Deadline to Damnation (Sons of Templar MC 7)

His eyes changed as if I’d caught him off guard. I guessed he expected me to ask about the blood too. About the club, about the silent war that was dead bodies and bloodstains. “Not often,” he replied. “Well, not anymore. When I first got here, I smoked because it numbed me. Physical pain from my injury, but more than that too. I was weak at the start. Could handle the physical, not the emotional. Got stronger. Stopped smoking. Stopped doin’ shit that would numb me because I realized I deserved to hurt. To feel every inch of that shit for what I did to you. To my family.”

A tear trailed down my cheek. “And that night?”

“I was a coward again. I couldn’t face your pain. I couldn’t even fuckin’ look at something you had to live with for fourteen years.”

His words were weapons, even though I knew he wasn’t using them that way. But everything was a weapon with Liam now.

The sliding door opened and closed, but I didn’t move, didn’t falter my gaze from what was in front of us, even if it was just houses and fast food restaurants. This was the last time I’d wake up in a room that wasn’t inside a biker clubhouse. The last morning things between Liam and I would even be just the littlest bit simple.

Liam sat down beside me. Didn’t touch me, didn’t pull me into his arms as he used to do in a life before.

“I used to love being alive,” I whispered. “It didn’t start with you, though the romantic side of me would love to say that it did. But it didn’t. For as long as I could remember, I was just a happy person. I stared at the world in wonder, ordinary things never ceased to amaze and delight me.”

I tried to reach for all those moments.

My cloudless skies.

“A sunrise. A sunset,” I said. “The way the air smells before rain. An old couple holding hands on a park bench. Every day I fell in love with the world a little deeper.” I glanced to my side, where Liam was watching me, in jeans unbuttoned and no shirt.

I swallowed roughly.

There were scratches on his torso from my desperate need for blood last night.

“And then I met you,” I said through my desire. “I didn’t think I knew a love so deep, it amazed and delighted me more than the whole world could.” I gritted my teeth and tore my eyes from him. I couldn’t look at him for what I was about to say.

“That day, that moment I found out, I lost it. Brutally and immediately. That love for the world was gone.” I squinted at the horizon, yellow, orange, faintly blue. “I didn’t even want to die. Because a part of me was already dead. A part of me that loved the world. Maybe, if you had come home, that part would’ve inevitably died with some other disaster, but I don’t think so.” I sucked in a rough breath, twisting the fabric of his tee between my fingers. “Because losing you wasn’t a disaster. I don’t even think there’s a word for what that was. And I’ve tried to find it. A word for it.”

As a journalist, I was supposed to know all the words for suffering, to use them creatively, in a way to make the biggest impact on the world. I did that. But I couldn’t do it for myself. A word hadn’t been invented for what I felt.

“I stopped searching for what made me love life,” I whispered. “I hate you for taking that from me. And now, since I’ve been here, in your ugly, brutal and violent world, I hate you for giving it back to me. It didn’t happen immediately. I didn’t even notice it. But I love a sunrise again. And that’s because of you.”

He was staring at me now. In that way that made me want to come out of my skin.

I stood so I could sit in his lap. “I know that you think that you’re bad for me. And maybe you are. Maybe I’m bad for you. Maybe we’re the worst for each other. But you made me love sunrise again.”

His arms flexed around me. Then he kissed me.

Chapter Nineteen

One Week Later

“I’m buying tampons, Elden,” I said looking at the store. “If you want to come with me and know just how heavy my flow is, be my guest.”

Never did I think the man in front of me was even capable of a blush or that I’d be able to make him do it. He’d likely seen all kinds of violence and death, yet here he was blushing in the face of tampons.

Men. They could handle war but not women’s menstruation.

“Be quick,” he all but barked, brogue rough to cover up his embarrassment.