Somewhere between Middle Earth and Mt. Doom, I told her everything.
I had never given so much of myself while on a story.
Or ever.
I didn’t have close friends, apart from Emily. And the only reason she knew about my sordid past was because vodka shouldn’t be drunk on an empty stomach. I hadn’t mentioned a word after.
Neither had she.
I had friends in the industry, most of us didn’t get close because we might’ve been friendly, but we were also competition. We all wanted the story, the scoop. And even those I wasn’t in competition with, I needed to detach from, because the possibility of them dying was high.
And there also wasn’t much opportunity to get deep and meaningful in the middle of a warzone. In the middle of a story.
And here I was, in the middle of both, and getting deep and meaningful with a woman I only just met, a woman who used to fuck Liam.
Her reaction to the story was not the same as Scarlett’s. Though they were both good women, they were very fricking different women.
Scarlett was all hard edges, barely letting anything in, mainly so nothing got let out of all those carefully locked closets full of skeletons. I knew that because that was me too.
Macy was the opposite. She was soft. Warm. She let me in, she let my pain in and made it her own. She was crying about one-minute into the story.
Then she turned dry-eyed after giving me yet another hug. I was beginning to get used to it, like I was used to waking up in a biker compound, not being allowed anywhere but the bar I worked. I was getting used to the violence.
But I was not getting used to Liam’s absence. Though I had almost fifteen years of practice.
“Get to know him,” Macy said when I finished. “He might not be the man he was, but he’s a good man. You might even like him.”
I already knew I liked him. Whoever he was now. That was the problem.
“I can’t,” I whispered. “Because the more I get to know this man called Jagger, the less he is Liam. And when I know Jagger fully, it’s gonna be unavoidable, I’ll have to accept that he’s not Liam, that Liam’s really gone. In a way that is worse than before. What if I can’t forgive him?”
I did it. I voiced that great fear from a little voice inside me. Confessed it to a woman I barely knew.
Macy smiled sadly and squeezed my hand. “Human beings are capable of some of the most horrific things,” she said. “So I think it stands to reason that human beings are also capable of forgiving some of the most horrific acts.”
This time I cried.
And Macy hugged me.
And I let her.
Scarlett texted me every day, now she was back in Amber.
Not saying poignant and soulful things like Macy.
The first day…
Unknown: Have you boned him yet?
Me: I’m guessing this is Scarlett.
Me: And no. We’ve got the complicated issue of him pretending to be dead.
Scarlett: Sex won’t uncomplicate it but at least you’ll get an orgasm. You both need it.
I’d rolled my eyes and smiled. But a smile was a big thing these days. The rest of the texts were along the same vein, sometimes her talking about the other old ladies, just chatting. I got the feeling that Scarlett was not a woman to text someone and just chat.
Neither was I.
But I needed it.
I couldn’t admit that I was beginning to like some of the members of the Sons of Templar, and becoming friends with their wives.
I couldn’t have that personal connection to them, because that would taint my story. Taint the truth. Though, the truth was always going to be tainted.
My story was going nowhere fast. I was witnessing things people already knew about biker clubs, the scantily clad women, the drinking, the violence—there was a cage fight every Wednesday night that I’d been invited to the week previous—and in the daytime hours, they ran a garage.
But they were doing other things.
Running guns like Jagger had admitted.
Torturing enemies like I’d witnessed.
They were gearing up for retributions toward the man that ordered the massacre of the entire club.
I had heard back from my friend, a source that I would never disclose, and he said the Fernandez had deep pockets and no soul. He owned every government official that could be owned, and his client list had hundreds of international dignitaries, movie stars, everyone you wouldn’t expect to participate in human trafficking, really.
I knew all this, or at least a version.
My source did tell me something interesting, latest reports had him in Russia. And the Sons of Templar dealt with the Russians for their guns.
It could be a coincidence…
I snapped my laptop shut as the door opened so hard that it fell off one of its hinges. I jerked off my bed—Liam’s bed—immediately, with an instinctive reaction that had become second nature when I’d had to be prepared for my hotel to be bombed while covering a story.