Deadline to Damnation (Sons of Templar MC 7)

Jagger had broken his promise.

That much was apparent as he sat beside the same girl in a different and uglier world than the one in his memories.

She had a hardness about her, something calcified over her eyes that told him she wouldn’t cry at movies anymore. He traced a scar on her cheek with his eyes. One that hadn’t been there before.

He tortured himself with what that tiny mark could’ve been from. What sharp edges of this world had cut through his beautiful soft girl.

But did it matter?

She was scar tissue, and nothing could change that.

He didn’t know what to expect from her, but the continued silence all the way to the club wasn’t that. He expected her to yell. Cry. Demand to know why he wasn’t dead. Why he was wearing a cut and a scar that marred half his face. Why he didn’t come home to her.

He asked himself those questions daily.

But she didn’t utter a single one.

As if the answers didn’t matter.

He guessed they didn’t.

Caroline

The clubhouse was silent as we walked through the common area I’d only ever seen littered with bodies and pulsating music. Now it was eerily empty, rogue beer bottles scattered around the place.

Someone had obviously called ahead of time to clear it out. I wondered if it was so they could kill me. But they wouldn’t have bothered to bring me back here to do that. They would’ve killed me in that alley, easier to clean up, easier to dump my body in whatever deep grave they were currently digging.

I almost wished for that grave for the seven minutes and thirty-six seconds it took to drive from the bar to the clubhouse. To sit inside an enclosed space with Liam. No worse torture had been invented. I clenched my hands so hard that I cut the insides of my palms with my nails. They were covered in blood now.

What was more blood?

Liam opened a door at the end of a hallway. It was small, clean with an impeccably made bed, military corners and no personal effects.

I walked in silently.

He closed the door behind us.

I held my breath so I wouldn’t have to breathe in his scent.

“Pea—Caroline,” my name was a plea. It was a prayer. Coming out of a familiar mouth but spoken by a stranger. “Please say something.”

I turned, slowly and purposefully to face him. I didn’t look at him, though. I focused on a small rip in the wallpaper to the left of his head.

“I’m covered in blood, Liam,” I said, my voice a sigh. I couldn’t call him Jagger. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. “I can’t believe I have to say that to you.”

I can’t believe I’m saying anything to you, was what was left unsaid.

“Though it’s not the covered in blood part that should come as a surprise, really, this isn’t the first time. Likely won’t be the last,” I added, thinking of the many times I’d stared at dull crimson water draining in the shower as I tried to wash death and reality away.

Liam’s face was cold marble, sculpted with fury, sharp edges, not even counting the long scar marring the face of a stranger who’d once known me better than I knew myself. “It’s the fucking last,” he gritted out.

I smiled at him coldly. “Like you have a say. The fact that you’re standing in front of me and that’s more shocking than being covered in blood means that you don’t have a say in my life, ever.”

“Babe—”

“I need to shower,” I interrupted him. I didn’t have the energy to snap at him for calling me that. I knew the term was throwaway for bikers—which was what he was now—it wasn’t that for Liam. It was a term of endearment. But there was nothing dear between us now.

He clenched his jaw but nodded once, violently.

Everything that he did now was violent. It wasn’t just that jagged scar on his face. It was him. Every moment, every inhale and exhale was fierce. Foreign.

“He pulled open drawers to expose neatly folded tees, similar to the one he was wearing now. Simple gray, pressed, with flecks of blood staining it. I wondered if he would go to the trouble of trying to wash the blood out or just throw it in the trash.

The fact that this was his room should’ve surprised me. Liam had always been disorganized. Messy. Of course, all teenage boys were messy, I guessed. All I knew of him was a boy, long dead. This was a man who made his bed with military corners, had neatly folded tees in an impersonal room at a biker clubhouse, and a man who shot people in the face without hesitation.

He threw some sweats on the bed, along with a tee, eyes moving up and down my body.

I shivered at the intensity of his gaze, as if the air had turned to winter.