrecked me the way missing her does.
Now it’s Valentine’s night. Snow falls again, silent, relentless, like the world’s trying to remind me of the night she walked back into my life. The night everything changed.
I sit alone in the garage, the space heater humming uselessly as cold creeps through the metal walls. Tools lie untouched. The Harley I pretended to work on sits half-assembled. My hands haven’t done a damn thing in an hour. Because tonight, I’m losing her.
The garage door creaks open. A rush of cold and a swirl of snow enter in front of Aria. She steps inside slowly, snow melting in her hair, eyes red-rimmed like she’s been holding back the kind of tears that burn more than they fall.
Her voice is soft, almost fragile. “You weren’t going to call me.”
“No,” I admit.
“And I wasn’t going to let you get away with that.”
My chest tightens. Of course, she came. Of course, she found me on a night built to hurt.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I rasp.
“I know.” She closes the door, shutting the storm out behind her. “That’s why I came anyway.” She walks toward me with slow, deliberate steps, as if crossing this garage is crossing a fault line between who we were and who we can no longer be.
“You look tired,” she whispers.
“I am.”
“You look like you’ve been carrying the world on your back.”
“I have.”
Aria stops in front of me, close enough for me to feel her warmth. Close enough that I want to fall into her. Hold her. Bury myself in her. But I don’t. I can’t.
“Isaiah,” she says gently. “Talk to me.”
I take a breath that tastes like metal, winter, and regret. “I can’t be both men, Aria,” I say quietly. “Not for you. Not for them. Every time I choose one, I betray the other.”
She exhales, eyes shining. “Then be the one you have to live with.”
I shake my head. “I don’t know who that is anymore.”
“You do,” she whispers. “You just don’t like him.” Her hand reaches for mine. I let her take it. “I’m scared,” she says softly. “Not of you. Never of you.”
“Then of what?” I breathe.
Her voice fractures. “I’m scared of watching you turn into him.”
Tama. The name hits me like a blow. I look away, jaw clenched hard enough to snap.
She doesn’t let me hide. She takes my face in her hands and forces me to look at her. “You’re terrified of it too, aren’t you?”
I swallow against the lump in my throat. “Yes.” Barely audible. Barely real.
She nods, tears slipping free. “Then this has to be honest. All of it. Because lies will destroy us faster than the Syndicate ever could.”
I nod once, barely, like a man accepting a verdict. “If the Syndicate ever realizes what you mean to me,” I whisper, voice raw, “you’ll be gone before I can stop the bullet. The club can survive my silence… but you won’t survive my enemies.” The truth tastes like blood. And she hears every word.
“And if honesty means goodbye?” I ask.
She closes her eyes, and a tear tracks down her cheek. “Then goodbye.”
The moment she says it, something inside me shatters. Not loudly. Not violently. Quietly. Devastatingly. The way a heart breaks when it knows it’s losing something it never deserved to have.
I reach for her like it’s instinct. She reaches back like it’s fate.
Our mouths meet in a slow, trembling kiss that tastes like salt and sorrow.
Not hungry. Not frantic. Just... goodbye.
I lift her onto the workbench, her legs wrapping around my waist as snowmelt drips from her hair onto my shirt, cold trails on overheated skin.
Her fingers slide under my shirt, not to claim but to memorize.
The shape of my ribs. The scar beneath my shoulder blade.
The way my heart hammers against her palm.
If this is the last time I get to hold her, I think as I pull her closer, I want to carve every second into my bones. I’ve never deserved her. I just hope she lets me pretend I do tonight.
Every touch is archaeology. Every breath, a question with no good answer. Every kiss, a plea for more time than we have.
"Isaiah…" My name breaks open in her throat, and the sound nearly undoes me.
I lay her back gently, the wood cold beneath her, my body warm above.
I undress her slowly. Each button, each zipper, a small ritual of devotion.
I kiss the hollow of her throat where her pulse flutters like a trapped bird.
The curve of her shoulder. The inside of her wrist, where blue veins map her vulnerability.
She trembles. Not from cold.
"Look at me," I whisper.
