Deadline to Damnation (Sons of Templar MC 7)

I blinked at the philosophical insight coming from a woman in snakeskin at a biker bar after midnight.

“You some kind of expert on life?”

She laughed, it was throaty and attractive. “If there’s an exact opposite of an expert on life, that’s what I am. No one’s an expert. That’s the big secret. Even the men in the cuts who try to control life the best they can. We got a brutal reminder on Christmas Day that not even the strongest of us can escape death. Or life, depending on how you look at it.”

Her eyes glistened with the same ghosts I’d seen in Hansen’s eyes.

She blinked rapidly and downed her drink. She eyed me. “Well, what are you waiting for?”

I took my shot.

Told my story.

The bottle of tequila was empty.

I was disturbingly sober.

The tequila wasn’t there to get me drunk, it was there to use as anesthesia to the emotional surgery I had to undergo in order to tell Scarlett my story.

Our story, I guessed.

Though I didn’t think it belonged to either of us anymore.

“Holy shit,” Scarlett said when I was done.

Though I wasn’t done, was I? The story, the one that wasn’t ours, it wasn’t finished, it wasn’t over.

Or maybe it was.

I didn’t know which was worse.

We’d had our happy ending. Ironically the happy ending, the happiest ending under the circumstances, would’ve been if Liam actually died. If he died without having to become…Jagger. And so I didn’t have to see this. Feel this.

But happy endings didn’t exist. Happy ever afters were just stories that weren’t over yet.

“Yeah,” I agreed, trailing my finger around the rim of my empty glass.

I waited for her to curse Liam out, talk about what an asshole he was. She was the kind of woman who didn’t hesitate to call a spade a spade or an outlaw and asshole.

But there was only silence.

“That’s it?” I asked. “You’re not gonna say anything else?”

She shrugged. “No, that’s not it, but anything I say isn’t gonna mean shit since you said it all. And it’s not me that has to do any talking. No, it’s Jagger, after you tell him the story you told me.” She did something I would understand to be very uncharacteristic of her then, reaching over to squeeze my hand. The contact was important not because it wasn’t normal for her. But it was a sharing of something. Of a past that she wouldn’t share with me, not in words at least. It wasn’t sympathy or pity either. It was an acknowledgment of the battles we were both fighting.

“I’m not talking to him,” I said after she let go of my hand. “He doesn’t deserve my explanation. I’m not the one who pretended to be dead. I’m the one who had to bury him.”

“You didn’t bury him, though,” she said. “Not really. From what it sounds like, whether he had really died or not, he would’ve always been alive to you.”

Her words hit me to my core because they came from there. She’d sat there and given me truth I was too cowardly or too blind to see.

“Tell me I’m wrong,” she challenged after a long silence.

“I can’t,” I admitted. “But it’s not that simple.”

“No,” she agreed. “It’s not.”

“What he did…” I trailed off, choking on the truth of it all. “It’s unforgivable.”

“In love, babe, nothing’s unforgivable, that’s the ugly truth of it.” She paused. “You knew this Liam character…right? Trusted him?”

I nodded. “I did.”

“You knew Liam, I know Jagger. He’s a lot of things. Some of them bad. Most of them good. On an outlaw scale, at least.” She grinned.

The knowledge hit me with that grin. She was a former club girl for this charter. She likely would’ve slept with Liam. Strangely, the thought wasn’t as toxic as it had been thinking of faceless women having his warm body while I had his cold ghost.

No, it was somehow comforting to me.

“I know that he went through something. Something that follows him around. Something he wears on his face that’s more than just torn up skin. It makes sense, seeing you. He was dragging around the guilt of what he did, sure. With pain. If he was really as evil and heartless as you’re trying to convince yourself he is, he wouldn’t have had that weight. There’s no explanation for what he did. Nothing that will make it okay. But there’s a reason. One you need to hear. So you can decide whether you’re finally going to bury Liam, or accept that he’s alive inside another man.”

“You know, I’ve been to Scotland,” I said, attempting to make conversation with Elden for the hundredth time. At first, I’d been very happy to be surly and silent in a protest to my conditions. I’d been determined to wallow and rot in my own pain.

But there was only so long you could do that.