When she does, her eyes are bright with unshed tears, and I see everything. The woman she was before this, the woman she'll have to become after. I kiss her eyelids closed, tasting salt.
Her hands thread into my hair, anchoring herself to this moment, to me, to the impossible choice of loving someone you're about to lose.
We move together unhurried, like we have all the time in the world when we both know we don't. There's no urgency, no desperation, just the slow, synchronized rhythm of two people trying to hold onto something already slipping away.
I touch her like I'm learning a language I'll never speak again. She responds like every sensation might be the last one that matters.
The garage around us fades. The storm, the snow, the danger waiting beyond these walls, all of it dissolves until there's only skin against skin, breath mingling, the exquisite ache of being fully present in a moment you know is ending.
Her fingernails drag lightly down my back, not possessive, just present. Bearing witness. I memorize the sound she makes when I kiss the curve between her neck and shoulder. The way she arches. The way her body knows mine like coming home to a house that's already been sold.
"I love you," she whispers against my mouth, and the confession shatters something in my chest.
"I know." I press my forehead to hers. "I know."
We're both crying now, silent tears mixing with sweat and snowmelt, baptizing this moment in grief for what it is and what it can't be.
When she finally comes apart beneath me, she cries into my mouth, a sound so broken and beautiful it destroys every defense I've ever built. Her body trembles, clenches, and surrenders completely.
I follow moments later with a shudder that starts in my spine and radiates outward. I bury my face in her neck, breathing her in, trying not to shatter into pieces she'll have to sweep up after I'm gone.
We stay tangled together long after the world stops moving.
Her fingers trace patterns on my shoulder blades, constellations, maybe, or maps to places we'll never go together. My hand cups her face, thumb brushing away tears that keep falling.
Neither of us speaks. Words would cheapen this, would try to make sense of something that only makes sense in the language of touch and breath and beating hearts.
Outside, the snow continues to fall. Inside, we hold each other like survivors of a shipwreck, clinging to wreckage that's already sinking. The fire crackles. Her breathing steadies against my chest. My heart slows to match hers.
"When?" she finally asks, voice small.
"Dawn."
She nods against my shoulder. Doesn't argue. Doesn't beg me to stay. She already knows the answer, has always known.
"Then we have tonight."
"We have tonight," I echo.
And we do. We spend it mapping each other's skin, whispering confessions into the dark, making love again, slower this time, softer, like we're trying to stretch the hours into something eternal.
But dawn always comes.
When the first gray light creeps through the window, I'm already dressed, watching her sleep. Her hair fans across the pillow. Her hand reaches for the space where I was.
I press a kiss to her forehead. One last touch. Aria opens her eyes, and tears settle in the depths of them. She strokes my jaw and whispers, “This wasn’t wrong.”
“No,” I breathe. “It was perfect.”
Her voice trembles. “And perfect things never last around you.”
“No,” I whisper again, hating myself. “They don’t.”
She dresses slowly, every motion threaded with grief. When she reaches the door, she turns back.
“Steel,” she murmurs.
I step closer, but not close enough to stop her.
She reaches into her coat pocket and pulls out the Saint ring, my ring, the one I gave her without meaning to. The one she held during every moment she was trying not to break.
She lifts the chain around my neck, fingers brushing my skin, and slides the ring into my palm.
She brings it to her lips and presses a soft kiss to the metal. “Keep this safe for me,” she whispers.
I reach for her hand, but she pulls it back gently.
“No,” she says. “You don’t have to let me go. I’m letting you go.” Her voice shakes. “I love you. Even if love is the weapon that’s killing us.”
Snow roars against the door as she opens it. Wind whips her hair back, cold, wild, and unforgiving.
Aria steps out into the storm. I stand there and listen to her tires crunch down the drive until the sound fades into the storm.
The cold hits me when the door finally swings shut, a blast of winter that feels too much like a world without her.
The taillights of her car glow red through the snowfall, bright, then dimmer, then gone.
I stand in the doorway long after she disappears. The Saint ring lays heavily in my hand. The last piece of her I’m allowed to keep.